Car Sales Confidential

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Mental health challenges will often present themselves early on in family members—the autistic child who doesn't speak when so-called normal kids his age are all already talking, doesn't like to be touched, or is put off by sounds. In the case of Aspergers, the high-functioning individual can often be the smartest person in the room and yet have trouble changing a light bulb or engaging in the most basic kind of balanced back-and-forth conversation.

In our story, the individual with Aspergers has been mismanaged from an early age by parents who rather than institutionalize him, or lock him up in the attic, kept him in the home, in the family.

The results often devastating, his tantrums were unintentionally reinforced. When physical violence erupted, instead of taking strong measures to extinguish the behavior, they gave into his unreasonable, often impossible demands. Aspergers individuals will feel their own psychic pain and often self-medicate with various behaviors, drugs, and or alcohol. For our story's principal character, gambling became another addiction. All of these addictions, combined with the inability of a person with autism to feel much empathy or concern for anyone but themselves, can lead to physical and verbal abuse, theft, and the destruction of property.

On the plus side of the condition, Aspergers persons often have at least one remarkable ability, such as being able to perform at a high level on an instrument with little or no training. In our story the character has a genius level of ability with anything to do with numbers. As a successful car salesman he had all the relevant numbers connected to a sale, such as the original list price, the financing charges, margins, all at the tip of a remarkable mind and therefore able to recite them to customers without having to reference any printed or computerized information.

Also, living mostly in a world of their own making, Aspergers individuals do not respond well to requests or suggestions that they do this or that. Instead, they typically make up their own minds, doing what they want to do.

When you add in a bipolar diagnosis and combine it with autism and addictions, the resulting dysfunctional individual can be a challenge to live with and an even greater challenge to manage.

Simple things like grocery shopping, paying bills, making home repairs, are often beyond them. And, as you might expect such individuals have problems making friends in the normal world, so the people closest to them, most often family members, end up shouldering the burden of being their best friends—typically involving much suffering and sacrifice, often over a lifetime. And there will be cycles of intense moods and behavior.

Each person will have a unique, but often more or less regular cycle between manic productivity and devastating clinical depression. As their caregiver you can look for signs to determine which phase of the cycle they're in, many of which will be obvious. Obsessive cleaning and organizing, even just being happy and more positive might signal a manic phase. On the other hand, irrational, argumentative, and escapist behavior along with attempts to tamp down the depression with drugs and or alcohol will lead to a dangerous few days when the lives of everyone surrounding the depressed person will be upended.

And what about the prospects of such a person getting and holding down a job. The whole interview process will be daunting if not impossibly difficult for them. A prospective employer can't expect someone on the autism spectrum to understand that their attitude and behavior should operate up to certain acceptable standards when they simply aren't always in full control of emotions which can flare into rage at any time because of any number of triggers.

If you are someone responsible for the care of such an individual, although everything mentioned so far is reasonably accurate, know that there is room for optimism, that progress is possible even with difficult cases.

Of course there are many types of autism affecting people in a variety of ways. Studies are ongoing and every day more is being learned. For example, one family with a severely autistic child who had repeated tantrums, wouldn't speak to anyone, and after trying every known, available treatment with no results, discovered that the child could somehow connect with horses in a way that eventually opened the child up to much more normal contact with humans and many fewer tantrums.

In this story, our character is based on a real person with Aspergers. Over many years of managing his life, providing them with unconditional love, modeling the attitudes and behaviors they hoped to someday see in them, slowly but surely a radical transformation began taking place. Eventually displays of understanding and empathy began to emerge. In time joy began to replace the chronic negativity and depression, giving way to efforts to give back to those who had stood by them with acts of kindness and gifts.

As you take on such a task, never underestimate the...Power of Love.