Theory of mind question.

[moosemama]

I have a puzzle.

I noticed a piece of work in ds's literacy book yesterday that first worried me and now confuses me.

It was all about being in rough waters and dragged down to his death by other people and how terrifying it was.

Asked him about it today and it turns out it was to do with their topic on water and was an account of a molecule and how they join together in I think boiling water. So at least not as scary or disturbing as first thought.

BUT

Would I be right in thinking that, in order to write it, he would have to have been able to put himself in the molecule's position and thought about it from the molecule's perspective?

AND

If so, is that pretty good TOM, or is there something else at work here?

Ds is generally unable to see anything from other people's perspective. He has learned, if we spend time with him working it out, to think about a similar situation he's been in himself and use that to kind of guess/approximate, but generally needs quite a lot of guidance to do this.

I suppose he could have used his experience of learning to swim to inform it. He certainly spent a lot of his lessons feeling like he was drowning - although never being dragged down by his friends to his death!

I just asked him another question about how he thought a person would feel if they fell off a mountain and he said he can do that because it's obvious that anyone would be really scared and probably feel sick from tumbling.

I am really confused by this. Is this TOM or am I getting things in a muddle?

I think this is the frustrating intersection between what is innate in terms of TOM and what can be learnt, iyswim. The boiling and molecules stuff sounds as if he might be over-empathising, in a way?

I think you're right there TLP. We have certainly worked hard with him on trying to relate what is happening to other people to something in his own experience, so that he can try and understand their feelings a bit better.

The over-empathising is interesting. It was certainly a very traumatic piece of writing. Vocabulary and language is his 'thing', so it was very well described with very emotive language, but actually, that is how he related his swimming lessons to me at first, he was traumatised by them and genuinely felt as if he was drowning. (Well, at least until the instructors actually grasped that he wasn't going to suddenly be able to hold his body up in the water and started surrounding him with floats and arm and leg bands etc.)

I just mentioned something else about the 'falling off the mountain' question to him. I said, he was right of course that anyone would be scared, but could he describe what the man would be experiencing and he said "well no, because I have never fallen off a mountain". So it seems we might be on to something with the relating to his own experience thing.