2:06pm May 24, 2014

patholoigcal demand avoidance stimming

nicocoer:

autisticdrift:

Pathological demand avoidance is possibly the most pathologizing view of autistic behavior ever dreamed up. It’s defining feature is “obsessively resisting ordinary demands”. Basically the person (and it was just one person) who came up with this “syndrome” says that people who have PDA use meltdowns and other “tactics” to resist “ordinary” demands placed on them by others (i.e. parents).

An especially horrible quote from a website describing PDA:

“People with PDA are often very sociable and can display degrees of empathy previously not thought to be consistent with autism.” (emphasis mine)

So basically, autism as seen by someone who has no idea what autism can look like beyond the stereotypes.

… and now this being one of the “is she?”s from when I was a kid makes a lot more sense. Talk about a perspective taking failure on their part…

I remember reading about this when I was a teenager. I was a member in a couple of Yahoo Groups for autistic people, and there was an autistic girl who was really into this being a thing. And I was utterly terrified that this described me and guilt-ridden about it.

I finally moved out, and lived somewhere where I wasn’t constantly bombarded with more interaction than I could handle, and where I wasn’t constantly picking up on and internalizing other people’s tension. And those supposed “tactics” pretty much vanished. Because it wasn’t about avoiding demands at all. It was a result of living with such a high baseline stress level that the threshold for triggering a meltdown was dramatically decreased.

I was there. I remember all that. This is why I was so adamant, at the time, that PDA was a really horrible way to look at people’s behavior, autistic or otherwise. I know that sort of thing is the kind of thing that insidiously gets into other people’s heads and makes them doubt everything about themselves.

Unfortunately some people’s entire approach to things, ranging from PDA to functioning labels, is not to say "Hey, this doesn’t make sense,” but rather to say “This is real, but it isn’t bad.” No matter what anyone comes up with, she always picks the latter. "It’s not that functioning labels are wrong, it’s just not bad to be low functioning.“ "But you really did ~find hope~, because now you hope to live to old age.”

That’s why she invented the word allistic in the manner she did – the exact same reason she accepted things like PDA as existing. She accepted at face value that autistic meant self-centered, she simply said “It’s real, but it’s not bad.” And then she made up a word that meant other-centered, and applied it to nonautistic people. That’s how she operates no matter what word or concept is at stake. (Just in case anyone wonders, my problem with autistic = self-centered/nonautistic = other-centered isn’t that there’s something wrong with being oriented towards yourself. It’s that it’s not true, and no amount of verbal gymnastics makes it true. And I don’t like that this has been enshrined in language, or that most people don’t even realize what happened there. But I will never tell anyone what language to use, and I am not telling people to stop using allistic if it’s a word they like. I just want people to be informed.)

Note that I’m not trying to tear her down. But there is a pattern here and I know of no other way to describe it than to point out that it’s consistent over time in a particular person. Please nobody go looking for this person or treating her differently if you know who I’m discussing. I’m just trying to describe why this outlook creates damage.

And it does create damage. It basically leaves existing thought-structures untouched, even when these thought-structures do immeasurable harm to actual people. It feels good to do the gymnastics, to sit there and say “I’ve figured it out! It’s not that functioning labels are bad! It’s that people think being low functioning is a bad thing! We just need to convince people that being low functioning is not a bad thing, and the problem with functioning labels will go away!” But it doesn’t solve the problem, in fact it usually perpetuates it and makes it worse.

Notes: