2:45am July 8, 2013

➸ Is it necessarily the case that non-autistic people are better at...

soilrockslove:

youneedacat:

mulder -are-you-suggesting:

Is it necessarily the case that non-autistic people are better at “managing" their emotions, or do they just not tend to feel as highly overwhelmed by things as autistic people, and therefore don’t typically have to do as much work “managing" anything?

I mean, like, people will say that an…

Much as people with Tourette have more ability to control our bodies than people without it. Because people without it never have bodies going so far out of control that they learn how to control them.

Yes, there are things that we feel more strongly both sensation wise and emotion wise. So *agrees with all of the above*

And also, I think we often *do* control our emotions - but our ways of doing so look more outwardly weird. Like, that’s what certain kinds of rocking *are*.

Yes! Stimming is definitely there to regulate things. Whether they are sensory, cognitive, or emotional. That’s why it’s so dangerous to remove it.

Of course many so called experts in autism disagree with me there. One renowned autism expert writes that stimming serves no functional purpose and can be removed with no damage done.

Of course I used to know a kid who, because of behavior programs she created for him, lost his toilet training and developed a phobia of toilets, among other things. But she wouldn’t care about that.

A second renowned autism expert is the same way. I read a book by her that said meltdowns and shutdowns have no actual cause, that they are simply manipulative or attention seeking behavior on the part of the autistic person. Never mind that attention is the last thing we want at that particular moment. Autism experts aren’t required to make sense, they only have to be able to regurgitate a lot of false facts about us. Nothing in the writing of either of these experts showed they had any comprehension at all of what autism actually is – a condition affecting cognition, perception, and movement. They simply listed off all the outward signs, as perceived by particularly dense nonautistic people, and then came up with particularly dense explanations for it all.

I’m not really surprised by the second expert’s position on meltdowns, shutdowns, sensory issues, and cognitive problems such as multitasking problems. She used to force me to sit in a fluorescent lit room and talk to two grad students at once. Ignoring when I protested that these things were both very difficult. Then I’d go into shutdown or meltdown and lose the ability to communicate. I had a cognitive interpreter who explained what was going on. The expert would shut her down with “I don’t want you speaking for her, let her speak for herself.” My interpreter would get so mad she was almost yelling.

Then I would start bashing my head with my hand. Which the expert would treat as bad behavior. She’d sometimes say people like me didn’t belong in a university campus. Worse, I’d originally come to her because I couldn’t seem to bathe, cook, or eat. I’d beg her to teach me these things. She’d insist on trying to improve my social skills and nothing else.

Because to her, every problem autistic people have is social in nature. Never mind that I was standing in front of her grubby from not bathing, weak with hunger, with a growling stomach and hunger pangs. None of that mattered if she could only fix up my social skills. And only on her terms.

I realized that she and many other autism experts only get their renown because they are skilled at manipulating autistic children. They don’t have to understand autism at all. They just have to be able to describe our behavior on a very superficial level as interpreted by nonautistic people. They don’t even usually understand that autism is, at the core, about cognition, perception, and movement, and their interplay. When they want to explain our behavior, all they have to do is guess, pull something out of their ass. And the ass pull as research method is perfectly acceptable to people around them.

So basically they don’t need to understand why we stim, or even that stimming has reasons. Those reasons are generally the regulation of cognition, perception, and emotion.Sometimes there’s also an element of difficulty controlling movement, resulting in body movements that repeat over and over without intending to. But it’s sure as hell not because of social skills problems or manipulative or attention seeking behavior.

Also, I’ve seen an observation made by parents. And not just parents willing to listen to autistic people. Parents in general. Not a majority but a surprising number.

They will tell each other not to suppress their children’s stimming. They point out that once you eliminate harmless behavior like rocking, you often see truly alarming behavior like head banging, biting holes in their arms, and sometimes even violence. They may not understand the purpose stimming serves, but they become quite aware of the catastrophic effects of eliminating it.

So you’re absolutely right. One of many purposes of stimming is to regulate emotions. Every autistic behavior has a definite purpose, even when everyone including the autistic person ourselves fails to understand what that purpose is. One of the worst things about many autism experts is that they don’t have to understand anything about us in order to rise to the top of their field. We generally know more about ourselves than they know about us, but nobody considers us experts at all.

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