This is an article I wrote in response to a thing that annoys me.
Dear Mods: Not sure if this counts as self-promotion, if it is, please remove it ASAP, or tell me and I will delete it.
Thank you,
PS: if you can, do me a favor and crosspost it on other social media sites, thanks
Thank you for sharing, this was an enjoyable read!
The experience of noticing patterns that others don’t, even after pointing it out to them, is extremely relatable to me. I didn’t realize it was a neurodiverse trait, I just thought it was something relatively unique to my experience, so it’s nice to discover I’m not alone there.
It’s so unbelievably frustrating trying to warn people about dangers and being told that I’m making slippery slope arguments only to be proven right later again and again and again. It’s really exhausting, and never even slightly validating when I’m proven right.
Reading that psychology article is… really something. This fucking passage:
Yuck, yuck, yuck. Implying autistic people have to mask to be articulate, thoughful, caring or empathic? We have to work harder to understand social cues and sometimes need a bit of extra guidance with things like sarcasm. In my experience autistic people are sensitive and empathic to a fault.
It sounds like what they’re describing isn’t autism, but rather more like sociopathy or something…
By the way, you have a little typo:
Yeah, that whole psychology article reads like something from the old days honestly. The language and just how demeaning it is sounds like the shit I read from when they used to say autism was “child psychopathy” and stuff like that.
This whole “appear to be articulate, thoughtful…” crap is just straight up ableism right? It’s missing the entire point, which is not that autistic people are pretending to be positive characteristics but may be abusive behind closed doors. The point that seems obvious here is that the NT and their friends don’t understand masking and fluctuating capacity. The point is that the general public still need a lot more education around autism… but instead they’re just like nah let’s just turn autistic people into the abusers, that’s easier. 🤷♀️
Yep, pattern recognition can be fun at times but the other side of it is actually really hard when it’s important stuff with big and harmful consequences.
Personally, I find my pattern recognition on a lot of things is put down to anxiety, trauma response etc. Sure, maybe that does affect it but that shouldn’t be an automatic dismissal/trivialisation. Discussions are good to have and when someone goes with “that’s your anxiety talking” it doesn’t encourage discussion, it shuts it down. Explore the thread of thought and the pattern collaboratively. Even if you don’t agree all the time, I think even just talking respectfully without those instant shutdowns through trivialisation, is a more productive way to go.
As soon as people give themselves permission to dismiss something that another person said just because “anxiety/trauma/autism/any other characteristic” we lose a LOT of voices - which sadly, is the exact society we do live in. Where it’s too easy to find reasons to not even engage and just erase certain people from important discussions.
Thanks for pointing that typo.
That psychiatrist.com gave so many “Autism Speaks” vibes. It was disgusting.
The most charitable way I can read it is like, sometimes autistic people can struggle with communicating, especially if things are implied rather than expressed, and I can imagine that it can be a frustrating experience for neurotypical people when they’re misunderstood.
But like… it just takes finding a communication style that works for both partners. Maybe a bit more clear and deliberately expressive, laying out exactly how they feel and what they expect/want of eachother to be happy.
Being in a relationship with an autistic person and blaming them for behaving autistically is like getting into a relationship with a wheelchair user and getting mad that they can’t take the stairs. Find a workaround, or find another partner!
It sounds like the neurotypical took him as an “I can fix him” project, marry them, then discard in their partners once they learn there’s nothing to fix. And instead of taking responsibility for messing with someone’s life and feelings, just blame the partner instead.
Been in a relationship like that and it almost killed me.
I’m really, really sorry to hear that. I hope you’re doing better now, and that you find/have found someone who loves and appreciates you exactly as you are, you deserve it.
I am in a much better place, still dealing with cPTSD from that. I am extremely upset that my abuser, who encouraged my suicide after I got my autism diagnosis, is considered a victim of the “Cassandra Syndrome”, and I am the bad guy.
I’m really glad to hear that you’re doing better. At the end of the day, it’s classic psychiatrist behavior. They’ve always treated us as problems because we’re different, and blamed us for not fitting neatly into the mold society expects everyone to fit, rather than helping society to accept other people for being different.
This is also why I hate modern psychiatric approaches to treating trauma such as CBT and EMDR, it focuses on making trauma victims fit into society better through some sort of systematic approach, tackling “symptoms”, rather than treating people as individuals and just talking them through issues in a holistic way.