realisticautistic

Improve Your Social Skills by Daniel Wendler, is a plainspoken, relatively brief, \”what it says on the tin\” guide, written by an autistic adult who makes a business out of teaching this subject.  Surprisingly to me, since it\’s such a complicated subject, it delivers.  In a perfect world, this book could be given to every autistic teenager so we\’d always have a good place to start from, when social stuff gets complicated.

Topics include how to start a conversation and keep it going, a really basic guide to body language, how to make friendships that are meaningful, how to date, and how to tell stories well.  The book does this in just over 200 pages.  You can thusly guess, then, that it\’s written to address these subjects very, very broadly.

Even at such a broad level, though, I was impressed with this book.  The subjects it tackles are complicated as heck, yet the author was able to boil them down to basics.  Or the bedrock, as he seems to like to call it.  Almost all of the advice and guidelines in the book I agreed with, or at least thought were a good start.  

I\’ve reviewed a piece from this author before, and like the other one, it\’s written in the  same, basically accurate but adorably optimistic writing style.  While I don\’t particularly disagree with any of the information in this book, I suppose reading so much optimism (bordering on idealism) may have clashed with my remarkably pessimistic (read: cynical and depressed in the long term) nature.  I had a similar reaction to watching an episode of the new My Little Pony TV show a few years back.

My personal optimism poisoning aside, Mr. Wendler has a gift for creating visual, teachable metaphors.  The one that\’s stuck with the most is his concept for creating a successful conversation, which involves making a sandwich from opposite sides of a deli counter.  The conversation is the sandwich, and you take turns with your partner adding ingredients to it before sliding it back to the other person.  It sounds odd, but it made a lot of sense to me, both visually and in practice for how a good conversation actually works.  

A couple improvements come to mind when It\’s a bit outside the scope of the book, but I would have appreciated a bit more in the section about getting a good therapist.  The scope of the book does not cover fighting through mental illness to learn these social skills.  In fact, it quite literally says, in a few places, that if you\’re struggling with mental illness, to get a therapist to work on that.  

Which is good advice, and fine, but the section to help you choose one was limited at best.  A good therapist is essential, but you aren\’t always going to find one that fits well the first time.  Trust is an essential component.  I\’m unsure if the author simply hasn\’t needed to therapist-shop or if he simply didn\’t consider it important information… but considering that up to 80% of autistic people suffer mental illness, it strikes me as far more important than it was made to be here.  

A last note: like the other one I read, this seems to be a self-published book.  I can\’t tell you how much that disappoints me.  Not that the book exists, but that it doesn\’t have conventional advertising or a network to distribute it.  This guide is what a lot of teenagers deeply, truly need in their lives (autistic or not).  Sure, you can buy this book on Amazon, and that\’s certainly better than nothing.  But this book probably won\’t receive the publicity and exposure it\’s due.  

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Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger\’s Syndrome, by Liane Holliday Willey, is a \”my life with autism\” account written by an older autistic woman, one of the generation before mine that had little-to-no supports or help unless they were deemed \”completely disabled.\”  She was not, and so she had to fend her way through life mostly alone.  This is not a long book: less than 200 pages, almost 50 of that in appendices.  

I\’ve read Liane\’s work in the past, and actually met her in person during one of the DOD\’s yearly Autism Research Program conferences.  She lives in the same state as me, perhaps a few dozen miles north, and has ties to the same entity that diagnosed me as autistic about a decade ago.  

She is a very knowledgeable person, but like me, not a cheerful one.  In reading this book, one can easily see the myriad of ways life has battered her down.  In Japan, the saying is \”the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.\”  Meaning, that people who do not fit into proper social norms and expectations get pressured to conform until they do.  This is particularly true in Japan, but even in a more individualistic culture like the US, it is still true.  I have the depression and anxiety diagnoses to prove it.

I see a couple things of specific note in this account.  

First, there is a certain pervasive negativity to her view of autism.  I see this often with freshly diagnosed autistic people, those prone to depression, and parents that fit those categories or haven\’t been introduced to neurodiversity as a philosophy.  

When I, and others, first receive our diagnoses, there is the tendency to hyperfocus on it, and blame it for everything we don\’t like about ourselves.  The depression, the anxiety, the sensory differences, the low energy, even medical things like dietary sensitivities and gut dysbiosis.  

This is part of what contributes to the confusion around what exactly is meant when someone says \”autism,\” by the way.   

Perhaps more importantly, though, it is inherently unfair.   

Autism is not a collection of negative traits that serve only to disable a person.  It is not \”everything that\’s wrong with me/my child.\”  It is a brain difference, and that comes with positives and negatives.  Neurodiversity teaches us to celebrate those positives.  

For example, I would say I am a very reliable human.  If I say I\’m going to do something, I do it.  I am rarely, if ever, late to appointments.  I don\’t make promises lightly, or say things I don\’t mean.  I make efforts to be conscientious of others\’ time and energy.  These traits are a facet of the autistic tendency to adhere to rules.  

There are dozens of ways to spin that tendency negatively.  \”Rigidity\” is one of them.  \”Change intolerant\” is another.  \”Inflexible\” is yet another I hear regularly.  It\’s true that autistic people can have great difficulty shifting gears and accepting rule changes, and that can make our lives harder.  Most recently my friend needed to reschedule my hair appointment due to a sudden change of schedule, and I was doing so poorly at the time that I quite literally couldn\’t face rescheduling it for a couple weeks.  

Does my difficulty with sudden changes of plan negate the value of my reliability as a person?  I don\’t think it does.  Or I don\’t think it should, ideally.  But in the course of communication, especially with parents and professionals, it basically does.  The strength and value of my differences is ignored in favor of spotlighting my weakness.

It\’s a very cruel thing to do to people.  Having our parents, our friends, our support staff, constantly preaching to us all our failings and ignoring our successes and good points… well, it\’s no wonder many autistic people are depressed.  Having so many anti-cheerleaders is terribly damaging to one\’s self-worth.  Particularly on top of already being the metaphorical nail in the Japanese saying, which is hammered day and night to conform, by people who don\’t know us and don\’t care about us.  

The kind of relentless negativity can be internalized, and I wonder if Liane perhaps struggles with exactly that.  There\’s certainly a mention here and there of \”becoming less AS [autistic]\” when talking about learning to get by in life better, or improving her social skills.  

In the book, Liane wishes in several places that she had found someone like herself earlier in life.  Based on how she talks about her daughters (one of which is also autistic), it seems like she eventually found that in her own family.  At the time I met her, more than 15 years after she wrote this book, she had also branched out into meeting other autistic people, which I\’m glad of.  

The main of the book ends with a hope and a wish for the sort of world that embraces differences, rather than rejecting them.  It was, I was glad to see, pretty much exactly what most people who identify as neurodiverse would wish for. 

At the very end is a set of seven appendices, which include the author\’s coping strategies, organizational suggestions, thoughts on disclosure of diagnosis, further reading, etc.  They span a bit less than 50 pages.  

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Dietary Interventions in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Why They Work When They Work, Why They Don\’t When They Don\’t, by Kenneth J. Aitken, provides a discussion of the history of special diets for symptom management in autistic people.  Despite the rather blunt title, the book seems to be aimed at healthcare professionals.  However, a layperson such as myself can follow the gist of the matter without understanding the specific formulas and chemical interactions described.  

I\’ll preface this review by informing you, sadly, that there is no one proposed diet that solves all autistic ills.  This won\’t surprise you if you\’re familiar with the saying, \”If you\’ve met one person with autism, you\’ve met one person with autism.\”  

Also, when the word \”diet\” is used in this book, it is not referring to the typical USian understanding of the word, which refers to the fad weight loss diets that come and go like the wind.  These diets are undertaken to lose weight, and, without assuming that goal is even accomplished, dropped quickly.  The book does not, in fact, give any care for weight loss at all.  Apparently a significant portion of the autistic population is rail thin instead of obese.  That sounds nice to me, but the author insists this is as much as problem as obesity.  

At any rate, the book\’s intention with the word \”diet\” hearkens back to an older understanding of the word: the food and drink regularly consumed.  In short, these diets are meant to be undertaken in the long term.  They are lifestyle changes, not temporary measures to appease one\’s guilt or prop up one\’s body image.  (I have a deep dislike of \”dieting,\” can you tell?)

The first section of the book discusses ASD and special diets.  It contains good background knowledge, some of which is helpful to understanding the how and why of the diets.  It also covers how food and nutrition has shifted in the development of humanity and technology, which I thought was quite interesting and helpful.  To cap it off, it contains information about particular toxins whose effects are particularly obvious in autistic people, as well as protective factors against these toxins.  

The second section is the meat of the title:  Nine diets are analyzed and summarized in brief (sometimes \”less than 10 pages\” brief).  Factors considered in each analysis include the evidence for and against each diet, possible health problems associated with the diet, and practical difficulties with following the diet.  

I was particularly impressed with the author\’s choice to have that last criteria in each section.  It strongly suggests he\’s aware of the challenges that come with making these changes.  The specific sections, too, suggest his awareness of the differing situational challenges any given family might come up against.  Not every family is going to be able to find farro to cook with, for example.  

Each analysis also includes a Resources section, which tends to include a healthy mix of books, websites, organizations, and scientific research.  This is in additon to the Resources section at the end, which contains all the same info but centralized.  The information in this book is about ten years old, so it\’s quite possible that some resources may not work.  However, the author has listed enough of them that at least one should serve to get you further information and likely other resources.  

Part three of the book is the author\’s answer to \”but which of these diets should I do!?\”  He proposes a 10th diet (the Simple Restriction Diet), drawing on the best parts of the most effective diets previously described.  He includes a proposed plan, complete with worksheets, a table to help you match problem foods with toxins, and a suggested timetable with which to implement the diet and subsequent re-introductions of food categories.  

In all honesty, I kind of want to try this Simple Restriction Diet.  It seems distinctly promising in terms of both weight loss and narrowing down whatever keeps wrecking my guts.  Maybe even whatever\’s wrecking my spouse\’s guts.  In practicality, I\’m… dubious of my ability to convince my spouse to try this diet.  \”Restriction\” is a very apt descriptor, because this diet has you eliminate or heftily reduce quite a bit of commonly consumed foods.  Feasibility is a serious concern.  

The suggested timeline for implementing the diet is actually only three weeks, after which you start adding in carbohydrates to a point, and watching for adverse reactions.  And then, assuming none, you move onto transitioning off the next category, and so on.  If adding a category back in causes a reaction, then you can take that to your doctor and get more specific tests.  

As such, it\’s still a significant expenditure of time and energy… but you aren\’t necessarily bound to a particular diet for life.  The author even stresses testing your final resulting diet every once in a while, because none of these are perfectly scientifically sound.  Improvements might be seen  while on a gluten-free/casein-free diet, but not actually be related to the diet itself, and the person may find some years hence that they don\’t need to adhere to it but still remain healthy.

I have a couple complaints.  The first is that no mention is made of the difficulties of transitioning off a typical USian diet.  Sugar addiction is a very real and very miserable thing to detox off of.  I have done so several times and will need to do so again at some point soon, because Halloween candy and Christmas sweets exist and I only have so much patience with not eating them.

The second is that I don\’t feel there are sufficient resources for the author\’s pet diet, the Simple Restriction Diet.  There are resources in plenty for the other nine he looks into, and one could, I suppose, research the relevant ones and try to combine them with a great deal of effort.  I would much rather have links to directly relevant cookbooks, with no guesswork about whether I\’m failing at this or that aspect.  

All in all, I was impressed with this book.  It\’s analytical and healthily skeptical while remaining positive and hopeful.  It acknowledges the shortcomings of the science without disallowing their effectiveness.  It explains the science in detail without being overly verbose, and you needn\’t truly understand the chemical formulas to follow the rest of the discussion.

Read This Book If

You\’re an interested care provider, interested parent, or interested autistic.  This is a pretty focused book.  It\’s written well, in a manner that seems aimed at healthcare providers but is accessible to laypeople (except maybe the chemical formulas).  It discusses the science (or what exists of the science) as well as providing feasibility information and potential positives and negatives to each diet.  In short, this is a good resource for anyone looking into special diets, and I\’m glad my local library has it in their collection.