Dr. Liz Laugeson on How to Make Friends
I’ve just come from a morning at the Parents/Families/Community
conference that’s associated with the big IMFAR autism science meeting. The conference moves around every year
(some of the scientists have a reputation for getting wild) and this year we’re
in San Diego. I flew in late last
night just in time to sleep three hours and get up bright and early for the cab
ride to the University of California at San Diego.
As long as I remain functional, I will be reporting on
events here and at the main conference for the next three days. In addition, I hope to visit the San
Diego container terminal and perhaps capture novel and exciting images of
shipping and transportation.
As much I love ships and trains, I recognized my commitment
to autism science and dutifully appeared where I was supposed to be, before I
was supposed to be there. I was
just in time for the keynote sessions, which I found totally fascinating.
The first talk I’d like to share with you concerned a
program called PEERS, which was developed by Liz Laugeson and Fred Frankel of
UCLA, and presented by Liz at this morning’s session.
PEERS is a science-based program that helps kids make
friends. I say its science based
because she actually tested and proved out the various concepts in PEERS
through trials. By doing that, she
was able to quantify what worked and what didn’t.
And that, folks, is a really important thing in the world of
therapy.
Most therapists who work with folks on the spectrum do not
have autism themselves. Therefore,
things that may seem obvious to them may be totally obscure to the folks they
are trying to help. Consider the
example of a teen who has trouble getting into conversations with strangers.
A person who does not have autism instinctively reads the
non verbal signals from people around him. He knows when to speak up and when to be quiet, and he knows
how to join a conversation smoothly.
At least, that’s the idea.
A therapist who grew up with those skills naturally assumes everyone else
is similar. That being the case,
conversational skill is simply a matter of polishing one’s skill.
Unfortunately, for most autistic people, “polishing” does
not work. We lack the ability to
read other people, so “watching and slipping in smoothly” is not something we
can do at all, without special training and a lot of practice. Yet that deficiency may not be at all apparent
to a nypical therapist, even after he’s studied autism. Therefore, the advice that worked for
him may totally fail for us, and he may not have any idea why, except to say “we
just can’t get it.”
That’s where science and evidence-based therapy development come
in. Researchers can try different
ways of helping people solve problems, and them measure how well that training
works in real life. By testing
different strategies, it becomes possible to separate what works from what
doesn’t, and to refine what works well into what works better. That is what Drs Laugeson and Frankel
have done with PEERS.
I could cite example after example from the book, but
frankly, if you have a personal stake in helping people make friends, I urge
you to buy the workbook. It’s
written to do group therapy for high school students but it’s immediately
obvious to me that the concepts can be used for self-study and even for Asperger adults. I mentioned that to Dr. Laugeson and
she agreed but was quick to point out that the work had not been validated yet
in adults.
So if you’re an adult Aspergian, or you know one . . .you
can be among the first to try these ideas out. Let me know what you think.
The PEERS workbook is in many ways a clinical version of my
Be Different book. In that book, I
talk about the strategies I’ve used to find success, and how I made the most of
my autistic gifts while minimizing my disability. What PEERS does is take those ideas to the next level.
I wrote about making friends from the perspective of my own
success as a person with Asperger’s.
PEERS approaches the same problem but from the perspective of many
young people with autism, not just me.
PEERS was developed with funding from the National Institutes
of Health. To me, it’s a great
example of the kind of research we should encourage in the autism
community. This is work that will
be of tremendous benefit to many people growing up with autism now.
Over the next few days, I’ll be looking at all sorts of
research. I’ll see work from
biologists, geneticists, psychologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists. I’ll even be looking at studies from
public health people and statisticians.
Stay tuned as I report on highlights to come . . . after I visit the Container Terminal
John Elder Robison
Comments
anyway. my self-help book is going to sound very, very different from most of what's out there. "People Suck: a guide to better hating."
or something like that.
In grade school I had "relationships" with other children though I often remember sitting alone. I remember being in a group just to "be there" and not talking, just standing there. I also remember "drifting" from person to person. Of course, in grade school, "play dates" and similar are usually set up by parents, so if a person had a moderate/mild form of HFA/AS it would be more difficult to pick up, especially in a female.
In middle school I didn't have a "friend" for over a year. I sat with a "group" but wasn't "among" the group, if that makes sense. After about a year I made a friend and was the "oddball" in the group. Then I drifted to another group later and my "friend" became angry and I couldn't understand why she wouldn't talk to me. I didn't really miss the friendship because I was really just friends with this one person and she had many other friends in the "group."
Had no friends in HS and have none as an adult. Adult relationships are much more complex than middle school and I have no idea how they work. I would like to have a girlfriend (since I'm gay) but I have NO idea how to do that or how to sustain one.
Relationship problems like these are one reason why college/work is so difficult because I have NO IDEA how human relationships work.
The only person I talk to is my father, literally.
I remember around age 7/8 reading a book about "How to Make Friends" that I got from the library. So, relationship problems evident around that age.
I also remember my mother/father telling me that as a toddler when they called my name I wouldn't respond, so relationship problems evident in early childhood.
On this subject I also recommend reading this article: http://www.howdoimakefriends.com