Find Your Voice

Helping Miss A find her voice when she just can't find the words.

Miss A is what some people would consider as having low support needs; she is functioning relatively well as an Autistic person in an *allistic world. As part of that, at face value she has no difficulty using language.

However, even with her language skills, she sometimes struggles to speak or understand, particularly in certain high- stress situations. Sometimes it’s due to sensory or social overwhelm or unpredictable situations. Sometimes it’s because she doesn’t know a person very well and she’s uncomfortable or preoccupied by something else.

But whatever the trigger, on occasions she is experiencing verbal shutdown.

So what does that look like?

For Miss A it can be a total freeze, she can lock up and not answer at all. Her body is in flight or fight mode. Her face will show anything from panic to confusion. She may nod or agree, but even though she may look like she is still listening and is engaged, she might have checked out. If you know her well, you can see the subtleties that her body is experiencing a panic response. When she tries to speak, she cannot, even if she wants to. 

The times this happens for her is mostly in school, a place where I think she feels at her most vulnerable, and possibly the least understood and heard. School can be where you don’t have much of a ‘voice’, even when you use your voice if you know what I mean.

Using her voice in these situations can be a real challenge. Sometimes knowing what she wants to say - but can’t - is the problem. Other times it’s wrapped up in her concern for doing or saying the ‘right thing’. Sometimes it's fear, fear that if she advocates for herself she will ‘get in trouble’. It can become an issue when she feels pressure to answer too, even if that pressure is being applied internally.

So here is where we decided to step in. We needed something to help her communicate with ease, we needed to help her find her voice.

There is a whole host of communication aids out there. The obvious choice for Miss A was some form of communication card; something she could easily lay her hands on that could effectively get across her needs, wants and feelings. But when I started looking for some of these for Miss A, I was overwhelmed with the choice, and to be honest (and I don’t mean to be rude - maybe it’s the autistic in me) there is a lot of rubbish out there too!

There are all sorts of communication cards available with every style imaginable and yet nothing ticked our boxes. Many were ‘babyish’ and condescending, lots were unclear with muddled messaging and some were just damn ugly. When I shared them with Miss A she flatly refused to use them for all the reasons stated above, and more.

Her biggest gripe is ‘they are just cringe’. Cringe is obviously not what these people are aiming for, but got us wondering if any of these communication aids are ticking the boxes for a discerning customer who is autistic.

So we decided that Dad's 3 million years of expertise in graphic design could be put to good use here. We set ourselves the challenge of coming up with a basic set of communication cards that first and foremost meet with the approval of Miss A who we also put to work helping design things she needed. We also hope that they might appeal to others who have communication struggles.

We want to make using these cool, not cringe! And we want people who struggle to have an easier time finding their voice. Find them here.

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*allistic refers to people who are not on the autism spectrum, and has become an increasingly popular term to help distinguish people from their autistic peers without using judgmental terms like “normal” in contrast to “autistic”.