This week Tim moves into a full time Residential Unit. As well as living there, he'll be continuing a range of day programs and supported employment as well. Adam went there today and he was very impressed firstly with the range of options that they have available, and their approach which is all about personal development.

And boy oh boy oh boy does Tim need personal development.

We knew, when we decided to move him here permanently that we were in for some rough times. Not because Tim has an intellectual disability, but because of his learned behavioural problems that frankly, were staggering.

What we were really pleased about is that in the nearly 6 months that he has been here we've been reassured that most of his behavioural issues are just that - learned and they can be unlearned. The problem is whether or not you can be bothered with the battle - and to be brutally honest, we're over it. It's definitely time to hand him onto people who are paid to deal with this sort of challenge and have seen it all before.

I think it would be fair to say that it was on from the day that Tim arrived. We expected that and were prepared to cut him considerable slack in the early days - after all, originally he was only going to be here until his mother's health improved, and a period of adjustment is only fair.

So we started off with the simplest thing - please and thank you are not optional. It also should not be something that has to be dragged out of you and/or delivered in an extremely sarcastic manner. We fought that battle right through Christmas Day - when our friends had gone out of their way to provide him with Christmas presents and he had to be forced to grudgingly thank them for the bother. It continued on a daily basis with us having to hang onto plates of food until he would force himself to mutter thank you (or more irritatingly create a major performance out of saying thank you), until eventually, after a few months he gave up that fight and stopped behaving like a little savage.

Other little battles along the way - pick up after yourself, clean up the table after you've spread your lunch all over it without having to be told all the time, and so on - but a month or so in - time to take on one of the major issues. The fight to have him shower himself (he's got form after all / he's showered himself just fine in the past, we just turn on the kitchen timer to remind him when to get out and he's away). We fought that battle for months and months - he would nail the 3 step routine in the mornings for a while, even got to the stage where he didn't need the timer, but then start the attention seeking - switching the order of tasks around so he's be in the road of everyone else in the house, predictably degenerating into not doing anything - just sitting in bed "waiting" to be noticed.

And therein lay the biggest battle of all. Tim does NOTHING without an audience. He wants a rousing round of applause if he goes to the toilet, if he washes his hands, if he gets himself a glass of water, makes himself a cup of tea (these things are announced ad nauseum just to make sure that you notice). He solicits congratulations when he sits at a table and spends up to 3 hours dusting his dozen or so DVD's (the chances of him dusting anything else on the table not his, are less than zero mind you). He constantly and consistently demanded attention. If you were on the phone - he'd interrupt or do something to distract you. You could go hours and hours without him uttering a word to anybody - start to work at the computer, get a visitor, do anything that meant you were tied up and he suddenly had to be the centre of attention. And one of my "favourite" things - the shake. Can't open something in a restaurant. Silently shake it in front of Karen. When that ends badly - try it with everything for a while. But then stubbornness is a speciality of Tim's. It can be channelled - we tried that and had some good success (he can tie his shoelaces if you target the stubborn streak for example). It's just a pity that he's deeply programmed to use that will for failure and manipulation as opposed to success.

Not talking takes on an even more interesting twist. What would you do if you got out of the shower and found you had no towel to dry yourself with? Tim tried a number of options - he used mine (that ended very badly), he stood around and waited until we noticed that he'd not emerged from the bathroom for an hour, he tried getting dressed soaking wet. What he refused point-blank to try was stick his head out the door and shout. Same as when he ran out of clean underwear - that time he sat in the bedroom stark-naked for a few hours until we went looking for him. Now Tim definitely has a problem with forming language. No two ways about that - it's part of the disability that is most frustrating for him. But you'll imagine our somewhat stunned amazement when one night he launched into a long, very verbal, quite clear and very succinct rant about the injustices that were committed against him at his last centre and Respite House. I don't know that he realised how quicky he managed to incriminate himself in most of the events along the way. But more instructively - he can get his point across quite well. Helps if you're talking about the only subject that he'll talk about - Tim. But it proved quite conclusively that there is no excuse for not speaking up when something's not right. None.

Then there was the "going-out" behaviour. Now Tim's always been notorious for being slow - but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the "slowness" is extremely targeted. Announce we were going to do something he wanted to do, and he could be dressed and ready to go out the door in 15 minutes. Announce something we wanted to do (in particular something I wanted to do), and it would take him 15 minutes to walk into the bedroom. Of course he wanted us to fuss, wanted us to dress him, to pay attention to him, to make us pay for whatever it was that we wanted to do.

Having said that, taking him places was increasingly a highly fraught experience. Fine if all the women in the room picked up on the fact that Tim thinks he needs to be cosseted, but then Tim has a very skewed view of women and no coping mechanisms at all if his standard manipulative tactics fail, so heaven help us if if it didn't work his way. We got into the name calling, the idiotic cackling, the lagging behind walking / attention dragging, the beckoning finger and whispering in the ears of people and it all got very old very very quickly. I really don't think we need to be holding workshops with our friends to explain how to "deal with Tim" when your only sin is to treat him like an adult.

Now we know what's going on with all of this behaviour. Life-long negative-feedback loops that have reinforced everything else. Addicted to attention to the point of obsession, pointless / petty and stupid stubbornness, the Ruler of All I Survey complex and a manipulative and quite cunning personality. What I guess neither of us expected however, was the sheer nastiness - the vicious, manipulative nastiness. We got the full barrelled nasty experience - the name calling which started on Boxing Night (directed at all the women in the room not just me), the deaf / mute routine when 10 minutes ago he knew exactly what you'd asked, the glaring and the sulking, the tantrums and the whole catastrophe. And my all time favourites - the don't swear / don't shout instructions delivered directly at me - whilst he'd not bothered with cleaning up after his last toilet visit (I'll leave it to your imagination to work out what smell alerted me to that little joy), or maybe you'd prefer to think about the sight of somebody about to eat their lunch in a restaurant without bothering with the need to use a handkerchief (this time you can consider the visual "clue" that I got for that one), and you will excuse me if I spent some time contemplating hypocrisy and sheer gall into the bargain.

As you can probably imagine this has made for a difficult living situation for a while. It's almost impossible to explain the impact of a malevolent, nasty presence in your house, day after day after day. That glares, snarls or, on a good day, simply disregards you. Somebody who miraculously can follow instructions given by somebody else, but if the same words come out of my mouth - no comprehension. Somebody who has taken away your self-determination, stuffed up your personal life completely but can't even be bothered to try the absolute basics. That certainly won't volunteer to do anything to help, and plays such mindless stupid games when asked to do something as simple as pick up a broom and sweep the house - that you fight the urge to give up and do it yourself on an hourly basis because you know that means that you'll have to "notice him" and you're in the stupid game. Mind you, this malevolent presence also fully expects / demands that you do everything for him - there is this assumption that no matter how nasty he gets, you will provide / wait on / feed / pick up after / toilet / amuse / arrange life for ....

Well let's just say that the day I found myself listening carefully to Nigel Latta talk about parenting and thinking that's a trick we could use, it was time to pull the pin. He's nearly 42 years old for god's sake and we're not his parents. Whilst it would be perfectly okay for him to be childlike, he's not, he's childish and there is a very very very big difference.

Hopefully Tim will now take the opportunity that's in front of him and actually put in some effort - god knows it's taking a lot of time and effort on the part of a lot of people (not just us) - not that he seems to care how much disruption or even how much pain he's causing. It's well and truly time for him to step up to the mark. Everybody's very willing to help him learn and grow and cope with his disability. The rest of the crap? Not acceptable.