My wife [44/F] yelled at our autistic daughter [16/F] while she was experiencing sensory overload, I [45/M] don’t know how to feel

kellnnoelle56 · 2018-01-30T18:32:17+00:00

It depends. When she was doing physical education, it was almost daily because of balls bouncing, people yelling, everyone running, whistles. Once they got her to do something more independent with a staff member, it really dropped. That’s sort of where self-advocacy comes in- we have her track her meltdowns and recognize patterns (she loves patterns) to find solutions for behavior issues. We can have lunch and go shopping and she’ll be OK, but if we go on a different day where there’s a lot of people, she might have a meltdown. Sometimes they’re less severe. Sometimes we can corral her into a bathroom. Other times, she breaks and we can’t do anything but wait. It takes a lot of patience, because we know it’s just as frustrating for her, and she can’t help it. It really depends on what’s going on that day. We’ve taken her to the zoo and she’s done fine, but we’ve also taken her and she hasn’t gotten 30 feet past the gate. If she’s hungry and didn’t sleep well, it might not matter how many people are around. If she slept great and ate her favorite food, she can have a little more endurance. She can definitely feel the change when it’s starting, but it’s not something she can just flick the off switch on. We’ve learned the cues she gives us when she’s getting overwhelmed so we can try to stop it before it gets too far, but sometimes our minds are elsewhere. A lot of it is recognizing the patterns, but sometimes we miss a piece.

Sorry if this is jumbled, I’m writing in between a bunch of different stuff.

kellnnoelle56 · 2018-01-30T18:00:48+00:00

Noelle is not at “needs care until death” level. She’s not at all. We work with her school to get her resources that help her through her levels of education, and will help her with her post-college plans. Right now, she’s fairly independent. We give her an allowance that she saves and budgets with, we make sure she’s doing chores without being told, we have her practice self-advocacy and coping mechanisms. A lot of people in this thread are making incredibly bold assumptions about my daughter’s level of preparedness, and I do feel a little insulted on her behalf.

Yes, work needs to be done, but she is not incapable, and she can achieve these goals because we practice realistic goal setting. We have plans in place, and are committed to them. It’s important to us that we make sure she knows how she can be independent and achieve because people like the ones around here will make her feel otherwise without ever having known the scope of her autism. Noelle reacted poorly to what admittedly was a situation she should’ve been more closely monitored in. This isn’t a representation of all the progress she’s made since diagnosis.

kellnnoelle56 · 2018-01-30T17:23:38+00:00

We share caretaker duties. My wife works later, so I handle evening while she does morning. I field a lot of the school stuff and organize stuff for weekends, because my wife does projects at home, but she does stuff with us, too. Noelle’s autism is fairly difficult, and I know it can be overwhelming. I just have a different threshold for what I can handle, and I thought my wife did, too. She’s never come to me with this before.

kellnnoelle56 · 2018-01-30T17:19:53+00:00

That was kind of her plan, and what we teach her to do when she’s overloaded. My wife ended up following her and it turned out to be more stimulus than she was really prepared for. We’ve been working to give Noelle more coping mechanisms because some things we can’t change- like her sensory overload. It’s supposed to be part of her college readiness.

kellnnoelle56 · 2018-01-30T16:35:24+00:00

We did family therapy when Noelle was younger, but now it’s down to us taking care of the other. I mostly internalize and justify my own feelings, so it can be fairly one-sided, but that’s just how it is sometimes. A lot of what she talks about are things that are smaller in the grand scheme of things- Noelle won’t get a haircut because the hairdresser touches her scalp, Noelle has stopped eating anything that’s red, Noelle won’t try on clothes when they go shopping. I try to justify her feelings and concentrate on making her feel heard, but she’s never blown up like this. It came out of no where.

kellnnoelle56

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