The way we learned to cope with life may not work for us as adults
Autism works in us, and in our worlds in many ways from the day we are born to the day we die.
we have many struggles, most not visible to any human perception, which cause us to expend more energy, try harder, fail more frequently, cause us endless frustration, exasperation, shame and self blame.
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Many of us grew up with our autism working “behind the scenes” and we as well as our family/caretakers/ teachers, peers had no idea why we perpetually failed to perform as expected. Most of us learned coping behavior of many sorts to deal with the constant negative input surrounding our “failures”.
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Self blame, shame, aggressive self defensiveness, avoidance, mimicking behavior and camouflage, hypersensitivity and reactive behavior , including substance abuse, emotional or physical abuse and violence to others.
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Many to most of us reflect adaptation of our behaviors common in trauma responses, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn/appeasement.
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We may have dysfunctional family behavior patterns going back generations and including physical abuse, drug or alcohol abuse, fights and arguments, estrangements, lack of emotional care or neglect of children, and so much more. Unhealthy patterns are for the most part learned and can be “unlearned” and replaced with new and healthier behavior.
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I have come to the conclusion that autism hidden in many families includes parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. who may also be autistic, in older generations like mine, there may be years of “handed down” learned behavior patterns that helped families live their lives (unhealthily in most cases) and simply survive around undiagnosed autism. I bet if you think about it, you can see the unhealthy family patterns of your own experience. Nobody knew!!!!!!
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The survival techniques we learned as children in such unhealthy homes rarely work well for us when we reach adulthood. Many of us have lived long and painful lives trying to use unhealthy behaviors we learned to survive in many cases even before we could speak. We may not have any idea at all that we have choices we can make every day in the way we choose to respond to others and how we may react to others in any situation.
Here’s the good part about this heritage of unhealthy learned behavior:
We can “unlearn” it.
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I was stuck in a rigid pattern of trained response to the demands of others, and I never had a clue that I had alternatives that I could choose in how to react or respond in any situation. I had to have an outsider point it out to me. I had to have “how to do it” explained to me. I had no insights or ideas beyond those I had been taught and clung to throughout my abusive childhood to survive.
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With the help of a therapist I was able to learn healthy communication, how to set boundaries and enforce them, how to recognize when I was being used, intimidated, manipulated, abused, and how to defend myself in healthy ways by making better choices and choosing from several responses that were healthier than the learned automatic responses I had learned through trauma as a child.
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Practicing new techniques and consciously applying them was very emotionally scary at first but as I gained skill through practice, I was able to become independent, make my own healthy decisions, and defend myself from unhealthy demands by others.
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I believe if I could do it almost anybody can.
Getting therapy to learn healthy communication and decision making was the best thing I ever did for myself. Therapy saved my life and my sanity, and it was not until 40 years later that I discovered the autism that worked behind the scenes in my own growing up and family life.
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Even without your therapist knowing about your autism, you can learn and grow new skills to help you interact in healthier ways for the rest of your life. Ask your therapist to teach you healthy self assertive communication , how to set boundaries and enforce them, how to make healthier choices.
There is no shame in reaching out to learn things others can teach us, there is no shame in recognizing that we need new “tools” to live healthier every day lives, and no shame in asking for help to do that.
What we learned in the past may not be serving us as grown adults, and we have so many new and different choices in tools we can use, we might just need somebody to help us learn “how to do it”.
Hope you find what you need. Don’t be afraid to explore the possibilities!
Tag: autism behavior
Autism in a Box
Mistaken thinking, ideas and concepts about Autism
From the first discovery and attempts to define autism, its origins, and its struggles, there has been a natural human tendency to assign traits to all of those who are autistic.
“autistic people don’t look you in the eye”
“autistic people think in pictures”
“autistic people have no empathy”
“autistic people are ” “
“autistic people do ” ”
There are attempts to define autism by traits of thinking, sensory issues, behaviors, and more. There are many mistaken ideas being perpetuated today, too.
Here is what everybody missed from the beginning. Each of us is completely different. Today autism is understood as being a feature of unevenly developed neurology, where some parts of our neurological systems perform amazingly well all the way to very poorly indeed.
Depending on what part of our neurology is affected, we will show very high performance in neurological testing in some areas, right down to exceptionally weak performance in other areas.
Not one of us is the same, except that our neurological functions have been affected by the way we developed. (autism)
This can not be changed by diet, medications, miracle drugs, behavior training, or any other known mode of treatment. We are born autistic and we die autistic.
There is no “look” to autism. “you don’t look autistic” is a common comment totally based in false ideas about autism.
There is no set pattern of thinking, no set pattern of behaviors, not set level of intellect, no set performance levels of any tests available to us today.
Every single autistic individual has neurology that is unevenly developed, but this can show in as many ways as there are autistic people on earth.
Some mistaken ideas and misinformation I have heard “quoted” lately.
“autistic people are many times more sensitive ( some quote(sic) 8x, 12x etc) than neurotypical individuals”
Where did that one come from?
How does one measure sensitivity levels and how does one weigh how each individual reacts to stimulus.???? Do they mean physically sensitive or emotionally sensitive? Do they mean actually feeling, or are they referring to reactivity to any stimulus?
I blame this false information on the “highly sensitive person” social movement.
This idea that certain people are either slow, stupid, sluggish, or highly sensitive and therefore somehow socially or otherwise desirably “highly sensitive”, which fashion often has tied into highly intelligent.
This theory was around in the 1800s, perhaps even earlier when body types were tied for no actual prove-able reason to certain personalities, and perpetuated by psychologist William Sheldon in the 1940s . (and by others since, as well) (this theory has been thoroughly disproven/debunked by the way)
I need to do more research for past writings to uncover the historical bias evident in these loosely associated ideas.
There are no studies or tests to prove “sensitivity”. Science has not developed this capability. Every trait described by the “highly sensitive person” social movement is frequently found in autistic individuals, yet the most recent perpetuator of this ‘diagnosis’ denies that “highly sensitive persons” may be autistic. Oh, great way to avoid stigma of the autism label and all its misconceptions, by the way.
Any statement that begins with “autistic people” and describes a single trait should be regarded with suspicion and caution.
Almost all the ideas about the way we (autistic individuals) think (heard of “extreme male brain” ?) and behave ( heard about autism and “theory of mind”??) needs to be re examined in light of science’s new understanding of autism.
Not one of us is the same. We can not be put into a box and categorized under one thought process, one neurological response, one mode of speech, behavior, ability, or trait.
More and more, those professionals and others who understand autism in this new neurological light are looking for the ways our neurodevelopment or lack thereof affect our interactions with every day living, from the way we communicate, the way we respond or don’t respond to stimuli of many sorts, to our motor and perceptual differences.
Autism is sensory, neurological, and gives us neurological struggles that most NT individuals will never experience. Our sometimes unusual , strange, or seemingly extreme behaviors may be our attempts to adapt and cope to the experience of living with uneven development of our neurology.
When people make blanket statements about autism, what it is, or what autistic individuals do, think again. Most such statements will be based in false ideas and misinformation.
Adjusting to Autism diagnosis
In our later years.
Recent diagnosis at any age can be a relief, a shock, cause emotional pain and distress, relieve emotional pain and distress, all of the above, or none. For each of us, our perspective will likely be changed forever. Things we thought we understood may change, as we begin to sort our long histories and pasts and make sense of many of the “whys” of the long lives we have lived before we ever discovered our autism.
Along the way, many of us may have learned ways to cope, adapted behaviors to survive and to get along, and many of these may not have been healthy! We may come to our recent diagnosis feeling overwhelmed, incompetent to deal with life and new perspectives our diagnosis might give us. That’s OK, and you can pretty much expect some form of all that!
The good news is that we can learn new ways to communicate and our diagnosis can give us tools and insights that might not have been evident before. We can figure out our worst struggles and find ways to “do life” in easier and less distressing ways, now we know about our autism.
I learned to communicate in healthy self assertive ways.
I learned to see when I was being “guilted” , “intimidated”, “manipulated” and how to set boundaries and protect myself against those behaviors from others.
Along with those skills, I also had to be taught to recognize “what is my job, and what is not”.
Let me explain. All my life I had been trained to please others. Frequently somebody would say “you made me cry” “You hurt my feelings” “you make me so angry”
See a pattern in those statements? The person involved is telling me it is my responsibility to make sure they are happy. That they do not have hurt feelings, that they are not “made” angry by whatever I do. Punishment reinforced this idea, that somehow it was my job to please and appease others in my household, or any other part of my world. I had that power! I had to control it, no matter what I wanted or how I felt, how I disliked doing whatever was asked of me. I must please the other people at any cost.
Now, of course each person’s experience will have been different, but I bet a lot of readers will relate to this experience on some level.
One thing that has helped me tremendously is to learn to recognize “things I can control” versus “things I can’t” . This has been surprisingly difficult to learn after the first 30 years of my life being indoctrinated to this point of view.
I started reading about control, about who can control me, (only me!) and who I must please (only me). things I can’t control include the weather, people’s opinions, disease, catastrophe/accidents, other people’s actions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings. OH? I wasn’t responsible after all when you cried over something I did and punished me over and over for it? OH? I was not responsible for the times you hit me because I did something that “made you” be angry? This was an extreme revelation to me… I had such a difficult time processing the fact that persons chose to respond to me and my behaviors in their own ways of their own choosing, and that I, in fact did not cause their hatred, their anger, their violence, their shaming, blaming, controlling behavior toward me. When people said I “should” do something, or I am “supposed to” do something or feel something, or believe something, I thought they had a secret manual or list of rules that I was not able to access. I believed that they were telling me rules I must live by, rather than understanding that these were things that THEY believed, things that THEY thought, things that THEY wanted from me.
Many of the ways we deal with our world are due to habit or learned as children to survive our struggles in “less-than-understanding” or healthy situations growing up. The ways we learned to protect ourselves may not work well for us as adults, but there are so many ways we can choose to behave in any interaction with others… we just need to find out what our choices are and learn how to use the newer and healthier tools we have access to as we discard our old struggles and make adaptions for ourselves as we age. It is Ok to reach out to a counselor or therapist or social worker to ask for help and explanations if you find it a struggle to sort all of this on your own.
Look for more information about healthy self assertive behavior, look for more information about things you can’t control, things you can, and learn how to tell one from the other. You may suddenly find yourself feeling freer than you ever have before.
When we are able to make our own choices depending only on what is right for us and be free of others opinions, feelings, agendas and wants, we are better able to have healthy relationships and fewer worries and struggles. Check it out!
trauma,anxiety, hyper-vigilance and negativity
An anecdotal comparison between me and my hamster to make a point about negative attitudes.
When I was in middle school I was given a hamster to keep as a pet. She had been used as part of a study done by a college student, where the hamster was administered random shocks and studied to see if its behavior changed.
When I first got her I named her fang.
She had a tendency to bite whenever touched and I had my fingers full of puncture wounds soon after I got her. I understood she bit from fear and self defense and spent a lot of time handling her gently ( and went through a lot of band aids).
Time went on, and she was easier to handle. Unless she was suddenly startled or experiencing anything new, she gradually relaxed and allowed me to pick her up and carry her, place her on my self- in pocket, my lap or on my shoulder and even began to accept offered treats. I enjoyed her company, took pleasure in her progress, even raised a litter of babies. Very positive experiences and gratifying that I could help her overcome her fears and feel safe.
When I was a very small child I was subjected to sudden punishment regarding things I did not understand. I was easily startled and frightened by anything new, any sudden action, sudden motion, sudden change, and overwhelmed by anything I saw as aggression or threatening toward myself.
I was acutely aware of others around me, watching always, wary of threats, bullying, intimidation, mimicry, examining every interaction with the certainty that people intended to harm me, to hurt me, to frighten me, to cause me emotional pain.
I developed huge anxiety, looking out for these assaults, whether physical, emotional, or threatening or suspicious behavior that could overwhelm. Any human interaction seemed to hold this potential.
By age 11 or 12 I was constantly angry, and ready to strike back. I was defensive over every question asked me, and for a while I was willing to confront and engage with others in rancorous disputes (especially the sister I shared a room with).
Sister almost always called our mother in when she thought she was not going to get her way.
I always lost the engagements and was frequently punished by my mother and made to “make amends”, etc for any argument we might have had. Usually it was about my sister wanting me to share something of mine and my refusal. My mother thought I was selfish and made me give or share whatever it was my sister wanted me to share. This was true for the way I was expected to act with others in the household… my other younger siblings, and my parents. Submissive obedience was the only response tolerated under any circumstances.
I felt I could not win and simply gave up. I had no rights, nothing I owned was mine alone to enjoy, no place I could go for privacy, others could come near me and pester, annoy, fight with me , there was no escape until I learned that I could go into the corner of the basement with spiders, mold and water on the floor, and that most of them did not follow me there.
Enter depression. I had been trained in hopelessness and helplessness. I had no alternatives.
I began contemplating being dead around 5th grade, and it seemed a good quiet peaceful place to be. I began to hope I would die every night as I went to sleep. ( If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take) . It was a fervent hope, I had been told Heaven was a goal we should aspire to.
I had no resources or tools to understand anything but appeasement. I tried to please others and to stay out of their way.
I have since gained tools, understanding, and independence from being micro- managed and controlled in every thought or behavior.
I have learned to love myself, perhaps that has been the hardest struggle of all.
I didn’t deserve happiness, I was not worthy of anything but abuse. I learned that early on and it was difficult to change my viewpoint.
It has taken me almost 40 years to overcome the 18 years I lived at home and finally all these years later to understand what my autism contributed (and my mother’s) to the mix.
At home I learned to expect nothing but negative consequences, to be on the watch for anything that hurt or threatened, to expect to be treated unfairly, to feel discouraged and overwhelmed and to wish I could escape these feelings.
I spent many miserable years from age 11 or so until I was 30 expecting the worst from everybody, feeling overwhelmed and trapped with my back to the wall, expecting each encounter with others to result in my hurt or harm. I had a negative attitude toward everything. I refused to do anything which I even slightly expected might put me in a spotlight for shaming, humiliation, being degraded, corrected or punished. I believed everybody was out to get me.
I don’t know to this day if it was rigid thinking, my autism keeping me from seeing positive experiences or appreciating them. I don’t know what proportion of my life as a child was actually spent being harassed, degraded, attacked, punished, and humiliated, ostracized, ridiculed, tormented, or bullied. It felt like “always” to me. I felt I could never feel safe.
I do know I felt that being under attack was constant and unrelenting, and I was as a usual state sad, emotionally exahusted, withdrawn or angry and defensive because I was in emotional pain.
I could not do a thing to help myself in my family circumstances and status. I had no idea how to help myself.
Family members and others avoided me because of my negativity. I frequently expressed the idea that I could do nothing right, that everybody hated me, that I could not do the things expected of me.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself”, “A person is as happy as they make up their minds to be” “pull yourself together and get on with it” “shape up”.
None of those constant remarks gave me the insights and tools I could use to help myself do better.
I never got the supports I needed. If anything these comments added to my misery and my belief that maybe it was all my fault. It convinced me further that I was nothing but a pain and misery to others and that they would be well off without me. ( all sentiments from my parents and others which were frequently expressed as well) .
Skip to today.
I finally got counseling in effective communication and how to make healthy self assertive choices at age 30.
I removed myself from my toxic family and their insistence on my playing the role of black sheep and scapegoat in the family behavior patterns. I could not change their behavior, but I could change the way I responded to it!
I began to make healthier choices and somewhere along the line a lot of my defensiveness and anger left because it was no longer needed.
I learned about negative thinking and tried to look at things from a positive angle.
Even the worst experience had a sometimes positive result ( learned what NOT to do!).
This persistent refusal to look for negative things in my life, to consciously change my outlook, eventually resulted in my ability to see things from a healthier perspective. Learning of my autism was the single best thing that has ever happened to me in terms of self knowledge and finally understanding whys of all the pain of my younger years.
I know now a lot of my negative thinking had been habit, and maybe appropriate for my situation as a helpless child. I could not see beyond my fears and my inability to cope with demands made upon me. I only expected pain and misery because I did not have understanding or teaching from others about how to avoid these experiences or to make them better. Perhaps in my particular family situation I truly was helpless to do any other thing. It seems like that looking back, but I don’t know how much of my experience has been actual, and how much my autistic processing difficulties interfered with my understanding. Probably a lot. For me, the life I lived in my understanding of it WAS my reality.
I am happier now at age 68 than I have ever been. Knowing and understanding my autism and how it affected my early life has been a key to giving me peace.
Parents, if your autistic child becomes hostile, angry, depressed, defensive, argumentative, or negative, consider that they might not be seeing anything but the pain that they are suffering because they struggle to be adequate to their experiences. Something or some things are causing them emotional (and perhaps physical) or mental pain, anguish, frustration and they are feeling inadequate to meet the challenges.
Provide tools… please, provide explanations, assurances, positive feedback as much as possible. When an autistic child is struggling, please consider testing to find which neurological struggles are the worst and use therapy to find new ways to build skills, knowledge, and understanding to do whatever is expected of them.
Consider family therapy too, so everybody can learn better ways to interact with each other.
Look farther than throwing the blame on the individual, and expecting them to magically understand to do whatever it is you expect of them.
Look at how you can help understanding, support progress and insights, give opportunities to build skills and grow emotionally. Explain everything in small steps, explain how, why, where, when, who, and every other small detail over absolutely everything. It is absolutely essential to an autistic child’s understanding. IF your child displays anxiety, overwhelm, defensiveness, anger, and negativity, see it not as that child doing everything they can to cause difficulty, but as an urgent need to change something that is happening in his or her life and teaching skills to cope with or adapt to that circumstance or set of circumstances.
Our sensory processing struggles and rigid thinking can sometimes be a roadblock to understanding the “big picture”. We need help seeing the way, we need tools, life skills to do our jobs (growing up!) and need specific concrete explanations about why and how to deal with so many new situations as we experience them and attempt to learn about them. Please make sure your child gets the explanations and alternatives to behave as expected, to make healthy choices, and the skills that they need to learn to survive and thrive in their world.
I knew my hamster was striking out in fear and self defense due to her constant anxiety over the things she had experienced.
I wonder how many parents or spouses, family and friends fail to see the truth in anxious, angry, defensive behavior in those they know and love?
OldLady With Autism 