Product Description

Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. To many it is an invisible cage, leaving the person suffering from it aware, but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation. Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents a range of approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it. Based on personal experience, the book shows how people with autism can be shown how to emerge from the stranglehold of exposure anxiety and develop their individuality. It progressively shapes the individual torn between experiencing it as the sanctuary and the prison. Exposure Anxiety makes it hard to stand noticing you are noticing. It can make love a form of torture, repel you from the sound of your own voice, make you meaning deaf to your own words and those of others and compel you to avoid, divert from or retaliate against the very things that which most have the power to reach you. Exposure Anxiety progressively co-opts the identity of the person as separate to the condition or it leaves them aware but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation. Exposure Anxiety is the involuntary social-emotional self-protection response that needs no enemy. It turns the world upside-down, makes no yes and yes no and co-opts and defies conventional, non-autistic teaching techniques. Exposure Anxiety has many faces. By defeating it at its own game, Donna demonstrates how the person can progressively be inspired to fight for themselves and attempt to emerge, from the undercurrent, as the tide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #313317 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Author
What Donna says about writing Text Books

I'm not an expert. I'm a social philosopher. As a sociologist, teacher and researcher, I try to avoid talking about pathology and look at processes. I take a stance closer to that of social psychology and raise the issues and perspectives that scientists then explore. My text books have become foundation texts in special education and psychology courses and have changed the treatment, education and educational environments of people on the autistic spectrum quite dramatically over the last ten years. My works are unapologetically controversial and about far more than autism spectrum conditions. I have written about sensory perceptual disorders and differences, cognitive and information processing differences, anxiety disorders, sensing and intuition, about identity, personality and co-dependency, about communication disorders and differences, about condition versus culture and most importantly about the person, individuality, daring and humility. I do not claim at any!
time that autism is any one thing, quite the contrary, I claim it is very diverse and far more like a fruit salad, the combinations of which differ from person to person as do the multitude of underlying causes and the wholistic means of addressing them. My books are read far outside of the autism world alone and as autism is merely normal processes with the volume turned way up, many of the issues I write about give non-autistic people surprising insights into themselves.

About the Author
Donna Williams was born in Australia in 1963 and raised in a working-class inner-city area in Australia. She grew up hearing words such as 'deaf', 'disturbed', 'crazy' and 'spastic', and like many able people with autism born in the 1960s and earlier, she wasn't formally diagnosed with autism until adulthood. As well as writing, composing, painting and sculpting, she lectures and runs workshops on autism all around the world. Donna is also the author of four autobiographies - Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere, Like Colour to the Blind and Everyday Heaven - along with several other books on autism, Autism and Sensing, Autism: An Inside-Out Approach, The Jumbled Jigsaw (forthcoming) and a collection of her poetry, Not Just Anything: A Collection of Thoughts on Paper. These books are also published by and available from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Her first international best-selling autobiography, Nobody Nowhere, is currently under option by a Hollywood film company. After 13 years in the UK, she now lives back in Australia with her husband Chris.

Customer Reviews

Hard going for a lay person
I bought this book as an interested parent of an autistic boy who suffers with exposure anxiety. His school teacher also purchased a copy at the same time (independently from me). I found the book extremely hard going - it is very "deep" for someone who has no pyschological training. I would have liked more examples of practical ways to help and approach problems together with clearer strategies. The book seems to keep repeating itself almost as if the writer was not edited by anyone and found herself going over topics she had already covered. It is an interesting book with plenty of food for thought but don't buy it expecting a self-help book. Perhaps another "expert" in anxiety exposure could pen a more useful book with practical strategies - I would buy it!