A Special Interest for Travelling

Sadly Sofia heads back to school today – it has been a great couple of weeks riding almost everyday.

I’ve tried to do as much prepping with her as possible. One aspect of this has been discussing the need for her to have her own special interest to help stay focused on her surroundings and reduce any PDA (pathological demand avoidance) responses.

In Africa it was birds, animals and different flavours of Fanta. On this trip it is birds and photography (as an extention of her art) at the moment … the latter may be more of an issue as she doesn’t understand what it means to take a photo. Obviously she can perform the action and understand it is a creative modality, but it has no meaning for her at this point in the sense of not being able to internalise photography as a concept of creative expression – if that makes sense. So I’m hoping one of the staff in her house at school, who is a keen photographer, will be able to help her with this.

Conceptual understanding of the world in autism is a real struggle, especially where there is no intellectual disability because ideas can be understood/verbalised in an abstract way on one level, but conceptual understanding needs ideas internalised in order to take action on that information. With out that internalisation the connections between things have no meaning or value.

The main thing is that she attempts to take advantage of this trip for her own means independent of me and what I’m doing and pushes that agenda.

She needs a lot of encouragement to do this in the presence of others (me in this case) as she is constantly hyper aware of audience over and above her own needs. So this will be an on going conversation until we find the right note or even activity that will float her boat enough to over come this. This will work in line with ‘living in the moment’.

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Canada Preparations

Canada preping on #Dartmoor ride. Ride – walk 2 hrs – then ride a distance.
Lesson learnt- not a good plan walking 2 hrs with biker trousers and boots! Not helped by me trying a kit variation involving keeping lining in making the trousers heavy to walk in. It was a good ride though, Dartmoor is stunning.

A big part of our #Canada trip is to slow down and ‘do’ more. Sofia really struggles with the concept of ‘doing’ and it triggers her pathological demand avoidance (#PDA) which is part of her #autism profile – this effectively means she refuses to ‘do’ that which she percieves is expected of her which is felt intensely and must be fought against and/or reinterpreted to her own liking. It is an anxiety state. From the outside this is often percieved by others as laziness, but actually it is anxiety driven.

Yet for her living in the future (aka in a state of anxiety) is more ‘relaxing’ than living in the present moment she tells me. A miss conception I hope to help her resolve in #Canada & hope in turn it will help her manage her PDA and enable her to do more. Because the frustrating thing for her is that it is not that she doesn’t want to go for a walk for example or draw the picture somone has asked her to, but she doesn’t understand why she can’t let herself ‘do’ these things.

How do I get her to do as much as she does with PDA? Constant negotiation and a huge amount of planning to ensure negotiations are successful. I don’t sweat the small stuff either, thats where the really big resistance is – in big stuff like travelling there is a fate à complis and serves as a distraction so small stuff can enter through the back door of her mind.

 

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Planning #Canada

Planning for #Canada begins. Sadly the friend joining us has decided to hold fire, we hope she changes her mind though as the extra dynamic will be good really good for us – the good news is that we own the map now.

I’m hoping the bike can start in #newfoundlandandlabrador so we can get the best of the weather there… also they have over 22 species of #whaleand #dolphin feeding off the coast in #summer.

Sofia has absolutely no idea how big this trip is going to be and remains neutral & I am now talking to her about slowing down, that this trip will not be rushed so we can enjoy more. Whilst time constraints didn’t help us before, there was also a strong element from Sofia to keep moving, moving, moving.

This trip I hope she really starts to get the feeling of the moment and enjoying it, as opposed to driving towards some future goal for fear of loosing it and missing the present experience (her current future goal is a pet bird – which will not happen until after this trip so the challenge is on!)

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