Component 8. Implementing immediate strategies of support.

8. In Dr. Shah's book, this component is called "Implementing immediate strategies of support," and it has three sub-components (a. support, assistance, and help; b. prompting, cognitive refocusing [distraction], and other activities; c. one-to-one support.)" As before, the advice in it is really for helpers and carers, not for autistic people themselves. So I am first going to introduce Dr. Shah's framing of this step and then introduce an idea I found on an ADD blog the other day, which gets at a similar idea from a different direction.

First of all: Dr. Shah's book talks a lot about something called "prompting," which is very important to recovery, but also a little bit difficult to visualize or imagine at first. "Prompting" is, above all, a strategy for someone else to use if you get stuck or frozen. It means that someone should very very very gently remind you of what you were about to do, or somehow, very very lightly, get your attention to bring you back to the present. Thinking about "prompting," I'm reminded of some of my meditation tapes, which talk about taking a breath so light that it's almost like a feather, lightly touching the rim of a wineglass. To me, a prompt has this same almost feather-like quality. The idea of a prompt is for someone else to bring someone out of a reverie--or a frozen state--as gently as possible. The idea is, if you get stuck--whether standing still, or frozen in a weird posture in a chair, or whatever--someone can come over and gently say your name, or touch your arm, and get you moving again. As you can imagine, prompting is very valuable as a strategy to combat freezing/"stuck"ness/catatonia.

On the other hand, the word "prompt" can be a little bit deceiving, as a term for this kind of activity, because in normal vernacular English, if I'm prompting you to do something, then I'm telling you to do it, or giving you the first few words of a sentence and expecting you to finish it, or somehow giving you quite a specific verbal instruction as to what to do. And reminding or telling a frozen autistic person what to do can be really likely to backfire. We just implode.

In other words, "prompting"...in this delicate therapeutic sense...is both more and less than reminding. If someone is frozen, simply reminding typically doesn't work; it makes things worse. On the other hand, at times, prompting is barely more than a kind of meditation that you can do for other people. Just as you are gently recalling yourself to the breath in meditation, so, when you prompt your autistic friend, you are gently recalling them to themselves and to the task at hand. You say their name lightly; if they are too stuck to open their mouth to eat, you might very gently graze their cheek; you might touch them lightly on the arm if they have completely spaced out in the process of brushing their teeth; etc. A lot of the time, the task of prompting is mostly to be present in the room while the task is taking place. It's a lot about presence and a lot about checking in.

Now of course, in real life, this kind of "prompting" is very challenging, so I'm going to offer up a much easier and intuitive version of something really similar, which I found on the ADD blog ADDitudeMag. It's called "body doubling." I think "body doubling" is very like "prompting," except that body doubling is a kind of ND-native term; one of us made it up (or Dr. Quinn did), and it's for us.

The basic version of body doubling is here: https://www.additudemag.com/getting-stuff-done-easier-with-a-friend-body-double/

A "body double" is someone who shows up while you are doing a particular task and might not do anything other than be an encouraging presence. At times they might simply help you do something, by doing the same thing at the same time. They might offer a gentle reminder about how to do something, in order to lighten the task (for instance, reminding you where something goes if you are putting something away), but they are not supervising you; they are "doubling" you. I like "doubling" as a different metaphor for "prompting," because I think it helps to conceptualise the close, relaxed, non-unobtrusive energy of prompting. It illustrates that much of the work of "prompting" is often just being there.

On a related post on the same blog, Tvisha Shah and Heki Dayo write about using a virtual assistant as a body double. One writes that their virtual assistant keeps them accountable, by phone, as they prepare a meal: "As I chop vegetables for dinner, she's on the phone with me, acting as a body double to ensure I finish the task."

I'm also intrigued by "body doubling" as a response to an aside by Dr. Shah, that autists living alone have often had really minimal success in being "prompted" by phone reminders or the like. Based on my own experience, I can agree with Dr. Shah's comment. But I do wonder whether this solution of virtual assisting and "body doubling"--developed by the ADD community--could not help autistic people with a different kind of virtual solution.

I will end this note by again recommending that people read Dr. Shah's book, which is vastly more complete than any cliffsnotes I can put together here. Instead of trying to summarize it, I've tried to provide a different version of a similar idea, which is produced by ND people for ND people, and which might be a little bit easier for people on their own to implement (since I'm Level 1, I feel most authorized/comfortable speaking for and to other Level 1 people, as I don't want to presume about the experiences of Level 2 and 3 people). (This is Dr. Shah's 8. Implementing immediate strategies of support--or, really, my own highly idiosyncratic riff on it.)