Thursday, 18 March 2010

• A Step Backwards

  This has been a tough week for Larry. After an amazing February, it seems he’s run out of steam for March. We’ve had no new words or skills show up. It’s become a fifteen minute struggle to get him to sit down to work. The only area we are still making progress in is food trials, and even that involves five or ten attempts to flee the room for every fifteen minutes of work. Things are getting tough.

  I didn’t take a step back and assess the situation until Friday though. Larry has been picking up some of the words we say when he’s in the middle of certain activities. So for awhile, when he was working, I’d hear him saying to himself, “awesome,” “Nice”, “Sweet,” in a lovely Long Island accent. Friday, during a meltdown, I heard new words he was saying to himself, over, and over, and over. These were words like “Stop!” “Knock it off” “Enough”, and “Sit Down and Stop it!” These were also said in a Long Island accent but it didn’t sound so lovely anymore. It sounded incriminating.  

  
  

  Is this what he remembers from our sessions? Me yelling at him to sit down and shut up? No wonder he hated coming in the doors and ran from the room as soon as I got him to sit down. I was no longer the friend he was working to impress but the drill sergeant requiring perfection. I had become used to the competent compliant Larry and couldn’t tolerate the one who needed some extra help.

  We sat, door closed and locked, for forty-five minutes. He cried and screamed and said “Knock it off. Stop. Stop. Knock it off” again and again. I reflected back on the past week and thought of all the times I’d yelled at him, punished him, for just being Larry. I told him I was sorry, even though he doesn’t know what the word means. I sat there, and watched him, and waited for the storm to end. Eventually he stopped repeating the phrase. He ceased to bang on the floor, and finally he stopped crying. I reinforced his calm state, and he came over to me, hands out and said “quish?” And we squished. And we tickled and squished and laughed and squished some more.

  For fifteen minutes I forgot about treatment goals and supervision and progress notes. I let words like “extinguish” and “redirect” slip into the background. We had fun. We goofed around. We messed up the sheets on his parents bed, stacked the pillows on top of each other, jumped on the mattress. We rediscovered our friendship.

  On the drive home, Larry’s mom said to me “Was everything alright in there? I heard things get a little rough but I wasn’t sure if I should intervene or not.” I paused for a second. How could I answer that question? I thought back to the Will and Grace episode I’d seen just a few days ago. “No,” I said. “Everything wasn’t alright. But it will be. It will be.”

  
  

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