Today my daughter was saying she wanted to do comparing her new white TY beanie bunny with a grey bunny of the same kind that was in the Easter holiday decorations bin, but wanted to use her cell phone instead of get the grey one down. I said I'd get it and she fought me, and I kept fighting to get it down, since most of the time she fights me and I think she'll prefer the outcome, I'm right, as in the recent example when she fought me on setting up the keyboard for easy and regular use in our living room, only to immediately join in and be excited within seconds of my playing the Mario theme and another show theme she loved as my initial piece to play. Only this time it was 180 degrees the other way - she was saying she now didn't want to compare them at all after being excited and happy to do so minutes before.
She finally revealed she was afraid to take down the bunny we bought last year because of fear of getting and dying from the virus (coronavirus), also depicted as the "Osaka Flu" in a Simpsons where people get sick from opening a box weeks after ordering it. After trying to reason with her that is makes no sense because she's using the new bunny just arriving this week that was probably made in the same place and most likely after coronavirus was happening - this one was over a year old, predating coronavirus /covid 19 - she absolutely would not listen and got up on a bench and put the grey bunny back in the holiday decor bin on a high shelf. She wouldn't listen to my arguments that the virus wouldn't live a year based on all data, that if her white bunny was safe, the grey bunny was safer. I even offered and she went back and forth about allowing me to spray the bunny with peroxide and wipe off to decontaminate the fantasy virus, but thought that was too far toward endorsing her irrational view, that there could still be legitimate virus there to infect her, and in the end she rejected cleaning off the bunny too.
I was angry because I refuse to allow such unrealistic and massively inaccurate understandings of reality in my house, but for a moment only told her she had to research how long viruses (coronavirus/covid-19 and perhaps other viruses) live on surfaces including cloth, which was what the bunny was made of, and that she'd have to compare them by tomorrow, hoping to reason and research her way out of her view of extreme trepidation at using this older bunny.
Then in a stroke of brilliance, I took on her view in a way that directly pointed out the massive inconsistency in her thinking: I said, "If you can't safely handle the grey bunny, then you can't play with the white bunny either, by your reasoning. It's your logic: if the grey bunny is unsafe so are all the other stuffed animals we've bought in the last year; you can't play with any of them, to be safe.". Immediately she got that if her white bunny was OK, the other one must be too. She was excited and got up on the bench and took down the grey bunny and excitedly got to work. She had none of the conflict of someone who was risking her life working with the bunny but risking losing her pet, and resenting me for putting her to this cruel choice, she was genuinely happy and light as if her view totally shifted 180 degrees and within seconds of my saying the sentence that connected the logic with her grey bunny to the new white bunny. Even our playroom participant working with her today asked her several times if she felt safe handing the bunny, double checking that she wasn't pressured or distressed, and he says she told him she was sure the bunny was safe.
I would never put her to a choice where I was the adversary like that; our continued relationship depends on not crossing that line and asking her to do something she truly thinks might kill her or I"ll take about her hard won property. Our relationship that is the core interface and engine for her recovery is not worth ruining over this assignment, but it appears that she totally shifted views to match the one I wanted her to have because I "leaned into the crazy". I got this concept from "Talking to Crazy", a book about how to deal with people who were having strong, dysfunctional reactions to things, and also, this was a form of joining, a la Anat Baniel Method (ABM) Neuromovement as well as the Son-Rise Program. Either way this was one of the fastest and most effective ways to reverse a situation that was feeling very crazy and upsetting, so I put it here as inspiration for those reading and for myself, that new and effective shortcuts to autistic people recovery will appear on our/my path even if we/I don't see them yet.
Keep going!!!
I'm reminded that those bible phrases might just be true:
7 "Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you willfind. Knock, and it will be opened for you.
8 For everyone who asks receives. He who seeksfinds. To him who knocks it will be opened.
Matthew 7:7–8
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