Thank you for joining us for RDIconnect’s® own podcast series, Autism: A New Perspective. In this episode, Dr. Gutstein talks about the common misunderstanding that treatment for autism must begin before a certain age to be effective. He then explains why, at RDI®, we believe it is never too late for treatment to begin.
Kat Lee: You know one thing I hear a lot from people unfortunately, is uh, and it’s a common question for me to get when people are inquiring about RDI. My child is 7. Is it too late? My child is 12 , I’ve heard it’s too late for RDI. My child is 18, I’ve heard it’s only for younger children. So I thought it was great for us to talk about because my son was I think 10 the first time I heard you speak and it’s never too late and I don’t say that just to be all Yay it’s never too late but I mean it’s truly not ever too late and so I wanted to speak to that.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: When we think about older folks, what happens I think is that a certain portion of the adult ASD population, they’re so traumatized, they’ve become so overwhelmed for so many years and so beaten down for so many years that they developed some very powerful defense mechanisms so it’s changed or it’s something new, towards trying anything new, they become very locked into what we call maintaining the stability of what they have. That is an obstacle and if we see someone who is at an age where they can make their own decision and obviously they’re deciding that they don’t want to try to remediate their difficulties. There’s nothing that we are going to be able to do whether it’s RDI or anything else that’s going to be helpful to them. But that really isn’t limited to RDI. It’s to anything that we try to do for someone to help them. Other than that we really don’t see any age limitations at all.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: It makes it more difficult I think for some of our adolescents and adults, as I said the fears they have about change, the habits they’ve developed are very strong so things are..the initial obstacles may be more difficult. But it’s for any kind of work you do for instance with adults and with adolescents and young adults and someone who has been a psychotherapist for many years as well as with a non ASD population. That’s equally as true for a non ASD population as it is for a ASD population.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: I work with adolescents who don’t have ASD but have other problems. The initial resistances could be very strong and fears..So I don’t think there’s anything unique about the ASD population in terms of an age that would limit them to be able to grow and develop.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: I think that if you think about what we’re doing is trying to open up a pathway for growth. It would be sad to think that there would be some age limit for this population. We don’t think of that for other populations, we don’t think that we have a limit for growth, we don’t think that anyone else would be. So why would it be if you have ASD? Why would you suddenly be unable to develop the capacity for growth, for mental and self growth, just because you have this diagnosis.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Instead of the arbitrary idea that there’s an age limit , it doesn’t come out of anyone that I know of. I think that it is important that they have someone who they can turn to to help them as a guide, to work with them along with us, whether that’s a parent or someone similar, parental figure. Because it’s very difficult to do this on your own. It’s very difficult without that support and without that guidance to make the types of changes we want them to make. I guess it’s possible to do but it’s so much more doable if you have somebody there by your side who is helping you to gain perspective and helping you to think through what the next step is and to help give you another voice to learn through, for another person to be able to co experience things with rather than having to do it on your own.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: So I think another obstacle is adults would become so isolated from their families, they don’t have anyone who can serve as that type of mentor or guide. And again I think that it’s something that is true for any adult or any working with a teenager or adult even if they don’t have ASD, when they become that isolated and they want to function completely on their own, it makes life very difficult.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: We’re a social species. We’re a species that is designed to develop and grow and evolve in a group with others, alongside others, sharing with others and we’re not designed, none of us are designed to do that completely on our own. So again, I don’t think it’s necessarily something that has to do with autism but we do it in individuals who have autism who become very isolated from others and even from their families. So I think in that respect it makes it more difficult but it has nothing to do with your age. It’s not about whether you’re 18 or 80 or 8, it has to do with your life circumstances and how open you are to what we can offer you.
Kat Lee: I think too, I was going to talk to you about the guiding relationship, thinking that it’s too late to have a guiding relationship or that be established doesn’t really make sense but I understand that there could be a plethora of obstacles to that.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Well a guiding relationship at any age, and some of those obstacles may occur again when the individual is estranged from their family or in a somewhat of a pseudo independent posture where they become so afraid of change that they’ve depended on the family for support, or sort of propping them up and their terrified of losing that and becoming more competent if you will.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: So there’s a lot of ways that there can be obstacles that can be created but it’s never too late to have a guiding relationship. I think anyone who has tried to move into a new area, that’s a new area of requirements or a new area of being if you will, finds that if they can have a guide, they can call a guide a spiritual advisor , they can call them coach, they can call them all kinds of names but there is no age limit to guiding, to finding someone who will guide you. And we all have had experiences of that and hopefully it has to do with being open to growth. And open to discovering, exploring , and not so much, well not at all about how old you are.
Kat Lee: I decided to take taekwondo when I was in my later thirties and I had no idea, I had never done anything like that. And over the years I eventually became a very lame black belt and I bet you didn’t know I was deadly like that in a lame way but I remember thinking is going through the process in RDI was I made the decision to be guided by another adult to learn something completely new and out of my competency. I mean really, totally out of my competency. But I did have to make that decision and I think that’s, like I say, a plethora of other obstacles but that does have to occur with older children, older adults or however we want to put it.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Yeah and not everyone does that but I think we have many examples as you point out of people who do do it, of all different ages , whether that’s again learning something like discipline like taekwondo or religious like someone becoming a buddhist or any religion really, it’s a experience in that in justifying a advisor or group or guide to that, or a new way of living or new type of lifestyle.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: So we have many examples of people doing it at all ages so there’s no reason to think that there’s any age limit and I think that we all benefit when we know that we can have a relationship with guides and sometimes we’re mutually guiding one another. So you know, again I don’t think there is any reason to think that there is a limit on that.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: I think that people may have misunderstood when they’ve seen certain very early examples of the work in RDI, that it was about certain activities that seemed more infantile or more associated with the younger ages that those activities somehow define what we’re trying to do and they don’t enroll. It’s got nothing to do with what goes on in a guiding relationship, even with younger children. My grandson and I, we do a lot of yard work together. We sweep the leaves and we rake, we use real adult tools. I give him small examples and he’s 2.5 years old and we’ve been doing this for a while and he sees himself as an apprentice and he is an apprentice and that’s his favorite thing to do and that’s certainly not something that is limited to a two year old. Another thing we do is wood work together, with real tools again. There are some things I don’t let him do, I don’t let him use a drill for instance or electrical buzzing hammers. We use nails and we screwdrivers and we use glue and we use wood and you know he’s under guidance with that and there are certain roles he takes with that but he has authentic roles in that.
Dr. Steven Gutstein:And what’s interesting is he thinks through, he uses those activities if you will to think through things and to come up with new solutions and solve problems and I’m very proud of his thinking. So you know, there’s a guide right now to my grandson, the things we do, we cook together too, we do two year old things too, I am not suggesting we only do those types of those things but if we think about the variety of the things that we do together, they have no, you know people would be surprised, their not two year old things.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: And the things I think he is most excited about are not related to, you would not associate to a child’s age, again he really wants to have that really authentic sense of competence he can gain through experiencing with me and trying to understand the world with me. And he is constantly curious about what things are and what’s around him and things he doesn’t understand. Just things like walking down the street for instance and again that is more the essence of a guiding relationship than any specific activity someone might have seen on a video clip.
Kat Lee: I think it’s such a great point of authenticity and I do think that that can get lost on people both with two years and young adults, older adults. Authentic is really important, really important.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: That defends that I have an authentic role. I mean it can be something playful, it can be a game, it can be anything. You know adults can play games too and be playful too, we can do that. But the sense of I am involved with you in an authentic way.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Whether it’s experiencing the world together walking down the street. Whether it is in work, that has more to do with a guiding relationship. That through your guidance, I’m able to perceive my mind and myself as mentally being becoming more competent, being able to think and experience and feel more as we go through things together, that they transfer to me of that mental capacity.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: That’s the essence of guiding too, it’s not just doing those activities. It’s using those activities whether it’s our yard work we do ever.. As a vehicle for transferring that mental functioning and that sense of self.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: So that shouldn’t have any kind of limitation in that type of guiding relationship because it has nothing to do with any activity or any physical arrangement. You don’t necessarily have to be living in the same house to do that. My grandson doesn’t live in my house for example. It has to do with a certain frequency of involvement so you stay connected and you can pick up where you left off, that you developed some common frameworks and know each other and know where you are and a guide is able to help you move one step ahead rather than overwhelming you or you know making it tedious and repetitive and that requires a certain frequency of contact and a certain sense of staying in touch with one another emotionally, psychologically.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: So that you can every time you connect, you can pick up where you left off, you can keep moving along.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: So it’s not something that is very well done on a once a week basis for instance, an hour a week. And that’s why it’s not something you can do in a traditional sort of therapy relationship, an hour a week. It’s hard, I’m not saying it’s impossible but it’s very hard to do that. And that’s why we encourage our adults or teenagers to be able to stay involved with family, people they can have more frequent contact with who can function as guide so that they can maintain that sense of shared knowing, of shared experiencing, of awareness when they come together again, it’s like they remember where they were, it’s like a book you’re reading. If you’re reading a book and you put it down for too long and then you try to come back to it, you can’t really do that, you don’t know where you left off right? Or to many other books in the way. It’s the same thing, you know, you have to have that sense of continuity and there’s a certain amount of frequencies, it doesn’t have to be every minute but there is a need for that feeling of continuity to keep moving along. Cause you’re moving one step ahead and it’s not. That I think becomes very important in terms of the guiding relationship. And again that has nothing to do with the age that someone would have but it does distinguish it from someone you would meet with once a week or once every few weeks or traditional therapy once a week therapy relationship, that’s not the same.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: We don’t have co-experience, you don’t have that sense of going through the flow of life together and then taking these temporary periods away and then coming back and moving from where you were , immediately remembering where you were. You don’t have all those shared frameworks in mind. So that is what I think we require and as I said if someone is very isolated and they have nobody who could function as a guide, that’s when we have the biggest problems.
Kat Lee: Also I was thinking about the parallel process of guides that are available and if they’ve been in this person’s life for a long time without that guiding relationship, that it’s possible that the, and I say this without judgment but the most affected are actually the guides in a student’s life. Do they have feelings of incompetence or lack of interest and I don’t mean again judgmentally, in growth, do they even think about growth for their young adult child.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: They don’t dare to hope for that. And they resign themselves to you know when the person wherever their problem with functioning is being the best that they can achieve and may not want to…it’s not also not conscious or not aware but it’s so turned off their hopes and dreams for growth or pin them on some miraculous drug or new therapy that’s going to change that person’s brain somehow. But they’ve never, they’ve been so cut off from what the feeling is of a guiding relationship day by day, hour by hour, day by day, by week by hour we have little tiny pieces of change. You know that rhythm of it, that constant sense of moving forward just a little by little. They don’t have that experience, they don’t have any reason to think that that’s going to be part of their lives, to be functioning as a guide to this person.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Now if they are fortunate and they have had other children then they can sort of capture that from their other children maybe and say I want that for this person but you know even then it’s very hard sometimes to capture recapture that hope when it’s been so , maybe been so hurt or felt so… for so long that it’s just impossible to do that. So I think that’s right, that’s another obstacle but again the age, age would have nothing to do with that as well. It’s just not a factor, age is not a factor at all. I don’t see it as one.
Kat Lee: No and that’s such hopeful news and age is not a factor for the guides either. What I would say to guides is you may have a pattern in your life that’s established out of necessity we’ll say but you as a guide can change as well
Dr. Steven Gutstein: And I’m a Grandpa and I’m guiding my grandson so hopefully age isn’t a barrier. I don’t think that you’re too old to be a guide, I can’t imagine that. People say I’m too old, I can’t run around as much, you don’t have to run around to be a guide. If you have a two year old probably you do but other that if you’re older you’re not psychically running around with them. Talking to them, to do that it’s not not a physical marathon but it’s very rewarding. By the way there is a lot of grandparents of all ages who functions as guides and as a primary guide for their grandchildren and so you can’t imagine that would be any age limit, I mean talk to any grandparent who’s very involved in their grandchild’s life and they will tell you that right away. And this is just a little plug for grandparents being involved in a guiding relationship with kids with ASD. I think that if they understand the role that they can play, they can have an enormous impact.
Kat Lee: Believe me with our grandbaby being due in July my husband is hearing nothing but about the guiding relationship from me right now. So I absolutely, I think it’s such a message of hope though for parents, I do think and I say this as we’ve talked about having a 24 year old son diagnosed with ASD , if we would have benchmarked at two years old, some of the things parents have heard by the time their young adults are reaching this age they heard when they were two, so the things about the brain and the brain is going to be done or cooked by five. Those are things we’ve heard, have lingered in them. I know, I believe that people said those things to us well meaning even though we know that the product of that isn’t very healthy for my husband or myself or my son but I think those thoughts linger when they have these older kiddos.
Well and you know there are some people that we all know and we kind of point to, it looks like their brains have been cooked, even with autism (? 22:34) and they’re never going to change. There are people who really become very fixed early in life and you know rigid and such. It’s nothing to do with autism and nothing to do with your brain. It may be your personality, it may be the environment you’re raised with, I don’t know. But certainly there’s we know that we know about our brains in this modern age that would convince anyone that there’s some kind of age limit to brain development or growth and I think that’s all based on old old old old you know I guess pseudo science or whatever people may have thought 40 or 50 years ago. It has nothing to do with the last generation or the last 20 years with what we know about development or neuroscience or anything.
Dr. Steven Gutstein:Brains continue to change in so many different ways. We know for instance that people who become musicians or as they get older, their brains changing in terms of how they handle auditory things. We know taxi drivers in London, their brains change to become spatially extremely powerfully aware of things and where they are in relationship with the city of London. You know, in their 30’s , 40’s and 50’s. It just goes on and on . There’s millions of examples of changes in the brain that have nothing to do with age and certainly don’t reflect any kind of limitation to things.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: I think there are these extreme examples of what children who have been deprived any stimulation. Where there’s brain damage to the extent where it’s very difficult to remediate that. And we know that if you are cut off from stimulation, you’re cut off from opportunities to experience and learn. Basically locked in the closet or in the basement in these horrendous cases that you know that it’s very difficult to remediate but those are extreme, those are the equivalent of severe brain damage. Those are not things that we should use a benchmark or as a prediction for anyone else. And people with ASD , they are not locked in closets and they are not deprived of anything and they’re not in the same position so we don’t expect their brains in any way to be impacted that way. They are cut off from opportunities through their own vulnerabilities to learn through a guiding relationship but that doesn’t mean they can’t . And we’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of great examples of that happening of being able to then make your own benefit from a guiding relationship and grow. So once again there’s no reason to think there is any neuro limitation in growth.
Kat Lee: You know I like what you were saying about you know there’s some people, People, ASD, not being an issue who are doing for whatever reason go and live a more static life. But in general and I see it in all age groups of adults, people are always pursuing some kind of newness or difference whether it be through a vacation or skill or enhancing their career or something. It may not even be in their career, it may be a hobby, that’s how hobbies come about for them, their golfing, they’re always looking , always in that growth seeking mode.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Certainly, there is capacity for changes there, for anyone right. That’s the nature of who we are as human beings. That’s our unique gift is that we have the capacity to transcend, to change and to grow, not just through biological evolution but through our own life evolution. I think that is a unique capacity that we don’t see in any other species.
Kat Lee: Well I think it’s the beauty of RDI. It gives hope whether your child is 2 or 8 or 18 or 80.
Dr. Steven Gutstein: Yeah I agree.
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