kaberett | the big lies

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the big lies

Not-really-a-linkspam: How Autistics and Neurotypicals Experience Emotions Differently. I have a whole bunch of quibbles & criticisms, but I'm interested in the framework, the concept of experiencing "justice" and "mercy" and "work" as emotions -- for example (emphasis as in the original):

I have a close friend [...] She will show me something she has been working on, and my immediate response will be to correct the language which might not be as accurate or as thoughtful as it could be. I do this before telling her how proud I am for the Work she’s doing, before I tell her it’s well-written, and before I affirm for her that she is a good person doing a good thing. She does the same for me.

The reason is because if someone complimented me on Work I was doing, then I would feel they were implying that I was Laboring in the interest of self-promotion or validation-seeking. These aren’t spoken values, but something we feel innately. This is how I Labor with other autistics. We correct each other. We offer what expertise and insight we can to sharpen the other’s Work, to add volume and clarity to the other’s Love song.

I don't think the things the author talks about as Weird Neurotypical Habits -- gifts, cards, talking about the weather, asking "how are you?" -- are in any sense universally solely Weird Neurotypical Habits even though they don't work for her. "We don’t really congratulate each other, because that would be an invalidation of the Purpose." -- um, excuse me, no. (There's probably something here about autism and trauma, as previously discussed: it's taken me a while to learn that it's useful for me to note and recognise and praise effort, as well as outcomes and product, but it taking me a while to notice that, it not coming naturally to me, doesn't mean it's pointless or invalidating.)

But it still feels like there is Something In There, even if I've not managed to articulate it yet, so apparently that's what I'll be chewing over this afternoon.

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I have not read the thing so can't comment on that part, but I tend to frame the whole "how are you"/small talk/etc as "hello, fellow human, i am also a human, we are sharing space in the world and I am acknowledging that and presenting myself as nonthreatening."

it's not that small talk is pointless, it's idk, mammalian group signalling behavior or something. For me at least, framing it that way makes it easier, because I'm not actually being asked to say intelligent things or be particularly friendly even, I can just make listening-noises and smile and I have fulfilled the purpose of the interaction. Which makes interacting with random strangers much less stressful.

anyway. humaning! it is complicated!

yep! this is how I attempt to work on it, too.

(though I now have the bonus that How's The Weather Eh is something I feel pretty good about special-interest-ing on re My Plants >_>)

I always think of it as like social grooming, like cats headbutting one another in greeting or washing one another. Like: hello! Let me express affection by expressing interest in you! Hi! Hi!

The essay is definite classic failure to negotiate general-specific (in this case "this is how i negotiate my asd ergo all asd is like this"), ayup. *facepalm*

but yeah there's something, but I do not have words.

PRETTY MUCH.

I think that, at the time you're showing someone what you're working on, your focus is on the content of the thing, and you want their focus to be on the content of the thing too, and that is validating. Whereas if their focus is on the relationship between you and the thing then they're not looking at what you're trying to show them.

Non-neurotypical, and fairly tired for thinking about this 8-/ I think there's a distinction between "look at this cool thing I did" and "look at me, I did a cool thing", and I am almost always in the first camp.

Also, if I'm gobsmack-amazed at someone having done a cool thing, as sometimes happens, that's almost always because I'm gobsmack-amazed at the coolness of the thing, and *then* that they've done it. Because if I wasn't struck by the thing, how could I be struck by them-having-done-it?

I mean, there's a calibration here, and there were things I was gobsmack-amazed by that baby-K did which I wouldn't have been amazed at if an adult had done, but in normal circumstances I think "you did *that*?" is way more affirming than "*you* did that?"

My first response is along the lines of "those are values, not necessarily emotions". I'm not trying to say that the author cannot experience them as emotions -- just that I find the framework of them as emotions misses the mark of my own experience, which is more that I feel a strong obligation to be truthful, to be just, to be merciful, to be accurate etc.

And most neurotypicals have these values too. But they also have a bunch of other values -- fitting in, not rocking the boat, etc -- which are basically inaccessible to me because I don't do social communication well enough to fit in, I don't catch enough unspoken cues about context to avoid rocking the boat until it's too late, and so on. Beyond a certain point, mainstream social conformity is a *meaningless* value to me.

(And I'm not sure typically-socialised neurotypicals feel an obligation to their values in the same way I do; sometimes their actions seem to suggest they don't, but this could just be the tendency to perceive reality in whatever way most favours the thing they are going to do anyway.)

Honestly I often think it comes down to facility in shifting focuses, and how we don't have it.

I think NTs have significant obligation to their values, it's just that they are much much better at having multiple systems of values on the go at once and shifting between them with sufficient facility that they often don't NOTICE.

They have to learn to notice, because the capability of switching perspective, position and focus is so much higher that it's like . . . done . . . before they know.

Whereas doing that is enough of an effort that even when extremely practiced we often can't HELP noticing, which means we're sitting there going "how do you not REALIZE you just decided to prioritize social connectivity over honesty?" because we can't NOT notice that change because changing, in and of itself, is a Huge Effort. Even if it's a change we WANT to make ("the happiness and mental peace of my grandmother is actually more important than the specific perfect accuracy of her understanding of the life of Beethoven"), it's HARD; it's work.

NT most often just . . . . do it. (Which is also why the few times they can't the are often incapable of recognizing this as "having trouble switching perspectives/value-sets", because they've never noticed doing that before.)

Vague motions towards thoughts, anyway.

This makes sense to me as a model, thank you.

The times I have been able to switch to prioritizing social connectivity with any real facility are times of significant duress, e.g. under immediate threat of physical violence. And even then, I'm as likely to freeze as anything else. Sometimes in less dangerous situations, freezing is mistaken for agreeableness, but it's usually just overload or distress. This is a real problem for me in medical appointments, among other things.

(As usual I have difficulty separating trauma-brain from neurodivergence-brain here; I am sure that some of my early traumatic experiences would also have caused lasting harm to a neurotypical child, and I am also sure that there were things I experienced as traumatic which a neurotypical child would not have found particularly difficult, and even some things a neurotypical child would have found terrible which were merely "meh" to me. But sorting out which is which and the after-effects of them is Hard, and devolves quickly into me trying to question which of my needs are really valid, which it turns out is often not a good idea for my general well-being.)

Oh absolutely: the entanglements of trauma and neurodivergence are so fucking complicated. Plus also the category "this experience would be traumatic for anyone but if I weren't neuroatypical this experience would not have arisen from this situation/the precursors to the experience", which is in and around mine a lot.

I also think that neuroatypicality and trauma can end up with one in the same place, and needing the same things, just from different angles (the super easy example being that both ASD kids and traumatized kids both need REALLY RELIABLE environments and life-patterns), and to some extent there's only any utility in trying to differentiate, on a personal level, when one is faced with a situation where the solution to a problem would be different depending on which is causative.

Which is, yeah, given the poison in our culture so often very easy to turn into "which need is valid?" but really isn't: whether one is freaking out at the crowd because of a trauma-response based in the arousal system, or freaking out in the crowd because THERE'S TOO MANY SOUNDS CANNOT PARSE, either need is EQUALLY valid.

And in both cases one probably most needs a coping strategy that allows one to sort out how to remove oneself from the crowd.

Only one is probably going to be ameliorated by putting earplugs in, though, and only the other is likely to be ameliorated by finding a wall to put one's back to in order to chart out the exits.

But if it's not that kind of situation, meh. And those can often be figured out through trial and error.

/ramble

Anyway. The POINT being: I fully endorse avoiding situations where you're trying to determine which need is Valid, as yes, it is not good for general wellbeing.

I have a zillion opinions re: Not Every Brain Works Like Yours, No Not Even Every One You Think Does.

But this: We are saying, “This is how I share your path.” There is a question implied, too. “Have I come close to your experience?”

is a whole dang mood.

RIGHT. It's a bunch of "... kiddo nO" with a sprinkling of Highly Relatable Experiences and an unusual way of framing them that I am itching to articulate better because it feels like, as I say, There Is Something There!

Nailed. It.

I'm very curious what you come up with, because you often articulate this sort of thing extremely well.

There's the grain of an interesting idea there, yes. In that piece, it seems to shake out into "neurotypicals have different priorities than neuroatypicals, and those priorities may be rooted in big concepts that produce strong emotions in different places than NT peopl expect."

But the idea of big concepts as emotions themselves to experience, rather than as causes of emotions, that's intriguing...

Oof, yeah, that whole "everyone treats me like I'm a monster for engaging with this subject matter in terms of research ethics rather than morality" opener is not... particularly self-aware, in terms of working out how people will perceive that (and I can see plenty of people, allistic and autistic, reacting pretty badly to a focus on research ethics without carefully noting that genital mutilation is bad).

(And of course, I am sitting here, with my own crabby emotional impatience for her framing, thinking "Well, your focus on Reason is actually counterproductive, because we use our emotional impulses to make decisions rather than logical processes, and by failing to consider your emotional reasoning and elevating Emotion-Free Logic above all, you leave yourself open to flaws in your thought process and errors of imagination..." which is, ah. Perhaps not as much of a counter-argument as I would like it to be.)

*squints* There definitely is Something there, though. Part of it I think is probably the focus on... outcomes rather than intentions? Like... I wonder if some of this comes down to learning, at a very basic level, that other people won't share your own emotional responses (very strong responses to video stimuli, for example) and learning, very early, to keep those emotional responses to yourself as much as humanly possible in service of making the good outcome happen, at least; if everyone else's emotions are unpredictably strong and anemic by turns, why would you bother developing habits about sharing them? Particularly when sharing your own emotional responses to the things in your life are likely to get you dismissed or ridiculed, like "why are you in almost-physical writhing pain because someone is embarrassed on a television show?"

So you find people who want the same outcomes as you, or at least are interested in developing those, and you approach life trying to execute those good outcomes as best as you can. Sometimes that involves devaluing emotion completely in favor of rational process, because that's easy to understand; sometimes it involves rapidly processing emotionality as a tool for communication and for achieving goals, as in use of emotional appeals in rhetoric. (I don't know, is that just me? I'm extremely conscious of my use of emotional description as a form of rhetoric and feel vaguely uneasy, sometimes, about doing so... even though I am pretty much always being completely honest about what I do share.)

There's maybe something there about trusting my emotional responses. Don't know. Not sure.

And then these "very grand emotions," well, they're grand enough that you can generally explain feeling very strongly about them and find plenty of people willing to agree that yes, very strong feelings for those, that makes sense, of course you would feel like that about them!

(And of course, I am sitting here, with my own crabby emotional impatience for her framing, thinking "Well, your focus on Reason is actually counterproductive, because we use our emotional impulses to make decisions rather than logical processes, and by failing to consider your emotional reasoning and elevating Emotion-Free Logic above all, you leave yourself open to flaws in your thought process and errors of imagination..." which is, ah. Perhaps not as much of a counter-argument as I would like it to be.)

(There is still no clash like a clash of competing Autisms.)

Absolutely none at all. The spouse and I are both on the spectrum, and you've never lived until you've sat through an argument with two people who each find loud voices from other people terrifying and difficult to process and who also both suck at volume control...

I feel so bad for laughing because I totally UNDERSTAND, I REALLY DO, but oh my god aaaaahhh.

NO IT'S OKAY, I LAUGH TOO

seriously it's hilarious! And also, laughing at the ridiculousness of the conflict (with affection) is pretty much THE best way I can think of to defuse the nasty feedback loops of shame and felt-hypocrisy and loss of ability to self-regulate as a result that I'm otherwise annoyingly prone to.

I currently have access to a whole lot of sensory, psychological, and neuroimaging data for autistic, SPD, and neurotypical kids, and sometime this month my lab will be meeting to discuss manuscript foci for it. Emotion and executive function are my primary interests; I don't know if I can spearhead a paper right now what with the entire (unrelated) study I'm in the middle of launching pretty much solo, along with the fact that I'm the new kid in the department, but I definitely want to dig into it when I can and hop onto whatever projects others are developing in the meantime. I would be very interested to hear more of your perspective on this kind of thing if and when you have more to say, and will also happily wander down rabbitholes of links if you or anyone else wants to share.

Also if there's anything in particular that you (or other folks on the spectrum reading these comments) think has been overlooked or done wrong in the current literature on autism and SPD in kids, I can definitely holler on your behalf in the meetings and gdoc comments even if I'm not on those projects myself.

*mmmmnnnnrgh* there is so much Wrong and yet there is something in there *flail*

it's taken me a while to learn that it's useful for me to note and recognise and praise effort, as well as outcomes and product, but it taking me a while to notice that, it not coming naturally to me, doesn't mean it's pointless or invalidating

Hmm, yeah. I had to work my way around the social logic in thanking someone for doing their job, and I think I got more confused about it before I got less, but that's just differences in NT vs ND social learning, not necessarily an idea wholly alien to the non-neurotypical subset of the species.

Interestingly the social logic of thanking for work is one of the ones that's actually totally transparent for me, and always has been? Which given how much of social logic is not is interesting to me especially given how it apparently is not for others!

But I also knew it explicitly as being about feelings and about, in its own way, a different set of outcomes: the reasons for saying "thank you" were explained to me, as a child, as "when someone does something for you, saying 'thank you' makes them feel good, and not saying 'thank you' makes them feel bad", and Making People Feel Bad was the worst thing in the world . . . and also (and this part was also explicitly laid out for me, even though my parents presumed I was NT at the time), when you make people feel bad, they don't want to do things for you anymore.

As this held up MARVELLOUSLY to repeated field-tests (although I never did get the hang of thank-you notes and still kind of hate them because they're so disconnected from the thing I am thanking for argh), it became a Know Mechanism of the world.

I think I got short-circuited between 'you particularly thank people for doing things they didn't need to do' and 'people need to do their job', plus not really paying enough attention to others to notice correlations.

That makes sense! And I think that's a pretty common cultural short-circuit, given how often even the allistics who supposedly make/are "naturals" at the rules then . . . don't thank people they consider socially below them, or whom they're osmotically taught they're allowed to take advantage of/etc?

Like that's what gets explicitly taught, and then the allistics pick up all the weird subtle social "also you are expected to thank people to motivate them to do what you want/to create a positive social atmosphere" shit Just Because (which then in many of them goes . . . weird. And sideways. And ends up in Unpleasant Cultural Things like the bs that's recently showed up on my Twitter timeline with a high-falutin' boss person saying "oh I never hire anyone who doesn't write me a thank you note after the interview, it's a great barrier to entry". e.e)

And I know that especially for the 80s-00s my family was somewhat unusual in that . . .thank-yous went both ways? Explicitly. Adults were to thank kids for doing things they wanted done, too. (This caused tension between my mother, who firmly believed this, and an uncle or two, who felt Kids Should Do As Told). And it was actually explained to me, that this is WHY we do it, in active efforts by my mother to foster better family communication.

It's more common now because we have a thread of Parenting Training that focuses on the "model the behaviour you want to see, you teach your children to say thank you by SHOWING them", but back then not so much.

But yeah. It's just interesting, at least to me!

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