I have met a lot of sheltered autistic people, and I mean really sheltered. Never lived independently, never held a job, never did any kind of activity that wasn’t structured, basically never allowed to explore the world on their own, and it shows. It’s some kind of parental instinct to want to shelter autistic kids when they fail, or when they melt down and embarrass the parents (poor poor parents), but the exact opposite is true. We need to fail. If we don’t, we’ll never learn.
I’ve made a lot of little rules as to how people interact with each other, but even more important than making the rules is noting the conditions under which these rules start to break down.
Social Stories are great and all, but only for writing the program. We need input/output checks, unit tests, debug procedures, black-box tests, etc. in addition.
My Theory Of Mind is that nobody rally has Theory Of Mind. They can just relate to people whose experiences, perceptions, and thought processes mostly match their own.
What I mean is that I think interpersonal relationships require belief in that fiction. That there is some “object persistence” to identity and awareness of self and other. My honest view of a “person” is not unlike a static photo of the internet. A person’s self is an aggregate of not only many cells, but many organisms. Each human organism has countless personae which each assert to be “the real one”. And many identities cannot be resolved to anything smaller than a cluster of organisms, such as a marriage, corporation, or D&D campaign.
Like with most things, people’s underlying assumptions are laid bare in the artefacts of language. That an organism is considered individual, that is - that the mind/body complex is the atom of self which cannot be divided any further if it is to remain alive. So people often react with some defensiveness and prefer to frame it as sophistry on my behalf, something that is so fundamentally at odds with their model of self and society that the best course is to hope that I come off it and defer to common-sense norms.
I don’t know if I give up, as such. It’s just the basic knowledge that to have interpersonal relationships, we first need some persons. The closest “I” get is probably the transpersonal. Without using ego as a frame of reference, we just as easily observe society-as-individual and individual-as-society. And most common frameworks for interaction rely upon feelings of attachment, apparently to reify this sense-of-self - itself a feeling of attachment. This is why I consider interpersonal relationships to be innately selfish, they require oversimplying the self into a more-or-less static ideal.
It sounds like a petty contest to say that “It is not I who give up, but others”, but the evidence seems to favor that view. I grew up thinking of myself as a person, but part of my routine from early on was to try updating my understanding with the latest evidence which becomes available. The biology of organism-as-biome and information theory of people-as-networks seem more accurate. Although those who are deeply invested in the ideal of personal identity could prefer to frame it that I am simply a difficult person who sociallzed to eastern philosophy, psychedelics, communism, transhumanism, and science from a very young age - instead of socializing to a “normal” Euro/colonial worldview and overlaying this other stuff later at university. It could be that I am attached to seeing things this way - or it could also be that without evidence to the contrary, what appeared to be an accurate model yesterday still appears more or less accurate today.
So I try to focus instead upon the social aspects and formalized frameworks. How groups of people come together to share ideas and participate in projects. I just don’t put emotional and physiological maintenance and comfort into a special category of privileged “intimacy”. Any more than food preparation, exercise, entertainment, politics, or other areas.
I think it’s very telling that in US society, there is a violent aversion to sexuality which is social rather than personal in nature. This might be because the focus upon personal attachment is what facilitates a society of selfishness. In a society where everything is a market commodity, emotional fulfilment is subject to the same manipulations of supply and demand. Desire and dissatisfaction are promoted with only hegemonically sanctioned options openly considered as remedies. To some USians, ritual or communal sex are more terrifying than murder, yet the former will assert that the latter are the ones subject to brainwashing, only to defend their status quo.
I’m sure some parents go very overboard with this, but I’m also sure that some people are never going to make it in the world as it is. Lacking a facility that everyone else takes for granted means you necessarily get a lot of practice compensating for that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll ever be good enough at compensating to do be able to do things like have a job.
I certainly hope that parents of kids with disabilities try to give their kids opportunities to find their own limits rather than imposing limits on them. But making opportunities for everyone is everyone’s business, and people with disabilities/differences and their parents can’t always do it themselves. (Not that you were saying they could, just going off on a little tangent about accommodating differences).
I think people do realize that other people have their own minds, but that generalizing from a single example is an endemic problem.
I don’t expect everyone on the spectrum to be able to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but they could make it further in life than if they had been sheltered.
Anyone who knew me when I was a small child would have said the same thing about me. It’s a miracle I wasn’t institutionalized. It is through my own hard work that I’m able to function in society.
There are autistic people who can’t function in society well, but they should have the opportunity to function as well as they can. It won’t be perfect, and even for me it’s far from perfect, but it will still be worthwhile.
Sure, but at the bottom of it is our reaction to something someone else does in relation to us.[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:224, topic:96611”]
People can do both towards you, from moment to moment, invalidation damages even if you are not ‘seeking validation’ from that or any source.
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Agreed. And my point is that there is real power in being able to control your own feelings, especially about your worth, no matter what anyone else does or says.
I suspect that it is the other way around - that most people do not have effective models for the world as it is, and there is not much social incentive for examining or improving such models. That is why masses of people merely settle for taking a poor consensus for granted.
It is debatable whether that is any sort of hallmark of skill, or being expected to unthinkingly take refuge in toil and social status (and dating!) only because many others do it. I can understand why many do it, but not why those who don’t would give it the primacy of a benchmark for successful living.
Society is what it does, and I never credited the notion that how well a kind of society works is mainly a factor of its popularity. Neurotypical people appear to socialize well basically because they, by their own standards, decide that they do. But reliance upon expectations could be seen as an argument that maladaptive strategies are themselves the norm.
Or they can be shot by police. The real world has real obstacles that are way outside the control of individuals and their parents. As I said, I think parents need to help kids find their own limits rather than imposing limits that make the parents feel safe, but there’s a balance to be struck between that and keeping your kids out of danger, and the line isn’t clear. Lots of parents screw this up whether their kids have disabilities or not.
I appreciate the reframing. But with either framing I think the biggest value is in diversity, and it’s good that different people see the same things through different lenses so we can learn more.
Yeah, it’s a difficult issue. Being able to hold down a job is a measure of how “functional” a person is within a capitalist society because that’s how capitalism works. Capitalism has big problems and it makes sense that some people don’t participate in it, and I’d differentiate choosing not to participate from trying to participate as hard as you can and getting fired all the time. I’d also guess some significant fraction of people people who are choosing not to participate are basically lying to themselves and masking their unwillingness or inability to participate (and, similarly, some group of people who are participating are papering over their lack of courage to try something radically different).
I lament that being able to hold down a job and sustain a romantic relationship are both taken as signs of the success of a person with mental health problems, but I’m pretty sure that those are used as metrics because they are effective. If a healthcare provider is trying to assess whether a person will end up in the emergency room with a mental health related problem in the next six months, looking at things like social supports and employment is a good idea.
We all have a limited time to reconsider ideas for ourselves from scratch, so I think most people are going to buy into a lot of broad consensuses. The alternative is spending a lot of time deconstructing those consensuses that you could be spending doing other things.
But, back to what I said about diversity above, it’s great that some people are spending their time doing that kind of deconstruction because everyone has the opportunity to benefit from it (just like I have the opportunity to benefit from all that work people did making better and better computers while I was doing philosophy and pure math).
I’m not talking about the number of choices that a given person might or might not have available to them. I’m talking about their internal state. A person who understands their choices and feels agency within the scope of those choices might be perfectly happy, while a person with a veritable buffet of choices might feel desperate and powerless to realize any of them.[quote=“anon50609448, post:221, topic:96611”]
I think desperation is pretty obviously negatively correlated with happiness, whether that’s desperation for control or for validation. But it seems like there are tons of people out there who choose a source of validation that works for them and that they can consistently generate validation from (like a religious organization) and then live happily, getting external validation but never really having to worry about it.
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Please understand that all of my comments were framed around and written in response to a comment that relationships and other’s approval were helpful to self esteem. In my opinion, a set of beliefs and even a community that inspires hope, faith and goodwill are a form of self-validation. This is not the same as relying on positive feedback from another individual to feel good.
Sure, but at the bottom of it is our reaction to something someone else does in relation to us.
Not someone. People with power over you specifically. You don’t have to give them that power, someone else might.
Like a sibling executing a will, or a jobsworth parking attendant who stonewalls you, or a president who speaks of you and encourages others to disregard your rights.
I seek approval from none of those people. That can still invalidate me and cause trouble.
We are not talking about quite the same thing, I hope you see the nuance.
There’s a lot of middle ground between totally sheltering a kid and allowing them out into the world with no supervision whatsoever. If it were me, and my I would prepare my kid for all realistic risks, or I would make sure I was prepared for them. I would supervise, but only to the extent that I would need to. I would also not allow them to become unnecessarily paranoid, because that can really backfire. It did for me. Caution is good, paranoia is not.
Yep, any of those things could happen, and they might cause you trouble.
What happens next with that trouble is up to you and how you decide to frame it. If you want to tell the story of what someone else did to you and how powerless you are, you can. But that is not the only option.
Alright, then I would say a difference in terminology explains my entire disagreement with you.
If it were me I would struggle every day with whether I was handling it right, doing too much or too little. That’s what I do with my plainly not-autistic kids. That’s why I stuck my neck out for parents.
Dating, and relationships, are not linear processes. One can date a person without a goal of an LTR or marriage (duh), but one can also live with someone, move out, and still date them. Or fuck someone without dating, move in, and start “dating.” Setting a goal to date, fuck, live together, and then get married with every first date is a way to mindfuck oneself out of good relationship experiences, imho.
If one finds it easer to relate to older women, why not date older women? Sure, one may not want to fuck them right away, or maybe never, but it could still be fun and help one feel better about oneself.
Idealizing “a relationship”, rather than having a relationship with someone, is unhealthy, and treating a relationship as a goal rather than a process is unrealistic. There is too much pressure there, and no real way to do have this idealized relationship while maintaining an actual relationship. The actual relationship kills the idealized one and vice versa.
I think it’s a way to drive towards a particular goal that many people seem to have. I’d like everyone to try to understand themselves well enough that their goals don’t have to align with the goals handed to them by dominant culture, but when you have goals working towards them makes sense. That’s why I was saying upthread that I found online dating for the purpose of marriage/family to work very well starting near 30. Around that age people who have decided they want to have kids become very goal focused and it is much easier to find someone else who shares that goal.
In my case, I started online dating with the intent to date, fuck, live with, marry [optional], and have kids with another person. I may well have missed out on some opportunities to do other interesting things because I had that goal, but I miss out on opportunities to do interesting things every day.
I think we’re capable of seeing the explicit part of social interaction but don’t see the implicit*. I struggle with small talk because I see “How are you?” as a request for information, not as an opening gambit in a conversation.
*I generally describe myself as unable to read subtext
