stimmyabby:

cptsdcarlosdevil:

autistech:

autistech:

i think the emphasis on social behaviors in autism is probably way overblown.

if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.

and that’s not the only bias we should expect if our model of autism derives primarily from the observations of clinicians.

imagine you’re a therapist of some kind, and an autistic person shows up in your office. what is there to notice about them?

there’s the way they greet you. they way they talk, their vocabulary and sentence structure. the awkward feeling when they respond in unexpected ways to your non-verbal social signals, or fail to take turns in conversation. the way they move, how they rock back and forth or flap their hands or make other repetitive movements. the way they tend to repeat everything you say. the way they keep talking about horticulture session after session despite your every attempt to change the topic. the way they cover their eyes and start yelling when you turn the lights on or forget to hide your yellow jacket, but don’t react at all to the sound of their mother calling their name from the doorway. the way they melt down when you ask to meet at a different time next week.

you see the same behavior patterns over and over in this certain group of clients. so autism appears to be a condition characterized by 1) social deficits in emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and social participation in general; 2) repetitive movements and speech patterns, 3) unusual intense focus on highly restricted interests, 4) something really odd about how they react to sensory inputs from the environment, and 5) insistence on sameness or rigid adherence to ritualized behavior patterns.

i have blind-men-touching-an-elephant feels about this description of autism. or maybe even looking-for-your-keys-under-the-lamp-post,-even-though-that’s-not-where-you-dropped-them,-because-you-can-see-here,-and-over-where-you-dropped-them-it’s-all-dark feels.

…except like it’s not even an elephant but instead some kind of enormous dinosaur with parts that are way too high up to reach. if people try to figure out what it is by touching its feet, one person says “it’s a thing with claws”, and another person says “no, it’s a thing with feathers”, and a third person who’s very clever responds, “the underlying truth is that it’s a thing with both claws and feathers”. eventually everyone agrees that whatever the thing is, it has claws and/or feathers of various types and to varying degrees. (which just clears everything right up, yeah?)

when you can only touch its feet, there’s no way to draw a picture of anything like the real animal, because nearly all of it is out of reach. your drawing will be all feathers and claws, and no torso or tail or head or teeth. you’re not *wrong* that dinosaurs tend to have feathers and claws, but you’re missing the true shape of things anyway.

importantly, a dinosaur would have a hellofa time recognizing itself in your drawing. especially an unusually tall dinosaur, or a dinosaur with few feathers, or one who’s been filing their claws way down since age five.

autism is a cognitive/perceptual style that *impacts* socialization, movement, speech patterns, conversation topics, reactions to sensory inputs, and preferences about order and sameness. but *none* of those factors carves reality at its joints.

(you wanna know what i think autism *really* is now, right? well i’ll tell you this much: i don’t know. but i think i “weak central coherence” is a shockingly powerful working model for predicting my own experiences, even if i’m still confused.)

I agree with this post, which is why I am really sympathetic to Lynn Waterhouse’s theory that autism is actually many different underlying neurodivergences which happen to all look the same to therapists. (Analogy: fever. Fever is clearly a discrete thing, and many treatments help all kinds of fever, but sometimes you have a fever because you have a flu and sometimes you have a fever as a drug reaction and sometimes you have a fever because you have a tumor, and these are meaningfully and importantly different.)

Anyway, “weak central coherence” feels really inaccurate to describe my autism, but I resonate with Temple Grandin’s description of the verbal/logic autistic thinking style. 

if you’re interacting with someone whose cognition and perceptions are unusual, you don’t have the opportunity to directly observe their cognition and perceptions. but you have lots of opportunity to directly observe their social behaviors. so if their cognition and perception have any sort of effect on their social behaviors, it’s going to look like whatever weird thing is going on with them is inherently social.