Father's Day

My Father died in 1979 of a heart attack. It was his third major coronary, but even so it was a shock.

I was in my second year at university and, despite high academic success, having a rough time personally. I had ongoing problems with my throat (quinsy) which resulted in an  operation, but also psychological issues which I now recognise were down to my undiagnosed autism. The psychiatrists and doctors I saw at that time completely failed to spot that problem, which is not surprising given the state of autism diagnosis in those days.

Looking back, I think my father probably tried his best to deal with me. He was ill-equipped to do so. As a traditional Christian disciplinarian, his only frame of reference for me was wilful disobedience, as I failed to conform to everything he expected. I was constantly disapproved of and frequently punished. The only time that changed was in my first year at university when I achieved very high marks in exams and was top of the class. For the first, and possibly only, time in my life, he showed genuine approval of my achievements.

But how could he have done so? I was a composer, something that was completely alien to him, and I refused to follow him into the family engineering business. I was terrible at sport, which he loved. But most of all my brain just would not function in the way he thought good. We had so many challenging encounters it is hard to describe them in detail, but the gist of them was that I thought in a divergent way whereas he was entirely convergent. In other words, any initial stimulus would set me off into a train of speculative reasoning that led to creative outcomes, whereas he wanted to gather facts and information in order to find a straightforward solution to any problem or situation.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you!” he would shout as, yet again, I failed to make eye contact. “It’s just common sense!” “Are you thick or something?” And, most tellingly: “you’re just trying to be different!”. The problem, I now know, was that I am different. I’m not trying to be anything. I am simply ‘wired’ differently. What he saw as wilful disobedience was just honesty. I was never a naughty child.

I try to be fair to him, despite the fact that I had to go into counselling some years later to try to resolve the many issues in my relationship with him. The counsellor also failed to spot my autism, once again because autism was not well recognised at that time. But my memories of my father are often negative. We were very different. I read voraciously, whereas he was proud of never having read a book in his life. He was an authoritarian right-winger who strongly supported Margaret Thatcher, whereas I was always left-leaning and believed in freedom. He seemed to dedicate himself to diminishing and suppressing me as much as possible.

But I do wonder whether, had I had an autism diagnosis then rather than now, would that have changed his attitude? I think he did have the capacity for sympathy and understanding. He struggled with me because he was frustrated by me. He went away to National Service and returned when I was three years old to find a difficult and problematic child. He probably blamed my mother for that. If only he had known, perhaps life could have been very different…

Book Review: 'Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children' by Dr Luke Beardon

Book Review: 'Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children: A Guide for Autistic Wellbeing' by Dr Luke Beardon. Published by Sheldon Press. ISBN-10: 1529394767. ISBN-13: 978-1529394764. Paperback: £10.99. Kindle: £7.49. Available from 10 December 2020. Pre-ordering available on Amazon.

I was sent an advance copy of this new book by Luke Beardon. I was initially cautious about reviewing it, because I am hardly an expert on children. However, it soon became obvious that I am in fact perfectly well qualified, because I was an autistic child myself once and can remember that experience in detail! So, here is my review:

The very existence of this book is a mark of how far we have come as a society in our understanding of autism. This will be small comfort to the many thousands of autistic people whose anxiety levels remain high, because the lessons Dr Beardon teaches us have not yet been learned by wider society. Indeed, the book begins with a powerful statement by the author, who hopes that it will "swiftly but surely get removed from the bookshelves" as its insights reduce anxiety. This is probably a distant dream, because anxiety remains such an enormous issue, and not just amongst children. 

‘Avoiding Anxiety in Autistic Children’ is written with Luke Beardon's trademark mix of a highly readable style that is approachable for non-academic readers, coupled with a deep understanding of autism built over many years of research and observation carried out at The Autism Centre in Sheffield Hallam University. He distils the wisdom of autistic experiences in a way that speaks directly to the individual reader. He is keen to emphasize the differences between autistic children and so avoid falling into a trap of over-generalisation. To achieve this, he supports his text with numerous first-person case studies from autistic people. This leads to a remarkable book that alternates between moments of deep recognition and precious insights. 

Beardon expands his foundational equation "autism + environment = outcome" with new ones, such as: "the level of enthusiasm shown for a passionate interest = the amount of pleasure a child gets from it" and "the better informed the child is = lower risk of anxiety". These principles underpin a series of calls to action or advice for parents and educators and anyone involved with autistic children. Since these recommendations come from a position which seeks to improve life for autistic people, they invariably make sense to this reader. My most frequent reaction was a wistful "if only people had understood that when I was growing up!"

To take just two examples from the many that stood out for me: he includes "fear of getting it wrong" as a common cause of autistic anxiety and demonstrates with many supporting examples how it can lead to a dangerous state of affairs in which the child is inhibited from trying anything new; he also describes very well the destructive tension between a strict adherence to the rules (e.g. following a timetable to the second) and not knowing what the rules are (e.g. the unwritten rules that bedevil social interaction).

One particular interesting comment was the suggestion that autistic children "would actually be better suited at Doctoral style learning than secondary age educational systems". This led me to speculate what an autism-friendly curriculum, which actively encourages intensely focused interests, might look like. I also would have liked to see even more discussion of exams, which are such enormous sources of anxiety for all children but often especially for autistic children. To what extent is the increased testing regime which permeates education a cause of increased anxiety in autistic youngsters?

The general methodology in this book is to explore the extent to which external factors influence autistic people. This is a positive approach, because it shows how important environment can be for anxiety regulation. It teaches adaptability and flexibility and advocates passionately for an increased understanding of autistic children. It is of some comfort to realise that there is now a significant work by one of the leading experts on autism that elegantly summarises the important issues in such a readable and authoritative way.

Early Childhood

One of the first things that the psychologists ask for when you request a diagnosis is an interview with your parents. In my case that was impossible. My father died in 1979. My mother died more recently, but was in no condition to give interviews. My brother and sister are both younger than me so did not know me during early childhood. 

I did manage to speak to some old friends of the family, who recounted various stories that I also remember. These became family favourites, endlessly repeated by my mother as she tried to give an account of how I turned out. As she kept saying: "you were eccentric from the moment you were born". I think I can now safely say that "eccentric" = "autistic". I wonder how many other "absent-minded Professors" fit that profile.

One of the earliest stories concerned this interaction with my paternal grandmother:

GRANDMA: Look! Look at all the lickle dickie-birdies on the lawn!

ME: Yes, Grandma. Three starlings, a blackbird and a robin. Erithacus rubecula. It’s a male or a female: young birds lack the red breast.

According to my mother, I was 3 years old when that happened. I'm a bit sceptical about that, but I was very young indeed. I had memorised the contents of the The Observer’s Book of British Birds. I used to read it over and over again, fascinated by the information it contained. To this day I can recall the layout of each of the pages, with their alternating black-and-white and colour photographs. Birds, and the natural world in general, became my special interest during early childhood.

From my point of view, this conversation was far from an example of eccentricity. I merely wanted to share what I knew. I don’t think I was showing off or being arrogant, and I certainly didn’t want to embarrass my grandmother. It was just that these facts were fascinating and I wanted to get them out of my head and into the world. Looking back, I now realise that of course that is exactly what I have been doing all my life: absorbing information and ideas, critically examining them and then enthusiastically communicating them to others. That is the essence of being a Professor, I suppose.

My ability to focus so intensely on things caused tensions, especially with my father. As I grew up, I found I had a 'photographic memory' (although this is a misleading term). I could read whole paragraphs or even pages at a single glance, a technique which I still use in my academic work. My father, by contrast, was proud of the fact that he had never read anything apart from the Bible. One day, when I was aged perhaps six or seven, he snatched a book out of my hand:

FATHER: You cannot be reading that properly! You are going too fast! 

(He read aloud half a sentence from a random page).

FATHER: What comes after that?

ME: It appears on page 23, which is a right-hand page, near the top. 

(After which I quoted the rest of the sentence exactly, and some of the following paragraph).

He never challenged me like that again.

My parents were Christians who believed in the old maxim “spare the rod, spoil the child”. My father, in particular, tried to drive out my unwanted behaviours with threats and punishments. While this was a common enough technique at the time, with me it went beyond what would be normal discipline for a child. My maternal grandparents even intervened at one point, alarmed by what they saw as excessively harsh treatment. My father gave them short-shrift and, if anything, stepped up his disciplinary regime.

Seen from my vantage point today, I guess this was an amateur form of aversion therapy. Behaviour my parents didn’t like was accompanied by an unpleasant stimulus. For example, my mother put a foul-tasting substance on my fingernails to stop my incessant nail-biting (it didn’t work - I just learned to like the taste anyway). My father’s methods were more violent, consisting of verbal and physical punishments that grew in number and intensity. It all seemed completely arbitrary to me. I can remember trying to work out why I was being punished. It seemed to happen on alternate nights, and I started to keep track of the patterns. I made diary entries about it. Thursdays were particularly bad days. I can remember sobbing uncontrollably into my pillow one day and resolving that I would never forgive my father for his unfair treatment of me. 

I was frequently told off for being “too clever by half”, being “selfish” and “trying to be different”. In one celebrated incident we, as a family, visited some church acquaintances who lived nearby. The wife of the house served “curry puffs” for tea. I expressed my disapproval with such precision and ferocity that I had to be whisked away. We rarely visited anyone after that, with the exception of a few relatives and family friends who were close enough not to be bothered by my “eccentricities”.

The problem was that I did not know I was different. Each day would begin with the overwhelming inward stream of information from my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth, my touch, that I still experience to this day. At the same time, I would launch myself into a futile effort to try to connect it all up and make sense of the world. I worked so hard to understand, but could not, with the result that I had a sense of failure every day. I assumed that everybody else was having the same struggles, but were more successful than I at dealing with them. It took many decades for me to realise that, in fact, they were not and I am different.

I always tried very hard to behave well. I was never violent and I didn’t have meltdowns. Instead, I internalised everything and would shut down, often unnoticed by others. Why did I do this, when I was being overwhelmed by such powerful feelings that I would lose contact with the world around me? Because I was working so hard to do the right thing, to get it right, to abide by the social rules as far as I understood them. I believed that my honesty would shield me from getting into trouble. I was ridiculously honest and would tell my mother not only the things I had done but also the things I was planning to do, for example:

ME: I’m going outside now, to play in the mud.

MOTHER: Don’t do that.

ME: Oh, alright.

But in the end, my honesty was no defence. I was usually wrong and I frequently got chastised. I can remember becoming desperately upset by the injustice of it all. 

This is difficult to write about, not so much because the memories are uncomfortable, but because I would not want anyone to get the idea that chastising autistic children leads to a successful adult. This lies behind Applied Behavioural Analysis and other controversial therapies. In fact, the only things my parents achieved by their strategies were to make me (and themselves) unhappy and to drive my autism underground. Take, for example, the business of eye contact. My father constantly told me to “look at me when I’m talking to you” and backed up the command with punishments. So I figured out how to fake eye contact, something which I still do. This has been a benefit in terms of functioning in non-autistic society, but it has come at a cost in terms of my mental health. He only succeeded in changing outward behaviours, but never got through to what was really going on. The depth of the reality of that is revealed in early photographs, which show me squinting, apparently frowning, while trying to look directly into the camera.

By way of comfort, I engaged in some of the “restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities” which characterise autism. Some of these were interiorised and so undetectable by others. I would catalogue things endlessly (I still do this) and collect items such as toys, stamps, butterflies, apples, anything. The pleasure was not so much the collecting as the organising into elaborate systems, alphabetically, by colour, by type, etc. I would rearrange the items frequently, using the different systems. I would also repeat certain words and phrases over and over again, mostly either under my breath or in my head, but occasionally, when alone, out loud. And I would constantly try to align things, such as a mark on a window-pane with a tree outside, by closing one eye and shifting my head position. The more obviously physical “stimming” (self-stimulating) behaviours were suppressed by my parents. I can remember flapping my hands, from which I got pleasure, but this was frowned upon and prevented. I would also twirl my hair surreptitiously, something which continued until I was in my mid twenties. 

It’s hard to be even-handed about such memories, and a child’s perspective is not one that really carries much weight in later life. However, seen through the lens of an autism diagnosis, I can understand why my parents struggled so much. They must have been very frustrated and, frankly, exhausted by me. I never gave them a moment’s respite, because my brain was so active and constantly struggling with social and sensory challenges. It is perhaps not a surprise, therefore, that this phase of my life came to an end at age 7, when I was sent away to boarding school. The reason given for this move was that they had “had enough of me”, which I guess sums up the difficulty.