Autism Conclusions (at least for now)

I have just about had it.  My own fault, I know. Someday soon I will have to collect them all into one place for ease of location.

They can have a very low tolerance for intrusion, and a very low tolerance for emotionality, even for positive feelings at high intensity, like being in love. It is tough for those who have to live with it. Remember Harold, who finds it hard to tell his wife he loves her, not because he is not tender and ultimately supportive, but because he tends to avoid thinking about all high-emotion subjects. We all want peace in the family, but sometimes issues must be discussed and can't be avoided.  Sometimes emotionality or intrusion is appropriate.

I will stress again that they are generally not seeking to exploit others, it is simply not noticing, and so missing an aspect of caring, whatever their feelings for others are.  They often have less automatic empathy, or it is impaired in some way.  Autists, especially women who notice their difference from other women, tend to like about themselves that they don't engage in the same amount of "drama" or "manipulation." They therefore get on well with other autistic women, who also eschew drama. But isn't this pretty similar to a low tolerance for emotionality, that emotions (especially negative but not excluding intense ) just bother them?  I have known some who quickly become less rational, more impulsive in the face of emotion. And some are pretty self-righteous about it, as if they are the ones that have got it right and the others being somewhat destructive because they find them irritating.

Aspies/autists, is it that the internal signal of just jangling in the face of emotions - not dissimilar to sensory issues, really - is so strong that it knocks out the external signals, like other people disapproving subtly?  I have long noticed (okay, noticed in retrospect that some had done it decades ago) that when they focus on the task of reading other people's emotions they do quite well, so was not shocked when I saw this from Claire Jack, who wrote Women with Autism. 

Compare this to the mimicking of auditory hallucinations of dichotic listening. We had a machine that would be brought 'round at the hospital that would headset you into "hearing voices" in the same way that a psychotic person does.  Many people found it highly upsetting. Any distracting reduces functioning, and unsurprisingly, more complex tasks are affected more. Tasks which require attending to both emotional/social and intellectual content at the same time are particularly affected. The subject will often pick one and hope that they get enough of the other to get by. If autism has the internal signal of being just plain bothered, as we are familiar with with loud noises or distracting lights or other sensory upsets (clothing), then it could throw them into something similar, attending only to the intellectual, especially if that is a strong suit, and just hoping for the best on the other.  Or the emotional/social might be so powerful that they have to flip the other way, unable to perform the intellectual tasks that they would ordinarily find easy. ("You said I was being rude. I must shut you up/walk away/punish you.") Therefore, they learn to intensely focus and tune out the rest of the world. They do it first to reduce anxiety, yet as we have seen , it can become a become a powerful tool. Everyone else is distracted by the heightened noise or emotionality or ambiguous signals, but you have both predisposition and long practice in zeroing in on the important point. Aspies can ignore hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, the anger of those around them, etc in the service of focus on a problem.

"Just plain bothered" might also describe having to attend to social cues they do not well understand. This may underlie the demand avoidance, the intense dislike of being told to do something.

In those situations I have seen them flip to anger and be overwhelmed by emotion themselves, sometimes instantly.  As they are usually not excitable it can be jarring. It is not meanness or cruelty, but a certain "I have to make this bad thing stop" seems to take over. The strategy of complete removal, of ignoring others and giving them the silent treatment rather than staying in and arguing is not only common, but it is deeply rationalised as being a superior, even polite strategy, because then they aren't "bothering" the other person with upsetting emotions. They define "politely ignoring" things so broadly as to have little meaning. They can cut you dead and think they are being the polite one.  It works great with schoolgirls and maiden aunts. 

Yeah, that was me being a bit mean, wasn't it? It's not common, but I've seen it. Ignoring others can be redefined as being the one that is seeking peace, even as such insult heightens tensions. High intrusion people like myself are going to encounter this more often.  For example, my personal note of responding to the overliteral interpretation of "But you said...but you said..." by engaging in it myself, overanalysing the word-choices of others, reading in a lot of meaning, is more than a little ironic. Dueling Aspie Extremes. This gets very strong in the face of the Silent Treatment and ignoring, because there is inadequate data to work from, causing others to scramble to find some ground to stand on.  The person administering the Silent Treatment thinks this is just backwards: "No, you were supposed to just go away whether you understood or not.  If you feel you didn't get enough explanation, too bad for you. I just don't want to talk, so your needs don't matter."

There is a failure of imagination described in the literature that I am quite uncertain about.  I get the part that some don't engage the social hypotheticals of 

However, girls with autism have described this to be almost the opposite: They may live in an atypically rich world of imagination with multiple imaginary friends.

Most of my clients get lost in role-playing games and books and the fictional characters in their books and movies can be more real to them than their peers. They can relate to fictional characters and understand their motives and backstories even as real people are hidden and difficult.

The difficulties with general overview, self-observation, overliteralness, reciprocity, theory of mind - these seem related, along the lines of stepping out of internal experience and converting to external. Aspies often learn social skills by direct imitation of others who seem to be getting it right. That would be an odd counterbalance to a group of people who find it easier to stand alone, insisting that something is teal (because it is teal, dammit) when everyone else is saying it's green, that they are even more dependent than others on social imitation.  Perhaps it is along the lines of choosing who they will imitate, and then clinging fiercely to that. That would fit with the highly counterintutive idea that they find themselves in cults, and unable to stand outside and look at that objectively, as well as the observation that they have more trouble with group rather than one-to-one conversations.  There is just too much going on. 

What have I learned? I had never heard of Pathological Demand Avoidance, but it is one of those things I recognised on sight when I saw it, and thought of half-a-dozen individuals immediately. Significantly, I don't think this applies to all Aspies, and I think care should be taken not to assume you are going to see it. It may be that we've all got it to a certain extent - that is, more than everyone who just doesn't like being told what to do - but that there are protective factors like agreeableness, or the desire for peace in the household is so strong that it overrules PDA, or a sort of double-reverse-gainer effect where some learn to see demands coming so well at an intuitive level that they head it off at the pass, take steps to mitigate it early, or learn to get out of Dodge before it comes.  I don't know. I just know there are people I don't see it in at all.

Pathological Demand Avoidance or

Pathological Demand Avoidance (better) 

I have seen YouTube videoas go by about them, but don't know if they are any good.