On Eye Contact
24 Feb 10 by jeff
This was written in response to a discussion on training autistic children to maintain eye contact:
For many of us, the amount of eye contact we engage in has to do with sensory regulation. For instance, I often find myself being overwhelmed by the amount of information I receive after only a few seconds of eye contact.
I imagine you might get a sense of it if you were to confront a very angry, sad or miserable person and stare them in the eyes silently for 10 minutes from a foot away. Imagine the amount of information you might receive? Can you see how painful that might be? Many of us get more than we need in a moment of contact, and need to look away to avoid a discomforting flood of very intimate - and unnecessary - sensations.
My son was able to make much more progress in school when I explained to his teachers that he wasn’t ignoring them when he looked away - he was looking away so he could pay closer attention to what they were saying. Prolonged eye contact can often be so distracting that it makes it near impossible to actually listen to what is being said. Being flooded with intimate information can make the point of the discussion hard to isolate. Besides being very painful.
It can also feel like a very intense personal boundary violation. A very inappropriate intimacy - especially with strangers and those with power and authority.
When you see an autistic stare onto someone’s eyes, it usually means he’s trying to figure out what you really mean. Eye contact, in that case, often signifies confusion.
It can be counter-productive, and a bit cruel, to “train” a child to force eye contact.
Of course, your mileage may certainly vary, but people who stare at MY eyes tend to invoke an involuntary fear or loathing in me. And when they insist, the loathing sometimes stops being involuntary.
My experience of eye contact is, I learned to make positive eye contact on an advanced course run by Landmark Education in London. The training involved standing in a room with all the other course participants and staring into their eyes one by one until I had done the whole room of around 150 people. This took several hours.
My stories about the eyes being windows to the sould disappeared. Eyes are ocular devices connected to the brain to allow us to see.
Until then I used to stare at the floor a lot and didn’t make much eye contact.
After doing their course, I am very comfortable with eye contact.
What I notice about eye contact though, is when I make a lot of eye contact, the person I am speaking to is not always comfortable with it.
The other thing I notice is I don’t listen to a single word a person is saying when I look at their eyes.
What works for me is to look at the floor to minimise distractions and get the context of the conversation entirely from tone of voice.
It sometimes helps the person I am communicating with when I tell them this is my communication style.
Kind regards
Mark
Some people have very intense eye contact…others are gentle, and barely intrude. Some people make me nervous as hell, while others set me at ease. I don’t know how else to say it. I guess I take eye contact on a case by case basis.
While I used Catherine Maurice’s book, based on Lovaas’s ABA, to teach my son language, I never made him make eye contact or sit (items #2 and #3 in “ya gotta save your child” behaviorism, if I remember right). I guess you could say I never “trained” him, because it just felt wrong. Being shy myself, why would I demand it of him? It was stupid. BUT, it was a great book to cover the basics of language, and allowed me to check off down the line every word I presented visually or kinesthetically to him for over a year of teaching language via pictures and movement.
I don’t know if it made a difference, but I sure as hell know he didn’t pick up language by hearing. I wonder where Ben would be if I hadn’t presented thousands of words to him visually/kinesthetically. I’ll go to my grave wondering.
There is a great video out there on why people with autism don’t look people in the eye. Check it out.
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