Monthly Archives: September 2018

ABA, Autistic community, Interests, Liberation, Long Reads, Parents, Self-advocacy, Sensory Integration, Stimming, Teenage Liberation, Violence against us

Alternatives to ABA and behavioralism

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This is a first draft. (Yes, I’m trying to set something off here.) I’m especially looking for feedback from Autistics, especially ones who went through ABA or ABA-like programs in the school system. (I’m in my 50s. I went through a whole bunch of behavioralist, ABA-like experiences, including assessment, but this was before inclusion of autistic children was mandated as part of the U.S. school system’s requirements.) “Play nice”, don’t flame me or others, but please feel free to leave comments and feedback.

For Autistic students:

— You have a right to play alone.

— You have a right to your interests.

— You have a right to say “no”, and be taken seriously.

— You have a right to your stims.

— You have a right to not make eye contact.

— You have a right to move your body.

— You have right to sit where you want, and that’s yours.

— You have a right to learn.

— You have a right not to learn.

— You have a right to make mistakes.

— You have a right not to trust people.

— You have a right to interact with who you want.

— You have a right to make friends of your own choosing.

— You have a right to respect.

— You have a right to self-determination.

— You have a right to self-advocacy.

— If nobody understands what you’re asking for, find a way to tell them. (This may take some time.)

— If doing something hurts, try to find something that doesn’t hurt that works just as well. (It’s ok if you can’t.)

— If you make a mistake and people get mad, ask why in whatever way is safe, if possible. (It’s ok to make your own decisions.)

— People say and do things for reasons other than you might think. Observe, learn, and if possible, ask. (You have a right to not respond.)

For parents:

— Embrace the child who is front of you, not the one that you hoped for.

— Reject ABA, both at a therapist’s office or center, and at home. Being assessed and aggressed upon by teachers messed me up, but not as half as much as having compliance forced on me at home did.  (This was before ABA was formalized as school-age “intervention” under IDEA, otherwise they probably would’ve subjected me to that as well, and fucked me up even more.)

— Advocate for your child. Parent and teacher-led advocacy is one of the things that helped me break free – not from autism, but from people who kept trying to “fix” me. Presume competence.

— If your child has affirming teachers who they have rapport with – let your child know that you support those teachers, and that you disapprove of the ones that deny your child’s humanity.

— Interests aren’t talents or career paths, necessarily. They’re interests, which is enough on its own. (If they wind up being career paths or long-term pursuits, that’s fine too.)

— Never demand quiet hands. (This is part of what messed me up.) Suppressing stims, echolalia and interests is abusive. If you need a time out for yourself, take it.

— Aggressive behavior is happening for a reason. Center your child’s needs, not their behaviors.

— Read the section for teachers below; it’s relevant to parenting as well.

For teachers:

— Dump ABA, including the “good” ABA. ABA is conversion therapy for autistics. Torturing children for being trans or gay isn’t acceptable, torturing us for being autistic shouldn’t be, either.

— Allow students to find their own interests.

— Don’t suppress student’s stims.

— Explosive behavior (hitting, kicking) is communication and self-regulation. Find out what is being said.

— If students want to play alone, let them.

— Ask students about their interests, *gently*.

— Create a welcoming environment, full of things to explore and learn about.

— Create an environment that’s focused on learning.

— What you might think is important isn’t necessarily the same as what your students think is important.

— Don’t force gender expression. Let students express themselves in ways that work for them.

— If a student is swinging their arms, and not seriously injuring themselves: take a step back.

— No restraints! Restraints are violence.

— Every Autistic student is different.

— Every Autistic student is valid.

ABA, Autvoid, Functioning Labels, Liberation, Parents, Uncategorized, Violence against us

Erasure

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Trigger warning: long read, anger, suicidality, ABA, trauma, functioning labels

This pattern: adaptive skill -> “intelligent” -> high-functioning. wtf.

Further, this pattern: need for support -> “lack” -> low-functioning. Again: wtf.

First off: it’s ableist. That’s a given. Functioning labels, intelligence and correlating adaptability to both (and its respective presumed opposites) are *all* flawed concepts.

That said, I’d like to talk about how this makes no sense. Not just because functioning labels are ableist, but how the entire pattern doesn’t make any sense.

A *lot* of being viewed as high-functioning is about masking, and possibly having some particular set of skills or talents that are viewed as “humanizing” (and under capitalism, valuable). I can do both (even if it’s sending me careening towards a meltdown while I do it), up to a point — then things fall apart. So, rhetorically speaking: what does that make me? It is virtually impossible to memorize every possible social interaction; even if some hypothetical person did so, new ones emerge regularly, if not constantly. No amount of scanning a database of situations and scripted responses, and affective empathy (if needed) can fix that. It’s as if those of us who get viewed as “high functioning” (or in some mixed state of high and low functioning, if someone is bothering to pay attention) are the opposite of the “puzzle piece” metaphor; instead of being a neurotypical person trapped inside an autistic shell, we’re autistic people trapped in a learned/assimilated neurotypical one, to varying degrees.

A huge part of this is due to viewing typed or spoken communication as a key marker of ability and intelligence, if not proof of intelligence itself. When I’m non-speaking, does my ability shift? When I melt down? When I’m non-compliant? Is an IQ test an indicator of anything at all? (If you answer is “yes”, consider: even the official WAIS site encourages people to study in advance for testing. So then, what is being tested? If your answer is speed of response as an indicator of intelligence, perhaps consider that this concept is also flawed and ableist.) Also, the lived experience of having a skill or talent in society is predicated on a complex set of social skills, and it’s rare for accommodations to be made based entirely on that skill or talent, especially if you’re marginalized or oppressed. <sarcasm> So much for talent being mapped to functionality with the inference of social acceptance and inclusion! </sarcasm>

That said, there’s also the problem of viewing “low functioning” as lack rather than difference, of equating challenges and the need for support through the lens of intelligence, if not correlating lack of speech to lack of intelligence to lack of capability. Everything from the rather condescending ways people approach facilitated communication on an individual basis, without allowing for context, training or the person’s ability to type independently, to the ways that exhibiting high-functioning traits is equated with being high functioning at all times (or for that matter, with “not really being autistic”) are rooted in biased assumptions about functionality, both “high” and “low”.

Here’s a deeper problem that I see, especially for autistic youth: either through adversives or positive reinforcement, ABA presumes making an allistic child out of an autistic one. This alone is abuse, but on top of it, there’s a presumption that you’ll ditch that “fake child” (the autistic one) and become the real one (the made-up allistic one) that was buried under a pile of broken puzzle pieces. It’s very abuser-as-false-savior-like, as a “therapeutic” approach.

The problem with this is that it’s a lie. The real child is the autistic one, (TW: ABA, coercion, violence) the rest is forced and/or bribed compliance. Further, if you remember who you actually are in adolescence and adulthood, this creates a tension between your real self and the fake allistic one — which is masking at its most harmful. It can lead to forgetting who you are altogether, so you know that your mask isn’t real, but you can’t get back to who you are before you masked, either. This was coming up a lot on the #takethemaskoff campaign: autistic people kept saying “I’ve been masking for so long, I don’t even know who am anymore.” I know what it feels like to start to forget. It’s like someone is murdering you, and you get to watch. There’s masking out of necessity and survival, as well as masking to get your wants and needs met — then there’s masking that can be overcome, safely, or that could if someone hadn’t been subjected to years of forced compliance. (These categories aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, either.) In my opinion this is part of why there’s a link between suicidality and masking.

There’s a variety of ways that ABA and directly ABA-like things are foisted upon autistics. I know that ABA as a practice has been around since the mid-1960s, and the first assessment questionnaires have been around since then as well; my parents used behavioralist techniques that map to ABA more than closely enough to parallel ABA itself. Why that is, I don’t know (although I have my guesses), all I know is that it was traumatizing as fuck, and once the “compliance protocol” was established, it *never* went way. Not just in childhood, period. I have had to unlearn “people tell you what to do, you do it”. It’s a life skills anti-pattern.

What helped me find modes of expression and learning in the school system was *NOT* being assessed, and the more negative aspects of what my parents did at home. What did were teachers that encouraged students to find their own ways of learning and communicating, instead of trying to force us into a box. I thrived under these teachers, and didn’t otherwise. (It’s probably important to point out here that I was frequently what now gets labeled as combative, non-compliant or passive otherwise.) By high school, I learned how to coast, until I was forced out for other reasons. This wasn’t just educational, it was inter-personal as well. I was literally rescued from some personal hell, assessment included, twice — only to fall back into hell until I left the school system altogether, and I have no intentions of forgetting that.

Perhaps what is flawed here is both the entire concept of intelligence in the first place, as a presumed indicator of cognition as well as ability, if not sentience — as well as the idea of “functioning” being a fixed state, that can only be deviated from by regression or “cure”. Both of these assumptions are dangerously ableist, if not eugenicist in their world-views. This is the sort of never-ending array of conundrums that Melanie Yergeau talks about — the frequent assumption is that someone is either too autistic or not autistic enough to self-advocate. This basically is a toxic worldview, and deserves to be challenged as a pernicious threat to our well-being and survival. Self-advocacy is communication, and non-compliance is a social skill, regardless of how we have been labeled, how we communicate and express ourselves, and what levels of support we need.

Interests, Sensory Integration, Stimming

sensory diet and musicianship

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no caps for this one, says the inner dgaf editor.

i’m making progress on how the fuck to even compose anything at all because computer.

it’s frustrating that this isn’t talked about more. i started working on this actively in 2011, because i kept wanting to stim every time my hands touched an instrument, loaded a DAW or thought about either.

it took diagnosing myself to even start to get to solutions for that. i’m learning things that are either embedded in the Autistic self-advocacy literature, or that otherwise require working with an occupational therapist.

some things i’ve figured out:

  • i have to stim. a lot. if i’m not stimming, it’s usually a sign that i’m getting overwhelmed and shutting down.
  • i don’t have a single dominant mode of thinking. i’m visual-auditory-kinesthetic-analytical-sort-of-verbal.
  • bright colors help integrate sensory diet into my work. two recent examples are below.
Moog Grandmother
A photo of the Moog Grandmother synthesizer. Source: https://www.pmtonline.co.uk/yoma_press/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/moog-grandmother.jpg
A photograph of the Komplete Kontrol MK2 keyboard controller.
A photograph of the Komplete Kontrol MK2 keyboard controller. https://s3.amazonaws.com/factmag-images/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/komplete-kontrol-mk2-screens.jpg
  • music pulls together multiple interests of mine, and they exist both independently and inter-dependently. i have to honor all of those interests, or things like “i need to buy all the drum machines” or “why do i love this hardware even though it doesn’t work for me as a producer” or “arrgh, i’ll just watch steven universe instead” start happening. this is a daily thing for me. it actively interferes with my ability to work, if i don’t integrate it.
  • there’s also subtle (and obvious) forms of stigma with liking things that have loud colors and note guides, especially among serious and professional musicians and producers. it can get viewed as being amateurish or unprofessional or corny, and i have to watch out for that sort of negative self-talk as well, because i’m undermining myself as a creative worker when i buy into it.

unsurprisingly, this leaves little energy for anything else, if left unchecked. so then, i’m either in sloth mode, starting to melt down more, or really, really bitchy. which affects my ability to interact with other people, neurotypicals and some neurodivergent non-autistics especially.

the “hidden curriculum” for interacting with neurotypicals comes up regularly, but what doesn’t get covered as much is what gets hidden from us, about us. all the more if you’re undiagnosed, or your diagnosis was suppressed. like i said earlier, i had no way to know until i did a lot of digging. it’s frustrating.

i’m relieved to be getting real answers though, even if it’s meant piecing together things on my own (and working to not get upset over the lack of good ‘by us, for us” materials that aren’t neurotypical-centric or patently false). i’m getting there.

Autistic community, Autistic People of Color, Passing/Masking, Police, Self-advocacy, Violence against us

Scripting and non-compliance

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Scripting = making your way through a conversation based on memorized interactions.

This doesn’t include talking (or not talking) about interests, that’s its own dynamic.

It’s ok to not script because:

  • It’s painful
  • It’s exhausting
  • It’s overwhelming

That is hopefully a given, but also: it’s ok not to script because you don’t like doing it.

There’s a lot of social skills training materials around, including for autistic adults. scripting is a common topic. “How to do interviews.” “How to go on a date.” “How to keep a job.” What seems to get left out, especially in context, is that it’s ok *not* to script as well. Non-compliance is a social skill! It may not always be desirable, or even safely possible, but knowing how to not comply is a *critical skill*, every bit as much as scripting.

This has parallels to the community-based conversations around masking.

Sometimes, scripting (if possible) is necessary to avoid getting harassed, arrested or worse, but that’s not necessarily the same as doing it because it’s getting you something you want or need, past “surviving the moment”. Which is clearly important, and necessary (especially if you’re a potential target for harassment, abuse or violence, including from the police), but that’s only one facet of life (an important one). That’s a whole other conversation, though.

Scripting is usually somewhere between “massively boring” and “exhausting, sometimes painful” for me. My unmasked state of conversing is slow and with my eyes closed, or not speaking. Some sort of social make-believe conversation as part of a social transaction isn’t where I live, it’s a courtesy and an actual waste of my time and energy in most cases. It’s what I do to eat and pay the bills, as needed. Automation is a pretty strong curb cut for me.

It’s taken a while for me to be proud of bolting from shitty conversations, but i’m getting there. That’s non-compliance, too, and should be celebrated. Do I do my best if a cop stops me? Definitely, but that’s not fun, either. I don’t want someone to teach me how to “pass for the nice officer”, especially on compliance (rather than survival) terms. Work isn’t really any different, save for getting paid. ✊🏽

Autistic community, Autistic People of Color, Autistic Women, Functioning Labels

“Where have you been experienced?”

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I feel like there needs more ways for us to converse, write and talk about what our experiences are, relative to a given moment in time, that definitely is *not* about functioning labels, or otherwise requiring a complex set of descriptive markers. Autistic burnout, shutdowns, meltdowns and masking go a long way towards that, but it still feels like there’s things that aren’t described fully. Here’s a few that I’ve encountered:

– having a “pre-words” connection with another autistic person, either non-verbally or ✨ sparsely verbal/textual ✨
– that feeling of realizing that someone is more socially fluent than you are, but you’re both autistic
– getting stuck in a code-switching loop when someone is unmasked and you’re not
– getting stuck in a code-switching loop with someone who isn’t autistic where you keep trying to mask/script/compensate, and failing at it

I want to be able to tell someone when I’m having a hard time, when I’m doing fine *and* don’t get social cues at times, how I’m a hand flapping, emotionally volatile, ball of all the feels on a daily basis, and that’s just where I’m at — without using a pathologizing sub-label that is largely rejected by our community. Having to say “I don’t necessarily fit to rigid categories in either direction, but if I had to choose, I’m low-functioning leaning more than high-functioning leaning — oh and btw, I’m hyperempathic as fuck, and fairly alexithymic on top of it, so go easy on me, don’t armchair diagnose me as having bipolar disorder or BPD, and oh yeah, functioning labels are bullshit. ✨” is sort of awkward, at the very least.

Details and bloggy blog things:

“What’s wrong with functioning labels?” The problem with functioning labels is that they get into “Master’s Tools”-like territory, but in relation to disability, rather than race.

They also don’t tend to work. If anything, they reinforce NT passing dynamics — “I never would’ve guessed you’re autistic!” or “I’m definitely guessing that you’re depressed, not burned out!”

Functioning Labels, Again

“High functioning” as a form of gatekeeping means that people’s actual ways of being can get obscured, where they tend to be on the spectrum overall can get obscured as well (if someone masks heavily) or result in them being rejected out of some Autistic spaces (if they don’t). It’s residual from when Asperger’s syndrome was a diagnostic category, and still persists in things such as clinical levels within the autistic spectrum, and people using functioning labels period. There’s an “Oh, I pass so well, people think I’m NT” vs. “You don’t pass at all? Well, that explains why you’re weird :laugh track:” dynamic at times that troubles me. Anybody who has known me for more than a few weeks tends to figure out that I’m just good at memorizing scripts and adapting in familiar settings, which isn’t the same as being “high functioning” in relation to NT-driven social dynamics. (More like “fake it until you fail it“.)

Autistic Women, Passing/Masking, Self-advocacy

masking: an emergent lexicon

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masking has many facets. lower caps are good things. here’s some proposed definitions.

– masking: passing as allistic, either as a means to an end, or out of necessity.
– camouflaging: taking on a role to fit in, sometimes to great detail
– passing: presenting as neurotypical. passing as in the closet, but autistically, not necessarily in terms of gender or sexuality.
– compensating: a strategic social exchange with neurotypical people and society. sort of like scripting, but improvisatory as well. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5.
– mimicry: taking on a new persona to fit in. see https://womanwithaspergers.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/who-are-we-women-autism-and-social-mimicry-part-ii/.

it’s been interesting to watch the “take the mask off” hashtag campaign on twitter evolve over the past several weeks. at first it was a mix of important narratives about how masking and camouflaging can be a health risk, personal accounts and “i’m wearing a spinner ring in public! *selfie*” things. all of which is fine, but it also was very white at some points, in terms of presenting masking as something to aspire to (which i agree with) while not talking about the risks in doing so for autistics of color. that got addressed quickly, thankfully.

i think unmasking (or never being masked, and points in-between), when safely possible, can be a form of liberation. there’s a ton of important lessons to be taken from demasking, both as a form of reclaiming, and as a form of personal direct action. horizontalist vanguards (including explicitly crip liberation-focused ones) ebb and flow all the time under late capitalism, including in individual acts of resistance, both intentionally and not, and this is a very good example of one, with useful emergent theories/strategies/tactics for everybody on the left, not just those of us who are autistic as well. this includes discussions around how masking is seriously (and violently) gatekept for neurodivergent people of color, and at times, white and light-skinned passing autistics as well. for those of us who can create openings in public space for the rest of us to unmask safely, we should be doing so. i also think we need to support people who can’t in their needs, both so they can and simply because supporting those most in need in a given community is a good thing to do.

also, getting my needs met either on my own or in-community helped me to mask less often, or at least, to mask in a softer way than i do with strangers, white cishet neurotypical strangers in particular. including in spaces where i wasn’t out about being neurodivergent, or even “weird” (as much as being “non-weird” is possible for me, which isn’t that much, to say the least). even if people didn’t understand what meltdowns were, or actively disliked the way I came off, or who knows how many arguments i got into — there was an understanding of there being a [sometimes annoying] human being behind my “unacceptable” behavior. having the times where i went mute for days, or paced angrily and ranted about (or at) roommates, or got in a screaming match? that was understood to be our business. the time i was echolalic and speaking in nothing but nth level metaphors, and couldn’t find my way back to “normal words”? “addressed” quietly by a friend until i found my way back to linear sentences. comfy nouns that reference cozy verbs. left foot, right foot, left. i do think much of that was ableist, though. it just wasn’t ableist in a way that inherently denied my humanity to the level that ABA and most of the non-autistic “takes” about us do. it’s not unlike how being mixed can “present”, including in communities of color spaces, as being both inside and outside of community. it’s another kind of borderlands.

#actuallyautistic, Autistic community, Autistic Women, Functioning Labels, Liberation, Self-advocacy, Uncategorized

Neurodiversity lite, or assimilationist plus?

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CW: use of functioning labels to “call in” exclusions of less visible forms of functioning hierarchies, patronizing mainstream media “autism think pieces”

https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/09/siri-love-problem-neurodiversity-lite/

https://www.tumblr.com/sherlocksflataffect/121295972384/psa-from-the-actual-coiner-of-neurodivergent

http://highlysensitiveperson.net/hsp-autism-aspergers/

Preface: I am *NOT* advocating for anti-neurodiversity here! I am proud to be part of the neurodiversity movement. If you are against us, have a seat.

I’m starting to wonder if the late 1990s was not just a step forward in terms of self-advocacy, but also a partial setback, despite best intentions. There’s a way of looking at neurodiversity that emerged as being “differently abled”, which is not everybody on the spectrum’s experience. Some of us *are* disabled. It’s like people are missing the “crip liberation” component of self-advocacy. It’s also true that the press has been very condescending and dismissive (even when being disparagingly pro-neurodiversity ), some of which has spilled over into our familial relations. In contrast, I had a close friend tell me that I was “sensitive” somewhere back in the 90s, and referenced HSP as “something that’s a thing now”. It was basically the opposite of what Astrid’s dad did – asserting something as being good, while also not factoring in autistic traits and life experiences. It was an honest mistake, and I don’t blame her for trying to help, but it probably delayed me seeking a diagnosis.

It can also mean that only the most “shiny”, “maps to high functioning”, “personality typed” of us get a seat…well, not at the table as much as under it, but still. Saying “neurodiversity means that we just have different kinds of brains than NTs” can erase how some us have other disabilities, how many of us have co-morbidities, and not all of us are autistic to the same level or degree, including within the same day! That’s definitely not always the intent, but it can have that sort of “impact”, so to speak.

“You’re not including the *real* people with autism!” is the one trump card autism parents, curebies and aspie supremacists have, and they twist that into whatever toxic balloon animal suits their needs on a regular basis, because they have nothing else to base their shitty assertions on – other than “I <3 torture, gaslighting, and copping a patronizing attitude”. This is something we need to be critiquing in our own community, rather than leaving to adversaries. People who get labeled as “low-functioning” *do* get ignored or otherwise not included in community-based needs assessments on a regular basis, as Julia Bascom and Amy Sequenzia have pointed out. From what I can gather as a relative newcomer to the Autistic community, it’s not that people are willfully ignorant, indifferent or ill-intentioned (although that happens too), as much as not always working in consort and solidarity across the spectrum, as autistic liberationists.

I remember all too well what it felt like to be a terrified 10 year old, watching adults trying to decide if I was “enough of a problem” to escalate their attempts to assess and “convert” me (both cisnormatively and neurotypically). Thankfully, that passed (although the aggressing against me, including in physically violent ways, did not). I’ve never been fully accepted in society, even in marginalized spaces. I see similar things happening in the more relatively privileged corners of the neurodiversity movement as well, my gratitude and indebtedness to some of those corners notwithstanding.

I’ve been in activist spaces enough to know how this can wind up. It sounds…familiar. It’s assimilationist, harms the most oppressed members of our community directly, and eventually harms all of us as well. It needs to be replaced with liberation-focused approaches that include all of us. Not just “Nothing about us, without us” — although definitely that as well! — but “All of us or none of us!”, too.

Autistic Women, Liberation, Passing/Masking, self-care, Stimming

Being “inappropriate”

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I am inappropriate on a regular basis, I have been since childhood. Doing this without accidentally pissing people off, or even hurting people at times, takes work. I’ve learned how to work with this so everybody gets their needs met (or stepping away from situations, if that’s the best option available), and not always by masking, either. If anything, I tend to mask among non-autistic friends — masking is a way of saying “I trust you enough to shift gears for your benefit, not mine, and to do emotional labor to be able to talk with you”. If i don’t trust people, I’m definitely not masked. More like *starts yelling* or *goes mute*. It’s sort of like being in a room full of grad students and professors in mathematics, and they keep assuming that because you can write equations on a board, and got a C in Algebra I, that you’re “social peers”, when in fact: you’re lost (or in a format that gets used on the internet sometimes: lost???????????).

My guess is that for non-autistics, the social imperative is so strong/assumed/acculturated, that they just flow right past checking in with the autistic person, and assume “Well, you’re speaking (even if you can’t always speak), so therefore, you’re not *really* autistic. Therefore: what is wrong with you.” Or they just assume you’re neurotypical (NT) without thinking about it. Either way, they’re a blamey bunch of non-autistics.

I’m good at being inappropriate! I do script on a regular basis, though, especially for basic tasks — that can be exhausting as well, so I’m working on eliminating it via curb cuts, or dropping it altogether if possible. I grew up in some sort of early 1970s assessed (both neurologically and queer/transly, from the looks of things) suburban subaltern, and quickly learned that I needed to adapt and find what now are called “curb cuts” if i was going to survive and/or not wind up institutionalized.

Here’s some things I’ve learned that I’d like to share, in case they might help.

BASELINE:

This is important, and gets missed in some of the online conversations about “inappropriate behavior”: it’s ok to prioritize your needs. Read that again. Seriously, it’s OK — if it seems like nobody believes in you, I do. “But I did a horrible thing!” And? Capitalism both teaches, and forces, people to do horrible things. This doesn’t mean do whatever you want, though! More like “feed yourself first, so you can feed others later”.  If the situation is more serious, that’s where transformative justice and harm reduction (if needed) come into play.

PRACTICE:

First and foremost! If you’re confused by something — if it’s safe to ask, do it!

If it’s not safe to ask, make a note of what happened to research later, and get yourself out of the situation. Apologize, if you can.

If someone asks you to stop, stop. If you can’t stop, do your best to walk away, or otherwise end the conversation.

Again, don’t beat yourself up if you made a mistake! We learn from situations, not from abstractions. (You also have a right to be who you are if you don’t know how to learn, or refuse to learn. It may make things more complicated when you deal with other people, though. I’ve found this book to be very helpful, if you’re so inclined.

ACTION:

Stim! This includes aggressive stimming/sensory seeking. It’s possible to redirect self-injurious or “explosive” stimming into aggressive stimming, and with some practice, physically safer forms of one’s sensory diet. Loud, aggressive music works *really* well for me. I flail and stim dance until I’m regulated. I still pace a lot, but I’ve learned to pace and yell when it’s just me, rather than doing so at other people, and not only as my only out until the “pop bottle” explodes. A gentle nudge in a different direction can make all the difference. “But aren’t stims automatic?” Neurologically, probably — but that doesn’t mean you’re devoid of agency, either.

I’ve also regulated my senses visually, both from still images and from film/video. For some reason, really high-contrast, and at times, violent images work for me, especially if it’s so over-the-top that the “sensitive” part of my brain is like “Ha, good one! Human existence is suffering, liberate your desires! Good pun.” (What I can’t handle: realistic or hyper-realistic depictions of violence. I used to watch The Walking Dead, and after a while, it was pretty barftastic to keep up with. I am not fond of being eaten by zombies in white cop-led Hobbesian social horror scenarios that serve as a metaphor for the extended nuclear family under extreme duress. (The same can be said for The Governor or Negan.) Ridiculous, high-contrast, cartoon-like violence? Workable and very useful, in limited doses.

TW: suicide, institutionalization, gaslighting, alt-right, MRAs, abuse

Learn new ways! Look, the rules can be very confusing. Believe me, I know, and it’s fucking ableist how people demand that we understand things “spontaneously”. But it’s possible to learn from the research of other people like us. It’s also possible to get the wrong advice from people with ill intent, and wind up harming someone as a result. So be careful, but thrice-greatest Hermes: don’t beat yourself up! A lot of us (myself included) tend to do that way too much anyway. Research, explore, learn *in whatever way works best for you*. It doesn’t have to be via words or visuals. Learn how you learn, be how you be.