Care and the other

Being paid to work in a care position with another human being creates an intimate-othered relationship. I work as a play therapist with a ten year-old girl named Esther. She is autistic and does not speak. The intention behind the therapy is to offer the child-participant the opportunity to play with another person, the therapist, and in doing so learn social skills.

The therapy has two stages: Joining and Initiating. In the joining stage, the therapist immitates what the child is doing. For instance, if they are rocking back and forth by the wall and occasionally snapping their torso forward, bringing the clasped fingers of one hand upwards with a vocalisation, then the therapist will do the same, close enough to be notices but without disturbing the child. The idea is that the child will feel curious about this person who seems to be into the same stuff or on the same page. And this curiosity will allow the child to meet the therapist in a way in which play may become possible. Perhaps the child offers a glance, eye contact, hand holding. At this stage, the second stage, the therapist can find a way to initiate (or follow the initiation of) an interactive game.

The first stage, the joining, is most interesting and powerful, if you not only immitate, but also take on the spirit of the action. In doing so you may discover more than you expected. For instance, as you rock towards the wall, the marks of dirt and plaster move before your eyes rapidly and the light from the ceiling lamp is blocked by your body making the wall kind of blue, and the line of your shadow stops somewhere different each time, sometimes reaching the old nail hole, sometimes the bump which is a splodge of paint, and each time it is kind of exciting to see where the shadow is going to end up. Bringing the hand up and vocalising is like a drum to celebrate the end of each round. There is something to be fascinated about here and it is outside of your prior understanding or control.

But within the context of AuJa/Son-Rise play therapy, you have an alterior motive (though I often forget about it) – which is to initiate the interactive game. And you have to keep the child safe. One cannot easily give in to the sensory experience of joining. Sometimes I get bored. And when I get bored, well, that means that my mean inner monologue gets going, and starts telling me that my life isn’t moving in the direction it should do. Well, then it’s hard to join, and I get frustrated with Esther, and wonder why I’m doing the job at all. What particularly happens is that my judgements about my own life occur in relation to the experience of the child, an experience I cannot enter at that judgement and language filled interior moment. Then the joining really is just imitation. I find the whole endeavour pointless and a waste of my skills. Where did I go wrong? How did I end up here in this room? Glorified babysitting. I need a plan. I mean, I have a plan. But I need to be better at it. Why can’t I … maybe it was wrong to leave that job twelve years ago? Have I really ever made any of my own decisions? I can’t even be playful here in this space, that’s my job!

As a therapist I am drawn to the atmosphere where ways of being are explored. I like entering other ways of being — I take a similar pleasure as I do going to an art exhibition. It awakens modes of being in myself. By joining, I celebrate Esther, and so I celebrate the part of me that loves that way of being too. It allows me to accept parts of myself. In that sense, it is not an othering, but the opposite — we are the same here.

But it allows me to distance myself simultaneously from such modes of being. For me, as therapist, this is a game I am playing, a mask I am putting on. And when I take the mask off I will be back to the normal world again, where I can start to work on all my projects and be horrible to myself. Yay.

Now I consider myself to have autism, though what that really feels like is that I am autistic sometimes, I think it would depend on the psychologist whether I would receive a diagnosis. If I’d been to the gym and had many positive experiences of socialising and work recently then less likely than if I’d failed to meditate for four days and had been watching TV and was tired from too many social activities. So for me, and I think I’m not alone here, there is a desire for both complicity with Esther and distancing from her. I want to explore and celebrate my autism. And I want to push it away and not identify with it.

Rosqvist and Nygren examine Neurotribes by Steven Silberman, a book that looks at ‘the neurodivergent them’ from a ‘neurotypical’ perspective. Rosqvist and Nvgren write:

There is a friendly curiosity in Silbermans gaze. However, the naming of the wizards creates a distance from the I that looks at them. Sometimes this neurotypical gazing explicitly constitutes an autistic otherness in relation to an imagined (neurotypical) “we”.

What is the need to create this otherness? It is also a great act of intimacy to write about an autistic subject: to be describing, empathising. It brings the writer closer, somehow, and may help them experience themselves there. But it also says ‘not me’.

But I wonder if this ‘not me’ is genuine, or a wish. A wish driven by our own fear of the autistic inside us.

Two questions raised: