A Case Study by Yoko Sato

"Autism" gives an impression of those who lock themselves in their own world. However, after meeting Miss M and doing some research on autism, I came to realize that they do not lock themselves in. Rather, they are very sensitive, and try to reach out to people very cautiously.

Case Summary

The client, Miss M, age seventeen, was in her second year of senior high school. She was born with autism and attends the school for the disabled. It was her mother's request to have sessions.

A kindergarten teacher alleged that Miss M's case was posteriori, blaming her mother for a problematic upbringing. Unfortunately, her mother and father did not know that she was disabled with autism at that time. Her father apparently failed to understand the situation, and the mother seriously suffered from this misunderstanding. Eventually, (I assume that there were other reasons, too), Miss M's parents divorced.

Her early life was not easy for her, as her parents repeatedly separated and then lived together again, each time moving to new location. In particular, people with autism are generally characterized by not doing well with change as they are obsessive to certain habits and/or ritual. For example, they extremely hate when furniture is moved from one place to another, and try to put it back in the original location. Born with such a quality, I guess that Miss M experienced much emotional pain due to frequent relocations.

Miss M has specific behavioral patterns of people with autism:

• She could not communicate with others since her childhood and was regarded as a problem child. Even when she played with other children of the same age, she would finally be excluded from the group because she always beat other children; she could not control her anger and impulse. Although she beat other children, she apparently did not hate them. Rather, she liked them, but she did not know how to express her feeling, that is the reason why she beat them.
  
  
• Physical contact is the least favorite of people with autism. In fact, she was reluctant to hold her mother's hand.
  
  
• She tended to talk about past events fragmentally and repeatedly.
  
  
• She showed less facial expressions, and her smiles were apparently artificial.
  
  
• Her appearance (including height, weight, and timing of first menstrual period) was not different from other girls of the same age. However, her clothes and other belongings were chosen to be pink colored, giving childish impression.
  
  
• Miss M was particularly obsessive about time. Since she had learned how to read a clock in the second year of elementary school (age seven), she has been fixated on doing certain things at a certain time. A digital clock was her most favorite item and she predefined her schedule for almost all of her main activities in a day, including time to go to school in the morning, time to have a tea break, time to watch TV, time to take a bath, time to go to bed. In this regard, she told me that she tried to cover her sense of insecurity by doing certain things at certain times of the day. That was the constant source of concern for her mother however, and the primary reason to give some flower essences to her. In addition, not only controlling her own activities by time, Miss M was keen to control her brother's activities by time as well. She could naturally follow her schedule, but her brother acted freely on his own will, so she made complaints against him in a loud voice every night. As she continued to make noise and to cause troubles every night, her family could not have a peaceful moment, which worried her mother.
  

  Miss M. went through a series of dramatic changes as follows when she started to ingest the flower essences:

• She talked about a hurtful past experience with much emotion, which was unusual for her.

• She came to eat her meals quietly in the evenings. She became less prone to make a loud commotion at night.
  
• She started to use a variety of colors in her oil painting; she used to use pink almost exclusively as it was her most favorite color.
  
• She stopped watching TV programs for children when she came home from school.
  
• She came to talk about what was going on that day, even though she used to talk about past events all the time.
  
• She responded more to reality, for example, when a bus was approaching, she said "let's hurry up" to her mother. Her mother told me that she never heard such words from her.
  
• Her smiling face was no longer artificial. People around her started to say that she looked more lovely than before.
  
• Once she talked about past events and gave the impression that she was not present. But now she is able to help her mother by washing dishes on her own will, and reacts to ongoing events, which makes her mother feel that her mind is in the here and now.

Miss M changed dramatically within the five months since she started to ingest flower essences. I believe that most effective remedy was Scarlet Monkeyflower .

Read a detailed selection of essences here .

About Yoko Sato

Yoko Sato was born in 1957. She produced one of the first “new age” festivals held in Japan and was the chief editor of “Fili” magazine which was devoted to new age world issues.

Later, Yoko learned about aromatherapy and flower essence therapy. She sells essential oils, does flower essence therapy and numerology counseling, and holds seminars in Tokyo and Fukuoka.