Joci is a lady in her fifties with profound and multiple learning disabilities. She uses expressive sounds and body language to communicate. In the past she has spent much of her time alone in her room engaged in self-involved behaviours. When we first met Joci, social interaction and proximity seemed difficult for her. Earlier this year Julies’ mum confirmed that: “Joci’s life experience has taught her to be very wary about those people she can really trust, and you are definitely on her privileged few list”.
When Us in a Bus practitioners first met Joci (14 years ago) she would engage with us for very short periods of time during our session. Sometimes she shouted and pushed us towards the door of her room.
Our sessions today look very different: Joci consistently greets us with a huge smile on arrival. She nods excitedly and vocalises expressively when we ask if we can come in and she often reaches out and pulls us closer to her, making engaged eye contact. Joci rarely engages in self-involved behaviour during our time together and will often initiate social contact showing us how she’d like to spend time with us, and recently using recognisable words.
We believe this has come about through making ourselves available to her and consistently trying to establish a connection with her. We have used Intensive Interaction: mirroring Joci’s actions and echoing and embellishing her sounds to develop “conversation”, warm connection and trust. We let her know we are listening, encouraging self-expression and respecting her need for a break from interaction at times. We have used her strengths, such as her strong sense of rhythm to develop turn-taking interactions which she controls. This has developed further into games where we joined in with her rhythm until she suddenly changes it, laughing when she catches us out!
Recently we improvised words to “Supercalifragilistic….” based on what Joci was doing. The verse became “Tippy, tappy, shaky, clappy, shaky clappy hands” and we took turns to sing very quietly into her ears. This activity continued for 40 minutes, evolving as Joci provided us with more actions and new verses.
Occasionally Joci still gives us a little push, usually with a smile. She knows now that we will “fall” dramatically backwards and then roll back up again close to her, this usually results in much shared laughter! As her mum says: “I guess when you are profoundly disabled you have so little chance to call the shots and I think Joci often uses a little push just to turn a conversation.” We think Joci realises that she is in control of our time together and is aware of her influence within our sessions. We believe this to be empowering for her and have seen her communication, sociability and emotional well-being blossom.
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