Counseling as Adults -
It's all in the process
Roger N. Meyer
Paper
Introduction
I've found that when my clients lock up and remain stuck in a
perseverative thought pattern it is best to process the dynamic
itself rather than attempt to return to content. Until we both
process the effect of the dynamic itself, we can't make any
forward progress. I've also found that when this occurs, initially
enlisting the aid of the other spouse to redirect the conversation
doesn't help. The counselor's intervention should be directly
focused on a direct interaction with the client without the presence
of a third party. There is too much opportunity for distraction or a
likely desire to "say the right thing" rather than to focus on how
the right thing is being expressed.
It will take some backing and filling for you and the client to
arrive at a variety of best approaches. Nature of the words, the
general tone of the conversation, a sense of when it would be
useful to intervene and when to let the conversation wind out for
a while determine my approach. The clients' adoption of a
particular conversational approach may stem from a variety of
causes, some of which have to do with cognitive processing. For
example, he may be plumbing the depths of his long-term
memory to arrive at an old expressive script for the current
situation. He may be unable to distinguish between his current
experience and others in the past that are related but different.
(This latter condition occurs when the client has known problems
with generalization and experiential differentiation challenges a
common executive function issue with Asperger syndrome
persons). He may be trying to come up with a novel response
appropriate to the current circumstance but his thought pattern
has taken a one-way detour to old history.
In each instance, you may want to explore not only the dynamic
itself, but what in your interaction has led up to it. By discovering
and laying bare the antecedent causes for a certain
communication behaviour, you can build the platform for future
work with your client to help him monitor his behaviour. I've
found it helpful to understand how the client experiences
learning, and then to use the senses or cognitive hooks he uses
to teach him how to monitor his own communication. For
example, I ask the client to attend to our body postures, our
facial expressions, our tone of voice, but also our bodily
sensations and what we hear, see and "feel". I mean "feel" quite
literally. If the client is leaning forward on his chair, or
gesticulating with his hands, or expressing a double or confused
message through a mismatch between posture and words, we
look at that. I use full-length mirrors for visual cueing. (At
present, I do not use video feedback. I can't afford it, but for the
visual learners in the crowd, I know it would be a powerful tool.) I
use squeezable rubber balls so that the client can literally "get a
grip" on his words by noticing and gauging how he clutches the
ball in his hand, tightly or loosely, as we speak. I use a wall-clock
with a prominent second-hand to help illustrate the value of
self-imposed silence to construct "natural" breaks in the flow of
conversation. At first, the breaks occasioned by these formal
methods seem unnatural, but presenting them this way ties
communication components to sensual experience, and expands
the conversant's awareness of the environment. Gradually, the
exercises become less stressful. We work on gradual extinction of
these formal monitoring methods as the client searches his
response "tool box" for behaviours more natural to him. If he
doesn't have an appropriate response, we observe others in
casual and formal conversation, and observe their conventions
and cues, and agree upon which ones seem appropriate for our
work. When moving towards more sophisticated monitoring
techniques, I never start with methods foreign to his basic
expressive vocabulary. Too-different, as well as too-much
too-fast is a formula for disaster.
One key to all of this work is not to make it too detailed or
intensive at first. Initially, there is a lot of talk just to determine
the range of the client's style of communication and to establish
trust between us. I introduce processing the dynamic of the
conversation very gradually, so that the client is not overwhelmed
with detail and so that he doesn't become so self-conscious that
the flow is broken by hesitancy and anticipation of an
interruption. Although there are similarities to the communication
styles of my clients, getting to know them, and forming a unique
relationship convinces me that there is no real fomulary for the
work.
Because each of your AS clients is unique, there can be no
one-size-fits-all approach.
Back to your client
Due to the recency of his diagnosis, his wife is as mystified about
AS as you are. To introduce you to couples issues of Asperger
syndrome and neurotypical spouses, one good resource is an
Internet site built around such concerns. That is the FAAAS
(Families of Adults with Asperger Syndrome) web site. It can be
found at http://www.faaas.org/info.html#Contents
You will find material of direct relevance in the articles under the
"Tony Attwood" section. This section contains a guide to adult AS
communication behaviors, the transcript of a workshop that Dr.
Attwood conducted in March 1999, through the auspices of FAAS
and NAS (the English National Autistic Society). In the same
location, there are two excerpts from his book "Asperger
syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals." One excerpt
deals with the dynamics of the diagnostic process, while the other
excerpt is his Australian Asperger Syndrome Scale, a Likert scale
designed for parent and caregiver use in identifying Asperger
syndrome in children. Attwood's book remains the best single
source in print on AS. The site also contains a direct link to OASIS
(On-Line Asperger Syndrome Information Source), a mother lode
web site created and maintained by Barb Kirby. Her site is a
cornucopia of basic and advanced information on Asperger
syndrome.
That Website is found at:
http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/
Simon Baron-Cohen, developer of the concept of Theory of Mind,
recently authored book (1998) describes successful training
techniques to teach theory of mind to high functioning autistic
children and adolescents. He is currently conducting research at
Cambridge University oriented to adult Asperger syndrome
cognitive treatment modalities. It might be useful to consult his
book when dealing with some of the issues I discuss below.
I've been working on line with the NT spouse of a couple in
England for nearly a year. Their local NAS affiliate sent two field
workers out to counsel the husband and wife separately. For a
while I was proposing some step by step instructions in managing
daily communication challenges between the wife and her
husband which seemed to have some limited success. Like your
client, her husband is also recently diagnosed, but in his case,
he's not in denial. Theirs is a ten year marriage, and she is
finally getting over her spousal " rescue" orientation and into
serious self-care. Because her plight is common to many partners
of AS men, I started a discussion thread on a major closed email
parent listserv addressing the issue of NT/AS marriages and
spousal communication issues. The discussion in public and
between private parties continues today, and the matters raised
there are the same as those shared by your client's wife.
Now, on to communication challenges 101.
Several things have occurred simultaneously in their relationship.
According to your client's wife, he's still into denial, and she finds
it hard to interest him in reading anything about AS, although
they've gotten the DX from a local psychologist. In my first and
only call to your client's wife, I proposed that her husband seek a
medical diagnosis from the only MD qualified to diagnose adult
AS in our state. The value of the medical diagnosis is that with it,
he can get psychopharmaceutical support to moderate dysthymia
and anxiety, both of which are often present even in the "mild
cases." The prescriptive recipe for each patient is unique, and if
he has a good internist who has current knowledge of these
medications, he will be in good hands. Most psychiatrists are
simply not prepared to deal with high functioning adult autism,
and where he resides, far too many mental health professionals
are heavily influenced by classical psychodynamic thought. As
you've discovered, using traditional talk therapy of any kind does
not work with him.
As I started to suggest above, some adults with AS do respond
well to cognitive/behavioural work, and using a cognitive
behavioural approach might produce some breakthroughs
regarding his communication process.
His ruminative thought patterns and perserverative thinking are
the mental equivalent of echolalia, and they serve the same
calming and self-centering function. In adults, such behavior is
left over from early childhood adaptive behavior that parents and
other adults found difficult to extinguish. If you think of his
mental behavior as serving the same function as the visible
self-stimulatory physical behavioural manifestations commonly
found in younger children with autism ("stims"), then it is easy to
see that instead of extinguishing them outright, it is more useful
to move towards their gradual replacement and substitution with
behaviours which serve the same adaptive functions as stims do
in children. As he finds other behaviours more appropriate for
communication, his less functional responses will subside.
Children can learn to substitute more socially appropriate stims,
or to take their most disruptive ones and express them under
"safe conditions" unobserved by others. Parents report this
substitution and response rationing process works quite well.
Work with adults can produce impressive results, especially where
the stakes involved are higher. It often takes the threat of one
spouse to leave the AS spouse to impress him with the
seriousness of the failure of their communication. I say "him"
because the sex ratio of male to female AS incidence appears to
be in the range of 4:1.
When I first began to work with transition age young adults, I
often found myself wanting to use variants of "worse case
scenario" thinking with them in discussing their dysfunctional
behaviours. I quickly learned that such an approach eroded the
trust base. Cajoling the client with "if not now, when?" arguments,
or badgering them to "just stop" had a negative effect. There is
an internally logical reason why AS persons hold on to
dysfunctional patterns of thought and behaviour. It may appear
perverse to others, but to the AS person, such behaviors were
successful survival responses in the distant past. For persons with
excellent long term memories that don't self-prune or fade with
time, the disjunctive consequences of their "time-warp"
inappropriate response are not obvious to them.
Even when they become aware of the inappropriateness of their
current response patterns, they nevertheless feel locked into
revisiting them time after time. This behaviour is obsessive and
compulsive in appearance. For AS adults, time management and
executive function problems at work and in their other
relationships and functions demonstrate the frustrating effect of
this ingrained behaviour.
The trick to working with persons exhibiting such behaviour can
be boiled down to a single word:
Patience
I've found that gradually, on their own speed, they can appreciate
the need to change for reasons of their own self-interest. Where
the counsellor comes into the picture is in assisting them to get
from this realization to its actualization. Clients bring in their own
quiet desperation about being stuck or unable to move in
directions they know they must. After trust is established, I move
them in the direction of slight discomfort by alluding to their
original reasons for having sought help. Since there is a charge
behind that need, I help them access it as the source of energy
to tap while undergoing change. In doing this, I proceed with
great caution so as to avoid fostering dependence or learned
helplessness.
So far, more by flying by the seat of my pants than by doing
anything methodical, I've seen some significant shifts in my
clients' ability to function as verified by their own self-reports. We
so often get used to hearing reports of rapid change by
neurotypical clients that experiencing the same shift at a glacial
pace with Asperger syndrome clients is truly trying to our own
sense of professional competence.
When I get frustrated with a given client's rate of change, all I
need to remind me of how slow a process change can be is to
look at my own 57 years, 55 of which were spent without a clue
about my own flavor of Asperger syndrome. Now I turn to other
mental health professionals both for case consultation and
personal check-ins. I've been fortunate to find other
professionals willing to do this work with me.
According to your client's wife, you are the first person he really
trusts. That is a major breakthrough for anyone with AS. For all
recently diagnosed adults, self-trust and self-esteem are so low
and their self-definitions have been so dependent upon
ascription of others that many AS adults require a long time
following diagnosis to trust others. From this point forward, your
client will have less trouble trusting others as you help him
strengthen his self-confidence.
Once he accepts his diagnosis and he isn't there yet, you will be
able to access a lot of his resistance much as an Aikido master
uses the energy of an opponent to succeed. He can learn to give
himself the same gift once he experiences its benign exercise
from another trusted person. That's you.
All of this will take time.
He's going through a stage of self-determination that may take
some time to complete. One factor complicating your client's
progress is that initially it was not his idea to seek a diagnosis.
He rode into the psychologist's office on the agenda of his
spouse. Whenever this happens, a person with inadequately
formed self-concept can dismiss the results precisely because the
impetus for seeking the knowledge was not his alone. Successful
and more rapid progress towards personal change occurs when
the AS individual has an exclusive sense of ownership over the
entire diagnostic scenario.
Another complicating factor comes with the territory of this
neurobiological condition. Self-determination is an ongoing
process for everyone. For persons with AS, there is a strong need
for closure and a discomfort with incompleteness. The whole
process of stopping to process a conversation may leave him
frustrated and feeling thwarted in a desire to complete his
monologues. It's your job to sense this frustration, and work just
at the outer edge of it. Once you understand his frustration
"triggers", you can help him identify them as well. That is
advanced work, but you can start it early, and by keeping it
simple by remaining aware of your task of focusing the work, you
both can point to progress.
Depending on the degree of acceptance, and how soon after the
actual diagnosis the therapist works with the client, an AS adult
lives in a post-diagnostic world explainable by the very
self-knowledge they expend energy in denying and affirming at
the same time. Even if their knowledge was perfect, AS persons
still harbor lingering doubts. They often revisit imperfectly swept
corners housing old dysfunctional habits. A life's worth of low
self-trust can't be overcome just through will power. In the end,
the product is never perfect because it is undergoing constant
bewildering modification. Resistance to change a diagnostic
hallmark is not overcome with an identity tag, even if the label
"fits". One can't will the brain to be different, but one can learn
new positive behaviors that can supplant negative or
dysfunctional ones. This is as good as "willing". Perhaps it is
better, because the process appeals to the logic of many men
with Asperger syndrome. If the process is something they buy in
to, then they assume a sense of control over more parts of their
lives they experienced as chaotic and unpredictable.
A few "How-To's."
A brief, general remark about what follows. I believe that many
traditional therapy models can be counterproductive for people
with Asperger syndrome. Rather than starting from a stance of
viewing the client as someone with a disorder to be dealt with
using the concept of normalization and functional remediation,
I've found it more effective to employ the paradigms of
progressive adult education. So much of what is involved in
working with high functioning autistic adults is new learning and
new insight that it makes little sense to approach personal work
with a medical overlay. The medical model inevitably calls "cure"
and normalization into play.
Autistic persons do not want to be cured. They are not sick,
although some of their behaviours are clearly dysfunctional. High
functioning autistic people also do not want to be made "normal."
They see themselves as different, and wish to be respected as
persons with a built-in neurological difference. Their brains
operate differently. Because of the neurobiological character of
the disability, there are many things they cannot change.
Expecting them to do so is like asking a diabetic to produce
Insulin. It simply isn't going to happen.
Even though I've found it effective to approach each adult client
using the educational model, I realize that I am up against the
client's generally negative experiences with education at all
levels. I approach each client as a unique adult learner, and in
doing so, don't allow much room for categorical thinking. I do
attend to any information they can provide about how they learn
and part of my assessment process involves identification of
specific learning disabilities. If I have questions about these
challenges, and if the resources are available, I ask the client to
seek a full adult functional evaluation conducted by a
neuropsychologist and as complete a specific learning disability
screening as possible. So far, in working with transition age young
adults, their health plans or other community service agency
enrollment has made this possible. An informed client makes a
good student, especially when his subject matter is himself.
On to specifics
One way to start, even when your client is in a high state of
denial, is to focus on how he solves problems. The learning styles
of people with AS are often startlingly different than that of their
neurotypical peers. When he seems particularly stuck or
ruminative, surprise or distract him by introducing your problem:
you don't understand his problem-solving process. Could he
explain it to you?
You may come up with your own ideas, but struggle against
letting them impede the direct information about to come at you.
Ask HIM for help with the problem of understanding how he is
"working" now. Engaging him in a mutual problem-solving task
will simultaneously accomplish several tasks. Placing a problem
on the table can temporarily pull him away from his inward focus.
If he is a visual thinker and learner, use actual objects to
represent the problem on a desk or coffee table. If he is a
verbally oriented learner, encourage him to use his command of
precise language to pin down a description of how he solves this
problem. If he best learns through multi-sensory input, or favors
a single sense, have him indulge that one sense with the proviso
that he must communicate so that you understand the meaning
of his communication without a lot of additional interpretation
from you. You are asking him to relate to "your" problem and
asking him to help you with it. This depersonalizes the process,
and drains hidden and unknown to you threat factors so that he
can concentrate on "your" problem.
Share your difficulty by using expressions that objectify your
concerns, and try to avoid any "you" statements.
Put simply, don't assume anything. You have no more magic
power to guess what is going on in his head than he has in
guessing what is going on in yours. Keep an open mind. You are
both about to learn something.
By intervening with a request for common work, you are taking
back control of the interaction at the same time you invite him to
join with you in a common task. This may be a new experience
for him, and each new experience will force his own dysfunctional
rumination further into the background while he works in the
present tense with you. Rehearse your approach out loud with
some self-talk prior to seeing him. You can also present him with
the "acceptable" process of self-talk.
Though it may seem obvious to you, many persons with AS are
unaware of just how much silent self-talk they engage in. By
modelling audible self-talk yourself, you can encourage him to
externalize his own self-talk process. I know you wouldn't want a
babbling self-talker to walk out of your office into public spaces,
but in the privacy of your relationship with him, you can both do
the self-talk modelling as well as accomplish a second level of
training for him. The second level teaches him how to safely
handle self-talk out loud. Teaching deliberate process
verbalization is considered a best practice in cognitive
rehabilitation therapy. Largely, that is what your work is all about:
your focus is to help the AS client gain, rather than recover,
critical executive function skills.
Once you get to this stage in your work with him, you can enlist
his spouse as an active communication skills training partner.
What she may experience with him, in the safety of their
relationship, is this novel (for him) method of expression,
something he now knows how to deliberately share with her
because he has a problem he is working out. In their own work
with one another, his first issues may be totally self-centered. As
she learns to tolerate his self-talk, he will be drawn into desiring
reciprocity from her just as he has experienced it with you. The
process will not be quite the same as your work with him, because
you don't have a complex history of past communication failure
with him.
They both have that history with one another. In their
relationship, they have developed their own set of communication
codes. Working under the conditions of that background noise
may make their new work with one another very difficult. It can
also be very exciting and scary to both of them. What they are
both doing in the process is unlearning and dismantling one style
of dysfunctional, non-informative communication as they
construct another one. There too, just as with his working with
you, there will be backing and filling and a lot of "seat of the
pants flying". But this will be healthy, non-threatening risk taking
because it can always be focused on an objectified "thing" a
problem.
Initially objectifying a problem removes much of the emotive load
that impedes learning. Learning to consciously objectify a
problem is a process that must be taught. You can develop a set
of signals or shorthand to make this "stop-and-process
procedure" an automatic behaviour after many repetitions. For
the ease of his learning, it may be advisable that his spouse
uses the same signals so that the process is reinforced in the
same way at home. Initially, all of you will be self-conscious
about the process. Later, they can develop subtler, less disruptive
means to halt dysfunctional communication behaviour in which
they both indulge.
There is one last topic relating to work with AS adults worthy of
note. I'm sure that his spouse first came to you with a concern
that her husband didn't show his emotions easily or at all.
Persons with AS have difficulty identifying and then expressing
their emotions. Some materials describing AS refer to apparent
"flat" affect. This is an accurate but misleading description. It is
accurate from the point of view of an observer or a diagnostician.
This characterization is neither accurate nor helpful for working in
a therapeutic relationship with an AS client. What you encounter
isn't "flat" as much as a condition expressive of a state of mind
that is more aptly described by the client as "I don't know what to
call it" affect. For the therapist, it is important to recognize that
even if the client is successful in identifying a feeling state, he's
had a lifetime of failure with expressing it appropriately.
As a mediator, I've long recognized that when people get stuck or
keep repeating themselves or are silent and truly at a loss for
words, it is because their needs aren't being met. They stay stuck
or silent until they are "heard". For persons as intelligent as most
persons with Asperger syndrome are, this condition presents both
the client and the therapist with a unique challenge.
Housed in the body of the AS adult is a child who has yet to
develop an appropriate vocabulary to describe undifferentiated
feeling states. The client truly lacks a vocabulary to differentiate,
name, and express his emotional needs. This leads his
neurotypical partners into a regular game of twenty questions of
"Name that feeling" often with no clearer understanding at the
twentieth question than before the first. Although many AS
persons are highly verbal, there is something "not quite right"
about their use of words which is strange and often distancing to
others. Technically speaking, this is a language pragmatics
problem. The French have the perfect phrase to describe this: "Je
ne sais quois." Apart from sheer eccentricity, there is both a
receptive and expressive blindness to emotional states of the
person himself as well as others in that person's world. When you
encounter AS adults whose coping mechanisms and adaptive
scripts effectively mask this deficiency, it is a shock to discover
just how profound is this absence of basic skill in an otherwise
advanced semantic pragmatic language development.
If you ask many AS adults what they are feeling at a given
moment, a common answer is "I don't know". Believe me, we
don't. Not at that moment, anyway, and not with the pressure
applied to come up with a response the other person can make
sense of.
What you encounter with many AS adults are persons who have
never had the formal training as they must have to identify and
express their emotional needs in a manner which is both socially
correct and appropriate for the occasion. One of the major
reasons why adults with AS self-isolate, often dragging their
mates and families along with them, is because they have
experienced a lifetime of negative consequences flowing from
inappropriate expression of those needs. Avoidance is a natural
way of averting future pain. That's exactly what many adults with
AS do. As a relationships therapist, you have met one of very few
Asperger syndrome adults who has made it to a stage of some
kind of intimate relationship and some kind of marriage. This
condition is not typical of the vast majority of adults with the
diagnosis. They remain single and singular. For the most part,
their lives are spent in physical and emotional isolation from
others, but with a great longing early in life that this not be so. In
later years, it is common to experience resignation to and even a
defiant preference for an unconnected social existence.
Getting a handle on the first part of your personal work with him
will be a challenge, but once you begin work on process, no
matter how small the pieces you cut a problem into, you both will
experience success. One very common feature of AS is the
presence of specific learning disabilities. Many of them remain
life-long challenges. Breaking a multifaceted problem into
smaller components has proven to be an effective technique in
teaching Asperger yndrome children. Learning disabled adults
appear to benefit from the same approach.
Another technique to try is to propose challenges that go just to
the edge of his tolerance for accepting change. At first, it will be
hard to know where those limits are because he may not be
aware of them. Even once he becomes aware of them, he may
not express himself clearly or at all, so be prepared for surprises.
You may find many of his responses to be non-sequiturs or
appearing to come out of nowhere. Much of his internal logic may
be hard for him to express in words, and he may manifest his
responses behaviourally. He may either not respond, or you may
see frustration and anger. If he has a very limited sense of how
to modulate his response, he may take some time in learning
how to adjust his responses from almost unnoticeable displays of
emotion to dramatic, yet appropriate expression.
If he can't be engaged on a formal, abstract level and most
persons with AS can't with these kinds of challenges you might
want to ask him if he has interests through which he can literally
act out his responses. Despite a high level of abstraction in
formal speech, many persons with AS are very concrete thinkers.
Their imaginations can be engaged by encouraging them to
express themselves through talk of things of special interest.
Once you are introduced to what that interest is, you won't have
any trouble finding the "on" button. The challenge for you, and
your AS client, is to find the "off" button, and to know how and
when to press it. Special educators and parents of Asperger
syndrome children have found learning to be effective when it can
be hooked to the child's unique interests, and that could be a
route appropriate for a reluctant adult client.
Reluctance to consider and accept change, and a general
conservatism about acting affirmatively may be an essential part
of your client's character. While some persons with AS act
impulsively with respect to major life decisions, many others are
hesitant and cautious. Within their particular areas of interest or
expertise, they may be very high performers, but this high level
of activity rarely translates to other parts of their lives. There,
movement towards change can seem excruciatingly slow to
others. In making progress in these other areas, it is essential
for your client to experience success at taking baby steps with
positive reinforcement every step of the way. People with AS do
not respond well to negative discipline, and are very sensitive to
what they often misperceive as criticism or disapproval by others.
As his counsellor, a major role you might to assume is in helping
him deal with his own impatience. Once he experiences progress,
he'll want to be successful at times when it just doesn't seem to
happen. These are refractory periods, and you have undoubtedly
experienced them as a therapist in working with other clients with
developmental disorders. Sometimes it seems like one step
forward and four backward. The saving grace is that with adults,
the periods are shorter and their ability to express gratitude and
pride in their own progress is a powerful incentive to future
learning. Reflection on this progress is something that his wife
can also provide him, because her experience of him is constant
and occurs in real time.
I hope this very long post will prove to be of some help to you.
Asking the questions you did has gotten me much more in touch
with the actual processes I've used that have been effective for
me. I hope some of them work for you as well.
About the author:
Roger N. Meyer is author of Asperger Syndrome Employment
Workbook - An employment autobiographical workbook guide for
adults with Asperger Syndrome, (in press, Jessica Kingsley
Publishers, UK, Winter 1999). He is co-author with Michael J.
Ward, Ph.D. of Self-Determination for People with Developmental
Disabilities and Autism: Two Self-Advocates' Perspective, Focus
on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, Vol 14 No 3
(Fall, 1999). He has authored several articles that have appeared
in "the source," the national periodical of ASPEN, USA, "Rainbow
Kids," and the LD in Depth articles section of ldonline, a national
learning disabilities web site. He is a peer counselor at the
Independent Living Resource center in Portland, Oregon.
Mr. Meyer moderates a support group of Asperger Syndrome
adults, and is a parent/student special education advocate and
learning disabilities in-service presenter to professional groups
and post-secondary educational institutions. He is co-founder of
Oregon Parents United, an education, advocacy, and support
group for Oregon parents with children who have invisible
disabilities and is its webmaster. He is a person-centered planner
and advocate for transition age young adults with AS.
Copyright information:
This article is copyright 1999 © by Roger N. Meyer DBA "Of a
Different Mind." Individual copies may be made for personal and
educational purposes. No commercial use or other use for
personal gain is permitted. Individuals or organizations wishing to
reproduce more than ten (10) copies for use during any calendar
year must seek permission from the author. Quotations are
permitted providing they do not exceed ten (10) lines of eighty
(80) characters in length. Current legal standards regarding
"journalistic fair use" and "academic fair use" apply. All
quotations must be attributed and the user must cite the name
of this article.
Persons wishing to contact the author can do so by e-mail to:
rogernmeyer@earthlink.net
Correspondence to:
Roger N. Meyer
"Of a Different Mind"
606 SE 76th Avenue
Portland, OR 97215-2238
©
Roger N. Meyer
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are the melody, some are the rhythm, some are the harmony