Starting to Communicate

Dear Tony,

In pieces of these blogs, I will tell you directly what has worked for me. Most of my treatment is based on Bruce Perry’s ideas. All I know is what worked for me. They are not intended to be instructions or guidelines for everybody with a mental illness. They are simply suggestions.

Dr. Perry would say that one critical piece in my treatment was that I was about two-and-a-half when these traumas started happening. (There were multiple changes at once — my illness was the largest, but there was a number of other factors.) That meant that my brain and development had the chance to have a good start. If I had become ill when I was six months old I would have likely had very different problems. Most of his book focuses on children who were traumatized at a younger age. Dr. Perry gave me the essential philisophical underpinning, but I was on my own to devise specific strategies.

I don’t have much experience with children. I have a younger sibling and my mother is an elementary school teacher. Much of what I used is based on stereotypes and my own vague memories. While stereotypes are problematic, it was enough to give me a start.

My first strategy was for a problem I have described earlier: my inability to communicate effectively. That was at the time my most critical problem. My difficulties communicating had landed me into extremely uncomfortable and sometimes even dangerous situations. I tried to think of what young children do and what I missed. Young children struggle to communicate. They focus only on learning to communicate. Which was basically what I needed to do - focus solely on communicating my message. Not on eye contact. Not on my tone or volume (much like a young child, I had a tendency to speak very loudly for a while). Not on my specific word choice. Only on communicating my message. Once I was better able to communicate I could gradually incorporate those other elements into my speech.