“I am Like Petrified Wood”

“I am five years old. Terror is my bosom buddy. It never leaves me. It follows me like night follows day. I cannot move. I feel petrified like “petrified wood.” Every movement, every gesture is scary, beyond scary - frightening beyond belief. Words will not come out of my mouth. They stay in there like immovable objects. Words are frightening. They are enemies. Sentences seem fragmented. When I talk, I feel like one word is on my left and the next on my right. I feel like it will be damaging for me to talk. Every word I say will hurt me. I must not talk. My words are too threatening.”

What is this autistic boy telling us? From my perspective he is saying his fear/terror/anxiety is so big that he cannot manage himself. He is so scared he becomes ‘immobile’ and unable to function as a human being. He has turned to stone like a piece of petrified wood. Some might say he is scared out of his mind. This can also be called a type of hysteria. He is telling us that not only does he feel like ‘stone,’ but also that it feels like his words are stuck within him and are too frightening to use. We can say that words are not easily used if at all by him. Words seem all over the place for this autistic boy. Finally, probably because of his frightening experience with words he has decided that his spoken words are too threatening for others to hear. Thus he decides that he will keep to himself out of fear of hurting others as well as himself.

Let’s make sense out of this boy’s experience with anxiety and his frightening experience with words. From the perspective of an “Incomplete Attachment” we can make sense out of what is occurring here. During the attachment process, a child gains the ability to self-regulate through the experience of mutual regulation with the primary caregivers. Because the autistic child has not had a completed attachment he has not benefited from this regulation process. The child is left ‘waiting’ for the attachment process to resume. Within this state of ‘waiting’ the child is coping with an existence that is very different than for those with a completed attachment. An observation of any autistic child will give us a glimpse into how hard it is to exist without a completed attachment. Each child will have different methods of how he will cope with this unusual state of existence. That is why each autistic child seems so different from another child, but also at the same time can have similar behaviors. Without the ability to self-regulate which comes with a completed attachment the child is left in an extreme state of anxiety. Everything he does is filled with anxiety – moving his body, talking, walking and bodily functions to name only a few.

Therefore, working with those with autism and extreme states of anxiety, we need to 1) recognize that anxiety is a part of the autistic experience, 2) anxiety is the result of an “Incomplete Attachment”, 3) the key to working with the autistic child is to help him have a completed attachment, so the child can learn to self-regulate, and 4) in order for the child to have a completed attachment he needs a caregiver/therapist who can help in the process of mutual regulation.