Donna Williams
Список книг автора Donna WilliamsExposure Anxiety - The Invisible Cage
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.
The Jumbled Jigsaw
The Jumbled Jigsaw exposes autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) not as single entities but as a combination of a whole range of often untreated, sometimes easily treatable, underlying conditions. Exploring everything from mood, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and tic disorders to information processing and sensory perceptual difficulties, including dependency issues, identity problems and much more, Donna demonstrates how a number of such conditions can combine to form a 'cluster condition' and underpin the label 'autism spectrum disorder'. Donna Williams encourages and empowers families to look at what they can do to change their child's environment to address anxiety, overload and other issues. She also gives carers the necessary information to navigate the booming autism marketplace and demand the right tools for the job. The author also challenges professionals to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to identifying and treating the cluster conditions that make up an autism spectrum diagnosis, and to improve service delivery to those in need. The Jumbled Jigsaw is a call to modern society to take responsibility and accept diversity. It is written in a very human and user-friendly way for parents and for Auties and Aspies themselves, but it is also aimed at carers, professionals, policy-makers and service providers.
Everyday Heaven
Everyday Heaven is the much-awaited fourth installment in Donna Williams' series of best-selling autobiographies about her life with autism. A humorous, riveting, roller-coaster of a book, Everyday Heaven covers the monumental nine years from the time Ian left their accidental, 'autistic marriage', to Donna's candid, funny, often bumbling explorations of sexuality and orientation, the challenge of coming to terms with the sudden deaths of those closest to her and finally knowing what life was like without the invisible cage of her 'Exposure Anxiety'. Described as enthralling, deeply moving and gripping, this book will strike a lasting chord not only with autistic readers and professionals seeking to better understand those on the autism spectrum but all of us who simply dream of daring to love deeply, to adventure and to deal triumphantly with the losses along the way.