Hi Toni
I am interested in what you say about this man struggling to communicate verbally.
A couple of approaches I have taken in the past are:
1. Keep any communication simple. Clear out any noise. Remember the NLP Communication Model – the filtering process. Overwhelm may occur because of the ‘noise’. What I have done is provided any ‘therapy’ session in a simple way. one step at a time. I have also used simple visuals and have the person ask me questions in their words. My experience is that people who think they are ‘autistic’ are literal communicators. Sometimes they don’t like to have eye to eye contact and may look away. Questions being reframed could be because of the communication style being used by the speaker – language that is unclear or there are metaphors not expressed in a way that the listener can understand.
2. In reference to TLT(R) think about the word imagination and how you can going to keep the description of TLT(R) simple. What are his predicates, key words etc, does he speak in chunks etc, because all of that is going to help you when you describe TLT(R) to him. With some people who are described as ‘autistic’ they simply prefer a different way to communicate, simple words and simple sentences. Also, I have found that some like numbers, lists – ordinal i.e first this, then…steps in a process helps, short segments of work, calm body language. If the body language is composed with a lot of actions i.e. hands moving a lot, head movement, body movement etc can contribute to overwhelm too… bit like a large orchestra – where do you look and what do you listen to. Keep it simple and give him time to process. It’s a bit like this: they listen, formulate what they think is being said, put it into an order to make sense of it, etc etc. time to process is important.
If he uses repetitive behaviour like foot tapping or body movement etc…this can be a way of him communicating to you. Watch out for a pattern – it may be an expression also of how he is feeling. Positive feedback after completing a task or a technique is important.
Hope this gives you more insight….Gina