What the heck is going on here?! | Autism PDD

GTTO
Thank yo for your perspective. My Benjamin is back into full mainstreaming. His teacher has gotten some great academics from him. Then at home he is a bit of a mess. Really tired. Then I get baffled because my sweet kid is mouthing off at me and being very contrary. I respect your input and value the information. I now know what to do in the morning. It's 8pm here and Benjamin is asleep.
I do need to talk to his teacher about the requirement that he read a minimum of 30 minutes a day at home. Benjamin likes being read to and that has really helped language development. We are back to bed-wetting and chronic cranky.
man.
How can I be so forgetful of all this stuff? I know these things.?.?!?!?! We have been at it for several years now. I feel just awful that sometimes I am less helpful to my sweetie than I want to be.

I get it! He had that huge spurt, and like Gtto and Horizon said, it took a big emotional toll on him and he is just trying to get through that mental and emotional exaustion. That makes perfect sense, it really does. Thanks Gtto for explaining that to me, I appriciate your insight and you do not know how much you help us so we can help our children.

Spectrummum- I certainly agree with the one step forward, two steps back. I have seen that a lot in my DS. It is comforting to know he is ok, he just needs time and some quiet to reorganzie and regroup.

Remember a month or so ago I posted that my DS had a HUGE developmental spurt..his speech clarity improved, stuttering decreased, meltdowns were easier for him to bring under control by himslef, he stimmed less, and he actually sat on his bike (he has never sat on a bike, only ran beside it and pushed it along) etc.

For the past 4 weeks he has gone back to where he was at age 4..lots of meltdowns, crying over every little thing, very irritable, stimming more, hitting/throwing things and head banging when angry or frustrated and waking several times at night. It is getting worse this past week or so, but that isprobably because he his sick with a yucky cold.

Things are the same as during the summer except that his sisters went back to school two weeks ago. Nothing unexpected for him. I have no idea what is going on with him, I am truly puzzled. I know our kids regress a bit BEFORE a big developmental spurt, but after? The developmental ped. that diagnosed him has a backlog of appts. so we cant even get in to see her for 3 months.

Anyone have this happen to their little one? If so, why did this happen and how did you handle it?

My older son has a very uneven development, ups, downs and plateaus galore. I think these dev spurts take out a lot emotionally from our children. We can just try to be supportive and keep steady. He's approaching 9 and still has these ups and downs. I must say his greatest up (5-6yo) came along with an emotional roller coaster but it was well worth it. There are no guarantees but in my experience in the long run these spurts are worth the negatives that come with them. [QUOTE=Hmschlmama2five]

I rarely say anything near as certain as what I'm about to say, because I don't know people's children, etc etc etc.

But.

This is very familiar from my own life.

What it is is like this:

I have a certain amount of things that come into my brain slowly, over time, through sort of pattern-matching, and without me consciously thinking about it. This is easy and happens without effort, it is more accurate, but it is also extremely slow and unpredictable, and not able to be controlled either from outside or inside me very much.

I have another kind of thinking that I see as building block-towers on top of that.

Each block is a new level that I have to set up every time I do this.

I call myself an intellectual sprinter.

Because I could do amazing feats with this block-tower stuff. But I have to hold up every single block individually. And eventually I can't and they all come crashing down.

The important thing is the person I am at the core is not all that different when this happens, the person who learns slowly through pattern-matching and stuff is still very much there.

But the amount to which I can build those blocks up varies.

Sometimes tall, sometimes short.

But the taller I build them, it's like the longer a sprinter sprints. The easier it is for them to get tired, the easier it is for me to get intellectually exhausted.

I had a developmental trajectory of my own.

Lots of people tried to pile abstract/intellectual sorts of skills on.

The more piled on, they were all in that building-block area, the more overloaded I got, the more exhausted I got.

I managed years before I crashed.

Others don't manage as long.

Something familiar to many autistic adults is that we do a lot, sometimes better than most things we do. We do a project in a spurt of activity. And we do it very well. And then we are exhausted and we 'crash', we experience a full or partial shutdown.

The year when I was most able to pass for 'normal' was the age of 11. I passed for, maybe not normal, but just annoying and eccentric or something. I was a good student, I kept my temper for the first time in my life, my behavior was extremely controlled, and by force of will I ignored the neuropathic pain I experienced most of the time and the hand cramps I got from writing.

The next year things started falling apart. But because I had been doing "so well," it was decided I was bored. I echoed that. At age 12 I got put in an individualized program entirely to "accelerate me". At age 13 I was skipped a year into high school (which I lasted 3 months at before having to leave because of overload/shutdown behavior). And at age 14 I was put in college. And then I had a massive massive shutdown because what I needed was less overstimulation, not more, and what was happening was I was getting more and more information crammed into me that I had less and less ability to process.

So I had what most people call a regression, it was sudden in some ways and slow in others (and at various times), I lost a lot of things. But I also in retrospect think of it as my brain putting itself back on the developmental path it was meant to take, rather than the one other people were attempting to cram into it. If I had understood that it would not have been as frightening. (It did lead to an eventual autism diagnosis, but it also led to a lot of misdiagnoses and heavy overdrugging.)

Basically the way I really learn has taken the forefront and the other stuff has taken a backseat to it. So I learn (and give output) slowly, erratically, and differently than usual, but also do it better than I ever could when I crammed all that stuff into my head, most of which has simply fallen out over time. You can't get me to retain something by routing it through the standard abstract-intellectual thinking thing, you have to do it some other way. Nearly everything I was 'taught' that way is gone, but I fortunately learned a lot of other things in the process.

I don't know if any of this makes sense, but the thing you describe sounds either like a short-term or long-term shutdown in response to overstimulation.

Hi hun

it will always be one step forward two steps back its there way of dealing with the learning curve

suddenly things that have just been blah blah blah have fell into place and understanding is on the verge of breaking through.

so they go back to safe

but the understanding they have learnt will be to compelling to saty back down they will come right back out as soon as they feel it is safe enough to do so.

dont worry i know its hard but unless he is poorly i would not worry just ride it out but keep an eye on it

love shell

i also find when my aspie is stressed more and more old behaviours return

I'm not really sure it's about a feeling of safety. It's about the ability to deal with all that information (especially if it's information being processed through a way of processing information that is second-best for us at best) at once, and the fluctuating nature of our abilities in general.

I still prefer the sprinting analogy. Exhaustion is a closer analog to what we deal with than "not feeling safe" with new information (although overload in general doesn't feel very safe).
gtto39341.5859606481This is the way it's always been for Sharlet. A big leap in one area followd by regression in all others and eventually regression in the area that she was making gains in. At the moment the regression is a few weeks in. We saw huge gains in vocab of labeling words, now she has regressed in most all other areas and I expect her to regress in the verbal area soon. It's hard for us to see her loose things that we have all worked so hard on, but I try and take comfort in the fact that we don't slip all the way back, and some areas don't go far back at all. and anything she looses should be easier to get back once she is back in the moving forward phase again. One thing that helps a lot is structuring breaks into people's time.

Time when the person has no responsibility to do particularly anything, and might want to play with toys, zone out, read, do something that to that person is mindless (and that may differ from person to person and day to day).

Everyone needs some amount of break time. But for autistic people, it's often more urgent. We lose more when we don't get breaks than most people do. For any of you who are sleep-deprived from being parents, I am sure that you understand the awful effects that has on your emotions, thinking, and ability to handle situations. In other words, chronic sleep deprivation makes even non-autistic people "regress".

These breaks for autistic people can be as necessary as sleep. If we don't get them, we might not know why, but we become steadily more overloaded and steadily less capable of taking in or comprehending information. It's like sleep deprivation only it's not sleep we're being deprived of.

(But note that sleep disorders, particularly circadian rhythm disorders, are really common among autistic people too. Also for those of us with that small/receded jaw and all the other physical attributes that might or might not go with autism according to all that stuff, we're prone to developing sleep apnea which can be really serious. I'm going through testing soon for that because I stop breathing in my sleep and also wake up choking either because something closed off my airway or because of reflux. Can't stress how important it is to get that checked out if there are signs.)

But, basically, a lot of "regression" that goes with gaining skills comes from what I described above, and a really important component of our day is lots of breaks that are long enough for us to lose the momentum of whatever brainpower we're using on whatever task we're being asked to do. (Because breaks don't work as well when your mind is still acting like it did outside th break.)

And I've eventually learned to trust my brain to mostly know what it's doing, but that took awhile.

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