Autism and Transactional Analysis Dena Marshall Transcript

26 Pages·2014·0.35 MB·English

www.onlinevents.co.uk
www.onlinevents.co.uk

Transcript

Autism and Transactional
Analysis

Dena Marshall

Transcript

Conferences • Interviews • Training
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First published 2014
Copyright © John Wilson 2014

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
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Individuals with Autism (usually higher functioning Autism/Asperger Syndrome) will
frequent the therapy room, largely undiagnosed; seeking solutions to their relational,
emotional, and social issues.
These clients can have a major impact on the practitioners normal way of working,
potentially effecting both the therapist’s and the client’s self-worth. It’s important for
practitioners to have a good understanding of Autism, whether or not they choose to
work with this diagnosis. This understanding can primarily lead to identifying the
condition in order to work with the client effectively and/or refer on to another
therapist or agency.
From a primary care situation, TA can be useful to both the staff and family to gain a
deeper understanding of Autism, and how those on the Autistic Spectrum
communicate with their outside world. Treatment plans can be created around TA
concepts to help those with Autism meet their psychophysiological needs and
consequently enable them to have a good quality of life.
My background in working with individuals
presenting on the Autistic Spectrum goes back a
long way. During my early training as a
psychotherapist I was working in primary care within
an Autistic Community setting. I started looking at
the theory I was learning and applying it to my work,
and started seeing positive outcomes for the clients,
their family, and the staff. Since then I have been
passionate about what TA can bring to the lives of
those with Autism, especially within the
psychotherapeutic setting where I notice how easy
this diagnosis is to miss – along with the client too. I
have been practicing in Cornwall since 1999, and have had the pleasure of working
with many clients presenting with Autism, all of which have helped me challenge
myself, learn, and grow.
So come along and join in – I hope to have the live chat to hand so we can all have a
good discussion around this topic.
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Autism and Transactional Analysis
Dena Marshall

John: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our TA Tuesdays event, “Autism and
Transactional Analysis” with Dena Marshall. A very warm welcome to you
and to Online Events, Dena.
Dena: Hello, John. It’s good to be here, as everybody says. I’m good to be here in
my house, but it’s good to be with you virtually.
John: Thank you for having us in. We appreciate being with you in your home
today. It’s fab. Of course, a warm welcome to everyone who is joining us live
on the website. I have been teaching a new Scottish word, Dena. We’ve
been blathering away.
Dena: I’ve forgotten it already. Blathering.
John: We’ve been blathering away with everybody in the chat room for the last 20
minutes. That’s been nice. If you’re just arriving, it’s great to have you here.
Dena, you can see the chat room on your other laptop. I know now
everybody gets in the chat room but if you do want to, please feel free to do
that.
Leilani is here as well. We want to say thanks to Leilani for organising TA
Tuesdays. This is six months we’ve done already, which is incredible.
We’re really pleased to be doing this event on autism and TA with you,
Dena, as a way to wrap up our programme for the summer. It feels like a
great way to finish.
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Dena: Is this the last one of the official summer?
John: Yes. Saz and I are going to take a break for a month. Can you believe it? We
will be back in September. We’ve got a full programme all the way through.
We’re looking forward to that.
Dena: Excellent. Good stuff.
John: Maybe to get started we could hear a little bit about you, Dena, and our
usual where in the world are you?
Dena: I’m in sunny Cornwall in St. Austell which was made a bit famous by the
Eden project. Unfortunately, we have more visitors now in Cornwall than we
used to. St. Austell’s got really bad infrastructure. For me, six weeks of
staying indoors and ordering or shopping online is called for during summer
holidays. It is a nightmare out there.
People don’t know how to drive in Cornwall either, but it’s a beautiful place.
We do lots of kayaking, hiking, snorkelling and all sorts really. I’m one of
these kinds of people that enjoy where I’m living rather than take it for
granted.
If I go upstairs and get my binoculars out, I can see the sea, but I’m about
five minutes’ drive away to get to the coast. It’s pretty special. It’s a special
place to live.
John: You love it. I guess you live in a fantastic part of the UK. This year you’re
getting a summer where you can enjoy it.
Dena: We’ve had three bad years. This year has just been absolutely lovely.
John: That’s great. Thank you for giving us a sense of where you are. It would be
nice to hear a little bit about your professional journey as well and the kind
of things that you’ve done to bring you to here.
Dena: I guess I’m lucky because I was able to attend a transactional analysis
psychotherapy training course back in the ‘90s. It was one of a kind really. It
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only ever happened once, and then it kind of went back up country. I was
lucky to be part of that.
I finished my training in about 2000. I started seeing clients in 1999. In 2002
we set up an organisation. I say “we.” I do apologise. It’s a bit symbiotic with
my husband, Mark, who was doing the same thing basically. We set up
ongoing support in 2002.
We haven’t looked back really. We’ve just grown from year to year. We’ve
separated our house off. Where you can see, where I am now, is called our
training room. It’s small group training, eight people maximum. I run groups
and meditations in here.
Then next door we’ve got a dedicated client room as well, a dedicated client
bathroom and client kitchen. It’s all set up. We split off half of our house to
dedicate to our business, which works really well.
John: What a great environment. The time has flown by since your training. You’re
really embedded into the community as a service. That’s great.
Dena: With regard to autism, when I started training, I basically worked in primary
care. It was natural to start applying some of the theory because what you
like when you’re training is enthusiastic with all of the theories that you
learn. Then you go around people-watching and all that.
I was applying it not only how we as staff are all interacting with those with
autism but how they were interacting back, what ego states they were in
and all of that.
I started to play around with some transactions and immediately saw a
result. It went from there. I did some presentations and wrote a paper on
autism and transactional analysis looking at ego states. It started from there.
I’m pleased to have that experience for probably about eight to 10 years of
working with autism. It’s given me this fantastic base on an intuitive level.
When somebody walks in, there’s something there. Are they or aren’t they?
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It’s very tricky sometimes to diagnose on the higher functioning side of
autism.
I’ve been really passionate about it ever since. I was passionate back then as
being an advocate for autism to give them a good quality of life and put in
programmes in primary care where they would respond well, have less
incidents, be held less and all of those kind of things.
I think transactional analysis is a tool that goes amazingly well with autism.
Hopefully, we’ll discuss some of that in a bit.
John: You’ll give us a sense of some of the things that TA can do to support
someone with autism. I think also it’s so important when you have a client
come in to see you for the first time, you might have a sense that, as you
were saying, someone has that higher functioning on that continuum or
scale.
Maybe as therapists we miss some of that. That can have a real significance
in how we approach someone therapeutically or perhaps couples who are
coming to see us who have an experience of autism.
Dena: Yes. Most people who have come in have relational problems, those either
diagnosed or undiagnosed. A person diagnosed with autism or Asperger
Syndrome normally comes in and almost knows that they want support with
some emotional issues.
I find a lot of undiagnosed coming in having social issues where their partner
has said they’ve got some kind of social disorder. They have this big label,
but they don’t know what to do with it. They have lots of problems within all
of their relationships, including work.
I’m really passionate about therapists being able to spot that on whatever
level. I will hopefully explain how we do that as therapists in a very easy
way, actually.
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I do recommend that therapists learn about autism, whether that be just
googling that online. I’m not necessarily going to go into exactly what autism
is.
I’ve got the diagnostic criteria. It’s massively changed from the DSM4 to the
DSM5. There have been some big, controversial changes and not the
changes I think are particularly useful personally. That’s up for debate,
maybe not for tonight but maybe we do another one.
John: Of course. There’s a lot to squeeze in. Those are two important things. Why
might we notice? Someone might not know that they have an experience of
autism.
Dena: On a very quick explanation, autism is explained as a triad of impairment. I
don’t know about you or anybody else in the chat room, but the impairment
side gets to me. I really don’t like the word. I think it almost puts people in
the disability kind of position.
The triad I’ve written on the board here. Basically, they reckon it’s a social
and emotional interaction impairment, an impairment of social
communication language. The bit that I disagree with is an impairment of
imagination and flexibility of thought.
This is my explanation of autism, and I’m talking about Asperger’s really, the
higher-functioning, because we won’t get full-blown autism into the therapy
room, or not usually unless it’s part of an organised therapeutic event.
It’s a sensory input and interpretation and a brain organisational problem. In
other words, it’s how we normally understand what comes in on a sensory
level, and we have all these processes going off in the brain to deal with
what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell. Anybody with autism will not have
the same wiring.
It’s a bit like dyslexics. I’m slight dyslexic. I understand it from that point of
view because if somebody said to me in the middle of driving and I say,
“How do I get from here to there?” they all look at me with this quizzical
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look on their faces and say, “Are you joking?” because I can’t do it. I actually
can’t do it, as much as I rehearse and remember the route when I’m in it.
I really have a job understanding where I am, so I can understand a little bit
about what it might be to have those wires cross and things coming in not
being interpreted in the way that we take for granted. That’s a quick
introduction. I have another, John, which you know about.
John: I think that’s a great introduction in terms of description, but we’ve got
something a little bit experiential too.
Dena: We have, and I will get to the chatroom. I’m really keen to get interactive.
What I’m going to do is give you a little experience of what that might feel
like for somebody who might not be able to process sensory information in
as we do. By the way, it’s called neurotypical for a non-autistic person if we
get the terms right.
To everybody in the chatroom, what I want you to do is notice what you
notice. I’m going to do this for about 30 seconds.
John: The idea of this is, if we are neurotypical, to have the kind of experience that
someone with autism is having.
Dena: What I’m going to do while this is going on is read out the criteria for social
communication, John. This is specifically in social use of verbal and
nonverbal communication that is manifested by all of the following.
There’s deficit in using communication for social purposes, such as creating
and sharing information in a manner appropriate for the social context.
I’m going to look at the chatroom, and I want to know what you noticed.
What did you notice? I moved purposefully backward and forward. There
was sensory overload, most definitely.
John: If we say back some of things that are being experienced in the chatroom,
there’s overload of sound, too much going on and trying to concentrate on
one thing and then losing it.
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Dena: That’s really great because that was what I was hoping for. Some people are
going to find the visual and not being able to see my face because I was
going backward and forward.
It’s really great that there is a difference in the chatroom. Some people
focused on what they could hear and that it was an overload on sound. They
could concentrate on what I was saying underneath.
There are some people that it was the metronome. Maybe it was the sound
from that or because it was right in the middle of my face and eye line. You
wouldn’t have been able to see expressions.
Others concentrated on me moving backward and forward, and not getting
that spatial settlement of me being in one place and able to concentrate.
The sound breaking up wasn’t part of the experiment, but it could have
been.
That’s really great that it’s not just one person or a few people all focusing
on the same thing. That’s a lot like Asperger’s because they will have
problems interpreting information in different areas.
Sometimes it will be on sound. For other people it will be with touch.
Obviously, I can’t demonstrate that in that exercise. For some people, it will
be clutter around the room or too many people talking at once. It might just
be the visual side of too many people, like going into a supermarket.
It might be on the level of noise front that might be okay, but then with the
fact that there are a lot of people there they will then get overwhelmed.
One of the things that I think is really important with anybody walking into a
therapy room is really to note what their social problem is. I like to
differentiate between.
Somebody has a problem with social aspects because they feel shameful.
Then they get to recall how shameful they feel, and you can feel and smell
shame in the therapy room if you’ve been doing it long enough.