What if You Couldn't Talk: Non-Verbal Communication

Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone has a voice.
Everyone has a different way of expressing themselves.

#payitforward
Imagine you have laryngitis on the day you must present an important product (say, rubber eye glasses) to investors of your company, Positive Eyes. How do you get your point across without using words?

Imagine if your arms and legs are broken, your face is paralysed, and you have laryngitis: How do you communicate? How do you tell your wife you are hungry? How do you tell her you need to pee?

Certainly your wife would need to adjust how she interacts with you, how she listens.

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This is a realistic scenario for millions of people, the inability to talk using their mouths. Many of these non-verbal people are also paraplegic or quadriplegic. They often possess limited mental capacity due to autism, down syndrome, or some other disability.

And yet, like all of us, they have opinions. They have personality. They have desires, passions. Things make them excited or sad. They are people first.

I work with an individual in a Day Program environment. Bert is in a wheelchair and has limited use of his arms. He is non-verbal and never complains, even if someone less caring left him in a room alone all day. He typically keeps his face expressionless, so he is especially difficult to read. What inspires him? I was determined to find out.

I knew something, though: Just because he can't complain does not mean he has no opinion, or doesn't get sad.

Not knowing what else to do, I always talked to him, included him in conversations as much as possible. I would touch his arm to let him know I cared; he would often pull away with a gasp and a grimace: He was not used to loving human contact. I imagine he has spent many days alone before he came into the care of the State and got loving people in his life.

Then one day, someone turned the radio onto something different from Top 40. Surfer music from the sixties played, and Bert's face lit up like sunshine. His mouth opened into a smile as big as his face, he lifted both arms stiffly above his head, and laughed in his Bert way. It was magic.
OK, so Bert likes Oldies music.

I also discovered he won't eat Jello or canned fruit. To say "no" to a certain food, he closes his mouth tight and turns his face away.... an effective way of saying, I've had enough!

Bert does like snack cakes and chocolate milk. He will eat better if certain people feed him. His desires may be simple, but if we know how to listen and observe, they are obvious.

Let us remember the most famous non-verbal quadriplegic: Stephen Hawking, whose ideas have shaped the way we see the Universe. What else lurks in the minds of individuals without a voice?

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