Of course we can also play a significant role in helping people cope. If a child is hypersensitive to sound, a parent can offer noise-dampening headphones. Often a child will repeatedly ask a question—“Going to the park this afternoon? Going to the park this afternoon?”—even after the parent has repeatedly answered. Instead of answering directly, a

Lucy’s experience shows how the various people in an autistic person’s life can actually be the cause of dysregulation.

When a highly anxious child craves routine to understand the world, it’s no wonder a sudden change throws her off and triggers an extreme reaction.

what they’re really doing is stripping the person of coping strategies and communicating that what the person is doing is offensive or wrong, possibly leading to low self-esteem, depression, and a sense of oneself as flawed and incompetent.

Some strategies are verbal. Many autistic people display echolalia, the repetition of spoken language, repeated either immediately or sometime later (see chapter 2).

Sometimes autistic people become dysregulated if a particular person is absent.

One of the many harmful myths about autistic people is that they are isolated loners who neither need nor seek relationships. That’s not true. In fact, for many the presence and proximity of another trusted human being is the key to emotional regulation.

named Leo Kanner first introduced the autism diagnosis in 1943, he noticed a striking trait among the children he described. He called it “insistence on preservation of sameness” (a trait still considered definitive of autism). Indeed many autistic people regulate themselves by trying to control their surroundings or other people’s behavior—by

Others use the term stim or stimming (for repetitive, self-stimulatory behavior), terms that once had, and in some approaches still have negative connotations. In earlier decades many researchers aimed to rid children of stims, some employing punishment and even shock as a means to eliminate “autistic behaviors.”