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Sharon 75
long way in reducing their level of impairment, but they may not be
able to entirely lose their symptoms.
The second point is that some of the skills that Sharon used to
compensate for her difficulties in TOM could be used by other higherfunctioning
adolescents and adults with ASD to similar effect. In fact,
there is a study showing that children with autism who were specifically
taught a TOM were able to improve their ability to correctly assess others’
mental states. The skills they were taught were very similar to the
compensatory mechanisms that Sharon had come up with on her own.
She used her powers of logic and reason to monitor her social behavior
and to set up rules for social interaction, to scan what was not appropriate
under the circumstances. She used her insight, her memory, her reason,
and her ability to think things through to navigate the social world.
However, this study also showed that the newly acquired skills did not
generalize to everyday encounters. Strategies are needed to take these
skills out of the laboratory setting and into the real world. The skills
have to be learned over and over again in different situations. Sharon
had also developed other compensatory mechanisms that might be
helpful in accomplishing this generalization. She used her strengths in
visualization to conceptualize her emotions and to organize her day. In
a similar fashion, Carol Grey, a teacher who has developed helpful strategies
for children with ASDs, has described how social stories delivered
in a visual format are a useful way of teaching social skills to young
children with autism. Sharon kept to a routine and a structure to maintain
order and reduce anxiety. What symptoms she had, she tried to
keep private, aware that others would find her interests weird. She repeated
others’ conversation to herself in order to understand the meaning
and context of conversation. In essence, she used her strengths to
compensate for her difficulties; she did not practice what she found
hard because when she did, it made little difference. Most important,
she was motivated to improve her social skills, and this was a key factor
in her development. Developing these coping skills takes much effort,
and the person with autism or AS must be motivated to learn them. Unfortunately,
many people with ASD lack this motivation or find the effort
too strenuous. Clinical experience suggests that the timing of the
intervention must be absolutely right and works best when individuals
are keenly aware of their difficulties and want to narrow the gap between
themselves and peers. It also helps to break the social skill down
to its component parts and practice each one in turn so that the task
does not seem so onerous. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that behav-