Anxiety and panic from misunderstanding words?
Emerging as a language user can present challenges from non-verbal autistics.
As an autistic writer, the process of producing these articles or my books is very difficult. They’re “written” in the Theatre of My Mind before my fingers ever hit the keyboard. I can tell very clearly when there’s a conflict or a difficulty in resolving an issue with the text in my mind when I start to have random anxiety and panic attacks. My non-verbal brain really doesn’t like to cram 11th dimensional concepts into 4th dimensional semantics. Yet, these panic episodes often come from disagreements / misunderstandings about the meaning of a word, or from not knowing the correct word for a concept that has formed.
Now, if you’re reading this and you’re not non-verbal, you might not know what I’m talking about. That’s OK. Stay with me. I’ll get you there.
I make no secret of the fact that I’ve had a ton of help in my journey to literacy, as well as my struggles as a language learner. I’ve found help in the strangest of places. One of the strangest of all, I found a methodology that really resonated with me in a booklet from L. Ron Hubbard - Barriers to Study. First off, I’m not a Scientologist. I’ve never been to a Scientology centre. I was, after all, raised in the bosom of Scottish Marxism. Nevertheless, the text seemed to make sense to me. Here’s a bit of an annotated book review, for those that don’t want to click into a Scientology website.
What Happens When A Word Is Not Understood Or IS Wrongly Understood
“Mis” means not or wrongly. “Misunderstood” means not understood or wrongly understood. A misunderstood word is a word which is not understood or a word which is wrongly understood.
If you’re like me, you may have read a book or a report, gotten to the end of the page and couldn’t remember what you read? Is this my autistic brain? Is this my ADHD? Or, is it something more fundamental?
Hubbard calls this the phenomena of the misunderstood word— your recollection becomes distinctly blank beyond a word not understood or wrongly understood. There’s a disconnect that begins at the misunderstanding. For me, my brain scrambles and argues with itself. It’s vapourlocked until it resolves the issue with the word.
It can make you feel blank or washed out. It can make you feel “not there” and a sort of a nervous upset feeling can follow after that. I know it does for me.
The matter is far more critical than one might surmise and of the many barriers to learning, it is the misunderstood word that bears most upon human relations, the mind, and understanding.
It is the misunderstood word that establishes aptitude—or lack of it.
According to Hubbard, the misunderstood word produces a vast panorama of reactions and is the prime factor involved with stupidity - or not knowing what you don’t know + not caring that you don’t know. It also determines whether or not one can actually perform a learned skill, and to what degree of proficiency.
All of these are the result of one or more words or symbols not understood or wrongly understood.
The misunderstood word can stop a student in their tracks completely. Knowing how to determine when there is a misunderstood word or symbol, how to find it, and how to handle it, are critical to the success of any learner.
Cumulative Affects
As a Special Education Teacher, and an Inclusion Specialist, I create differentiated instructional events for my students. I take the lessons prepared by other teachers ad scaffold them so that the steep cognitive load is broken down into smaller, more manageable steps. I write procedurals that learners can follow. This allows them to build the mental muscle memory, learning concepts in a step by step way. A differentiated lesson can thus be easy to absorb and integrate into one’s personal working tools.
A problem often occurs when students are permitted to advance in spite of not having mastered prior skills. Here, a steep climb to the next step inhibits their ability to progress on to more complicated or detailed steps. They get stuck.
A learner who has skipped a step, or an important concept may feel a sort of confusion or even anxiety at not knowing what to do next. These are some of the leading causes of behavioural problems in classrooms - “missed basic skills” or “insufficient basic skills.”
Back to Basics
Understanding all of this, how does a SPED Teacher (or any teacher for that matter) overcome these issues. How does one effectively engage disconnected neurodivergent learners? Get back to basics. Get back to how we all learned about our world as toddlers - get hands-on. Engage the senses.
You see, if one is attempting to understand the function and operation of a car, or a computer, or a solar system, the printed page and spoken word are no substitute for the object itself.
It would be difficult to understand how to use a computer for the first time if you did not have the computer there in front of you. In fact, lacking the object associated with a word can inhibit understanding for those, like me, who are non-verbal. If the mass of a subject is absent, you can actually feel disconnected from the learning event. It can make you feel confused, sort of anxious, sort of numb, or bored. A neurodivergent student studying a subject without the objects related to that subject may experience these and several other non-optimal reactions.
Knowing how to identify and handle these reactions is vital to a student’s ability to grasp and use a subject—and more than vital to a teacher’s ability to get a student to learn the subject.
Conclusion
As odd as it seems, the points made in Barriers to Learning made sense to me. Employing these concepts - like using MathUSee to finally learn maths in such a was as I could present what I have learned to my students - helped me to overcome my anxiety around the most troublesome of subjects. It’s sad that when you mention the absence of mass as the root cause of someone’s troubles - you get scolded for invoking the concepts of Hubbard. But, when you mention that you use a distinctive set of manipulatives to visually represent and demonstrate math concepts, like MathUSee, and focus on a student-paced mastery approach suitable for all levels of learners, you get applause for trying your best to connect with learners. MathUSee helps you with the what. Hubbard, in all his strangeness, helps with the “why” in a way that I’ve not encountered elsewhere.
— December 16, 2023 Note —
Some of the materials herein have made it into my books, No Place for Autism? and Holistic Language Instruction. No Place for Autism was released in February 2023 from Lived Places Publishing and is available at Amazon and other major book retailers worldwide. Holistic Language Instruction will be out in 2024.