Atmosphere – Snowflakes (Part 1)

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Yes, I have social problems, but honestly I feel that the idea that autism is a ‘social disorder’ is putting the cart before the horse, and really missing the point. Autism is primarily a sensory and information processing and filtering difference, and the descriptions of autistics written by allistics are simply descriptions of the differences that allistics can see, and think are important.

Kirsten Lindsmith

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Differences in sensory processing do of course affect what might be called ‘social skills,’ for example many autistic people don’t integrate incoming visual information in a way that allows them to easily notice the tiny subtle differences in body position and facial expression that are used in neurotypical communication […]

Sensory integration also affects motor movements, and so many autistic people may not show the body language that non-autistic people expect for the way they are feeling. […]

Quincy Hansen

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In recent years the narrative has shifted from saying that autistic people feel too little – usually due to a purported empathy deficit – to saying we feel too much.

Perhaps the most worrying thing here regards how this new framing leads to autistic suffering being blamed on autistic oversensitivity.

In this regard it is worth drawing attention to a form of psychological domestic abuse sometimes called ‘gaslighting’. What this refers to is the systematic undermining of the victim’s sense of reality in order to make them think the abuse is their fault rather than the fault of the abuser. Very significantly, one of the core ways to do this is for the abuser to convince the victim that they are just too sensitive, meaning that any hurt they feel is not down to their abusive environment but rather due to their own inability to cope with the world. […]

With this in mind, I am wary of all accounts that frame autistic suffering and disablement stemming from us being hyper-sensitive. Far from reversing it, all this does is make the pathologisation of autism more subtle, more hegemonic.

In fact, the issue is that the sensory world is designed for the neurotypical, and so has by and large failed to accommodate the autistic sensory-style. That is, whilst it is true that we suffer from ‘too much information’, this stems from the neurotypical-centric way in which the world is organised – not due to how we process the world as such.

Robert Chapman

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So I’m sort of bad at figuring out how I feel about things, or just how things are, objectively. This is probably due to growing up with gaslighting although I also think that not being able to identify your feelings is supposed to be normal for people with ASD.

Although maybe it’s normal for people with ASD as a result of gaslighting.

Amanda Forest Vivian

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[…] But it is also a context where many of the things – such as eye contact and physical contact – often used by parents to show affection for their children either panic us or cause us physical pain, and where our ‘emotional growth’ might be measured by others in terms of how much we can deaden our bodies and emotions and allow ourselves to be subjected to terror and pain on a regular basis.

Imagine growing up somewhere where to be hit upside the head and locked in a room with a large predatory animal are the two highest forms of affection, and your emotional development is gauged on how well you learn to put up with those situations.

To people who experience certain kinds of touch as pain and eye contact as a predator-style threat, that is some part of our experience growing up. And that is an experience we can have in the most loving and caring of families, if our families don’t understand what those experiences feel like to us (and not all of us show pain and discomfort by pulling away, either, so it’s not always possible to gauge our reactions by that sort of thing).

Mel Baggs

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Neurotypical kids’ social development is fostered by feedback from their parents, who mirror their behavior and thus model reciprocal interactions from an early age. As Morton Ann Gernsbacher and her colleagues pointed out, autistic babies don’t give the usual cues their parents are expecting, and the parents don’t necessarily mirror them or give them the social feedback that helps neurotypical babies.

So how much of an autistic person’s social disabilities come from their own characteristics, and how much from early differences in their interactions with caretakers?

Emily Morson

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culture, class and disability play such a huge role in how we show emotions

Mel Baggs

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Many autistic traits are a result of being so in tune with other people’s energy that it literally hurts.

Shutting down to others emotions and taking them on without discrimination are two sides of the same coin.

Briannon Lee

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Next

Atmosphere – Breeze

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[R]ight from the start, from the time someone came up with the word ‘autism’, the condition has been judged from the outside, by its appearances, and not from the inside according to how it is experienced.

Donna Williams

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On how autistic people have to waste so much time trying to explain that our actions and behaviors don’t necessarily mean what other people assume they mean. And how people will actually argue with us about what our behaviors mean, because they erroneously believe body language and psychology are universal and are arrogantly intent on projecting the meaning of their own typical behaviors onto everyone else.

Twilah Hiari

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We say a child has autism if he displays a combination of traits and behaviours that are deemed to be problematic […] Professionals observe these ‘autistic behaviours’ and then assess the people who display them by using a sort of circular reasoning: Why does Rachel flap her hands? Because she has autism. Why has she been diagnosed with autism? Because she flaps.

Barry M. Prizant

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But it’s the research with typically developing babies that truly suggests we should take social attention theories of autism with a large dose of salt.

Too often, researchers assume a specific trait, such as social disability in autism, and then reach backwards looking for something to explain it. Or, they might see two traits – social disability and avoidance of eye contact – and link them together, because intuitively, eye contact seems related to social functioning. This is not good science, and the flaws of this approach become especially obvious when it is done without reference to how the trait [for instance, social (dis)ability] typically develops, as happened here.

Emily Morson

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For seventy years (at least), people have been making assumptions about autistic people based on outward behaviour.  Even the diagnostic criteria for autism is based on what is easily observable by an onlooker. They think that the stranger we act, the ‘more autistic’ we are.

C.L. Lynch

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Autistic being is predicated on un-being. In order to claim an emotion, we need to have it empirically validated.

[…]

An autistic person cannot experience abuse, cannot feel her body being shoved against the cold wall of a hospital psych ward – an autistic person cannot experience systemic violence unless a non-autistic person validates those claims.

Melanie Yergeau

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In my experience, the autism spectrum diagnostic criteria are frustratingly incomplete.  They paint a picture of that which can only be seen on the outside, by an observer who knows nothing about the firsthand experience – I.e., “what it’s like” to actually be on the spectrum.

Laina

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Next

Stories Analogies

Extra section related to:

Compass Sailing

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Sparrows and penguins

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Writing and speech

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A dog’s new kitten

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Thinking about autism & philosophical models – Poems: Moonstruck, Breath, Monster, Frog Prince

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Truth Beacon – Experiences

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The scientific literature is accurate, as far it goes. Multiple sclerosis results in progressive disability (there are scales for measuring this) or loss of function (you don’t need scales for this). But science is empirical, confined to the observable sphere. Science doesn’t know what anything feels like, the nature of anything. […]

Out of context, Paraic O’Donnell

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disability is a complex identity {if it even is _{(considered as)} one}, and disabled people are multifaceted non-monolithic human beings

Partial quote, Wendy Lu

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The moment you forget that you can make mistakes, you are able to do great harm to the people you base your ego on understanding. […]

Viewing yourself as Good With an entire category of people opens you up to massively egotistical mistakes that lead you down the road to outright physical and emotional abuse.

The best way to approach learning about cats is with a combination of respect and humility. Know that you’re going to mess up, but don’t focus on it so hard that you don’t even try. […]

Out of context, Mel Baggs

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Some of the better research I’ve been part of has given me space somewhere to share what I think and feel or how my experiences do or don’t fit. It also follows up in some way with the conclusions. There’s a relationship, a sense of reciprocity at least in the process even if we don’t agree at all about anything else. It doesn’t have to be participatory to be collaborative in that sense. Nor does participatory research bypass issues of exploitation or harm in and of itself. The nature of community is the diversity of perspectives and voice – it is rare to be able to accomodate each of them.

The other kinds of research (and I include interview here) feel exploitative. My experiences are collected as evidence of ideas I don’t agree with and contorted to fit arguments that don’t include me. Or they are simply inept, using my time to educate themselves on matters they haven’t bothered to read about.

Sarah K Reece

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It’s perfectly okay to cherry pick ideas and strategies from different – even conflicting – frameworks to create something individual and effective for yourself/selves.

The Dissociative Initiative

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[…] assume they are a person, and remember what you don’t know.

Julia Bascom

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In the same series:

Truth Beacon – Research & Authority

Truth Beacon – Advocacy