Wasn't that part of the story describing the first time Raun had ever even asked to get out of the room, and didn't he seek out Samarhia to give her his first self-initiated hug? That was on page 110 of my book.
There's another passage in the book that is useful - I remember reading it aloud in a group meeting during a time last summer when Ben was doing a lot of screaming and crying, mostly about pictures of helicopters falling down because the tape he was using was losing its stickiness. It's on page 131-2 and describes a night that Raun was trying to get something from Bears, and instead of "jumping up and running around wildly to help him", Bears gently and comfortably just tried to get Raun to communicate what he wanted. Two quotes really stood out for me: "My first impulse was to get up and go with him, but I realized such a response would defeat both of us. He would have to find his crying less and less effective in order to precipitate a move toward talking." and "I had watched someone I loved dearly go through a very private hell in helping him break through the invisible barriers that still imprisoned him."
I'm not sure that I would ever have truly understood what Bears was talking about if I hadn't been through the same thing with Ben. We could have just continued giving him new tape over and over again to make his helicopter pictures hang the way he wanted them to, but I knew that would have "defeated both of us".
My reason for having Ben at school is to learn how to communicate and socialize with other kids, so I think locking him in a room one-on-one with an adult would be inappropriate there. What's nice about our home program is that I've always been able to observe when Ben is challenging someone to get out of the room, and I can make sure that they are being comfortable and kind about it. If they are coming off as controlling or panicking, I can easily go in there and be with Ben in a more meaningful way.
One day we had a new guy who wanted to try going in the room with Ben, and we put them in there after Ben had already spent a day in the room and had been out for dinner and some playing already. He had never gone back into the room after an initial exit like this, so he screamed and cried and gave this guy a really hard time. The guy knew that we were right outside the window watching, so he was pretty comfortable about trying different things with Ben because he knew that if he was doing anything "wrong" that we would open up the door and intervene. It was a very interesting session, as we saw Ben using many new tricks to try and get what he wanted. They eventually settled on pointing to pictures in a magazine and laughing about pilots - it was very cute.
I'm thinking about how much time Ben has actually cried about getting out of the room, and I think it would be a very generous estimate if I guess he's done it for 30 hours in the nearly 2 years we've been doing our program. At an average of 30 hours per week, that would be about 1/90th of our program, .01%. Seems funny to have focused so much on this issue here, but I echo Kim's sentiments for the gratitude of a question.
Thank you Worried!! Love - Kelly.
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