Vanessa's Blog: September - Logic Diagrams

Peter Vermeulen is a Senior lecturer at Autisme Centraal in Belgium, a training and education centre for autism and the author of a number of brilliant books, including Autism As Context Blindness. We sadly had to cancel our conference with Peter in the spring, but I hope we can rearrange something once the pandemic is over. In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about one of my favourite strategies that Peter recommends.

Young people with autism rarely have negative behaviour through any malicious intent. Their behaviour is usually functional and they are trying to tell us something that they want or feel. Maybe they don’t have the flexible imagination needed to figure out how to get what they want? Maybe they are working on a false assumption based on a decision they made in the past which led them to get the result they wanted? Maybe they don’t have a clear understanding of cause and effect, so they cannot see what the outcome of their actions can be?

A logic diagram like this can be used to show a young person’s actions in logical steps and to talk through possible alternatives with a more positive outcome. Young people with autism can often be very logical and if we can show them visually that alternative actions are more likely to get them to their goals, they are less likely to repeat the negative behaviour. In the long term this can also help them to build the skills they need to predict the outcome of their actions and to stop and think things through logically.

Here is a link to a blank template, which could be laminated for repeat use

Here is a link to an alternative version which incorporates a young person’s emotions

A logic diagram could also be drawn very quickly on a little whiteboard or notepad. It may be something that you use to talk through an incident that has happened, but it could then be kept, or laminated so that the young person can refer back to it and hopefully member the more positive course of action in the future.