Self control,
Lately the autism “buzz word” is “self regulation”. I see constant reference to self regulation in articles, in comments, on blogs, and in discussions in groups. Time to update my autism vocabulary. What is self regulation???
When we talk about self regulation, we are talking about self control. This is not as simple as it might seem.
In order to have self control we must recognize our emotions, acknowledge them, and decide on an action to take or decide to do nothing.
This is actually a form of executive function where one must know one is angry, sad, upset, unhappy, jealous, insulted, afraid, etc. We first must learn to recognize our own feelings. This is very difficult for many autistic individuals for many reasons!
When we have our most powerful emotions, those that overwhelm us, our reactions often come in the form of response to trauma. Fight, Flight, Freeze, and sometimes those of us with long term adaption to trauma also fawn or appease.
In order to avoid disruptive interactions, melt downs, or confrontations, it is good to be able to recognize our emotions first, before they overwhelm us.
In many cases this is a skill we can learn.
We can learn to overcome poor interoception through counseling, therapy, and perhaps through self examination and becoming aware of our neurology.
We can also control our physical surroundings by changing them, by leaving them, by doing something different within those surroundings in times of stress or distress. (listening to music, wearing headphones, meditating, exercising, etc).
All of these things are part of self regulation.
We regulate our responses our own bodies have to our emotions… when we get angry, we don’t have to beat ourselves or somebody else up, we can go for a walk, take a hot shower, remove ourselves from the company of those who are upsetting us, choose to ignore the upsetting thing or confront it in a healthy manner instead of allowing ourselves to get overwhelmed, have a melt down or a shut down. WE can change our environment, we can change the way we do things. First we have to recognize that we are upset.
If meltdowns are common, or shutdowns, if we have rages or self injure while we are upset or over stimulated, we can many times learn to recognize that we are in distress before we reach that point of absolute overwhelm. This might require professional help.
When we recognize the very first signs of upset or overwhelm, a change in breathing patterns, general anxiety, tension in the body, agitation, restlessness, we can take steps to acknowledge we are becoming upset or over stimulated, and we can take steps to prevent losing control.
That is self regulation.
If you have struggles with meltdown and overwhelm, read up on how to recognize your own emotions, learn your body’s response to distress and stress. Talk to a counselor or therapist (some occupational therapists specialize in emotional recognition and self control techniques). Some people report that the use of biofeedback helps!
We can learn to recognize our emotions and we can find ways to help ourselves regulate emotions.
We can avoid outbursts of physical responses and change our environment to avoid rages, meltdowns, shut downs, or similar behavior/trauma response struggles.
If you have trouble recognizing your emotions before they build to being overwhelmed, ask for help. You don’t have to do this alone!
Tag: Autism emotions
Autism and Sorting Emotions
Do you know and understand your emotions?
So many of us have been trained to comply, trained in obedience, trained to respond in only certain ways to certain demands by others.
Many autistic individuals on forums I attend have said they learned to disregard their feelings because they were told over and over that it didn’t matter, they must do what they were told from a very early age. “do it” nothing else was discussed or explained.
Regardless if the emotion was fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, their emotions were disregarded and told either verbally or by actions that what they felt was unimportant.
I internalized this to a great degree, since insisting on my own opinion led to punishment even before I could talk.
Resistance was futile, trying to give my opinion or have any influence on my own situation regardless of discomfort or upsetting circumstances, etc met only punishment, shaming, and other very unpleasant experiences.
So much easier to be compliant and to do whatever I was told, jump to it, make sure I was safe by appeasement no matter the personal cost to me. I will do anything you say, don’t be angry, don’t hurt me! That was the only way I lived for 40 years. Survival mode. I had no idea I had alternatives. I had to have it explained in detail that there were other options available. Rigid autistic thinking would not let me see this for myself.
I became depressed and anxious. I attempted suicide at age 30 and was sent to therapy.
I learned that I could not express emotions at all. I could not even find emotions to express.
3 therapists spent talk time asking me how I felt and all I could do was sit there and cry.
I said “I don’t know” repeatedly, or shook my head and remained mute. Miserable and discouraging. I had begged for therapy throughout childhood thinking it might help and when I finally got the opportunity, it seemed like it was yet another failure.
“Talk therapy” may not work with autistic individuals for this very reason. Discussion might need to be based on something else besides feelings. “what do you think happened” What seemed to be the problem? Why do you suppose they did or said that?? etc might work better for most of us. (what do you think?)
I finally found a therapist who could reach me and teach me by asking me to write and read.
I was able to write and revise letters to the person or thing that was upsetting me and through multiple revisions and reading back what I wrote, I was able to begin to sort my feelings.
I had to learn how to get angry and to sort that anger from sorrow. I had to learn to recognize frustration, I had to learn to sort all the feelings I had locked away. I had to recognize I was having these emotions and to sort out exactly what they were.
After 30 years, those emotions were locked up tight and it took lots of emotional homework and scary memory sorting to begin to understand even the most basic of my personal needs and wants.
I really had no other want except to appease other’s demands for so long, this was very, very difficult.
I wish I had found books on emotions back then, but I suspect there was little out there (I never looked!)
Today we have a wonderful tool called an emotion wheel. It actually names our emotions and helps us refine our understanding of our feelings. What a wonderful tool!
I found some good ones on the “therapysystems.co ” website,
You can find others all over the internet in a simple web search.
I know there are many children’s books explaining emotions today. Even Mr Rogers came after I was mostly grown. Since I never relied on TV It might not have done a thing for me anyway.
I can’t use video/tv etc, I rely on printed words.
Others will find video explanations useful, or podcasts.
We have so many resources to use to learn more about ourselves today. It is never too late to “find yourself” and have better self understanding.
It took a lifetime to find out I am autistic.
It is taking a lot of time to find the “holes” in my life experiences and to fix them.
Life has never been better.
If you have problems with outbursts or upsets but can’t define exactly why you are upset, if you cry easily, anger easily, or mostly feel not too much of anything, learning more about emotions may help you too.
I never understood “why” I was feeling upset and anxious, I never understood why I was fearful , overwhelmed, depressed. I still can not define anything that makes me “happy”. It is still a work in progress.
I would love to hear from others who find sorting emotions a struggle. What has helped sort emotions for you?
Grief and Autism
Defining grief and discussing feelings of loss and sadness surrounding Autism
This is dangerous ground. Issues surrounding Autism are sometimes very political and raise great emotional reactions. Ideas about grief are among the most controversial, discussed, ranted over, rage-raising and distressing issues on many autistic forums and blogs today. I am about to try to sort some of the controversy, anger, shaming, blaming, and distress. Instead I might inadvertently add to it, who knows?
I spent hours reading definitions of grief preparatory to writing this.
Grief can be explained as a normal or natural reaction to loss, deep sorrow in reaction to change of any sort, the usual being over loss of a relationship due to death. There are also aspects of grief in loss of expected outcomes or change of expectations or plans .
Grief is not simply feelings of loss, but also a ground for conflicting feelings of guilt, anger,sadness, relief, or release. We can feel sorrow over the loss of a parent and still feel relief over their release from suffering, from the difficult behavior or painful relationship, and feel guilt for feeling the accompanying sense of freedom. All of that is part of grief, and there is often much more.
In natural cycles of grief there can be stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and sadness, and acceptance. These can happen in stages, and can be repeated over and over in any order, sometimes simultaneously, other times remaining in one stage for long periods of time.
Many people may need support and counseling or therapy to help with grief. It is not uncommon for adaptation to be incomplete or adjustments to be unhealthy in our search for consolation , solace, and peace over our place in the midst of our losses.
The thing that brought grief to my attention was the third reading of Tony Attwood’s excellent book on autism. “The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome.”
I read it through the first time when I suspected my autism but was not sure. I thought much of it was written only about children and did not see how much of it applied to me. Then I read it again and recognized so many traits and experiences of my own from my childhood (looking at it and comparing it to my younger self). The entire book read from the aspects of my own childhood was filled with “aha” moments.
I was amazed and so interested… it explained almost everything about my early life. This was it!
The third time I read the book, something very strange happened. As I read those descriptions of childhood struggles I had the urge to cry uncontrollably. I felt sadness and loss and immeasurable helplessness and confusion. I was re-living my childhood emotions. I felt the feelings I had felt in all of those impossible situations from my childhood, the guilt, the anger, the sorrow, overwhelming sorrow and sadness all wrapped together in one experience, each situation the author described bringing forth a flow of memories of similar situations from my childhood, adolescence, and teen years.
The most predominant of these was the deep sorrow I had for myself and my struggles.
I experienced this feeling for most of my life. Feeling nobody understood, nobody cared, I was lost and helpless, feeling I was the cause of everybody else’s troubles. I remember being told over and over to stop feeling sorry for myself. I remember wailing ” I don’t know how” .
I can remember so many tears and so much distress. I remember begging for therapy, a counselor, for somebody to help, and being told repeatedly that “there is nothing wrong with you”.
I just needed to shape up, to get with the program, to shake it off, pull myself together and TRY..to do right, to be good, and to stop being selfish and bad. I never understood how I was supposed to do these things, but I was to do them by myself by willpower and strength of character. The feeling of futility was immense.
OK, back to grief. I believe I was trapped in grief and despair. I knew I needed help and comfort and that I was not ever ever going to get. I had a need for understanding and compassion for the struggles nobody seemed to understand, and took for deliberate willfulness and acts of evil. I needed explanations, insights, support and directions, I needed details of almost everything explained in depth . I knew I was not going to get them in my home situation.
I came to the stage of acceptance eventually, but the underlying sadness was there throughout most of my childhood and young adulthood. I spent my early day to day life not only in fear and dread of any interaction or mistake I might make, but also in grieving for the things I was pretty sure others had somehow obtained but that were forever out of reach for me.
Grief for loss of loved ones is called bereavement. It is a reaction to losing through death, divorce, separation, life changing disability or other circumstances. I have always processed this sort of grief more easily because the “why” factor is usually evident. The loved one died, had health changes, was no longer in love , moved far away, all concrete facts that don’t have that “why” factor.
Now we come to an opinion that is not popular with many autism groups. There is a huge backlash against parents of autistic offspring who lament online that their children are suffering and wish that they were not autistic.
I find the anger of some autistic people may be misplaced because the distress the parents are showing is at their own helplessness to help their struggling children, some of whom are very heavily afflicted with many of the worst features of autism.
I think it is natural grief that is showing, however poorly worded in forums or blogs. The parents are truly grieving because they see all sorts of things that they have been helpless to prevent and to aid.
There is a loss of expectations for a normal childhood and adulthood, a loss of dreams for a bright future, a loss of the idea of “what it was supposed to be”.
I understand the angry autistics’ reaction to the spoken wishes of so many parents saying they wish the child had not been born, that they wish the child was not autistic, etc.
In many cases such children are killed by their parents. In many cases children are abused by their parents.
In times of the past and today, many wish for elimination of pregnancy of a potentially
” damaged ” child , society of today deeming it is OK to select which pregnancy can be terminated , the demand is there for tests for autism as there is for down’s syndrome and other genetic conditions. To be an autistic child and hear that you are unwanted is probably a very common state. I heard it too. I understand the reaction against such statements. I understand the reaction against being told we are unwanted.
I understand the pain it causes in our own autistic hearts and I suggest that the anger we feel is grieving of our own over things that we have missed, have lost, have never known. I have no answers. Grief is part of the human condition and will be experienced by the vast majority of humans today. Grief has been the hardest to sort and understand of all the almost constant emotions of my life. Now with my new understanding of my own autism I am making progress toward sorting it out.
I have no answers but find it difficult to focus all of my rage on the parents in these support groups who are feeling loss of ability to help their children, who feel grief at the things they want their children to be able to experience or goals they will perhaps never attain. I don’t think it is realistic to blame the behavior of a few parents on all parents of autistic children, any more than we all recognize how unfair it is to blame ourselves for our autistic struggles, or the behavior of a few autistic people .
I may write more about grief and autism as I continue to sort and to understand. Mean time, I want to make a call for unity. Autism needs different perspectives of diverse people to continue to help us all understand the many ways we are affected, our needs, our self understanding, our struggles and our triumphs. I hope we can refrain from tearing other grieving people apart in our quest for “justice”, “fairness”, etc.
As human beings we are all in this together. Let kindness and not anger and retribution win this one.
Autism Anger
Shhhhhhh don’t talk about that!!!!!
Autism has a few “sore spots” that seem to be avoided as topics for discussion in the forums I participate in. When somebody does open up, there is a flood of responses, seemingly relief in finding that individuals are not alone in their struggles. I am talking about emotional regulation struggles this time.
Autism and anger, autism and emotional breakdowns due to anxiety, fears, frustration, and inability to cope displayed as meltdowns, shutdowns, violence, tantrums, and outbursts.
We all understand this happens frequently to many of us. But we are ashamed or afraid to talk about it.
Autism is all about our neurology. Many of the ways we experience the world are not the same for us as “neurotypical” or average, “normal” or non-autistic people. Struggles with emotional regulation are definitely not limited to autistic people, we see examples everywhere of people behaving with one or another form of problems with emotional regulation.
Emotions and responses to those emotions are things we generally learn about when we are very small (people in general).
We are taught to recognize our emotions and how to deal with them in socially acceptable ways, usually before we leave home for school days.
Learning to recognize emotions can be helped by explanations given through instruction person to person, videos, books, and role playing, role modeling and other ways.
Learning to recognize emotions and learning ways to express those emotions in healthy and socially acceptable ways takes practice. The good news is that for the most part, these are skills that can benefit from a coach or teacher, a therapist or a counselor.
Sorting and learning to recognize one’s emotions and how to deal with them in healthy ways is part of the sensory system ( remember I said emotions had a neurological basis?) called interoception.
Interoception used to be considered part of the proprioceptive group of neurology but more recently has been removed to its own special category.
Interoception has to do with what you feel physically inside you. It is the sense which tells you what you are feeling when your body gives you physical clues to your needs and wants. That empty feeling in your middle is telling you that you need to eat. The pressure you feel in your lower regions means you need to use the bathroom. The tenseness of your muscles in your stomach and legs can mean that you are afraid and ready to run. The tenseness of your muscles in your neck, your clenched jaw, your tight fists may mean you are getting ready to fight.
Autism often interferes with our ability to recognize the first physical signs of our emotions… so we end up surprised at our own emotional outbursts and our extreme reactions to emotions we did not recognize we were feeling until they reached crisis proportions. The body experiences emotions in a physical way and we can learn to recognize the signs.
Many of us have not been aware of or have not learned to notice the physical signs of emotion. Elevated heartbeat? Heavy breathing? Weak pulse, feeling faint, tight muscles in any part or parts of the body? Feeling sick to one’s stomach, clenched fists, gritting teeth or tight muscles in lips, jaws? Smiling, grimacing, frowning, head lowered or thrown back? What we are feeling physically and doing with our bodies is a huge clue to how we are feeling emotionally. Many autistic people might not recognize body language in others, and many might not recognize our own body’s signs as well. We can learn!
In the forum discussions I have participated in and observed, many autistic adults have remembered that as children they decided emotions were not useful and made deliberate choices to disregard them or to hide them. This seems generally to have been “early on” in the nursery or as a very small child. We can learn to recognize and make use of our emotions, but it does not come naturally to may of us. It is one more thing we might need help with to sort it out. Especially this might be true in older people who are set in their ways and less likely to realize or recognize alternatives.
It is never too late to learn about interoception and how to recognize our building needs and emotions before we reach the bursting point.
Occupational therapists might be able to help, and there are many anger management classes, biofeedback specialists and therapists who specialize in behavioral difficulties. There is much printed and online regarding how to recognize emotions early inside us and how to use that “early warning system” when we recognize it in order to work with our emotions in healthy ways instead of finding ourselves in a huge and surprising/ distressing/ destructive/embarrassing/ blow up situation.
If you struggle with overwhelming emotions of any sort, I want to encourage you that this can be changed, and new ways can be learned to recognize our emotions, to direct and control them into healthier behavior in distressing situations. We can learn to recognize and use our interoception skills as an ‘early warning system’ to detect and divert our physical reactions to emotional situations and make better choices in how to express ourselves or to deal with those emotions before we are overwhelmed and helpless in still another emotional blowout.
If this is an area of distress for you, please be encouraged, it is something that can be helped.
We can learn new ways, sometimes we need to reach out to others who can help us sort it all out.
Don’t be embarrassed or ashamed to take action. Those folks are there because they want to help and they want us to live better lives. There is no shame in asking to learn new skills. And the benefits are beyond measure in terms of the quality of your life and your relationships to others as you move forward.
Flat Affect
I missed this one, I think!
I have been trying to learn if there is a link between Parkinsonism’s “mask” and Autism’s frequent reports of flat affect.
Flat affect is simply a lack of expressivity in one’s face and reactions.. the lack of showing emotion in one’s “presentation” to the world. Flat affect is reported as being frequent among autistic people.
I was quite surprised when the Doctor who diagnosed my autism said in the summary report that I “presented with flat affect”. I had always thought I was quite expressive both in my face and body, and in my voice! I certainly feel emotions, and was amazed that these emotions are not clearly visible on my face and in my reactions, etc in interactions with others, etc.
My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s while she was in her mid 50’s partly because she appeared to show “the mask” or flat affect that is known to develop with Parkinson’s disease… and knowing of her autism, I am now wondering if the flat affect due to her autism was perhaps attributed instead to Parkinson’s.
Flat affect might be one reason that autistic people are often accused of being cold.. our emotions may not be evident to others because of flat effect… NT people generally are very facially expressive of emotions and looking at one’s face is often a giveaway to one’s thoughts ( one being a person or an individual). When other people can not see our emotions clearly displayed on our faces, it is assumed that we are unfeeling. This is often far from the truth!
If you have been accused of ‘Not caring, being cold, being heartless, unreceptive, detached,” or otherwise unfeeling, yet you know you feel emotions sometimes desperately, perhaps flat affect is present. Did you know? I did not!
Was there LOVE????
Something is missing from the lives of autistic children.
If the insights I am gaining from adult reports of their childhood are any indication.
Growing up I truly believed my family hated me and could not wait to get rid of me,
did not want to hear from me, was not interested in anything I had to say, how I felt,
what I thought. I believed they looked for reasons to try to hurt me, to shame me, to humiliate me, to cause me emotional pain and to punish me. I learned to be wary, defensive, self protective, afraid and anxious.
I still remember vividly almost every incident in which I was treated this way . To be fair, my perceptions might have been skewed due to my very poor visual and audio processing, which did not allow me to experience anything in “real time”. I was not equipped to understand a thing I saw or heard (human interactions face to face or in any person to person settings such as family interactions, school classrooms and free time association with others, watching tv, movies, or today watching you tube or other online visual and audio presentations). Nobody knew or understood about autism back then. I do understand (now) how it happened.
I remember family sometimes said they loved me, but in day to day experiences it was very difficult to believe. I remember my sister asking me if I believed I was loved, and I replied that I believed my mother when she said she loved us. That’s what she said, one did not doubt mother!
But I never felt loved. I never understood the concept of love. Nobody ever explained it. I could not see it, so I could not feel it. Looking back, I can see signs ( now ) of concern and caring, but at the time of my family and youth experiences growing up, I did not see or understand. Nothing in my childhood was ever explained. I was simply ‘told’ and had to accept whatever i was told, and accept it immediately, whether it was good or bad.
I rely on my autistic brothers and sisters on several forums to give me insight and understanding of how my autistic life experiences compare with others’.
I rely on insights they provide to make adaptations or adjustments in the way I see my world. They explain much that has remained hidden to me all these years. I asked on a couple of the larger forums (over a thousand members in each) this question.
“When you were growing up , did you feel loved?”
Hundreds of answers poured in over a period of days. If the answers I got were any insight, the majority (approximately 19 out of 20) reported that they did not feel loved. I was not alone!
I had suspected as much due to the large number of posts with memories of difficult struggles and cruelty reported of childhoods past.
In other conversations, Autistic parents swear they will not intentionally make their child feel unloved, uncared for, ignored, or cast aside, isolated or as though they were being discarded.
I believe it is human nature for parents to want life to be better for their children than the childhood they experienced. (but I don’t know many people who had happy childhoods).
I then asked a follow up question and asked the people who gave me insights to answer another question. “if you grew up unloved, what could have changed to make you feel loved?” and
” If you grew up feeling loved, what do you think made you believe you were loved”?
Overwhelmingly, the answers to this question were so moving. First of all, many of us needed to feel safe. Many of us remembered frequent emotional or physical punishments, criticisms, pointing out of weaknesses and scoldings, never feeling free to be themselves, feeling the anger, disgust, contempt and revulsion of their family members and just waiting for the next round of attacks on their bodes and or their psychological/emotional existence.
Most said they wished they had been listened to, encouraged, had explanations or discussions about so many aspects of life, had been approved of, had been included in family activities, had been at least sometimes the focus of loving and kind attention, instead of being ignored, criticized, cast aside or isolated.
One point brought up over and over, was being kept from family outings, family events, family activities that other siblings were included in.
I remember being sent to my grandparents, who did make me feel loved and worthy and who encouraged me, engaged me, and were kind to me.
I was in about 4th grade when I finally realized that the weekends I spent at my grandparents were weekends that family outings without me happened. I got full reports from the sister next younger, about where they went and what fun it all was. When I protested, and asked whi I could not have gone too, I was told “you had your special time with grandma and grandpa”.
The weekends when my siblings went to visit grandma and grandpa, the rest of us stayed home.
Many others had similar memories. Not welcome in my own family circle to do the fun things they did. What message does that send?
I think I really did not understood about all the facets of love and all its implications or the ways it is shown. I know I tried to make my own children loved, and as young adults, they report I succeeded in that. Somehow that is so precious to me. Of all the things I longed for as a child, to feel I was loved was at the top of the list. I never felt I succeeded with my parents or my siblings. Love may have been present but I did not experience it. I did not believe it. How much of my experience and its interpretation was the truth, and how much was my processing struggles and my autism keeping me from understanding???
I have struggled, as many autistic folks do, to sort my emotions and understand them.
Not until my learning about my own autism, and examining my previous experiences through the understanding of how autism has affected everything in my life did I have more than crumbs of understanding taken from clues in my early life, and most of it I “got wrong” or was incompletely informed. It is a lot to digest, it is a lot to understand. I am still working on sorting it out.
I hope that autistic children today are getting explanations about everything, the nature of things that are not black and white cut and dried in life, things like emotions- love, hate, how they can happen in a relationship at the same time and what it means. How emotions work, how to recognize them, how to understand other peoples’ emotions and what to do about it all.
Parents of autistic children, please keep explaining everything… what, how, why, when…. it is so important your child’s understanding of the world, their place in it, and to their sense of self and their perception of life as it unfolds around them. Don’t assume they understand what seems evident to you. I am fully intelligent, and I can learn, but sometimes I need to have the nature of things explained. In the case of those with auditory and or visual processing struggles, a lot that is evident to neurotypical people can be missed or misinterpreted.
Take time, explain everything. Your children will thank you some day.
Double Empathy
whose point of view measures autistic responses?
This is extremely important! https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/92352784/posts/2592725199
Quincy describes the problem very clearly.
Countless studies have been done over the years supposedly measuring autistic subjects responses to emotional situations, to situations regarding “theory of mind” and to measuring empathy and the like. How do we measure emotional response? Can it be done scientifically? Some of the problems regarding the design of “tests” and “studies” of autism are subjective to the views of the testers.
Autistic adults on the “elder autism” forums I attend discuss tests about ‘cold autism’. ‘Lack of insight’ , “Lack of empathy” knowing these tests are completely inaccurate and scoffing at the claims made. Nothing about us without us… time for science to take a second look at some shoddy and poorly constructed “tests” of autistic subjects.
My personal worst gripe is the test that supposedly measures emotions viewed in photographs of eyes. The photographs used in the 2 tests I have viewed use actors and people “pretending” the emotions that are being portrayed. The human “pretending” to feel certain ways is not likely to express themselves exactly as a person who actually feels the emotions. There is a social bias in this test which is outrageous, since cultural traditions and training also have a part in human facial expressions.
The list would be a mile long if we named all the false conclusions “scientists” have presented as truth and reality. Please read and understand what is presented here.
I am Grateful to Quincy for permission to share. His insights and eloquence here are unparalleled. Read it all!
There is an old joke about a scientist who cuts off a frog’s legs, one by one, saying “jump frog jump” and each time the frog jumps with 3, 2, 1 leg, he measures the distance and records it. Then he cuts off the 4th leg and says “jump frog jump”. The frog does not jump. Scientist writes in his little record book “frog with no legs can’t hear”. Think about it.
Autism and Interoception
How are you feeling?
Have you ever heard of interoception?
This a sensory function which is still being described, and there is still some disagreement over what its definition should include.
Interoception is the sense of your inner self which includes the ability to feel what is going on inside you.
The initial definitions were about giving a person ability to recognize inner physical symptoms of needs: when you felt hungry, thirsty, needed to go to the bathroom, felt pain or discomfort in your internal workings.
The definition has been refined over time and using recent studies now includes also your emotional status.
Studies are in the initial stages but tend toward showing that neurological ties to the inner body are the same that are used for ‘feeling’ emotions, and that yes, emotions are tied to physical feelings as well.
We all know that, if we think about it. Tension headaches, anxiety stomach aches, the burning that comes with anger and the churning gut of distress, and how do you suppose the term ‘heartache’ was coined?
Right now there is debate over which comes first, the physical sensations or the emotional processes involved in recognizing ones “feelings”. Some scientists are saying that the physical responses are the initial ones which cause us to then recognize the emotions behind them.
I think the jury is still out on that idea, but it is interesting to think about the implications.
Interoception as it is described today is related to recognizing physical and emotional status of our inner selves. It is the neurological sense that tells us ‘how we feel’ in the most literal way.
How is this likely to be tied to autism?
Interoception is believed to exist because of human neurology. It is being defined as another sense.
We are equipped with an internal monitor through a network of nerves which sense and report “how we feel”.
Autism being a function of neurology and strongly tied to sensory processing, can show its effects in any part of the human neurological system.
Many autistic people are not good at recognizing when they are hungry, thirsty, tired, whether their bladder is full, and on and on.
We are notoriously poor at sorting our emotions as well.
All of these issues are related to interoception because they are all issues of sensory processing within us.
I will use imaginary Sally as an example.
Sally was late to be toilet trained, she simply was not able to tell when she ‘had to go”. She often wet the bed. Her body did not wake her when her bladder was full because it did not recognize that discomfort.
Sally had a ruptured appendix when she was 25, and did not recognize the abdominal ache, which she reported as vague and undefined. She finally had uncontrollable vomiting which drove her to the emergency room where she was barely in time for her life to be saved by immediate surgery.
Sally will get so involved in a project that she forgets to eat, and when she finally does eat, she does not know when to stop, often getting sick from overeating.
She is known for her volatile temper and her extreme emotional outbusts.
All those struggles are likely to have their base in processing input from her interoceptive system.
Do you have signs of interoceptive struggles in your own life?
Emotions and Autism
Sorting or recognizing emotions is something not addressed too often in discussions about autism, yet I see it as being one of the most troubling features of my autism for most of my life.
I am not sure how my emotions got so tangled. How much was due to the dysfunction of our family, and my position in the dynamics? How much was due to the autistic inability to recognize the emotional state of others? I was dependent on others to explain the world to me, and for the most part the explanations I got ( or at least the way i understood the explanations- which were few) were wrong. If I assimilated the explanations I was given and applied them, it ( my perceptions of these explanations ) just dug me deeper into confusion. I really had no idea about emotions, how to identify them, and what they actually meant.
Autism confused me further… when I believed I grasped a concept or a rule, inflexibility did not allow me to see I might not have understood “the rules” after all. I held that rule fast to my heart and mind because I understood somehow that there were rules and I needed to follow them, and the better I learned the rules, the less trouble I would be in, the less angry people would be with me, the less I would be scolded or spanked or scorned or ridiculed. There was safety in being able to cling to a rule. Of course my autistic perceptions were inaccurate, and incomplete. My understanding of explanations was literal, my concepts of ‘the way the world is” were drastically skewed.
So it is no wonder that the world of emotions, which I did not perceive in others until i brought their wrath down around me, was left behind in my search to understand how to avoid the complications by learning the rules. My emotions were not useful, other’s emotions were not clearly understood and the dynamics of what things activate emotions was for the most part very unclear to me. I was told over and over that I was rude, unfeeling, selfish, thoughtless, etc… but nobody ever explained in what ways or how I was ‘being’ all of those things. I was told over and over “you should know”… but that did not show or explain to me how I “should know”, nor yet the specifics of what I “should know” and how to apply that knowledge to whatever situation it was I was in that got me into perpetual trouble.
It was not until I became suicidal and finally found a good counselor that I began to figure out emotional dynamics, both other people’s and my own. I had no idea I was autistic at age 30, that understanding finally arrived at age 66, but mean time the therapist I worked with was able to point out several misunderstandings in my thinking. He taught me to be healthily self assertive… but before I could be self assertive, I had to know what I needed and wanted. I had always tried to please others and appease/prevent their aggression and anger, but never had looked at trying to figure out who I was or what I needed, what I thought about any topic, what I wanted. I went from such family dynamics into a married state that duplicated the patterns at home, only perhaps escalated the severity of the problems in patterns that existed. During that time the therapist encouraged me to write. I had been in the habit of writing long apologetic letters to people whenever they were upset with me. The therapist somehow could see that for me the written word, and writing was my best form of understanding, communication, and self expression.
He assigned me books about making healthy choices and how to have effective and healthy communications to read, and asked me to write about my problems.
This was such an illuminative experience! What most people probably learn in their early teens, I was learning for the first time as a 30 year old adult. It was freeing! When I read back the things I wrote ( I wrote letters which i never sent to the individuals who I had struggles with) I began to understand what my problems were… and the therapist was able to point out how I could choose to respond in different ways to those problems.
Among other things, I had to learn to recognize anger in myself and to express it. I had to learn how to say NO to people instead of bending over backwards and going far out of my way to please them. Family member or complete stranger, I was the servant and the doormat and the “please don’t be angry or aggressive with me, I will do anything to avoid that” person. Think of Archie Bunker’s Edith and you will have a small idea.
I still have to resist this tendency in every day life and measure in my mind exactly what is reasonable and sane for me to do as opposed to simply responding with”yes” to avoid any discomfort.
I had to learn to recognize frustration, sadness, shock/surprise and understand how these emotions could be acknowledged and expressed as well.
I learned communication tools and how to use them. I had empathy/sympathy when others’ pain was explained to me, but had (and still have) struggles with recognizing distress or anger or other emotions in others.
I am better at trying to put myself in people’s places , endlessly comparing in my mind their current experience to any previous experience I may have had to get a clue to what they may be thinking or feeling as I interact with them.
This seems to be something “neurotypical”( non autistic) people know without working at it, they are able to perceive emotion and understand its significance as if by instinct. I still am not good at this, but I have better skills with practice 37 years after the counselor than I had as a child and young adult.
In struggles for everyday function, my emotions tend to get shoved to the background and not recognized or acknowledged until they build into ‘overload’. Then it all comes out. I have got much better at recognizing the first hints of emotions in myself and paying attention to them, and if and when I can do that, I might be able to better respond to a situation instead of its building until I fall apart.
I have to say that going to that therapist was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was also the best thing I ever did in making my life better and easier for myself. I have so much more understanding than I did before.
I have lived with fear and anxiety as being my 2 predominant emotions for most of my life. Certainly in those days, they were the only emotions I deeply experienced on an every day level. Never knowing when you are going to get punished for ‘doing wrong’ and never knowing when or understanding why it happened are powerful motivators to be anxious and worried. As I have got more practice and made better choices , and now especially since I understand that my autism caused so many misunderstandings, and how that worked, my anxiety is leaving me, and I am rarely bothered by depression.
I think both anxiety and depression were because I was helpless in my former roles with no way to avoid the emotional and physical pain.
I learned how to recognize my emotions and how to change my behavior patterns by making better choices. But first I had to recognize that I had the power to choose.
OldLady With Autism 