Autism? It’s my SUPERPOWER
There are 700,000 people with autism in the UK and more than 7,000 in Ireland and while some are extremely successful and confident – TV presenter Chris Packham among them – there are others who need a high level of support.
For those who don’t have friends or relatives with autism, it’s easy to be confused about what it actually means.
Anyone who has watched the Netflix programme Love On The Spectrum will be familiar with the Australian dynamo Jodi Rodgers, who is the show’s resident therapist. A counsellor and special education teacher who also runs a practice helping neurodivergent people ‘create love and connection’, Rodgers has been working with autistic people for the past 30 years.
These are the moving and often funny stories of some of the hundreds of people she has counselled. Many autistic people suffer from hypersensitivity. Labels in clothes can feel like a razor, and seams in a sock are agony. Certain sounds, even something as simple as a bathroom fan, can be so overwhelming they cause a mental and physical shutdown.
Rodgers points out that many of us manifest this trait to some degree. If you have ever been driven mad by a ticking clock or a dripping tap, you’ll have some idea of how this hypersensitivity feels. While for most of us it’s annoying when the supermarket moves the produce around to different aisles, for someone who’s autistic it can be terrifying, as ‘rigid or repetitive thinking is a component of their neurological system… the need for sameness is central to an autistic person’s way of moving through the world.’
Most children go through a phase where they are fixated on something, like dinosaurs or fire engines or fairies, but this obsession usually fades once they start school. For neurodivergent people, it often doesn’t. The need to talk about their passion is overwhelming.
One child Rodgers worked with was so consumed by his interest in Spider-Man that his teacher banned him from talking about it or bringing all his Spidey stuff into school. The result was that he turned from a bright, chatty boy into ‘a shadow of his former self ’.
With Rodgers’s help, the school reversed the ban and instead turned Spider-Man into a learning tool for the boy. For maths, he would count spiderwebs, he used words connected to Spider-Man to learn to read and write, and he joyfully set off on ‘missions’ to sharpen pencils and tidy the classroom. SpiderMan’s motto, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, even became the class motto.
Rodgers’s patience, like that of many of the parents of the children she meets, is extraordinary. One young man refused to come out of his room when she visited him, so each time they had a session she would sit outside his bedroom door, reading aloud to him. After four months he finally emerged from his room, and started coming to her office for counselling. ‘I never thought I’d meet someone more stubborn than me,’ he told her.
This is a splendid book, full of warmth and understanding and mercifully free of jargon. Rodgers believes the world would be a happier place if we learned to be less judgemental and more accepting of those whose brains work differently from ours.