Autism: My Take

I believe very strongly that the central problem in autistic children is a lack of intimacy. Eye contact is absolutely critical when trying to help an autistic child. Our society is so fast paced and everyone is always on the go. The effects this has on our kids may not be obvious as living the fast paced hectic lifestyle has become the norm. But when everyone is always running from place to place, we seldom connect intimately.

In addition to running from place to place all day, we love our television. Instead of getting together in the evening to connect, we get together to connect with the tube. The only intimacy we get from this is perhaps laughing together over a funny joke. It seems our whole society is obsessed with entertainment. Even churches now are turning into amusement type parks rather than places to learn about G-d. Our culture revolves around one central thing, numbing out our uncomfortable angst through doing, and doing, and doing more. Or watching and listening and moving and etc.

In order to bring autistic kids out of the darkness they are in, we need to connect with them. The most important element to this is eye contact. Eyes are the windows to our souls and connecting your soul to your childs is the key. We need to be able to look deep in their eyes and give them the intimacy they need. Touch is also another way to show intimacy, a simple rub on the shoulder or pat on the back will go along way. But the main ingredient is being able to sit in a quiet place with them face to face and make as much eye contact as possible. It may be a real challenge at first to do this, but once they start getting their deep longings met, they will slowly come around. This may take a ton of patience for some time, but sitting down face to face for at least 30 minutes a day with them is key. You may want to work your way up to 30 minutes and start only with 5 for example.

A technique that can be used while looking at them is what I'll call lifting. You do this by looking deep into their eyes and then focussing on your connection with them, and then lifting their energy up towards the ceiling. It is hard to explain this, but you want to try and lift the energy in their body up and pull them out of the darkness they are in. You should be able to feel this and the degree to which they are in a word lost.

Through slowing down our lifestyles and doing less, we will be doing a whole lot more for our autistic child. We need to stop running the marathon and start sitting down at the table together. Playing games as opposed to always watching TV is a great way to increase eye contact and intimacy in the family. But nothing works as well as one on one face to face conversation while attempting to make as much deep intimate eye contact as possible. I truly believe by working on these techniques that you will notice the difference. In some cases the inability to connect at an intimate level may be passed down from the parents. In this case it is important for the parents to work on their own communication skills. This will help them then work better to connect with their kids. Deep intimate eye contact and calm conversation is what we need for all of us that is. You can connect deeply with people outside of a romantic relationship. We were all meant to connect deeply with one another and the eyes are the way we do this.

Please help us out and start our social community that will focus on real problems and issues we face. You can join here!