Intellectual Disabilities

Intellectual Disabilities (or PWID)

Today we will be discussing social skills—interpersonal skills, and social responsibility. There are lots more in this category but I feel we need to handle this one difficulty, alone without any distractions.

Being socially responsible, I think is very difficult. There is a naïveté sense about the pwid that is wonderful on one hand and very difficult on the other. They tend to take EVERYTHING personally which can be very frustrating to the pwid. Imagine yourself having an innocuous conversation, only to have someone say something terribly inappropriate. How do you recognize the inappropriateness of the statement or action without causing a scene and do you really care if it does cause a scene.  Most pwid’s are reactionary. They have uncontrollable responses to their perceptions and not the world’s reality. How do we teach them that unreasonable responses to innocuous situations are not in his or her best interest? I am NOT saying that what was said or done was in anyway unacceptable, we are talking about their perception. And their perception, is their reality.

I believe it goes back to the concrete issue. Even people with intellectual disabilities speak in abstractions, it is the decipher mechanism deeply rooted in us that make our reactions positive or negative. Instead of raising our hands in defeat we need to raise our thinking to accept that our pwid does not think on our level. Whether their standards are me oriented, “it’s all about me” or “it’s all about someone else”, we need to start correcting that theory. It is about balance. Sometimes there are irresponsible thoughts bantered about without consideration of ANYONE’S feeling, whether they are the perpetrator or the one who was perpetrated. There needs to have a concrete philosophy established, an example there was teasing going on and someone got hurt. We could make an argument for or against the intent of the teasing. Was it malicious or playful, what was the intent of the statement or action? We need to stop and quickly analyze the situation and deal with that as soon as possible. One of the problems we have is that our pwid usually has short term memory loss and we need to logically handle perceptions accurately and quickly.

Take your time make concrete examples and ask questions, “Do you understand the example I have just given you?” “How would you feel is someone said that to you?” The more questions you can ask calmly and patiently, I know that is not easy, the better.