What The Autistic Nervous System Needs
My therapist and I last week, although I can’t recall how we got onto it although probably it was our discussion of resilience, talked briefly about two seemingly discrepant ways in which my autistic brain approaches and handles circumstances in which my answers basically seem to be a matter of a binary “yes” or “no”.
It turns out I’ve mentioned my go-to stories for each scenario together before, when I was getting into the idea of the neuroergonomics of being autistic.
This is as good a description as any of why I’ve grown increasingly insistent that people give me time and space for answers and decisions. It’s why, even before the revelation of my diagnosis, colleagues at a nonprofit used to let me go for a walk before I weighed in on a suggestion or idea. It’s why I agreed to a job coach’s suggestion that I pursue a job placement in our first session, rather than first working through the usual weeks-long job development process.
The contadiction here is what struck me in therapy, because I was referencing one of these experiences (I don’t remember which, and not for the first time), and I immediately got caught up in how it so seemingly was at odds with the other experience. Why, when faced with the job coach, did I simply and quickly accede to the request, yet when faced with a colleague I’d balk and need both space and time?
As near as I can tell, the ground-level distinction is that in the case of my colleagues, I was faced with the pressure of deviations from some established norm which likely had become one of my robust defaults, while in the case of the job coach I was faced with the pressures of an unfamiliar relationship, with power differentials, and a suffocating physical environment. In both cases I was confronted by something new, but in one case it was something new in a familiar and predictable environment while in the other case it very much was not.
Interestingly, in neither case did I have any sort of script prepared—let alone any outright catastrophizing—which is a thing autistics do in order to exert anticipatory rather than compensatory control. Although clearly my need to “go for a walk” in the case of my colleagues making suggestions in essence became the script for that scenario.
I’ve said before that I agreed to the job coach’s premature suggestion because the quickest and shortest way out of the pressures I listed above was to say “yes”, which would enable me to end and so then leave the meeting. There wasn’t an option to “go for a walk” and consider my options, or at least I was incapabale of finding that choice amid the social and physical claustrophobia.
The irony of the two situations when looked at together is that in the case of my colleagues the correct answer almost always was “yes”, or at least “yes, but…” while the correct answer in the case of my job coach should have been “no”, or at least “not yet”. Familiarity and comfort bred a situation wherein I was able to get to that “yes” in my own time and in my own way, whereas high-pressure novelty with no script to address it effectively banished any sense of my own agency and autonomy.
There sometimes was a ready alternative to going for a walk: were my resource levels high enough, I’d just ask them to take me through their thought process, so that I could see how they got from the way we did things to the way they wanted to do things. In the case of my job coach, there actually was some of this, in the sense that he made a connection between a specific “easy” job experience I’d had in the past and the job he was pitching. What my brain didn’t understand was that this was not sufficient in that situation.
What’s interesting here is that all of this says that there is a sort of manual override to my pervasive demand for autonomy: an unfamiliar relationship, with power differentials, and a suffocating physical environment. If my resources also happened to be at an ebb, all the worse.
As I write this, however, I’m finding it interesting as well that one’s resources can become so compromised that the breakers trip. Shutdown and meltdown, in a very real way, are the autistic nervous system’s autonomic means of ensuring agency and autonomy in the worst situations. The troubling irony there, however, is that if you shutdown hard enough that agency and autonomy depends upon an environment that allows you it. Shutdown might be protective but it’s also vulnerable, like the turtle withdrawing into its shell.
At any rate, as this becomes ever so more digressive and discursive, all of it is just meant to say that what helps the autistic nervous system is space, time, and agency. The trick is that one or more—but at least one—of the parties involved need to have the resources to recognize this in the moment.