Thanks, folks. What I just did was to reinforce Ann for her good presenting. I gave her - and please keep your seats after I say this - I gave her a bag of dark chocolate M&Ms. They’re available for a limited time as part of a promotion with the new Star Wars movie. Just for your general information, Target has the best buy as far as the size of the bag and the price, but first we’ll listen to me, then we’ll go buy M&Ms, okay? I learned that in one of the workshops earlier.

I’m privileged to be here; I’m glad to see you all and I hope I can contribute to the atmosphere of learning and growing together which is so important to the good folks of the Autism Society and to the whole autism community.

I’m going to first focus on the sensory aspects of things and then be noncompliant and expand things a little bit, and hopefully end up at a place where we’ll feel together and energized to do all of the hard and good work that needs doing.

It was mentioned that I have a son. Andrew, after going through various incorrect provisional diagnoses, was finally diagnosed as being autistic by the Asheville (NC) TEACCH Center in 1993 at which point he was eight (years of age), and at that point I requested an evaluation for myself. I was diagnosed the following Spring at age 46; I’m now 57. Forty-six is a little late in life to be identified with developmental stuff, but I hope I’ll show you that that really can happen sometimes.

The first thing I’ll do is, I’ll confirm my diagnosis for any doubters by asking what seems like an off-the-wall question: has anyone here heard of Vladimir Posner? Didn’t think so, okay. Oh - I saw one or two hands - good. Vladimir Posner is, or was at least, a television commentator. He worked for the Soviet government, I believe. He was involved in the Soviet media, anyway, for many years. If someone wanted a representation of the Soviet point of view or commentary he would frequently show up on news programs and stuff. He speaks flawless English. No trace of an accent.

Some of us on the autism spectrum are able to present quite typically, if you will, and you might be tempted to assume, “Oh, well, all right, they just have a touch of… you know, like they…” um… all right, I’ll prove it again. I heard that the best recipe for a dry martini is to put the bottle of gin in the closet and walk by the closet carrying a bottle of vermouth… that I might be that close to having autism, just a touch of it. But for someone to presume that those of us who are able to put sentences together and use vocabulary reasonably well at least some of the time cannot possibly be autistic would be like saying that Vladimir Posner cannot possibly be Russian because he speaks such good English. Okay? That would deny Vladimir his Russianness… really, it would deny him his identity… and that’s something of a sore point with me, thanks in fact to something that happened not long ago at this conference this afternoon. And that gave me the energy to finish this presentation in a way that I wanted to.

So I’d ask you to keep in mind that it’s entirely possible that communicative elements - like the use of vocabulary and grammar and such things - may themselves be splinter skills. That some of us can have very great ability in those areas, and that doesn’t automatically mean that, for instance, because a young child sounds very adultlike, that there is an adultlike thinking and reasoning process behind that. The act of speaking and sounding like an adult does not mean that all the rest of the stuff is there as well.

That’s an important distinction. There is an editor of one particular online autism newsletter, which I guess has a fair number of subscribers, who generally compiles news items and sends them out. I’ve had some email conversations with him, and it turns out that individuals who claim to be autistic - adults who claim to be autistic - are by him considered to be imposters unless they send him copies of their diagnostic report (to) let him examine them. I don’t intend to do that. I don’t feel he has the right to ask for that. If he wants to consider me an imposter I suppose he can - I still intend to sleep at night - but it shows the amount of misunderstanding, the amount of mistrust that can happen sometimes, which is really unfortunate and I hope I’ll do at least a little bit towards trying to ameliorate some of that - there’s that vocabulary again.

I sometimes do a fair job as a neurotypical imposter, if you will, but sooner or later the act breaks down, and sensory stuff - to finally come to the topic of what we’re about here today - is often involved. And sensory issues I think are useful for everybody to look at. Maybe I’ll have better luck asking if anybody has heard of the use of canaries in coal mines. How about that one? Okay, we get some hands up, good. For those who aren’t familiar, coal miners - before there was more sophisticated measuring equipment, I guess - used to take canaries down into coal mines. The reason is that the canary has a very rapid metabolism, and for that reason apparently is more sensitive to the presence of things like methane gas which appears in pockets in coal mines and which can be fatal to coal miners either through suffocation or the risk of explosion, that kind of thing. And they would kind of keep an eye on the canary, and if the canary keeled over they would know there was methane present, and that would give them the time to get out of there. They were kind of the early warning system.

Well, some of us on the autism spectrum, as we react to, say, sensory issues, may serve as the canaries in the coal mine for the rest of you all, because if there are things that prevent me from functioning hardly at all, or other folks on the spectrum, that seriously interfere - the resultant behaviors and all that stuff - then it’s possible that those same things if they are addressed would improve the quality of life for everyone, even if folks didn’t immediately realize it at first. That “Gee, I didn’t even know that was a problem.” Kind of like a headache that you don’t really notice until, “My gosh, it’s gone.” So we can serve that purpose.

I have a problem with sensory experiences, particularly, because I perceive them as being inside me. Whatever-it-is has entered my body, and if it isn’t pleasant I want it out of there. This morning I got to stand over the tray of pastries and muffins and just inhale. And the experience was glorious. I didn’t mind having sensory issues in that moment, because the sensitivity was, you know, "Ohhh, boy. There it is." Listening to good music through a good stereo is exquisite.

Last night, we had the fortune - I won’t label it good or bad, but the fortune - of sitting next to someone who went through most of her dinner talking on a cell phone, occasionally with her mouth full. And that wasn’t that great a sensory experience. So one has to take what one gets.

Now the handouts you might have scratched your head at a little bit. They look primitive. Those are hand-drawn, by me, and that is about how I draw things. If I wrap a package, everyone knows who it’s from because I wrap presents like a little child; I draw things like a little child. That’s my level of skill there. So if I’m able to put words together don’t generalize that to say, “Oh, he can do all this stuff so wonderfully.” There is that exaggerated range of greater and lesser abilities that is typical of those of us in the spectrum.

The handouts are also unlabeled, and that’s for a couple of reasons. See, they can serve more than one purpose, as you’ll find out as we go on, and by leaving them unlabeled and giving you all room for notes to take on them, that makes us all involved in co-creating them, which brings people into the process. Hopefully you’ll be less able to sit passively back and say, “Okay, well I’ll just skim through the notes and kind of see if this guy has anything useful to say.” For those of you who might have difficulty in taking notes or paying attention to writing at the same time as listening, that kind of stuff, it is my honest desire - my intent - to have the substance of this presentation available on that web site in like a month.

Let’s go to the first one.

We can consider that a graph of ability on the vertical axis versus either time or age on the horizontal axis. The typically-developing folks are the solid line. You notice the curve steepens, I would say like during adolescence, and those of us who have developmental issues may be more like what the dashed line is, and you notice where I’ve drawn that arrow. That you get to a place like in adolescence where the typically-developing kids are developing very rapidly, and those of us who are not on that path are developing more slowly, so the distance between us gets greater and greater, and it can get quite large. I would offer first the reassurance - small though it might be - that falling farther behind is not the same as going backwards. We’re developing at our own pace, and if you look to the right there, there’s no telling where we might wind up and I’ll get back to that later as well.

You can have things like motor clumsiness. I ran into a good bit of that, so did my son. Social clumsiness. Into fine motor skills, things like trying to put together models. I remember the frustration I had as a kid trying to put together models. On the other hand, my son does very well with that stuff even though the larger stuff is harder, so there’s… we’re individuals. And it can be hard to tell which of the difficulties are sensory, which ones are cognitive, which ones are social - if there’s stress, or trying to keep up with others in doing something, that can influence things, that kind of stuff. So sensory issues are part of the picture, and there are synergistic effects of other parts of the picture.

I tend to think in visual metaphors often, and for some reason it felt appropriate for me to say here - I wrote it down so I’ll say it - that if an individual has one area of great strength, that it can be awfully hard to stay upright if you’re trying to balance on a one-legged stool. It can be done, under good circumstances. It’s a lot easier if there are hands to hold onto, and I’ll get to that later as well. Having limited strength can (still) give you quite a view, but it’s a precarious one, and that’s something that can lead to a lot of anxiety.

One quick thing I’d say about emotions is the primary emotion that I would feel when I was upset was not anger but frustration. When I feel anger there is always another emotion beneath it. I’ve heard other folks say this; it’s not something I’ve discovered or invented myself. And underneath anger, for me, is nearly always frustration. Frustration at not being able to understand others, frustration at me not being understood… for many years it was frustration at not understanding myself and at despairing at ever being able to. That’s changing, and we’ll get to that as well.

What I found is important is just staying teachable. That’s a responsibility, and an opportunity, that I have. We have to, and get to, do this. That gives you an occasion to flip over to page 5 in the handouts, because that’s a sheet that has nothing but two pairs of letters on the left side. [For website visitors: take a blank sheet of paper, write the letter "A" at the top left, "E" at the left margin one-quarter of the way down the page, "R" halfway down, and "O" three-quarters of the way down.] You now get to know what two of them are labeled. The R and the O at the bottom are Responsibilities and Opportunities, and we’ll get to the other two in a bit.

Slide number two.

I’m old enough that I remember when car radios weren’t these thousand-dollar things that sounded fabulous no matter what you did. It used to be that, if you had a car radio, you could turn it up and it would start to sound pretty good. Your turn it up more, it would sound better. You turn it up (still) more and it sounds pretty good but now it’s a little fuzzy, and you turn it up farther, and you get to a point where it stops getting any louder but the sound gets worse and worse. That is, more and more of the sound is distortion. You see the line (sloping) down there and the shaded area; you could think of the shaded area as distortion.

Well, there are times when I feel like I’m maxed out, and the distortion, or stress if you will, is a greater and greater part of what I’m perceiving. So that if I’m stressed I will do things like pull away from a touch - even from my wife - that is intended to be comforting. Or I’ll duck and flinch and stuff when there’ll be sound or light or something. Things that I don’t ordinarily do. Because I’m just maxed out and whatever happened “sounds” terrible, if you will. So if I’m trying to please other people, I might think that what I need to do is just keep trying harder, and if its starting to “sound bad” - if I’m not doing that well and they’re kind of making a face - I can think, “Gee, I need to try even harder.” But that pushes me farther in the wrong direction.

Similarly, asking me to try harder when I’m already exhausted doesn’t help - the results would actually be better if I would ease off a little bit, and what I wind up with is more of what’s important, more of what the actual goal is. That may seem counterintuitive, but I think most of us that have anything to do with autism realize there are lots of paradoxes. That, you could say, is one of them.

The sensory data that I get, the stuff that comes in, seems to be unfiltered. My understanding is that most people have some kind of a prescreening mechanism where the stuff that isn’t significant doesn’t reach conscious awareness. I get all of it. It’s as though, I tell people in the panels that were mentioned in the introduction, I had to wear a pair of glasses all the time that correct my vision not to the standard 20/20 but to 20/10 which is a step sharper than normal. It’s not like all of the lights are bright or all of the sounds are loud or all of the touch is really invasive, but rather that there’s this enormous amount of detail that I’m aware of that I have to deal with.

I’m very aware of the texture of the corduroy through my fingers holding onto the side of the lectern, and I’m not panic-grasping it. Really. Of how my feet feel in the soles of my shoes. Of how my shirt feels hanging on my body. These things are not useful for me in giving this presentation yet they are present. And I have to be able to cope with that information, if nothing else but to say, “Yeah, okay, I know that’s there and I’ll set it aside.” But I have to keep doing that. So the amount of detail is huge.

Now. This peculiar-looking slide (#3).

It shows a kind of baseline plus something additional on top of it, which at times is quite a bit and at other times is hardly anything at all. What interpretive ability can one bring to the sensory data? You could think of this as like a snapshot of my ability in dealing with different things at a given time. I can have a lot of coping ability with some kinds of sensory stuff - right now I’m not having a problem with sound. But other things - like if it was particularly hot in here - I have a terrible problem with heat - it’s a question of how much I can do in addition to what’s being presented to me.

Some of my ability for coping with sensory stuff I’ll practically have blind spots, like with eye contact. I recognize eye contact as being something that is socially important to many people. It’s a very high-bandwidth channel that happens in a protocol that I don’t really understand very much of. So I have to pay huge attention to eye contact to try to figure out what it is that’s being conveyed, and no matter how hard I try to analyze it I feel like I’m not getting it. So I try with everything I’ve got which leaves me nothing left to understand, for instance, what people are saying to me, or if they’ve asked me a question how I should respond. Or if it happens to be one of these situations that neurotypical folks love where their eyes say one thing and their voice says another and their body language says a third thing, and I’ve heard of people who have the audacity to describe that as “richness of communication”. Trying to figure that stuff out is awfully hard, and in eye contact it can be very hard. I do much better if I don’t look. A couple of people have asked me, “How do you do with all these people in the room?” and I tell them I look at the floor. Really, that’s basically it, because parking my gaze somewhere lets me get through things, and lets me try to say the next right thing, which is really ultimately why I’m here.

That (#4)...

is kind of like a real-world version of #3. You could think of the horizontal axis as the passage of time and again the vertical axis is like coping ability. My coping ability is curve “a” - I actually labeled that - and curve “b” is the demands of the situation. And as you’ll see, I run into a problem there. It goes negative. Those of you who have mortgages or leases might not want to hear about the term “upside down” - that’s where you owe more than you borrowed in the first place, or more than it’s worth, or something - anyway, if I get in a situation where my coping ability is less than the demands of the moment, then I crash. You hear of crashes or meltdowns, that kind of thing.

It’s situational. Under some circumstances I have more coping ability than others. So while it may be true that I did something yesterday that I can’t do today, that doesn’t mean that the next right thing to do is say, “But come on, Dave, you did it yesterday and you’ve almost got it today. All you need to do is try a little harder.” There may be situations where that is true, but as a general rule it runs the risk of telling somebody to try harder when they’re already maxed out. And that to me falls in the general category of not being understood; if I’m upset enough I might think I’m being disrespected and then I’m apt to lash out in some fashion or other.

And people might look for an antecedent. You’ve got the ABCs that was in one of the other presentations. A valid concept, but I feel with its limitations because what was the antecedent when I was dealing with sensory stuff okay for a long time, finally became exhausted, and then crashed? What happened just before I crashed? Come on, there’s got to be an antecedent here somewhere. It may not always be that there is (clearly) one. Looking beneath the surface is something that takes ongoing practice, and so that’s part of what we’re doing here.

Now we get a chance to label the other two letters on page 5. The A and E stand for Assumptions and Expectations. And that sheet is your homework assignment, because assumptions and expectations, in my experience in my own life and of course here I’m generalizing - everybody must be just like me, right? - are so pervasive that it can take me a while to realize that I’m making any of them (at all). And them once I start seeing them, holy cow, they’re everywhere. And so being able to write down the assumptions that I’m making and the expectations that I have can help a lot in figuring out what’s happening, why situations didn’t go well, sometimes why situations did go well. And getting a look at them to see what’s reasonable and what isn’t, perhaps what I can change to get better results the next time, can be quite useful. I’d say autism-spectrum folks’ responses to sensory input - there can be lots of assumptions and expectations from how we behave or don’t behave in different situations and not all of it is just as it may - however plainly - appear to be on the surface.

I mentioned heat before. There are a number of things that I perceive that I think can be considered in a larger sense as sensory input. One of the most powerful ones… I’m calling it sensory input and that’s just my opinion of course, but… is adrenaline. I have to be careful with my own adrenaline, because my judgment, typically, tends to go out the window. It is a very powerful thing and it has survival value and there’s all kinds of reasons why it’s there and so on. I mean, if I’m in a burning building I don’t want to stand there and analyze - "Gee, I wonder what’s happening and what should I do about this?" - I need to get out of there. But it provides more stuff that I have to deal with in trying to figure out what to do in a situation.

And some of us, if we happen to have relatively more, at least, processing power to try to bring to bear as far as reasoning through situations, it gets awfully hard to try to think one’s way through situations. You’d think that greater intelligence is always a gift (but) it can be a mixed blessing. That’s all I can say about that.

But adrenaline is a type of sensory input, I feel restimulated memories - my memory of some things is terrible, my memory of social blunders I did like 45 or 50 years ago is crystal clear, I wish it was not that way but that’s how it is today - those, as they recur, are part of sensory input. Fatigue, heat, exhaustion - all those things add to the burden of dealing with sensory input for me, and so there are times when it’s really hard just to keep putting one foot in front of the other because there’s so much going on.

The other thing about assumptions and expectations, and responsibilities and opportunities which I’ll get to in a bit: ideally, I understand what’s going on and I know why it’s happening. Or, sometimes I may understand what’s going on and I assume I know why it’s happening. Or I guess why it’s happening. Or I understand part of what’s going on and I make assumptions or guesses about the rest as to what’s going on and then make assumptions or guesses about why it’s happening, or I completely misunderstand what’s going on, and then things go farther and farther awry from there. That happens quite a bit with me.

Stopping and checking out what’s happening in the middle of things, I choose to believe, both for my own and my wife’s sanity, is something that can be learned. Learned behavior, and I’ve been working on that. To be able to somehow process through what’s happening in a way that works for both of us, regardless of what it looks like to anybody else. Again, the idea of those of us on the spectrum as individuals is that what works, and works well, for one of us might not work at all for another. We have to - and get to - figure out what is just right for the individuals involved.

Okay - now we’re going to take another pass through the first four slides, and we’re going to generalize a little bit. So on the right side of...

...this one (#1), as I said, we can keep growing and learning. We have to and get to do this. My experience at college - Ann mentioned in her introduction that I’m a student at UNCA. I’m taking this semester off, but I’ve been going for coming up on five years, just a course or two at a time. My first college experience was horrible. It was a nightmare. It was in the mid-late 1960s. There were any number of reasons why it didn’t work, and I’ll get to some more of those in a bit too, but it took me from 1968 until 2000 to decide to again darken the door of a college campus. And what’s happening now is that I’m taking a course a two at a time, I’m in the Honors program, which sure isn’t what happened before.

I think I’m a good student. I’m learning stuff, and I’m experiencing success at the same time I’m facing the fear of being in a college classroom. Those two things happen simultaneously. Our memories can be pretty long sometimes. But if someone told me back in 1968 how things would turn out now, I wouldn’t have believed them. I couldn’t tell how things would turn out based on how I felt in the middle of stuff. And I’ve run into that as an autistic individual myself, certainly as the parent of an autistic kid. My son has been in therapeutic foster care for ten years now. He lives with another family in the Asheville area. At the time, that was the worst possible thing that could have happened - it was catastrophic. My God, I can’t even raise my own kid. His mom and I were divorced by that time and had been for several years. It was just like, this is the worst possible thing.

When he was finally placed after his third psychiatric hospitalization in a year and a half, the crisis was finally over enough that I could fall apart and I wound up in the psychiatric hospital myself, having become suicidally depressed. Had someone told me at the time that that was the best possible thing that could have happened, his placement with that family, and how things would have turned out - how they’ve turned out since, I wouldn’t have dared believe them. I couldn’t tell that that’s how things were going to turn out.

I happened, just by chance, to be walking down the hall earlier today and I heard a woman call to an older man, and she said, "Dad!" and he turned around. And she said to him, "This is the first time in my life I called you Dad and you responded.' It’s possible that gentleman is even older that I am; and the reason that I mention this is because it shows that change and growth can keep taking place as long as we live.

And I would have it no other way. I don’t want to look back on some good old days that were decades ago, and boy, things are never going to be that good. Or do the thing where the curve of the solid line kind of levels off and it’s like, "Okay, now I’m an adult, here I am… is this all there is? Oh boy, I better buy more and see more and be entertained more so I don’t think about that. Because come on, it’s supposed to be better than this, isn’t it?"

What I get to do - what I have to and get to do instead - is to have a number of small successes each day. A decent social interaction with a clerk in a store, for me, is something I can feel good about. It’s a success. Something that most people would take entirely for granted. But I don’t care. I might not have the quantity of things, so I focus more on quality. And that frees me from having to have as much or do as much as anybody else, if I can do what I can do well. That’s better for me, I’m less in the “cranking the thing up until it’s all distortion” from one of the other slides. It works so much better that I do what I can, and I’m much more at peace with myself doing that.

This (#2)...

...has application that’s broader than sensory processing too. It may be natural or logical to figure that if some is good then more is better, but we’re not machines, any of us. And even machines break down when they’re overloaded.

[Slide #3 again:]

How much extra do I have for learning or to be able to relax? Even if the situation stays the same, I won’t be able to respond uniformly to it. That’s something that’s beyond me. I do what I can, as I can, when I can, but that’s really the best I can do. Another maybe somewhat subversive way of looking at this is that I can consider the upper line the Asperger layer on top of the underlying autism stuff. That might not be useful from a pharmalogical standpoint - Dr. Tsai this morning spoke of different medications for the different things in the diagnostic categories and so on, but from a behavioral standpoint I feel it is useful.

[Slide #4 again:)

My functioning is apt to be asymmetrical. I want more consistency from others than I’m able to achieve on my own. But under the right conditions I can do quite a lot, sometimes even combining quality and quantity. But please don’t keep raising the bar when I’m able to do something outstanding. Again, it’s what I can do and when I can. That’s what works for me.

Now. What if... I’m not always that great with hypotheticals, but I’m going to suggest something that probably goes beyond subversiveness clear into heresy, but since almost everyone is sitting down and the person that isn’t sitting down is leaning against the wall, I’m going to try this.

There seems to be a growing conflict between many parents and some autistic folks… try mentioning the word “cure” and see what happens. It can be very polarizing. It’s almost as though our less-verbal kids, or some of our autism-spectrum brothers and sisters, are caught in a tug-of-war between two groups, each with passionately-held beliefs about what “should” happen. If only the energy involved in this conflict could be freed up and put to better use.

I mentioned before the thing about the “imposters”. I was stung several years ago in one online discussion group (when) someone referred to “fake autistics.” That hurt. It wasn’t out of malice, it was just, I think, a lack of understanding. Or, perhaps, a perfectly legitimate viewpoint that I don’t happen to share. What I can bring, in sharing what I’m sharing with you all, is one more point of view. And if there are many facets to this, then maybe we need to be mindful of as many facets as there are and look at each of them and see what we can find, figuring that no one person is going to have the whole truth. What I choose to do is go back a third time to that slide (#2) and do some reframing.

Now. What if that shaded area was instead labeled "side effects"? Things like the self-injurious stuff, like the tantruming, like all kinds of things that are really, really hard behaviorally to deal with. Suppose that we considered those things as side effects of autism, and considered autism itself to be a neurological arrangement which had all kinds of possibilities in it and had some side effects that manifested as behavioral stuff.

I’m not minimizing the impact of side effects. A little more of my own story is that while I was up at college the first time, that began what turned out for me to be seventeen years of active alcoholism. And active alcoholism on top of undiagnosed autism is not a pretty picture. So I’ve been in places where the only way I knew how to do things didn’t work, clearly. I know about that stuff. The nature of addiction, and being trapped in stuff that just doesn’t work.

Well, if we can consider the side effects and think of them that way, then look what happens: the two groups - here’s a bunch of autistic folks saying, "Cure us? Hell no! We’re okay, we have a cultural identity - you want to take that away from us? Come on, you can’t do that!" and so on. And the parents saying, "Look, I want my child to have a life. Come on!" And there’s this tug-of-war thing going. If we consider the behavioral stuff to be side effects, then maybe that brings both of us together, so that the parents can say, "Okay, you call it whatever you want, but if we can get some relief on these behaviors, I mean the kid probably doesn’t get much out of banging his or her head and that kind of thing," then those of us on the spectrum can say, "Okay. I know what side effects are, and yeah, I could do without those, because it’s a quality-of-life issue. As long as I’m able to keep my essence as an autistic person."

Then all of a sudden we’re working together. And that’s not a bad thing. It probably turns some models of autism on their heads, I don’t know. But I’m offering it not as (The) Truth, but as a tool - a way to at least consider it. Let’s look at it that way, then if we look at it from other places too, let’s broaden our understanding and try to work together. That’s what it’s about for me.

And the synergistic effect shows up in all kinds of places. The structure of recovery programs for substance abuse fits nicely with my autistic need for sameness, for structure, for learning how to do things like turn-taking in conversations, and being in a setting where it’s actually not only okay but encouraged to talk only about myself - I can manage that. And to be able to learn from the experiences of others, and to connect with people who themselves may have serious social difficulties for whatever reason. I can know that there are people who are struggling too, and that it’s okay for us to be in this all together, and if people that have been around for a while are saying, "I’m doing this stuff, and it’s working," then the chances are more and more remote, as time goes on and I hear from more and more folks, that every single one of them is lying. And that means that if there’s a chance for them, then there’s a chance for me. Maybe there’s even an opportunity to become - and this is a phrase I ran across somewhere, I’m not sure where - "better than well". The effort to understand and to connect and to learn from each other will benefit all of us. We have to and get to do this. As Dr. Schopler put it so well this morning, we’ve got to work together.

And what would happen if we all did work together? I think there’s much more hope that way than there is feeling alone and isolated. A bunch of people can be in a room, each of whom is in sizeable pain, but someone has to go first, talking about how it is, and I’d like to do what I can to help this process and…

I’m going at this point to do one logistical thing and say that, rather than stand here and take formal questions at the end, I’ll just be down front here after I finish, because I think it’s important to finish and be done. And hopefully you’ll see why.

So what I’d like to do is close with an affirmation that may be familiar to some of you. I was speaking about sensory issues before; this is going to involve, for those that choose to, taking the hands of the people to the side of you. Check to make sure it’s okay first, don’t automatically grab, because we’ve got to practice what we learn. So what we’ll do is we will say this together: (at the conference, these words were shown on slides)

I put my hand in yours,
And together we can do what we could never do alone.
No longer is there a sense of hopelessness,
no longer must we depend upon our own unsteady willpower.
We are all together now,
reaching out for a power and strength greater than our own,
and as we join together we find love and understanding beyond our wildest dreams.

There’s a lot of work to be done, folks. We have ourselves, we have each other... and we get to do this, not having to choose between taking care of ourselves and taking care of others but doing both, because it all works together. We get to do this for ourselves, for each other...

....and for our children. Thank you very much.

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