Yesterday Emma came home from school with her forearm covered in bite marks. I sat down next to Emma on her bed and gently touched her arm.
“You bit!” She said sadly.
“I can see that,” I said, stroking her arm.
“I want to unlock it,” she said, twirling a scrap of what was once her blanket around and around her index finger. “I want cokie,” she added.
I continued to stroke her arm.
“You cannot bite! Emma! No biting!” She shouted.
When Emma is very upset, she begins to script. In other words she mimics things others have said to her using the same tone of voice and if they have an accent, she’ll say the words with the same accent. It’s a bizarre experience to listen to your upset child alternate between using someone else’s words, tone and inflections and her own voice, as though she were auditioning for all the roles in a play with an ensemble cast. Sometimes she’ll throw me into the mix – “Oh sweetheart!” and then severe and scolding – “You cannot bite! That is not okay,” with her own pleading, “I want cokie, I don’t want to lock it up,” then the logical, calm tone of a teacher or therapist, “You can have cokie later. First go to the roof, then you can have cokie.” Her face crumples up while she fights back the tears, often losing the battle and collapsing into an anguished heap of heaving sobs and cries.
At a certain point, when her frustration, anger and upset become more than she can bear she turns it inward and becomes violent toward herself. The emotions too great for her to contain, she bites herself, leaving the imprint of a full set of teeth upon her arm or finger or hand. Once, when I held her arm to prevent her from hurting herself she jerked her other arm away and punched herself hard in the face. The force with which she did this, took my breath away.
I mentioned on this blog, once before, when I was younger I struggled with bulimia. A more accurate description would be less a struggle and more a complete and utter surrender to the eating disorder. A therapist I was seeing at the time talked of the act of vomiting as self inflicted violence and I remember being furious with this description. I wasn’t being violent toward myself, I was simply pursuing a thinner physique. But after years and years of therapy and then recovery I came to recognize the violence in what I had done to myself for all those years. When I see my own daughter hurting herself it is impossible for me not to reflect on those years of frustration and rage.
Emma’s acts of self injurious behavior are expressions of her rage, frustration and there is an added piece to this, I am convinced – the desire to control the pain, coupled with her many and varied sensory issues. I think the combination is deadly. But how to help her?
That is the question I have no solid answer to. For now we are trying to explore other ways for her to get her sensory needs met without hurting herself. However I know from having engaged in destructive behavior for more than two decades how entrenched and addictive that behavior can become. There are no easy solutions, but then autism itself is like that.
For more on Emma’s journey through a childhood of autism, go to: www.EmmasHopeBook.com
Emma's Hope Book 