Who Am I?

Optimal Outcome for Whom?

Posted: August 12th, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Autism, Personal | 2 Comments »

Autisticzebra recently published a post: We do not outgrow our autism. On the surface that would seem self-evident. Even though we still know relatively little about how the brain actually works, we do currently know that autistic brains are wired and function differently from typically developing brains in a number of significant ways. It’s too soon to say we actually understand what those differences mean, but they do exist. And there are likely other structural differences we have yet to discover. In many ways, neuroscience is still in its early childhood as a field of knowledge. The human brain is enormously and in some ways irreducibly complex. The whole in this case is not merely the sum of the parts.

Given that, it should be self-evident that an autistic person can’t outgrow autism. While the brain is very flexible and can reroute function, adapt to damage, and can learn to operate in different ways, the functional aspects that lead to autistic thinking seem to be pervasive, not localized or limited. One problem, of course, is that we have a bifurcated view of autism today. On the one hand, we recognize that it’s neurodevelopmental and tied to the development and structure of the brain. On the other hand, we define and diagnose autism primarily through externally observable behaviors. And behaviors can often be changed. While changing behaviors can and does alter the ways the brain routes and handles signals and can enlarge or shrink specific areas, some overarching aspects of the structure of the brain remain the same, at least when it comes to autistic wiring.

It’s in that context that studies are performed such as Ratings of Broader Autism Phenotype and Personality Traits in Optimal Outcomes from Autism Spectrum Disorder. I would argue that ever stating that such individuals have “lost their autism diagnosis” or even as the study states, “no longer meet diagnostic criteria for ASD“, is actually a misrepresentation of the DSM. The diagnostic criteria for ASD all explicitly state that diagnostic behaviors have manifested “currently or by history” and the DSM explicitly requires that the “symptoms” have been present from early childhood. The DSM does recognize on some level the neurodevelopmental nature and lifelong persistence of autism.

With that said, I understand what the researchers are referencing, even if I think there’s a problem in the way it’s phrased. It is certainly possible for at least some of us to alter our behavior to the extent that, to an external observer, we do not recognizably display the visible markers of autism. I know that’s true because I did it. The “optimal outcome” for autistic children represents my personal lived experience.

There are, of course, some differences. There were no diagnostic criteria for autism when I was born. To the limited extent autism was recognized at all, it was considered a very rare, debilitating type of childhood schizophrenia and those so diagnosed were typically institutionalized. Therefore, I never received any “therapy” specifically for autism. I never knew my experience of the world even had a label. I never knew anyone else like me. As a result, the things I did were largely self-directed. I combined a not insignificant, but also not awe-inspiring intellect with a particular interest and focus on people around me to develop my own compensations.

However, that sounds too dry, rational, and clinical while my reality was anything but. I experienced a world of massive unpredictability where people could and did threaten and harm me for reasons I didn’t understand. Fear was therefore a motivating energy. But beyond that fear, the primary driver behind everything I did was a deep understanding that on some basic level I wasn’t like other people. The things I did failed to elicit the sorts of responses I saw going back and forth between other people. And others also recognized I wasn’t like them and responded accordingly.

I felt broken.

I need to let that truth stand by itself. When I peel back the layers of hurt and pain, my deepest experience and understanding of my place in relation to the world was that something was fundamentally wrong with me. And I was driven to hide it. No matter what I did, I never felt any less broken myself, but I didn’t want that brokenness exposed to others. That’s what I’ve been digging toward in counseling, I think. Here’s the way I wrote it to try to articulate it with my therapist.

I didn’t start working on tone, inflection, expressions, body language, and all the rest out of any sort of conscious, logical decision-making process. Rather, I felt like there was something wrong with me and I needed to find a way to fix it. I felt broken. I felt, down to the core of my being but never actually thinking it in words, that the ways “normal” people reacted to me and treated me were justified and caused by my own brokenness. I’ve always believed and internalized that every failure was my fault.

As long as I can remember, other people have not reacted to me as if I were one of them. That’s what fueled the intensity with which I worked to learn how to respond like they did to each other. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to know, and have repeatedly confirmed, that in some way you’re not like any other person you ever encounter. You feel almost like Pinocchio, that you aren’t a real person.

By the time I entered high school, I had largely succeeded in my endeavor, according to some definition of success. I continued to make significant strides after that point, but looking back I would say everything else was more incremental improvement than major substantive change. Even my mother has said she thought I outgrew the issues and problems I had had in childhood by the time I became a teen.

I think what I did and what is described in the literature as “optimal outcome” is qualitatively different from what most autistic people mean by masking or camouflaging. Rather, what I did was and is pervasive. I never stop doing it, even in most respects when I’m alone, though the intensity obviously is greater around others. It’s almost, but not quite, automatic. It’s never completely unconscious, but it’s not usually fully conscious either. If you have to actually consciously think about how to react in a social situation, it’s hard, and I would say probably impossible, to do so in a way that doesn’t markedly stand out to others. You have to internalize all your strategies and coping mechanisms. You have to make the part of your brain enforcing them powerful enough to dictate behavior. You have to become the mask.

And, even after internalizing everything, you still aren’t actually like “typically developing” people. That’s one truth evident, at least to me, in the observations from the study I found and referenced above. Even to removed observers some distinct differences between typically developing (TD) and optimal outcome (OO) children were apparent. And that’s been the story of my whole life. I may not appear clinically autistic in most settings, but other people still never quite treat me the same way they treat everyone else. They may not even notice, or perhaps only feel that something is ‘off’, but it’s painfully apparent to me.

From the study, I’m not sure exactly what’s behind the increased extraversion among the OO group, but I remember going through that phase throughout my teenage and young adulthood years. My wife recently commented that when she met me and for the first years of our marriage I talked all the time about everything. And she’s right. She first knew me in the tail end of that period. I found a comment in my basic training class “yearbook” where a fellow trainee had commented that I “sure talked a lot”. At some level, perhaps, it’s easier to manage the flow of the conversation when you’re speaking, though also from the same study, the OO children still had a hard time keeping the conversation focused. And in addition to getting sidetracked, OO people still “info dump” to some degree.

However, I found the “less reserved, shy, and inhibited” markers for “extraversion” in the study the most telling. Because it’s not simply that I talked a lot. The nature of my “conversation” was also qualitatively different, though I didn’t recognize that fact at the time. If I felt at all comfortable, connected, or even striving to connect with people around me, I had few, if any, filters on my speech. I would share things about my history, experience, and feelings without the normal inhibition that most people feel. I don’t know that I can put my finger on why that was true, but it was. Perhaps I had devoted the part of my brain normally involved in that sort of inhibition almost totally to managing social interaction, both through active performance and by inhibiting behaviors that detracted from it. Perhaps I spoke more out of a need to make connections. Maybe it was both of those and more. But I can see I lacked normal inhibition.

And that wasn’t good at all. It’s not just that I was vulnerable to manipulation and abuse because I couldn’t read the intent of other people toward me, though that’s certainly true. I also gave them all the information they needed to use against me on a silver platter. I gave them facts, history, preferences, inclinations, experiences, and feelings without any real effort on their part. I was already vulnerable and I actively made myself even more vulnerable and exposed.

I can still be talkative and assertive in conversations and social interactions, though that skill has become somewhat less accessible to me over the years. But I began to develop very strong filters on the things I revealed. However, even those filters don’t seem to function the way they do for “typically developing” people. I had to internalize the fact that revealing things that can be turned against me is bad by internalizing that all topics that are later used against me in conflict, abuse, or manipulation must be inhibited. But that process applies to everyone around me, no matter how close they are or how I feel about them. Take a moment to think through the implications, and I believe the negative side of that process is self-evident. Over the long term, I’ve filtered more and more with those who know me and the intense filtering has made it increasingly difficult to form new connections.

The observable differences between OO and TD groups in the study on remaining calm in a tense situation and being relaxed and handling stress well (with the OO group being noticeably worse) also makes perfect sense to anyone who is autistic. No matter how open, agreeable, conscientious and stable I can make myself appear, I am always in danger of being overwhelmed, I’m not really relaxed at all, and stress is a constant challenge.

The broader results make sense as well. The OO group was less likely to make conversation just to be polite than the TD group. The OO group had more pragmatic language difficulties than the TD group. They were more likely to get sidetracked in a conversation, lose their original point, and talk too much about some topics. Unsurprisingly to me, the OO group was more animated and less likely to use a flat or monotone voice than the TD group. They are more animated because they’ve practiced and focused on it more and have internalized a flat or monotone voice as a negative behavior that must be suppressed and avoided. How do I know that? Again, I lived through making those changes.

The OO group appeared similar to the TD group on rigidity, though the OO group was more likely to keep doing things the way they were used to doing it even if they knew a better way existed. Again, that makes perfect sense to me. It already takes a ton of effort to appear relaxed and flexible when you’re anything but. Why change something that works and which you’ve already learned?

So how does this optimal outcome play out over a lifetime? I can’t tell that anyone has truly studied that question, but I know how it went for me. Initially, I was highly vulnerable and abused or had others take advantage of me multiple times over the course of a decade of life. I had limited ability to establish true lasting connections with others and even when I did I had very limited resources or methods to repair inevitable relational damage. And over time, everything became overwhelming. What specifically was overwhelming me? I have no idea. I’m still working on that question. But I know it became harder and harder just to get through every day. And I internalized that as failure and proof there was something wrong with me and was driven to try to hide my struggle. Obviously, that made things worse and didn’t help at all. Externally, from the perspective of an observer, I checked all the boxes we expect for a “successful” life, though those boxes are primarily related to work and the benefits that flow from a stable income.

But I mostly never felt it.

And there is one other key difference between the children in the study and myself. While a ton of negative forces, internal and external, may have pushed and driven me, ultimately I decided how to approach and change each aspect of my behavior. I wouldn’t say all the impetus was internal or even fully conscious, nor do I want to overstate my volition, but I did have considerable agency in the specific choices I made and the self-training I undertook. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have those choices and that training imposed on me externally, especially by the very people on whom I relied for basic survival. As chaotic as my childhood was, that strikes me as even worse.

In order to achieve the state described as an “optimal outcome”, a person has to internalize the belief that at some level their survival depends on hiding their differences and looking like typically developing people. A child is not likely to explicitly or consciously think in those terms, but that’s the level of focus and energy it takes for an autistic person to develop and maintain a near-typical face. For me, I internalized the sense that I was broken and that I had to at all costs hide my brokenness. Any “failure” on my part reinforced that sense and made it stronger. I internalized the failures and never even really felt the “successes”. And if people didn’t treat me well, it was on some level experienced as nothing more than I deserved.

My way is almost certainly not the only approach that can be internalized sufficiently to produce an “optimal outcome”, but I don’t see any healthy, positive approach that will produce the same result. If you are even somewhat okay with the human being you are at your deepest levels, you will never be able to disguise all your many differences from everyone around you almost all the time. And that’s what the “optimal outcome” requires. It’s not masking at will or when circumstances demand. It’s managing and monitoring every behavior and every interaction all the time and never, ever stopping. It’s taking every failure and building it into your internalized system to try to avoid repeating it. And all that has to happen mostly on a semi-conscious or subconscious level like the details of driving a car. If you have to think about it too much, you won’t be able to actually do it.

And the whole time, you will still be autistic.

And that’s the basis for my plaintive, tear-filled question:

Optimal outcome for whom?

 


2 Comments on “Optimal Outcome for Whom?”

  1. 1 VisualVox said at 11:17 am on December 17th, 2017:

    “… ever stating that such individuals have “lost their autism diagnosis” or even as the study states, “no longer meet diagnostic criteria for ASD“, is actually a misrepresentation of the DSM. The diagnostic criteria for ASD all explicitly state that diagnostic behaviors have manifested “currently or by history” and the DSM explicitly requires that the “symptoms” have been present from early childhood. The DSM does recognize on some level the neurodevelopmental nature and lifelong persistence of autism.”

    That’s exactly it.

    Lots of other great points, but this one really stood out for me.

    The fact that people think it’s possible to “reverse” autism, or even that it’s a desirable state, is ample evidence that they do . not . understand . autism. Full stop.

    My optimal outcome involves napping at will on too-bright sunny afternoons. I’ll achieve that state in about 20 minutes, if the stars align properly 😉

    Thanks for the great post!

  2. 2 Scott said at 6:52 am on December 19th, 2017:

    Yes, that is the one basic reality so many people reject. No matter how much a person changes their presentation to the world, how well they are able to handle everything on any given day, month, year, or decade, their experience of life, encompassing everything, is always going to be an autistic experience. The places where I excel and the places where I struggle are all interwoven and connected with my autistic brain. Autism isn’t some collection of distinct and separable symptoms or limitations. Those are simply some of the things that are visible and which other people notice (or don’t if you hide them well enough). The more I understand and the more I examine my life the more I see every aspect of it touched and shaped by my autistic experience. Heck, even the entire way I structured and pursued training myself as a child to achieve whatever it is I achieved was a distinctly autistic reaction and solution to the problems I was experiencing.

    The brain that I have shapes the way I experience absolutely everything in the world around me, how I respond to that experience, and how I think. And that combination encompasses much of what it means to exist at all.