Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. Based on personal experience, this book describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it.

This book exposes autism spectrum disorders as a combination of a whole range of often underlying conditions. Exploring everything from mood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and tic disorders to information processing and sensory perceptual difficulties and more, Donna demonstrates how such conditions can combine to form a 'cluster condition'.

Publisher description

Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award Many people who find themselves "stuck" in life are vaguely aware that fear is responsible for holding them back. Whether it's a fear of intimacy, mortality, success, or failure, the majority of us experience an inhibiting fear at some point in our lives. Naming these fears and examining them is critical to becoming aware of and, eventually, overcoming them. Life Unlocked - by Srinivasan S. Pillay, MD - draws from cutting-edge research in human psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the ways in which fear applies a brake to our movement through life. Informed by the latest breakthroughs in brain imaging and psychiatry, Dr. Pillay offers readers an enlightening understanding of how our brains work and physically process feelings of fear and anxiety. Based on this research, and his extensive clinical experience with patients, Dr. Pillay has developed 7 essential lessons to help move people past their fears: 1. What you don't know can hurt you 2. Dread is not something you feel; it is something you attend to 3. If it's hard to change, it is not unchangeable 4. We all know that we fear failure, but fear of success is equally relevant 5. Attachments are not just crucial to survival; they affect your physiology 6. Fear-based prejudice may register entirely outside of awareness 7. Trauma can impact the developing brain In Life Unlocked, Dr. Pillay examines a wide breadth of issues and shares real examples from his practice to show readers that when they are able to move past the things that limit them, they can truly unlock their potential, and their lives.

Praise for the first edition: `An approachable and practical edition that will be welcomed by parents and carers alike. I know how hard it can be to find 'How to' resources for parents. Well here is a gem.' - Children, Young People and Families Parents of young children newly diagnosed as on the autism spectrum are often at a loss for ideas about how best to help their child. Playing, Laughing and Learning with Children on the Autism Spectrum is not just a collection of play ideas; it shows how to break down activities into manageable stages, and looks at ways to gain a child's attention and motivation and to build on small achievements. Each chapter covers a collection of ideas around a theme, including music, art, physical activities, playing outdoors, puzzles, turn-taking and using existing toys to create play sequences. There are also chapters on introducing reading and making the most of television. This updated second edition contains an extensive chapter on how to use the computer, the internet and the digital camera to find and make resources and activities, and suggests many suitable websites to help parents through the internet maze. The ideas are useful both for toddlers and primary age children who are still struggling with play.

Organised around the themes Home and Abroad, Performative Traffic, and Image, Circulation, Mobility, Victorian Traffic: Identity, Performance, Exchange variously addresses the cultural dimensions of traffic in the long Victorian period: cross-cultural experience; colonial and racial imaginaries; everyday, literary, autobiographical and professional stagings of identity; and trade in metaphors, communications, texts, images, celebrity, character types, and quilts. The concept of traffic underpins historical interpretation and theoretical formulations, and the rhetorics of trade in Victorian usage are contextualised. Understandings of identity emphasise the performative and the negotiation of agency in relation to social and cultural scriptings of gender, class, ethnicity and community. The essays have a wide global range and reach. "This collection of essays takes as its theme an enormously important concept for the nineteenth century: traffic, a term that, in a time of unprecedented commercial and imperial expansion, technological developments, population growth and urbanization, acquired new resonance, and came to signify the intensely transactional nature of modernity. One of Ruskin’s most searing critiques of the spiritual condition of England, an invited lecture he delivered in 1864 on the topic of the Bradford Exchange, is entitled ‘Traffic’, and the word clearly signifies for him all that is wrong with post-industrial capitalism. But this stimulating volume encompasses a range of other significations that have additionally come to accrue around the term, relating for example to inter-cultural exchange, to the circulation of ideas and images, to the commodification of identity, and to literature, art and performance in the market place. The scope of the collection is, appropriately, global, including essays on England’s relations of exchange with Australia, New Zealand, North America, the Far East, and the Caribbean. What we are shown ineluctably is that the traffic between Victorian Britain and the reaches of empire, between Home and Abroad, was two-way, a vehicle for cross-cultural encounter, mediation and trade; and that cultural identity is relational, circulatory and always in motion." —Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London

Autistic people are empirically and scientifically generalized as living in a fragmented, alternate reality, without a coherent continuous self. In Part I, this book presents recent neuropsychological research and its implications for existing theories of autism, selfhood, and identity, challenging common assumptions about the formation and structure of the autistic self and autism’s relationship to neurotypicality. Through several case studies in Part II, the book explores the ways in which artists diagnosed with autism have constructed their identities through participation within art communities and cultures, and how the concept of self as ‘story’ can be utilized to better understand the neurological differences between autism and typical cognition. This book will be of particular interest to researchers and scholars within the fields of Disability Studies, Art Education, and Art Therapy.