Affinity Therapy with Sarah Norris

Affinity therapy is really just using therapy based around what an individual likes. So affinity means likes. 

There's a really great example in the movie and the book "Life, Animated". It's a story about a young man who loves Disney, all the Disney films. His dad, just on a whim, used a puppet to say some lines from the film and talk with his son. It's very beautiful. Look up the trailer and see for yourself.

He just talks about how he had the first conversation with his son using this puppet and it was their doorway into his inner world. 

So affinity therapy is just that, it is that thing that will be the doorway into their inner world. There's a lot of benefits to affinity therapy and it's something that can be applied to a lot of different types of therapy. You can work on a lot of different goals using it but primarily the things that I like about it so much, are that it's very positive, it's affirming for individuals, they're motivated, it's something that they actually care about, instead of something that they could care less about. It also helps them really expand and learn how to connect with people based around something they're passionate about and it's very helpful for them to get that connection, again, to just have that ability to be seen by other people that what I care about matters to someone else. It can really be the key to unlocking their potential. 

So affinity therapy might sound like a really good thing but it can be hard to figure out where to start sometimes, especially if you don't really know what that thing is for your loved one. It does come back to being curious, spending some time getting to know them and waiting, watching, wondering what it is that they are going to love. When they start to show an interest in something, or many things, because some individuals will skip around, and they'll have several things that they love. It's not necessarily important what it is that they love. It's you taking an interest in getting to know what it is that they're so curious about, because that makes them feel validated that what I'm interested in matters. It's interesting to someone else, and someone I love cares about it too. So, you start by figuring out what the thing is, but it's not enough to just know what the thing is you have to you have to get kind of obsessed with it too, because it's what's going to help deepen that connection with your loved one. If you can talk about all the different types of trains there are and you know what makes this one better than that one then you're really going to have the heart of your child or your loved one because they'll feel like what they know matters and that they matter to you. So once you've done the work of figuring out what it is that your loved one enjoys what they're passionate about, what they really want to talk about, or learn about or what they're curious about, then it's a matter of figuring out how you build in that connection with that. So it might start with just you or just a therapist and your child. Over time you will learn that this is a really great way to add layers of complexity to helping them build skills. Not right away, because you don't want to overwhelm them, but over time figuring out what can we change, what can we add, maybe it's we just need to change the script that we've been following. Maybe we need to try and change the lyrics to the song that we've been singing or maybe we can add another person, can there be another role that we can build into this? Is there some way we can expand and make it interesting again, because for everyone, even people with autism, things get stale. You do need to figure out how to keep it fresh, how to keep it interesting, and how to connect it maybe to other interests. So for instance, if someone's really interested in film and they want to understand how to make a film. Find a new vehicle for their interest such as stop animation or something like that and let them figure out filmmaking through that. Being able to connect that with another interest, like maybe animals, maybe they really want to start doing acting out scenes with animals. So figuring out a way to combine interests to expand those interests. Then my favorite part of it is figuring out how to connect them to other people that have shared interests. So, in "Life, Animated" the Suskinds figured out what their son Owen really could connect with other kids with and that was talking about Disney films. So they started a club at his school where the children watched a Disney film and then discussed it. It created some really beautiful friendships and relationships so that Owen didn't feel so different. There were other people that had the same interest, the same real passion. Being able to find that community or build that community for your child can be such a gift.