The Davis Autism Approach

My mother told me that as an infant, any physical touch from her would set me off. Even when she was trying to nurse me I would try to scream and suckle at the same time. She was so afraid that I would choke that she had to find a way of feeding me without touching me. Being my mother must have made her life a hundred times more difficult than that of other women. But in spite of everything, she loved me.

My father on the other hand was just the opposite. When he came home from WWII, he was surprised and ashamed to find that he was the father of a mentally deficient child. He never found a way to effectively deal with his own feelings, let alone how to deal with me. There is evidence of 27 broken bones in my body from the beatings he gave me out of his ignorance, frustration, shame, and hatred. I don’t have actual memory of most of the beatings, or of being an autistic child; but I do have a sense of it.

Way before I started working with autism or had any understanding of it, I referred to myself as having come from a void. My sense of the void was not as existing as an individual, but as existing as both nothing and everything at the same time. There was no sense of being an individual, so there was no “me”. There was no sense of identity. Without a “me”, there was no basis for memory or knowledge.

Somehow—by pure luck or by the grace of God—around the age of nine I began to individuate and develop out of the state of oblivion—out of the void. In hindsight, I can see there was about an eleven-year delay in my early development. Also, in hindsight, I can see there were three phases that I had to go through to become a human being.

First, I had to individuate, I had to stop being everything and nothing and become just one thing, my body. Second, I had to develop an identity for the thing I had become. And third, I had to adapt to the world of being human and become socially integrated.

So there are three phases our “seed” must go through in the process of becoming human— individuation—identity development—and social integration.

I think all “normal” humans, in the first few years of life, go through this same sequence naturally. Although identity development and social integration are never totally completed, there has to be enough to allow the individual to exist as a human being. I also think that some individuals either fail to start or sufficiently complete one or more of these three phases, and therein we can find autism.

If you are “normal”, you’ve already done it—you did it naturally, and you did it totally by chance. If you happen to be autistic, you haven’t completed it yet. The Davis Autism Approach is a guide for making it happen. It will provide you with a different understanding of autism and it will provide you with a strategy for helping your loved ones participate more fully in life and find their place in human society.

I would like to say that my experience of being a “Kanner’s baby” provided insights into finding a “solution” to autism, but I can’t. It did provide a different foundation for looking at the condition. My history provided some understanding of what must be done, but nothing about how to do it. However, it did provide me with something that may have been even more important. It provided me with an undeniable purpose for being alive.

More about Ronald D. Davis: Click here to reveal

Ronald D. Davis

It took Ron Davis 38 years of struggle to regard himself as a complete human being. Born deeply autistic, he endured daily abuse at home and was labeled mentally retarded at school. Then, against all the odds, he somehow emerged from a void of isolation into the real world around the age of nine. By the time he was seventeen, his IQ tested at 137.

At age seventeen, speech therapy made it possible for Ron to speak coherently, but sadly he was still unable to read because, he was also severely dyslexic. He remained functionally illiterate until the age of thirty-eight and even though he achieved success as an engineer and businessman in that time, he was hiding from everyone around him the fact that he could neither read nor write.

Then, in 1981, he performed an experiment on his own perceptions that profoundly changed the way he experienced reality. This seminal breakthrough enabled him to correct and control the involuntary perceptual distortions, which were at the root of his dyslexia. For the first time in his life, he was able to read a book, cover to cover, without struggling.

Wishing to investigate his personal success in overcoming his life long reading problem, he experimented with several dyslexic adults who experienced similar immediate relief from their dyslexic symptoms. In 1982, with the help of educational psychologist, Dr Fatima Ali, he researched and developed an intensive one-week counseling program for correcting dyslexia in adults and children, and opened the doors of the Reading Research Council in Burlingame, California. He hasn’t looked back since.

Davis’s training methods, known as Davis Dyslexia Correction, are now changing the face of special education and learning disability treatment throughout the world. The unique aspect of his work is a series of perceptual and kinesthetic exercises called Davis Orientation Counseling, which teaches dyslexic students how to recognize and control the mental state that leads to distorted and confused perceptions of letters, words and numerals. In addition, he has developed creative learning procedures called Davis Symbol Mastery and unique reading exercises, which allow dyslexic students to learn how to read.

In 1994, he wrote and published The Gift of Dyslexia to answer the continuous demand from parents and educators for a book detailing the Davis Dyslexia Correction methods. By spring of 1995 it was published in English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish. Today, it is published in 18 languages. It is www.amazon.com’s number one bestseller on the subject of dyslexia.

In 2003, he wrote and published The Gift of Learning about his methods for correcting math (dyscalculia), handwriting (dysgraphia), and attention (ADD) difficulties.

Ron and Alice Davis founded Davis Dyslexia Association International (DDAI) in September 1995. Its goals are to increase worldwide awareness about the positive aspects of dyslexia and related learning difficulties and to present methods for improving literacy. DDAI is accomplishing these goals through Ron Davis’ international lecture tours, professional workshops for teachers and therapists, certification and licensing programs, its high profile website www.dyslexia.com and its international quarterly newsletter, The Dyslexic Reader. Today, there are more than 400 licensed Davis Facilitators worldwide providing Davis Dyslexia Correction, Math Mastery and Attention Mastery Programs in 33 languages and 44 nations.

Ron’s work with addressing autism began in 1982. Among the dyslexic clients who came to the Reading Research Council, there were also often children and adults with Asperger’s and other autism spectrum characteristics. The successes these individuals experienced using the Davis methods began his quest to develop a standardized program for addressing autism. In February 2008, he released the Davis Autism Approach Program and began training Davis Facilitators in its delivery. In October 2008, Davis Autism International was established to take his work further. Ron is currently working on a book for parents and therapists about his methods for addressing autism.

Ron Davis was born in 1942 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has two sons, Ray and Philip, and five grandchildren. He has been married to Alice Davis since 1975, who has been his 'rock’ both personally and professionally for all of these years.