9. Integrating the Nervous System

The nervous system needs to be soothed and integrated and educated, at all levels. The autist has to begin to engage and command the body.

The more an autist can gain cognition about what is happening, the more they can gain awareness; and with awareness comes control. Essentially, we want autists to come back into their body: to learn to steward it, rather than have the system run ad hoc. We want to make them aware, to teach them to engage with their body and have more control. As they begin to learn control, they can begin to learn to steward their body at a very simple, practical level.

What we want to do is to get the nervous system out of the learnt pattern; to physically build up the relationship between the social engagement system and the nervous system; and to build a bigger repertoire of social cues. At every opportunity we want to affirm the autist’s ability to tell the body to calm down, and to tell the mind to re-engage and look for something new.

We can teach autists to befriend their body, to understand its learnt patterns and to re-educate it themselves. Living is an embodied experience and reframing autism is a personal journey of discovery and mastery. The autist has to learn to listen to the body. This is a job that is usually done as babies. It is slow and the emphasis is on listening and engaging and re-integrating. It is subtle. It is not achievement-oriented, although once mastered, the achievements can be great.

Autism may not be a neurobiological disorder. It may be a learned response of the autonomic nervous system to trauma or an irritated vagal system. If so, the road ahead lies in re-educating the body, re-informing the body, not just the mind – which takes more than just a ‘snap out of it’ approach to healing.

You can’t simply teach autists social skills, or how to tie their shoelaces, because you/they also have to teach their nervous system. They have to train it to settle and they have to train it to encompass more, to awaken. It is not simply mind over matter, because the body needs to be retrained along with the brain. Ultimately there needs to be a stronger connection between body and brain, and with what we now know about brain plasticity, that is suddenly possible…