Center of The Maze: The Autistic Language Barrier

I hear Charlie in the other room watching a video on his iPad. Something about hotel elevators (his favorite). He grunts enthusiastically as he flaps his arms at his sides.

Suddenly he appears in the room. He walks toward me. He stops. He extends his arm. Waves it in the air for a moment. Then holds his palm toward his face as though he’s reading something off it. Then very abruptly looks at me and says:

“I want milk? Okay! Let’s get Charlie milk!”

There are three things which have just happened that I can surmise:

1. Charlie was watching a video that he was excited about. Instead of clapping his hands or saying “yay!” he flapped his arms and grunted.
2. Charlie has entered the room. It is much different in this room than the room he was in. It’s darker. The television is on. The fan is running. All of these sensory factors are difficult for him to absorb at once so he’s trying to focus. He waves his arm in the air as a means of acclimating to this new environment, then stares at his hand to allow him time to focus on what he wants to accomplish. Charlie’s relationship with sounds, sights, stimulation, is more complex than mine. I equate his behavior to entering a room filled with strangers and taking a moment to scan faces before feeling settled.
3. Now focused, he’s asking for milk. This was his intended purpose of entering the room. So when he asks for milk he knows I’ll say “Okay, let’s get you milk” because that’s what I always say if I decide he can have milk. He’s clever. He’s talking through the script that is his intended outcome rather than allowing me the opportunity to change the script with my own responses. He does this often when he wants to get his way.

In my early days of my son’s diagnosis, it was easy to write off a lot of his different expressions as being without purpose. And from that perspective they seemed like waste. Charlie fixates on some object. Charlie makes some weird noise. Charlie does some unusual action. It was like meaningless chaos in the body of a child. And while most children are random and silly, it was more difficult because of Charlie and my limited ability to communicate with each other.

My favorite film last year was The Arrival. The film depicts Amy Adams as an expert linguist contracted by the government to figure out how to communicate with aliens during first contact.

The film is brilliant in a number of aspects — the fish out of water tale of a human working with aliens is brilliantly exacerbated by the way Amy Adams’ character is completely out of place within the cold military industrial complex which controls her interactions with a tyrannical grip. The lengths to which her character has to explain to these uniformed commanders how complicated human language is becomes more painstaking than her attempts at teaching it to the aliens.

What struck me was how the film puts forth a very unique perspective of communication. It’s not about differences in language, it’s about differences in perspective. We can’t understand what each other is saying if we don’t understand how each other is thinking. In the film, communication is treated as a plane of existence. I found this utterly mind blowing. It was an awakening.

I spend much more time lately trying to understand Charlie’s perspective rather than his communication. Understanding that his sensory experiences are different, I understand his relationship with his environment more and how he engages with it. Rather than correct specific behaviors, I’ve found it useful to challenge the merit of mine and if his make more sense, so be it.

If Charlie is asking for a glass of milk, and 99 times out of 100 I will repeat the same exact set of words and behaviors, is it any better to teach him to talk through the theater of “you say this — now I say that” if the outcome is going to be exactly the same? In his mind, I imagine it isn’t. He likely perceives it to be as silly an expression as some might perceive his arm flapping to be. Neither is right and neither is wrong. They simply are.

A key to neurodiversity will be finding the nexus between perspectives of people who have ASD and people who don’t. Language will not overcome this barrier. The way we express ourselves to each other in language (be it verbal or body language) is not an indication of intelligence or emotion, and through its very narrow frame it blinds us to what is inside of our fellow human beings.

Every night I put my son to bed. And when I pull his blankets over his chest to tuck him in he looks at me and says, “I love you Charlie.” He pauses to gauge my reaction, then says, “No! I love you dad!” and grins while he flaps his arms. It’s a mixture of his language and mine, but the nexus between our two perspectives.

Some days I feel as though we’re both stumbling through a maze. There’s a father at the center of his. And a little boy at the center of mine. Each of us getting closer to finding each other. There isn’t a pursuit more worthwhile.