Contacting Jason

THE BIRTH

In late January of 1997, in New Mexico, Jason entered the world as a robust baby boy with a 9.9 Apgar score. He was expected, wanted, welcomed and loved by my son-in-law Vince and my daughter Jennifer. He was their second son and my second grandson. His mother breast-fed him.

Jason ate a lot, slept a little and screamed almost constantly when he wasn't eating or sleeping. He soon earned the label "colicky." To me, his early photos depicted an emotionally upset newborn, especially in comparison to his older brother who had been an "easy" baby from birth onwards. From these pictures I knew that Jason required emotional intervention. Besides, his middle name is Kenneth and I was damned if my namesake was going to develop a serious emotional disorder.

Jason's christening was scheduled for Easter Sunday, March 30 in Los Angeles. So Jennifer, Vince and the two boys flew from New Mexico to California and stayed at the home of Vince's parents.

OUR FIRST MEETING

It was there that I first met Jason in person on Wednesday, March 26 when he was nine weeks old. Physically he seemed healthy except that his left eye looked smaller than his right and he looked scrawny. Jennifer explained that Jason had atresia of his nasolacrimal duct on the left and that he used his nourishment for crying instead of putting on weight.

Psychologically, Jason frightened me. His eyes were unequal pools of pure horror. He stiffened and arched backward when people handled him. He looked away from people. He never smiled. When I picked him up he screamed, which he did most of the time anyway. But the horror in his eyes bothered me the most.

YEARS AGO

Let me go back about eleven years. I was working in a Tuesday evening clinic. A superb nurse named Melanie assisted me. The clinic ran from 7 to 9 PM. No matter how we scheduled the clients, the bulk of them arrived about 6:30 and the rest straggled in after 8:30. So every Tuesday, to minimize waiting, we started the clinic half an hour early and had about an hour of free time while we waited for the stragglers.

During that hour, Melanie and I would talk about all sorts of things, including my work with deep-feeling contact. Sometimes Melanie would bring her two daughters to the clinic. While Melanie and I saw clients, the older girl would wheel the baby around in a stroller through the empty but safe corridors of the building. The older child was perhaps seven years old. She was beautiful with captivating eyes, an emotional furnace dancing around the clinic. The younger child was about six months old. She was horrid with terror-filled eyes, a feral-looking creature curled up in the stroller.

After some weeks, I worked up my courage and told Melanie my concerns about her younger daughter. Melanie accepted my observations and asked me what she should do. I told her. By herself, with no further guidance or supervision from me, she emotionally contacted the younger girl. Her second daughter soon stopped looking like a terrified animal and has, in the years since, grown up to be a lovely and loveable child.

Some months after she had emotionally contacted her daughter, I was talking to Melanie about my work with emotions and doubting its value. Melanie gave me her sternest nurse-look and warned, "Never say that. You don't know how it feels when you want to cuddle your own flesh and blood and she sits bolt upright in your lap and screams." Now with Jason I knew what Melanie had meant.

SOOTHING JASON

That first afternoon I met him, I spent several hours watching Jason being soothed and soothing Jason myself. Jennifer was and is a bright, loving and resourceful mother. She had learned several ways to calm this new baby who was so different from her first son. She had tried many approaches and found that Jason liked the pendular motion of swinging in his car seat. And he liked watching the blades of a ceiling fan, looking at a blank wall and listening to white noise such as the sound of a clothes dryer or vacuum cleaner. But what soothed Jason unsettled me: his discomfort with human beings and his comfort from inanimate and repetitive things. To me, this spelled autism.

JASON'S DIAGNOSIS

According to DSM-IV-TR on Page 75, Jason just missed the diagnosis of 299.00 Autistic Disorder. To fulfill the diagnosis of autism, Jason would have had to meet six properly distributed criteria out of the twelve given. But six of the twelve criteria apply to older children only:

• 1. poor peer relationships
• 2. delayed language
• 3. impaired conversational skills
• 4. strange language usage
• 5. nonfunctional routines or rituals
• 6. preoccupation with parts of objects

Consequently, Jason would have had to meet all six of the remaining criteria and he met only five:

• 1. impairment of nonverbal behaviors in social interaction
• 2. lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment with other people
• 3. lack of social or emotional reciprocity
• 4. lack of social play
• 5. preoccupation with stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest

The missing criterion was

• 6. stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms

of which he might have been incapable at nine weeks of age.

HEARING JASON

I took my turn swinging Jason like a pendulum bob in his car seat. The two together were heavy. The clothes dryer was whirring. My daughter looked worn down after nine weeks with a screaming baby in the family. My son-in-law had said that he could not "connect" with Jason the way he could with his older son.

For the moment, Jason was awake and calm as I swung him. Something emotional in me began to flow toward him. And something emotional in Jason began to flow toward me. I withdrew. It took all the control that my experience as a helper with deep feelings had taught me in order to keep myself from emotionally contacting my grandson there and then. There was no way I wanted this little guy searching for me for the next twenty-five years. He needed his mother to contact him emotionally. I believe that his father had emotionally contacted my first grandson so now it was Jennifer's turn. But I knew that Jason had sensed emotionally that I was near if not actually in contact with him. With respect to emotion, I believed I had succeeded at hearing Jason and I hoped I had failed at contacting him.

As I got ready to leave, my daughter shyly asked me if Jason was "a communicator." To her disappointment I replied, "Not even close." We scheduled the deep-feeling contact session for Friday, two days hence, at my son Leon's house, which was nearby. Vince's parents' home, where my daughter and her family stayed, was scheduled for recarpeting that Friday.

The next morning, Thursday, I received an excited message from Jennifer: Jason had had the first good night of his life. Except for a couple of feedings, he had slept all night. Vince's mother opined that Jason's colic was finally going away. Strange how that happened when it did.

CONTACTING JASON

Friday morning, I arrived at my son Leon's house with my other son, Tom. Tom had had a lot of experience with deep-feeling contact and I wanted him to see the process occur with his nephew.

About eighteen months earlier I had been in New Zealand. A general practitioner had sent a woman with postnatal (postpartum) depression to the outpatient clinic where I worked. She brought along her one-week-old son, whom she was breast-feeding. She wanted drugs, specifically Prozac, which her GP was not allowed to give her. There was a reluctance to authorize medication because her depression was mild and no one knew what Prozac would do to her son's growing brain. I worked with her emotionally but we kept getting interrupted by emergencies. So our session together was fragmented into several parts. I helped her to contact her son emotionally. Between adults, deep-feeling contact occurs in an instant. With her newborn, it took a few moments for him to comprehend what was happening. With him, deep-feeling contact seemed like a cascade instead of a flash of realization. She remarked that the eye contact was "something like taming a wild animal." I agreed. She was surprised that, afterward, he could wait for his feeding because he had previously been impatient and insistent. She left the clinic disappointed because she expected to be given drugs.

I wanted my son Tom to see this cascade effect when his sister Jennifer emotionally contacted Jason. Tom was to be denied the experience.

My son Leon's house was all atwitter because, I think, both Jennifer and her mother (my ex-wife) believed I was about to perform some dark deed of alien legerdemain. Jennifer procrastinated. My ex-wife fussed and flitted about. Leon himself remained aloof and let us alone. Jennifer could have called off the emotional contacting but nine weeks with a screaming newborn had motivated her to try anything that might help.

In light of my experience with Jason on Wednesday last, I first checked to see if he was still a noncommunicator. He was. Jason lay in a baby seat on the dining room table. He was a bit upset in spite of the ceiling fan twirling above him. Jennifer, Tom and I took our places. I drew Jennifer's attention to her deep feelings and Jason immediately knew that something was afoot. And he didn't like that something. He was already crying. I continued to help Jennifer acknowledge her deep feelings until she got to her pain. Her emotional pain poured out of her in a flood. By this time, Jason was screaming with his eyes tightly shut. If Jennifer had contacted him emotionally, any cascade of his comprehension was invisible behind his closed eyelids. I called off the session, unsure if we had succeeded. Tom went off to one of the bedrooms for a nap.

Jennifer breast-fed Jason and he looked and acted about the same as ever. Then my son Leon (Jason's uncle) held Jason on his lap. Jason sat there peacefully like a lump of dough. He did not respond to Leon but neither did he resist him. Jennifer put Jason in his baby seat and he went to sleep on the kitchen counter.

About an hour later Jason woke up. I checked him and he made good emotional contact with me. However, he was reticent with his deep feelings. Then Tom walked in and Jason lit up at the sight of his uncle. Jason gooed, gurgled and smiled openly at Tom. To Jason, Grandpa was just OK but Uncle Tom was super. Deep-feeling contact had succeeded and Jason's deep-feeling communication channel was wide open!

Tom gazed at Jason for some time and I watched the deep emotions flow between them. I told Tom that he was communicating with Jason. Tom asked a profound question: "What did the communication represent?" I answered that deep-feeling communication was the act itself and represented (RE-presented) nothing further.

Jennifer suffered no aftereffects from the deep-feeling contact. But for the next five or six days, both Tom and I were somewhat dissociated. We slept a lot and accomplished nothing. Tom said he couldn't balance his check book, even by using a calculator. Furthermore, Tom developed a tight knot in one of his back muscles. My other daughter Marie and I tried to massage it away with almost no success.

The christening took place on Sunday, March 30. Jason got through it quietly. Then he, his brother, Vince and Jennifer flew back home to New Mexico.

FIVE-WEEK FOLLOW UP

One month later, on April 30, Vince's maternal grandmother died, not unexpectedly. Vince had to come back to Los Angeles for her funeral. To my surprise, he brought Jennifer and the two boys along. I got to see Jason five weeks after deep-feeling contact.

Jason looked better. He had put on weight. He was calmer, more relaxed and much easier to hold. Eye contact with people was improved but not spectacular. Often he seemed to be looking around for something that used to be there and was now gone.

While his father held him, I made emotional contact with Jason. He looked at me and smiled broadly. His smile was social and appropriate but seemed defensive. (How soon they learn.) I waited for Jason's smile to fade and then he surprised me. He communicated to me a sadness as beautiful, intricate and subtle as anything I had seen from an adult during my career as a helper with deep feelings. Such complex sadness from a person only fifteen weeks old!

After the funeral, Vince and his family returned to New Mexico. In the weeks that followed, I heard that Jason's left nasolacrimal duct had opened spontaneously. And he was often sleeping through the night. My son-in-law could "connect" with Jason and described him as "a star."

MORE FOLLOW UP

Today, Jason is happy and healthy boy. Love and good parenting produce his well being. By itself, deep-feeling contact cured nothing; it merely opened up a very special communication channel between Jason and other human beings so that their love and good parenting could work wonders with him.

JASON'S PICTURES AND HIS ARTWORK

Jason at 5 Weeks of Age

Jason at 5 weeks of Age with His Older Brother

Jason about 8 Weeks of Age

Jason's First Haircut at 17 Months of Age

Jason (left) at 20 Months of Age with His Older Brother

Jason (left) a 23 Months of Age with His Older Brother and Little Sister

Jason (right) at 4½ Years of Age with His Older Brother and Little Sister

Artwork by Jason at 20 Months of Age

List of Pages
	Contacting Jason			Medical Arguments Against My Theory of Autism
	A Feeling-Based Theory of Autism			Our Ideas about Autism: Theory or Grammar?
	Disclaimer			Three Overviews of Learning Deep Feelings
	Sayings & Stories			Frequently Asked Questions
	A Way to Make Autism Better			References & Citations
	The Genetics of Autism: Heredity or Heresy?			Curriculum Vitae