Here is an extract from Elias's blog by his mother Janet, about their living and learning together. They have been doing a HANDLE® programme for six months and Son-Rise for two years. We wanted to share it because it's an inspiring story of love, dedication, openness and learning.
We hope you like it.
"I do not always feel comfortable writing and disclosing issues about our family life and my parenting in public. The last time I wrote in E's blog was about two years ago when we had just begun working with the Son-rise approach when I felt a "great sense of faith" that this approach would support E to choose to come out of his autistic world. Below, I want to share a few lessons that I/we have made over the past years by working with the Son-rise programme and a method called HANDLE, as well as with my own development as a parent/human.
My willingness to share came today when I sat with E on the couch and he suddenly suggested that he would read aloud to me from a book about dolphins. E read the whole book, I listened. After having finished the reading, he suggested that he would "draw letters", which we did. I gave him a pen and paper, wrote down some examples and just stayed watching. After finishing the alphabet he happily said he wanted to continue "typing numbers". I felt happy and proud; we had now reached a point in our relationship and in both of our developments when we really had achieved something important. What was it that felt so huge?"