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About me (Darius) - my autistic son Mirko

Moderators: MrCoffee, Necroramo, spectrummum

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Darius

Wed Nov 14 2007, 02:36PM

Registered Member #919
Joined Thu Nov 08 2007, 10:20PM
posts 9

I am a 37 year old man and live with my wife in a small cottage.

(We don't reveal more personal details here, because in certain conservative professions it is unfortunately still considered a flaw for career to have mentally retarded children.)

Our autistic son Mirko (born in 1993) is hyperactive with various mental deficiencies. Mirko speaks quite slowly and seldom - it seems to be strenuous for him. He often runs around inside the house like when he had ants in the pants and several times collided with furniture.

But Mirko is not stupid. He e.g. can repair mechanical alarm clocks well and is patient enough to do this systematically. (But he freaks out when he looses a small component of it and can not find it on the floor to put the clock back together.) He can mentally do most things those other boys of his age can do (he even has a good memory), but he sometimes reacts uncontrollable when unexpected things happen. E.g. once in a narrow street a large fire engine was slowly passing him closely, when it suddenly turned on its loud siren and flashing lights; Mirko threw himself on the pavement, screamed, vigorously shook his body and kicked around like an angry baby. It took us ten minutes to calm him down. Mirko also has trouble to play together with other children, because he can not understand their behaviour or only very slowly. Thus they tended to beat him up or mock him, because he has no sense for insulting words and takes metaphors verbosely.

I am not sure what Mirko feels. Despite he writes nice poems (including topics like love), he seems to perform this rather like a formal intellectual task to compensate something. He never talks about own feelings, although he clearly has emotions. Once he said something like:

When I think I can not feel.
While I feel I can not think.
I need to think to speak.
Therefore I can not say what I feel.

Within a year Mirko made a lot of social progress after my nonmedical practitioner gave us the great tip to buy him an inflatable trance suit as a therapy device (see FAQ). In this latex rubber suit Mirko was like completely exchanged. It calmed him very much and he obviously felt very safe in it and enjoyed it a lot. Especially he loved to indulge himself into the low purring sound of slowly rubbing his fingers against it. After few hours in the suit, the calming effect lasted a couple of days, which did him very good.

Unfortunately he got a kind of phobia when he saw how in the TV show "Fist of Zen" such a rubber suit was overinflated and intentionally burst with a pin (see here). I still remember how we watched TV together; someone zapped away and back into that show. At the beginning of the mentioned scene, I expected nothing bad and said halfway joking something like: "Hey look, there is your suit...". Mirko leaped close to the screen and intensely stared at it while that inflating suit was destroyed. He immediately ran out of the living room and locked himself into his children's room. My wife first feared that he just got the freak idea to burst now his own (very expensive) therapy suit. But it came even worse - the opposite was true; he obviously wanted to protect it with all means. From that day on Mirko was not the same anymore. He seems to fear that some foreign intruder would suddenly sneak toward him and burst it. This suit yet had freed him from hyperactivity, but since he saw this TV show, he can not relax in it anymore and lost almost all the social progress he had gained within the last 2 years.

Me and my wife have tried to explain Mirko many times now that nobody intends to burst his suit, and that he would immediately get a new one if anything bad may happen to it. But he either does not realize or believe it. The pictures were stronger than words, and how shall anybody prove that it NOT will happen. Mirko knows well that it had taken 5 weeks to order his suit, and how vulnerable and expensive they are. But I think it is not just a material object for him, but something strongly emotional that he wants to protect. These suits reach the autist at a much deeper level than words ever could, thus it is hard to argue verbally against his fears. I therefore joined this forum to find answers.
[ Edited ]

Necroramo

Wed Nov 14 2007, 04:55PM

Aspie

Joined: Thu Jun 07 2007, 09:34PM
posts 199

Nice to meet you, already read about Mirko and the suit in your other threads

Vaccinations have nothing to do with it

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