  Sixth grade
I started seeing a therapist either late 5th or early 6th grade. Anyone who knows a little about SM knows that the sooner treatment is started, the greater chance of it actually working. I'm not saying it's impossible to get the kid able to talk after a certain age, but by the time they're 11 years old, there's probably not much hope of it happening. I was so used to not talking, that it would have taken a lot to get me to talk. But I did get an IEP from the therapist, which got the teachers to back off a little at least. I hated the therapy appointments, but we always had to go anyway. I remember thinking to myself the first day we went to her, If I just talk now I won't have to come back anymore. But if I talk, I'll make everyone look stupid and I'll be making it look like there's really nothing wrong and I have control over when I can talk. So I didn't say anything to her. I was so embarrassed, because I saw not talking as being very childish and it just seemed so stupid. It was embarrassing for me to not be able to talk to new people. I had been told so many times that I was doing it on purpose that I began to believe it. I think by the time I started therapy I was thinking about it too much. When you're younger and someone wants to play a game you just do it and don't think much about it. When I went, I would be thinking, "She's watching everything I do. Everything I do can be used against me to make me talk later. She'll learn the way I do things and what signals I give, and she'll use them against me." So I had to be very careful to avoid doing anything that might give myself away. I didn't want anyone predicting what I was doing. I made it a lot harder for myself, but I didn't understand what was going on. My mom and therapist must have known what was wrong, but no one ever explained anything about SM to me. All along, I thought the therapy was aimed at finding out what was wrong with me and how to fix it. I was never told what was wrong, or what the therapy was supposed to do for me. I heard 'Selective Mutism' a few times, but I thought it was a name they made up because they didn't know what it really was. I also thought that I didn't have anything wrong with me, I thought I was doing it on purpose. You have to make sure you have the right therapist. We went to one once who had me draw a bunch of pictures and then insisted I must have been kidnapped when I was younger. I feel bad for anyone stuck being his patient. We never went back to him after that. I'll give you an idea of what therapy might be like if you're taking your SM child. There's no guarantee that it will happen, but it could. There was one time when my mom had to give my therapist a $20 bill for something, so she handed it to me to give to her as I was sitting between them. I dropped it, and froze. I had no trouble handing it to her, but bending down to get it was too much. I couldn't move, I kept sort of twitching in the direction of the floor as I tried to force myself to do it but I couldn't totally move my body to pick it up. All conversation stopped as they both watched me. I might have been able to do it if they had kept talking and not payed as much attention to me, but when they both sat there staring at me, it certainly didn't help. I was so nervous I started crying, and eventually my therapist left the room for a second. I immediately picked up the money and put it on her desk so I wouldn't have to do it when she was there. Then there was the time I went in by myself while my mom waited in the waiting room. I was so nervous being in the room with just my therapist, that I couldn't sit down. I ended up standing the entire hour. I kept inching toward the chair, but I couldn't bring myself to sit down. There was also the time, much earlier in one of the first appointments, where it was just the therapist and me in the room, and she had an easel set up. She started painting a face, and told me to paint part of it. I picked up the brush and even knew what I would paint, but I couldn't move my arm to actually do it. She walked over to the window, and I immediately painted something on the paper. In school, things weren't much different than usual. I once told Suzie who I had a crush on, and she immediately announced it to the whole lunch table. He was, naturally, humiliated, even turning red. I was the insult that you used to top whatever insult someone had just said to you. If you said, "You like to eat dirt!" (I don't remember what 6th-grade insults are like) the other person would respond, "Well, you like Maureen!" The idea that I liked you was the worst possible situation. The next time Suzie asked me if I liked anyone, I wouldn't tell her. She promised not to tell anyone, so I told her. Again, she announced it to everyone with pretty much the same reaction but with a different person. The next time I really did refuse to tell her. She got pretty annoyed, but it was her own fault. I have since learned how to hide the fact that I like someone. I don't want to embarrass someone by making them think I like them, so I don't let on. Ignoring them, not looking at them, pretending they're not there, anything to make them think I don't like them. I don't know if I'll ever be able to tell someone right out that I like them. They'd probably move out of the state. I'll probably just wait until someone tells me, and even then they might just be joking, to embarrass me for believing that someone would actually want to go out with me. Similar things have happened. I did once have a 'boyfriend'. Bob was a kid I met at the lake, we started throwing a ball back and forth in the water and then we exchanged phone numbers. It was probably around the time I was in 6th grade. He called me a few times but I wasn't really interested in a boyfriend at the time, so I just kind of ignored him. I told Suzie about him, and she practically ran around the baseball field at recess screaming "Maureen has an older man!" because he was a year older than me. She seemed happy for me, I think, but everyone else seemed to think I had made it up, and just made fun of me for it. It didn't help that his name really was Bob, not a typical 11 year old name, and he didn't want to be called anything else. We were still going regularly to Penance in school. I was finally allowed to choose my own priest instead of automatically being sent to my church priest. Naturally I chose someone different, someone I didn't even know, because I thought I eventually would have to talk in confession so I wanted to just do it. Maybe I thought the priest wouldn't know about the written confession and wouldn't accept it, so I just left my paper behind when I went. I couldn't see him, which probably helped. I just said it, very quietly, and he helped me out when I couldn't say anything. He thought I had just forgotten it, but actually my throat wasn't letting the words out at times. So he would tell me the next word or two and I would continue. He didn't ask me if my sins were the only ones I had committed. Everything went well. My principal came running over when I came out, and asked me if I did it. I thought she meant was I done with my confession so someone else could go, and I nodded. I didn't think anything else of it until my mom came to pick me up at the end of the day. My pricipal came running out to tell her about it. Everyone was so proud. So I got a hamster for it. I never would reccomend getting your kid a pet as a reward unless you intend to take care of it, and my hamster didn't get cleaned or taken care of at all for a while. My sister usually took care of it, and everyone seemed mad at me for not taking care of it. I never even saw the hamster as a reward for talking. It was just like I had done something difficult so I was given a hamster. I didn't want rewards for doing it anyway, because it seemed pointless and embarrassing. I was just doing what any normal person would do, and they wouldn't get presents for talking in school. I just wanted to be treated like a normal person, and I think I could have gone farther if people had just let it go rather than jumping on me for the one thing I did. I did continue saying my confession, but I had to be extra careful from then on. It seemed like everyone would be watching me extra close for my next step. I don't even know how my principal knew I was doing it in the first place. In the SM group I'm in on Yahoo (hi everyone!), we were having a discussion once about the "I'm so proud of you!" thing. I hate to hear this, and so do several other people. I always thought it was just praising me and making a big deal over things that no one would notice if I was a 'normal' person. Someone else in the group mentioned that it seems like the 'proud' people are taking credit for your actions. That is what it seems like sometimes. When this happened in school, it seemed like the principal thought she had done something to get me to talk, when she hadn't even been involved in any way. It seemed like she was taking credit for me talking. I think it's kind of annoying how you can't do something without people being 'proud' of you. My mom reminded me of something I had forgotten about. My class would often play games in school to help us learn, games like the one where you answered a question and if you got it right you got to try to throw the blackboard eraser into the garbage can 'hoop'. When we played, and it was my turn, if the teacher told me I could write my answer on the board I would do it if I knew it. When she wouldn't tell me, I wasn't sure if I was allowed to or not, so I wouldn't write it. I would get it wrong and my teammates would be mad at me for not writing anything. My teacher would usually tell me afterwards that I could have written it if I wanted. Usually when we played these games, I was either picked last or, if the teacher picked our teams, my classmates would groan and whisper their disproval when they found out I was on the team. After I had the IEP, which I wish someone had explained to me, I wrote my answer on the board but the teacher wouldn't accept it unless I said it. If the IEP had been explained to me somewhat, I could have told my mom about it later, but instead our team just lost because I couldn't say the answer out loud. When a team won, all the members of that team usually got extra points on the next test, so my classmates had reason to hate me when I got an answer wrong. Previous Page | Next Page
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