Hi Everyone, I'm new here. I live in France, and my son is on the spectrum. He has been treated for autism since he was two, his condition has much improved over the years, at least from what we can see from the outside and now he is 15 years old.
So yesterday we were walking down the street, it was on the way to get his hair cut at the salon, and there was a cat on the roadside, who had been run over by a car. There wasn't any blood, or broken bones, but the eye of the cat was "dead", like a fish eye, and the cat was lying in the rain for some time, so the fur was completely wet.
He was shocked, and said "his eye!" so we passed to the other side of the street, I know that he is sensitive to images, he has a kind of photographic memory, so I started a game where you look at the clouds and try to find the form in there, to try and make the image of the eye of the cat go away.
We go to the salon, and while we were there, the daughter of the salon owner started a conversation about a cat that had been adopted, and how she knew it was a bad idea to adopt it because it had "tenia" which is a worm that makes animals lose their fur and look a bit dishevveled... then talked about a dog who had a nervous disorder that made him scratch his eye and lose the fur around his eye. The conversation went on for a while, and during, my son said "ah that explains the eye", or something like that.
So, when we left the salon, my son said "I'm glad that the cat isn't dead after all, I had thought when I saw his eye...", I didn't know what to do, so I let it pass, just said "yes". Maybe I shouldn't but I think that it is so incredibly disconnected from reality to think that a cat who you have seen lying dead in the street is actually alive and you were mistaken.
What do you think? Is this something that happens with autism? Should I sit him down and talk to him about it, or will it be even worse now that he thinks it was ok?
Thank you for any help.
So yesterday we were walking down the street, it was on the way to get his hair cut at the salon, and there was a cat on the roadside, who had been run over by a car. There wasn't any blood, or broken bones, but the eye of the cat was "dead", like a fish eye, and the cat was lying in the rain for some time, so the fur was completely wet.
He was shocked, and said "his eye!" so we passed to the other side of the street, I know that he is sensitive to images, he has a kind of photographic memory, so I started a game where you look at the clouds and try to find the form in there, to try and make the image of the eye of the cat go away.
We go to the salon, and while we were there, the daughter of the salon owner started a conversation about a cat that had been adopted, and how she knew it was a bad idea to adopt it because it had "tenia" which is a worm that makes animals lose their fur and look a bit dishevveled... then talked about a dog who had a nervous disorder that made him scratch his eye and lose the fur around his eye. The conversation went on for a while, and during, my son said "ah that explains the eye", or something like that.
So, when we left the salon, my son said "I'm glad that the cat isn't dead after all, I had thought when I saw his eye...", I didn't know what to do, so I let it pass, just said "yes". Maybe I shouldn't but I think that it is so incredibly disconnected from reality to think that a cat who you have seen lying dead in the street is actually alive and you were mistaken.
What do you think? Is this something that happens with autism? Should I sit him down and talk to him about it, or will it be even worse now that he thinks it was ok?
Thank you for any help.
