WE'RE ALL ON A SPECTRUM

Blog Post 

The following thoughts represent only my own opinion based on qualitative research, observation, and intuition, from years of interaction with what we currently deem to be neuro-atypical relatives, friends, and dozens of therapy clients. I park it here in the hopes that someone with a more scientific frame of mind will take up this ball of findings…and run with it.

Like most clinicians, I am encountering more and more clients – and families of clients – who appear to be ‘neurodiverse’...which is like saying that only some people are unique!  In fact, so many people are being assessed this way, that I originally believed that the brain might be changing in some evolutionarily coherent way which might make us more compatible with a world driven by computer technology and artificial intelligence. However, since not all so-called ‘atypical’ folks have a head for tech, I subsequently came to believe that we are simply broadening our understanding of this characteristic and thereby identifying it earlier, as well as later. Please notice that I do not say diagnosing it earlier, as I do not see neurodiversity as a disorder. Most recently, I have concluded that the re-framing of autism as something that can be understood on a spectrum, was far more ingenious than it was ever even intended to be by those who contributed to the DSM. The roots of the word autism are from the Greek aut, (self), and ism, (the state of being); autism is the state of being oneself.

I now believe that autism is a quality that we all possess, which looks different on everyone, and which can range from dysfunctionality in one spot, to genius on another, and everything in between. Notice, too, that I say, one spot, rather than one end…I do so because I want to erase the notion of a linear hierarchy. I would like to suggest that our autism is a measure of how our brains and nervous systems respond to outside input; sensory, cognitive, and social-emotional. This is also a wide band and has its own subsets, and micro-subsets. That is, one can have a high degree of reactivity to sensory input, such as loud sounds, bright lights, sudden movement, crowded conditions, medication, rough textures – as I do – and yet be very rapid processors of language, color, music, and other people’s feelings – as I also am. Others can be slow processors of emotions and language, and yet rapid with things mathematical and mechanical – as I am not! Some can read a face or a room in a nano-second, as I can, have a high level of competency with activities of daily living – as I do – and not be able to easily read a map or remember/picture how many cups are in a quart. Some, like myself, can write well, and cannot spell well. Others can memorize and cannot intuit – that is not me! Some people have animated faces, some appear blank. Some people need quietude and solitude, others need social immersion – currently categorized as the personality traits of introversion and extroversion – with the former often being seen as less ideal. Some people crave touch, some recoil from it.

And these differences are also situational, not static. I have worked with blank-faced clients who sobbed at goodbye. Non-verbal clients whose poetry gutted me. Highly sensitive clients who loved sound baths, and seemingly low-attaching clients whose grief at the death of a parent or pet was inconsolable. My point here, is that we all have spots of slow and rapid processing along cognitive, sensory, and social/emotional lines, which may or may not change in different conditions. Some of us are very particular, and others are numb to their surroundings. We are all autistic in the sense that our states of being have individual and varying responses to input that can be deemed as rapid or slow, and our social constructions take the measure of these rates and pathologize some of them.

As Dr. Howard Gardner discovered years ago, there are multiple kinds of intelligences, and we all learn, and need to be taught, differently from one another. Not an easy feat in a one-size fits-all, overcrowded and underfunded public school system. But if the buildings can’t change, our metrics can. We are all fast and slow processors in different spots along a spectrum. Albert Einstein couldn’t tie his shoes but somehow understood, better than any human before him, that everything is relative.

Don't Neglect Your Child's Narrative

In an article entitled Why We Can’t Remember Our Childhood Memories, published on CNN, August 13th, 2021, (https://apple.news/A48sMPwAFQZy0G0HLxfIibw) the authors discussed a phenomenon that I have been keenly aware for all of the years that I’ve practiced as a Narratologist.

Most of my clients, and those of the clinicians I train, do not remember much about their childhoods. I have always believed that brain development, and/or trauma, were only part of the reason. The other reason, is the lack of sharing of auto/biographical narrative within their families. That is, children must be taught to language their experience. This teaching happens when an adult inquires about their child’s experience, shows interest, stays present, asks good dramaturgical questions, and helps make meta-cognitive the experience that the child had, or is having. This kind of sense-making is crucial in helping the child process their experiences; in growing the adult-child relationship; and in forming the ability of the child to articulate their own minds, and hearts…toward making their lives more coherent. This is what the article asserts:

“…most research on the role of language focuses on a particular form of expression called narrative, and its social function. When parents reminisce with very young children about past events, they implicitly teach them narrative skills – what kinds of events are important to remember and how to structure talking about them in a way that others can understand. Unlike simply recounting information for factual purposes, reminiscing revolves around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family stories maintain the memory’s accessibility over time, and also increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and their degree of emotion. More coherent stories are remembered better. Maori adults have the earliest childhood memories (age 2.5) of any society studied so far, thanks to Maori parents’ highly elaborative style of telling family stories. “

I practiced this kind of Narratological parenting with my own children, and I am astounded at the access they both have, (now in their 20’s), to events, feelings, people and places encountered at ages as young as 2 and 3. I, on the other hand, had/have no shared family narrative about the first five years of my life — during which my father died suddenly — and consequently I recalled nothing before the age of 6. Some of that memory was recovered through writing, at an older age, and this is why I have my clients write to prompts from their own spoken text, between sessions. The memories are stored, and can be painstakingly exhumed, but this hard work would not be necessary if they had been processed and maintained from the start. Having a shared family narrative is the difference between an inner life that is frozen in trauma, or in unchosen solitude, and one that flows, and is communal.

Neglecting to help our children form and speak coherent narratives about themselves and their lives is, in fact, neglect.

The Troubled American Couple

As a psychotherapist and coach, I, of course, often apprehend the world in psychological terms. After reading up on Covid in my newsfeed for the tenth time the other day, I had an epiphany about the state of affairs in our government.

It is thought, in many corners of the world of couple’s therapy, that the success of a couple is largely predicated upon each person’s ability to tolerate their partner’s anxiety – and the coping mechanisms that they developed to manage it. Like every other living creature, we all possess survival anxiety; it is wired in, as are the ways in which our various brains are designed to cope with it. In addition to this built-in wiring, there is also the modelling we get from our families, which is indelibly baked in as early learnings, and remains largely unchanged unless there is s crisis arising from our way of being and we make a long and concerted effort to change.

It occurred to me, as I read about the latest antipathy between the two political Parties, that Republicans were the classic denier/optimists – preferring to hope for the best and not to know the worst. Democrats, conversely, demonstrated classic hypervigilant/pessimistic behavior, wanting to know and prepare for the worst, wanting to know the hard truths in order to do so – both hopelessly unable to tolerate one another’s ways.

I asked myself how I would work this gridlock in therapy, if divorce were not an option/preference. Always, to my mind, the first step toward any mindful resolution of conflict, and hoped-for shift, is awareness of the reasons for the rift, (as described above): that there are two colliding styles – neither one being right or wrong. That the preference for these styles is coherent with learnings from personal history, and seem urgently necessary to maintain. This step would entail a close life-review to reveal the histories, (I’m a narratologist), and to discern how and why these styles were adopted, and what is felt to be at risk if they were to be let go of. In the process of this forensic discovery work, the logic of the two predilections is revealed to both parties, and de-pathologized.

And, often, this first step is the only step needed toward easement of tension, as neither party has to take the antithetical position of the other personally, nor hold shame about their own. But, typically, the next step is to discern whether either party is actually feeling imprisoned in their own behavior, and would wish for some shift. This is often the case, as being polarized by a strong counter-force tends to keep us dug into an uncomfortable hole. The self-assessment is easier to bear, now that the shame has been lowered, and often some meeting in the middle then can be achieved. But this does not have to be the case for relations to improve; both can continue to incline – initially – the way they always did, but now with less reactivity and aggression. The assumption that they will be deemed as ‘wrong’ has been ameliorated, and the optimist can hold hope for the pessimist, while the pessimist can build Plan B. This is not to imply that opposites must attract in order to create this healthy whole – we all must aspire to see with clarity and hold our own hope in the face of despair. But as long as we couple, we need two-party solutions that will allow a tolerance for both.

Do As I Do

Today there was an article in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times ('Teaching Peace in Elementary School') on my favorite subject, emotional intelligence: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/sunday-review/teaching-peace-in-elementary-school.html? The author, Julie Scelfo, makes a smart case for the importance of teaching kids how to deal with their emotions, so that they can become self and other aware, and learn to make responsible decisions. Of course, the skeptics are immediately lining up to express concern that having teachers 'address feelings' will take time away from 'academics', which are already "starved for oxygen"...and that is the absurd problem in a nutshell. The thought that we might now have to create a special curriculum through which to teach children how to have EQ is as ridiculous as the notion that the ability to cope with anger without reaching for a weapon is less important in this world than algebra.

Here is the point that is being missed: EQ is not an end, it is a means. If teachers were trained in EQ, and they are not, (I know, because I used to impart this training to EQ starved educators through professional development workshops), everything they said and did in their classroom would be modeling emotional intelligence. By this, I do not mean to imply that teachers have no social skills...they do...and many can demonstrate them effectively when not being squeezed into test-prep all day long. That said, nowhere in the curriculum of Education degree programs, are such sacred subjects as: listening, mindful non-reactivity, or self-awareness building. How can this be inculcated in children, if it has not been inculcated in those who would lead them? 

Emotional intelligence is not an add-on. It is not a single weekend retreat for conflict resolution. It is not a luxury. It is also not a stand-alone subject. EQ needs to be the very vehicle of delivery for every single action and expression that occurs in every classroom. It is form, not content. It is what will make it safe for learners to open up to knowledge, and to one another. Emotional intelligence should be the beginning, middle and end of each and every human interaction at school; whether science, math, literature or history is being discussed. It is the oxygen in the room. It is the antidote to terrorism. It is our future.

Just Say No

It's time for parents to say no to testing.

As a parent myself, who shepherded two children through the NYC public school system, and as a clinician who treats the parents of many other such children, I can unhesitatingly assert that we are driving our children crazy at worst, at the least we are teaching them to hate learning.

There is hardly a family I know with school-aged children whose children are not on attentional medication, anti-anxiety medication, or anti-depressant medication. None of these children are enjoying school...they are all stressed out beyond belief. Not just because the classes are too large, the teachers overwhelmed and the new core curriculum unnecessarily difficult and stultifyingly boring, but because everything they are being taught to memorize, rather than think through, is in preparation for weekly tests, which will prepare them for annual tests, which will prepare them for pre-college tests. There is no learning for it's own sake. There is no joy in learning. There is no creativity in learning. Even at the supposedly highly creative specialized art schools that both of my sons attended, there was no relief from this push to turn them into parrots and monkeys.

While thought leaders like Dr. Dan Seigel (The Mindful Brain) and Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence), agree that memorization does NOT teach kids to learn, and despite the fact that our youth have unlimited access to more factoids on the information highway via the phones in their pockets than any teacher -- no matter how well trained -- could ever provide, schools continue to insist that the memorization of facts still constitutes an education. It does not. We are boring our kids to death, and then drilling the love of learning out of them. Even the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan came out in favor of less testing and said that all the testing is "sucking the oxygen out of the classrooms." (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/education/arne-duncan-says-administration-is-committed-to-testing.html?_r=0) Well, a lot of the canaries are already dead and gone; they left to pursue GEDs or homeschooling, or they ended up in rehab or psych wards.

We do not simply need a little less testing, we need to stop thinking of learners as computers. They will use their computers, to correct spelling and grammar, to add and subtract numbers, to do literature reviews and to acquire current and historical data. What they need from schools. and cannot acquire through their devices, is the means to: having their natural passion and curiosity met, developing and practicing problem solving skills experientially, engaging in emotionally intelligent discourse and collaborations with adults and one another, and the capacity to make meaning of their lives and express empathy toward their planet and fellow humans. This is what the workplace will demand of them, and this is what we are NOT preparing them for. It is also what will get their attention, help them relate to one another, and lift them out of the depths of depression.

We need to make schools places of learning and growth and empowerment, not torture, stress and failure. We need to make schools no-testing zones. It is up to us as parents. We are the taxpayers and we pay the salaries. Opt out of mandated testing. Just say no.
 

The Pace of Our Lives (And how it can support or crush our natural rhythms)

In our American culture, we learn early that those who work quickly and finish first get the prize. This has not only been the guiding principle in the sphere of business, but in our education system as well. As a clinician, and a learning consultant who worked with the Department of Education for decades, I have long wondered whether fewer children would be in danger of being ‘left behind’ if we were not trying to get them wherever they are supposed to go in such a great hurry.

During my many years of leading EQ workshops for students, the number of participants diagnosed with ADHD grew disproportionately to the steady size of the workshop populations, sometimes amounting to half of all those enrolled. In addition to being diagnosed with and medicated for attention disorders, many more students now seek what is commonplace shorthand from the New York State Department of Education: a “504” accommodation plan. Those in receipt of this coveted allowance receive permission for extended time to take a timed test or complete a pile of nightly homework. The rise in need for these allowances, including in my own family, occurred when standardized testing – and teaching toward preparation for these tests – became the dominant feature of the learning experience at school. Principals were pressured to pressure their teachers, who in turn pressured students, and their parents, to make sure that learning was happening as quickly as possible. Those families that could afford tutors to help maintain this lightening speed were able to thrive – though at a cost to vital relaxation time. Those who could not keep up financially, or even emotionally, began to slip shamefully behind.

The resulting shame tracked with these students through subsequent years of schooling, where it was not uncommon for bright children to think of themselves as ‘slow’. These young learners often found themselves being given prescriptions for focusing drugs, like Ritalin and Adderall, the long term effect of which will tell its story in later years and future generations. The Center for Disease Control reported earlier this year that 11% of children between 4-17 had received an ADHD diagnosis at some point, more than double the percentage from twenty years ago, and this rise is often being attributed to the way in which we are “schooling our kids.” Rather than changing this schooling, however, we are, in effect, drugging our kids in order to do well on competitive tests; something we would penalize in our Olympic athletes.

It is not surprising that in a culture that privileges productivity above all else, we have created a generation of learners who now suffer deep shame about the fact that they are too slow. But what, if anything, that achieves excellence - writing a great book, developing a great invention, making a great change in a social system - was ever done quickly? Being able to rattle off elements on the Periodic Table at top speed is not a predictor of a future Nobel Peace prize recipient, nor does quickly memorizing a list of SAT vocabulary words without error foreshadow the next William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf. More importantly, being the first to solve a math problem will certainly not predict that you will be an attuned parent, or spouse, or manager. It will not predict that you will take good care of your planet, or even your body. It will assure only that you will continue to mistake speed for quality of experience, as if the first one to complete their lives…will have won.

Attempts to cover too much ground too quickly fail those learners with sensitive temperaments who seize up and slow down in situations of being judged and graded. Ironically, these are the very kind of sensitive youngsters who could become compassionate leaders. Similarly, timed rote repetition is crippling to creative thinkers who tend to resist thinking ‘inside the box,’ yet these are the very kind of entrepreneurial thinkers that our future economy will depend upon. Racing also penalizes learners who are deeper thinkers, not given to a proclivity for fast memorization; let’s not forget that Daniel Goleman, in his seminal book on emotional intelligence, stated that memorization is “the opposite of learning.” We need to begin teaching in real time, the time it really takes to transform a learner – and learning is indeed an act of transformation. It is ironic that in our attempts to right the overcorrection that was “No Child Left Behind,” our new paradigm is framed as a race to the top.

In racing, we are crushing the spirits of our youth by asking them to work all day at school, and then to hold a job each night completing homework, not to mention that many kids also need to work most of the weekend if they hope to get a promotion at the end of the year. We are turning our children into a labor force medicated into submission, and marching ever more quickly toward a toxic world in which they will likely face challenging job prospects and a fragile ecology, and they will have gained no emotional skills along the way with which to cope with any of that. With our predilection for pharmaceutical solutions, I fear that we are also teaching them that they can always take an anti-depressant if the racing depletes them, or a sleep aid to slow them down at night.

And if they can slow down long enough, they might actually notice that someone has stolen their capacity for being mindfully present to themselves and their lives, and that they better do whatever it takes to get it back. We healers, educators, and parents can help them in this effort by striving for depth and not speed. Many colleges and secondary schools (see here and here) are now asking students to study one subject or complete only one project with profound excellence, over an extended period of time; in so doing they can learn everything they need to know about achieving excellence in anything. Their teachers might even be able to slow down long enough to enjoy guiding them to this glorious and mindful knowing.

Meditation as an Act of Compassion

Like most things in our culture of “thingness,” I fear that we are quickly turning the spiritual art of meditation into a tool for “success,” otherwise known as the attainment of “things”: money, status, possessions. This Buddhist practice was never intended to boost test scores or earning potential. Quite the contrary, it was a way to ground people in the spacious present, absent the clutter of attachment to things. In Phillip Moffit’s wonderful book on Buddhism, Dancing With Life, he refers to a cartoon entitled Dali Lama’s Birthday, in which he is opening a present that proves to be an empty box, and exclaims: “Nothing. Just what I always wanted!”

Now we find Buddhist mindfulness training being implemented in schools and businesses with the intention not so much to simplify, clarify, and purify our human longings into a comfortable state of being with what is, but to turn practitioners into people who will be able to do and achieve all that is not. This was not the intention behind Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal effort to bring mindfulness into medicine as a non-pharmacologic form of healing and stress reduction, which has now become an industry of quick-fix anxiety reduction; a kind of 12-step program for those of us addicted to busyness as a form of distraction from our pain.

As David DeSteno posits in his recent NYTimes article entitled, The Morality of Meditation, although the benefits of mindfulness to mind, heart, and body are now well researched, it is cognitively dissonant indeed to harness these benefits for the purposes of advancing that which we, as a nation, are in recovery from: over- attainment of personal gain. DeSteno, a psychologist, personally led a study that demonstrated evidence of people achieving greater levels of compassion as a result of regular meditation practice. His hope in sharing this data, was to highlight this as not a side benefit of meditation to us individually, and as a society, but as the main event. As a clinician and coach, I regularly invite my clients into a practice of deep awareness of self and other; when they sit with me, when they are quietly alone, and when they are interacting with wider humanity.

This deep awareness of inter-relationality is also known as “emotional intelligence.” EQ is something that needs to be mindfully and broadly filtered into the raising of children both at home and in the schools, not so that the next generation will be focused enough to have the highest standardized test scores or salaries ever, but as a way to ensure their well-being across the lifespan, and the well-being of the planet that we share with the people with whom we are interdependent. Taking the time to deeply notice our world, and the state of the people we share it with, is our best last hope for the species.

Another Vote for the Art of Listening

Last week, Lee Gutkind wrote a beautiful piece for the Times on How To Listen. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, as I have been teaching this skill — a skill that is not taught or even modeled well in most schools, or most families — for several decades. I also directed a documentary film about it (Listening With Their Eyes), and continue to practice it much of the day each week in private narrative therapy and coaching sessions.

I am a far more dynamic clinician than the one depicted by the author in the article, but I share with him an ardent commitment to paying close attention to the stories of my clients. I call myself a narratologist, and like the ‘interviewers’ referenced in the piece, it is my job to help people articulate their own stories and to attend to them utterly by reflecting back what I’ve heard, and asking the right questions to help elicit more. It is indeed an active process, one that requires all five senses, if not six or seven, as Dr. Daniel Seigel, a leading interpersonal neurobiologist, suggests.

Like the nonfiction writers that Gutkind also refers to, a narratologist is listening to the story that is told and the story that is left out: many of my clients claim to remember little or nothing of their childhoods. And, even when ‘the facts’ are shared, they are often filtered through the inherited opinions of others, or overlaid with the gloss of spin or the opacity of trauma. There are often tangential stories, which turn out not  to be so tangential... because everything is being filtered through and languaged by the same teller. And, as the writer asserts, if you keep your eye and ear on the primary narrative — ‘the story of them,’ as they hold it — you will keep returning to the source of historical learnings, as well as potential transformations.

Listening actively is all about asking the right questions, and knowing when to simply listen. But it is sensing the ‘inner POV’ to which Gutkind alludes that separates those of us who simply witness from those of us who can truly instantiate the experience of another. Knowing someone is about taking the time to learn the moments of their existence; as they say, ‘God is in the details.’ This kind of mindful attention is not only the stuff of good interviews, it is the stuff of good relationships.

New Support for the Importance of Healthy Narratives

Recently there was a piece in the NYTimes (The Stories That Bind Us), about the importance of families having a ‘narrative’; not just any narrative, but a narrative of resilience. To us narratologists, this is not new news. For decades I worked with young people, (through my former non-profit, Find Your Voice) to provide them with an outlet for articulating and revising their narratives, for this very reason. As humans, we are story-telling creatures. While current meditation practices advise us to simply breathe and ‘let go of the stories’ in our minds, in truth, we are not separable from our stories. Conversely, we are also not stuck with our negative narratives. We get into trouble is when we continually re-tell ourselves the same negative stories about ourselves, our families, or the world. What turns a negative story into a positive one, is not the changing of any of the facts of history, but the way in which we acknowledge and hold these facts, and the ways in which we envision and then create the potential future that can grow out of them.

It is the paradigm shift that was codified by Narrative Therapy founders Michael White and David Epston, and the simple act of dramaturgy that is effected every time a good editor sits with a writer, playwright or filmmaker and asks: what is the story here? Where are the patterns, the inconsistencies, the resolutions? How can we tell it, be affirmed in it, and also re-vise it...go beyond it? In my practice as a Narrative Coach, I do just that with client stories. My practice is dedicated to the facilitation of this healthy revision, whether in individual or group sessions, at clinics, schools, offices or families. We are dedicated to the belief that we have lived our stories, but we are also more than our stories...before we can know what we want, and how to achieve it, we must know who we’ve been.

Bringing Student "Voice" Into Education

On Friday, March 22, 2013, The Washington Post published an article about the "The Independent Project," a youth-driven initiative whose mission is to help students design their own schools. For some readers, it may seem that this movement is merely a direct result of the utter failure of schools designed by adults, and that the primacy of the student’s desire to get rid of grades and testing is merely a direct result of the utter failure of a movement that has left far too many students, and most of their teachers, way behind. Not only are we falling behind in attendance and graduation rates, but also in passion; in the desire of young people to participate fully in this thing that we have come to call "becoming educated.”  For me, this Project is a result of all of these failures, and of much, much more.

The guiding principle of the Project is to give students a "voice."  This will not only provide a means of including them, it will become the actual means of educating them. Most of what young people now engage in at school, once they can decode letters and numbers, is a process of disciplining and challenging their minds. Sadly, much too much of this is still done through the primitive act of memorization. In contrast, higher order brain activity is a process that advances creative problem solving, and relies on coherent communication.

Young minds should be as heavily engaged in acquiring self-knowledge, and other-knowledge, as in acquiring knowledge of the natural and abstract worlds of science and math. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the literacy of being able to read others and to respond appropriately; in short, it is about communication…it is about voice.  The specific spirit inside each student has a specific voice, and that voice grows and is strengthened by the opportunity to exercise it in discourse and inquiry, which is the true meaning of being liberally educated. The outcome of this will be that when young people have an opportunity to develop strong voices, they will become strong leaders - of themselves, and of one another. How poetic, then, that the groundswell for this right-minded approach to educational reform comes from those who will tolerate being voiceless no more.

​To watch The Independent Project in action, view the video below on students designing their own school:

The best small town in America experiments with self-directed learning at its public high school. A group of students gets to create their own school-within-a-school and they learn only what they want to learn. Does it work? Charles Tsai finds out by spending a week with the Independent Project.