{"id":69,"date":"2012-09-09T08:51:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-09T08:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/2012\/09\/09\/on-the-road\/"},"modified":"2012-09-09T08:51:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T08:51:00","slug":"on-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/?p=69","title":{"rendered":"On the road"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent last evening watching <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tonyattwood.com.au\/\">Asperger&#8217;s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals<\/a> by Tony Attwood, a British psychologist who has studied and written widely on the subject.&nbsp; This in preparation for a series of trainings we are undertaking with our staff to learn more about Asperger&#8217;s and autism.<\/p>\n<p>While I like to joke that I speak fluent Downs, I can&#8217;t claim the same about the autism spectrum.&nbsp; If anything, the whole subject, especially when it gets into the areas of anxiety and social cluelessness,&nbsp;is uncomfortable for me&#8211;not surprising, since I have struggled my whole life with these very issues.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Most cerebral people, I find, when they really sit down and look at the spectrum, are able to locate themselves on it somewhere.&nbsp; If you know me well at all, I have probably inflicted upon you more than you ever wanted to know about certain subjects.&nbsp; (My apologies, but really, in your heart of hearts,&nbsp;how <em>can<\/em> you not&nbsp;share my horror at the loss of the pluperfect subjunctive in everyday English usage?&nbsp; I&#8217;m just saying.)<\/p>\n<p>And so&nbsp;I have struggled to do justice to our Ranchers on the spectrum.&nbsp;&nbsp;Anxious people push my anxiety buttons.<\/p>\n<p>But last spring,&nbsp;in&nbsp;the daily&nbsp;struggle with my <em>own<\/em> anxiety disorder,&nbsp; I discovered a simple relaxation ap for my IPAD.&nbsp; I&#8217;ve tried so many things, read so many books, taken so many pills, usually with some marginal degree of relief but not really much help when push comes to shove.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>(I sympathize with&nbsp;the character in a famous <em>New Yorker<\/em> cartoon: &#8220;I garden, I meditate, I take bubble baths.&nbsp; Why do I still feel like I want to slug somebody?&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>These simple little aps (<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.withandrewjohnson.com\/\">www.with<b>andrewjohnson<\/b>.com<\/a>)<\/em>, lo and behold, for whatever reason, taken like medication for 15 minutes, after lunch, in the midst of my busy, stressful day&#8211;amazing.&nbsp; Within weeks I was able to sleep through the night and get through the day without the host of symptoms that have plagued me since I was a teenager.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore I was not&nbsp;surprised to see daily relaxation prescribed on the Attwood site for people on the spectrum.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a&nbsp;step to take at the beginning of a long journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent last evening watching Asperger&#8217;s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals by Tony Attwood, a British psychologist who has studied and written widely on the subject.&nbsp; This in preparation for a series of trainings we are undertaking with our staff to learn more about Asperger&#8217;s and autism. While I like to joke that&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhr.tiltedchair.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}