The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch Read Free Book Online Page B

article I was looking for and handed it to Kristen. Kristen, the actual expert on speech and communication disorders. She frowned at the title and handed the paper back to me. It was full steam ahead on the Asperger’s Express, but apparently I was the only one riding.
    It was true, she explained, that people on the autism spectrum tend to have difficulty navigating social interactions. Effective communication requires more than an exchange of words; conversational partners must adequately read each other’s emotions, reactions, and underlying motives, and they must be able to understand each other’s perspective. These abilities are a product of social intuition, a resource with which people with Asperger’s tend to be relatively ill equipped. But that, Kristen told me, was something we could worry about later.
    “For now, don’t worry about the implications of your diagnosis,” she said. “Yes, you have Asperger syndrome and that’s part of the barrier. But let’s face it, Dave, you can communicate. What’s holding you back are thirty years of habits. We need to practice talking to each other, that’s all.”
    Though she didn’t spell it out for me, I understood exactly what Kristen meant by thirty years of habits. Growing up, I was never taught the importance of healthy, therapeutic discourse. I was discouraged from talking about negative feelings toward other people, especially family members. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all—this old chestnut was both a philosophy and a firmly enforced rule in my family. My brother and I were not allowed to argue with each other, nor were we encouraged to voice any differences of opinion with authority figures (especially my parents). The airing of grievances, we were told, amounted to whining—“bellyaching,” as my dad called it—and nothing irritated my parents more than bellyaching. If we did have a personal issue with someone we loved, we were supposed to internalize the attendant frustration and hope that, like a virus or a stomachache, it would simply run its course. This kept emotions from boiling over, but just barely. It kept the house quiet, anyway.
    My parents led this crusade by example. If we had a family crest, it might bear the image of four smiling faces sweeping animosity under a rug. Which had always been fine with me, truth be told. As a child, I never (not even once) saw my parents argue. Sometimes I saw my friends’ parents argue viciously—right in front of me, their invited guest—and the tension it created was unbearable. This family sucks, I’d think. I can’t be friends with this kid. But that wouldn’t have happened at my house. My mom and dad clearly loved each other, so as I understood it, people who loved each other never argued.
    That’s not to say that my parents had nothing to argue about. Far from it. They were married, and like anyone else they must have had their own needs and disappointments. I remember my mom being angry on occasion, indignantly throwing silverware into drawers, but she never told any of us what was bothering her. Not me or my brother, and certainly not my dad. And I remember noticing how my mom’s fits coincided with my dad’s own bad moods—often I found that if I had to avoid my mom, it was best to stay away from my dad, too. Beyond that, I never thought anything of it. I didn’t understand that they were unwilling to sit down and talk about whatever the problem was, just as their parents had been, and their parents before them. And now me.
    “My parents never talked about their feelings,” I said to Kristen, “but they have been married almost forty years now and they’re getting happier all the time.”
    “That’s because their system works for them. But look at us. Can you honestly tell me you think it’s working, all this silence?”
    I sat back and propped my feet upon the coffee table, thinking of all the vacations that had been ruined over the years because I