I always think of families like a garden. If the kids are the plants, then the parents are like the soil and water. Siblings are like co-habitating plants. I always operate under this premise and work on parents of the kids I work with as much as possible because how can plants thrive if the earth and the water are out of balance?
The greatest experience I had today was in working with the older brother of a child with autism. Kids with challenges take a lot of resources, not only materially, but emotionally and in time. This older brother was such a sweet one, learning to put his needs aside to help his brother, but as I've been working with his family, he had been getting increasingly "annoyed" with his brother. A feeling he never really had before. It came up today that it was his turn to get worked on and when I put my attention wholly on him, he was at once relishing it and not knowing what to do with all the attention. It's like he was finally getting what he has been wanting but it's so much information that it's uncomfortable. So the goal we came up with was that "It's ok for me to focus on myself." It was a quick little procedure, some movements and a repatterning, but his whole attitude shifted, and when we were done with the balancing procedure, his little brother(as if on cue) turned up the volume on his game to the max. But rather than jump off the table to attend to his brother's behavior, he just laid there on the table, still paying attention to his own body. I told him, "did you notice that you were not only paying attention to what your brother was doing and you kept yourself focused on what we were working on?" He thought for a moment and said, "Oh....yeah. It doesn't really bother me anymore". His mom gave him a hug after he got off the table and this time rather than giggling uncomfortably, he faced her full on and really received her hug. It was beautiful to watch.
The greatest experience I had today was in working with the older brother of a child with autism. Kids with challenges take a lot of resources, not only materially, but emotionally and in time. This older brother was such a sweet one, learning to put his needs aside to help his brother, but as I've been working with his family, he had been getting increasingly "annoyed" with his brother. A feeling he never really had before. It came up today that it was his turn to get worked on and when I put my attention wholly on him, he was at once relishing it and not knowing what to do with all the attention. It's like he was finally getting what he has been wanting but it's so much information that it's uncomfortable. So the goal we came up with was that "It's ok for me to focus on myself." It was a quick little procedure, some movements and a repatterning, but his whole attitude shifted, and when we were done with the balancing procedure, his little brother(as if on cue) turned up the volume on his game to the max. But rather than jump off the table to attend to his brother's behavior, he just laid there on the table, still paying attention to his own body. I told him, "did you notice that you were not only paying attention to what your brother was doing and you kept yourself focused on what we were working on?" He thought for a moment and said, "Oh....yeah. It doesn't really bother me anymore". His mom gave him a hug after he got off the table and this time rather than giggling uncomfortably, he faced her full on and really received her hug. It was beautiful to watch.
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