I’m looking forward to seeing her work reports.

A person can “care” and have all sorts of good intentions or credentials and still lack an interested perceptiveness(which is helpful in *combination* with caring) that though it can be cultivated, is never so great as that [perceptiveness] which is largely innate. (Not everyone shares the same natural talents.)

If a person has many credentials, but through the eyes of spoon-fed brain mush they see only an “autistic”, and the *condition*, stereotypes, and assumptions they have been *taught*, they can still fail to relate to (not just them *being* a person) the valuable, interesting, real person with the experience, perceptions, and talents that they Do have.

It’s the difference between two people, one who sees what is really occurring, or what is motivating another, and another who strictly believes only what they knew before, and have largely learned from rote or the beliefs of others, and allow no novel insights, reading the autistic and their experience through those beliefs only.

So, yes… the right qualifications indeed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/6965345.stm

(unlike many news stories, a story with a happy ending)

Exactly, Rachel. I did it from day one with the psychology and counselling studies I took.

“Not that you can only learn this by going to college, obviously. Students weren’t taught how to give a crap, per se, but being exposed to the very idea that there ARE people who are oppressed in various ways, and that you have some responsibility for that, and that there are things you can do to help ameliorate that, often changes people’s attitudes.”

Brilliant.

“As far as learning to APPEAR as if you are listening, I think it is important, and I learned it in a training session.”

Me too. Many training sessions dealt with listening skills, too… not just looking like I was listening but actually listening. And checking with the person I was listening to as to whether I was getting what they were saying.

“If you do care but the person you’re talking to can’t tell by your body language and tone of voice, you may not be able to connect with them well enough to figure out how to be helpful.”

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.

“Practicing this kind of thing in role-plays (after reading a dry manual) taught me to be a lot better at this than I used to be.”

Same here. Which I why I have a lot more potential clients who can’t afford to pay for my work than I can afford to work with for nothing.

“Also I darn well hope that the classes and supervision I’ll be recieving over the next few years will help me be better at it than I am now.”

Indeed. The stuff done in training can be useful to everyone who takes that training course. Like I was trying to say earlier: it’s not the necessarily the training that one should blame for piss-poor attitudes of workers… that blame all to often lies with the workers themselves.

And without actually knowing why the field isn’t level in the first place… that’s impossible to do. Which is why training is important.

I would have thought you’d picked up on that. You know… when I said:

“What did I teach?

Theory.

Why?

Because without knowing why someone has to do what they do, they will only go through the motions. When the know WHY they are doing it, they tend to be more reflective on their work.”

I agree that taking a class in something far from makes one an expert in anything. However, at least I have two very strong angles on the whole autism issue: I’m autistic myself, and my MEd in educational psychology has a specialist angle on autism. I’ve lived it for 45 yrs and researched it throughout the duration of my studies over the past 11 yrs of my training as a psychologist. Even here, they can’t get past that as one hell of a qualification to tell them more than they already know.

Like I say, one course I designed (and not as a qualifying course in any sense of the word) led to an improvement in the services provided to two sets of autistic people being served by certain professional bodies in Finland. And course members are always reminded that their client is first and foremost a person, a human being. Compliance with interventions that the workers themselves would not countenance is never an aim: they have to think of a person as someone in a situation that is not helping him/her to develop in some way… and their job is not to ‘do stuff’ to the person. It’s to find ways to level the playing field off.