The First to Fall

I Can’t Express my Ideas Properly

When I write, I either spend too much time explaining things people already know (which frustrates them) or I say things without explaining them properly (which frustrates them). I can never find find a happy medium.

I’ll try to explain what I mean by “feedback sensitivity.”

When I was diagnosed, I spent months watching the same videos and reading the same books most people watch and read after a late diagnosis. I had the same feelings (probably).

I wanted to know WHAT MY AUTISM WAS. At its core. People say these particular traits are not really autism–they’re co-morbidities. Ok. Let’s put those aside. Therapists say these particular thought / behavior patterns are the result of layered trauma (i.e. decades of being autistic in a “neurotypical” world). Fine. I can see that. Let’s put those aside, as well.

What’s left? What’s at the CORE of this label people give me (autistic/ADHD/OCD/etc.)?

I was left with a pretty short list of what I started to call core traits. Black-and-white thinking, a need for routine and predictability, a need for a certain level of novelty, deep focus, etc.

But lists don’t do much for me. They never have. They taunt the part of me that needs to reason inductively, to find a larger explanatory model. I wanted to know what was common to all of those traits. Where do they come from? What explains them?

(Like anyone would, I applied my own existing knowledge, biases, and frameworks to the task. I’m heavy into permaculture, ecology, evolution, anthropology, and a few other fields. These have always been my “special interests,” as the clinical lingo goes.)

I went down a lot of paths. Some of them were just wrong, and I had to double back. Some led me to the ideas you read about in my book work as it stands, but they sounded different at the time.
They weren’t completely wrong, but they were juvenile or incomplete.

For example, I toyed with the idea that I have a DRIVE and a NEED to seek out species-appropriate stimuli and environments (things that are good for humans, in general), and the extent to which I succeed…I’m FINE. The extent to which an environment or stimulus is NOT species-appropriate (not good for people, in general), I’m NOT fine. In fact, the parts of me that were just fine, strengths sometimes, in healthy environments, became disabilities. I still believe this…but I wasn’t happy with “species-appropriate.” Because it didn’t take long for me to realize that what I was talking about were things that were good for ALL forms of life (animals, plants)…not just people.

In the end, what I found to be common to all the traits on my list was: sensitivity. They were all forms of sensitivity. More or less sensitive to change than a neurotypical person. More sensitive to contradiction. To unpredictability. To sounds and smells. Still with the species-appropriate idea firmly in mind, I felt strongly (and still do) that the change I was overly sensitive to wasn’t a level of change that was good for any person…those people were just somehow less sensitive to it. The same went for contradiction. Contradiction doesn’t benefit anyone…it leads to most of the problems we see on the news. The sounds and smells I was “overly” sensitive to? They were the smells and sounds of activities that are harmful to all people (and all living things, really)…engines, synthetic perfumes, etc. So I’m sensitive to harmful things. But shouldn’t I be? Why isn’t everyone else?

I started to think about what allows a living thing succeed in an environment, and what causes it to fail. And I came back to a pretty fundamental principle: an animal succeeds depending on how well it can figure out the rules of a place. The better and faster it can understand the rules of a forest/prairie/pond/etc., and the better it can change its behavior to match those rules, the better it will survive and reproduce.

Break the “rules” of the forest, and you will be “corrected.” Walk through a patch of poison ivy, and you’ll be in discomfort for a week. Go out at the wrong time of day, and you’ll be eaten alive by mosquitoes. These “corrections” the forest is giving you are known as feedback. It’s sort of a strange thing to say because we think of “feedback” as something a person gives to you. Something that’s given to you on purpose. But in ecology, the consequences of your actions in a certain ecosystem are just that: feedback / correction.

So, on the whole, the more sensitive you are to that feedback, the better you’ll survive and reproduce. The better you can read signals and adjust your behavior by them, the more success you’ll have. It’s evolution 101.

With that in mind…I came back to my experience in the world as an autistic person. I’d established (in my mind, anyway) that my level of sensitivity is the right level of sensitivity for a living thing. I didn’t have to come up with hypothetical scenarios to prove this to myself, I spent a lot of my early years at my uncle’s or grandfather’s…remote off-grid places where I just…lived.

But here in this place….I AM dysfunctional. It doesn’t “feel” like I’m dysfunctional, I really am. And it’s that trait, that feedback sensitivity, that is doing the disabling. But that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? How could THE trait most responsible for a living thing’s success lead to disability?

So I tried flipping the narrative. What if it’s the place? What if every single one of my core traits are really just indicators of what’s wrong with this place? “Deep” focus? There’s nothing deep about my focus when I’m in the woods. It’s just focus. “Black-and-white” thinking? In nature? Are you kidding? That’s the only kind of thinking there is. Something is either true or it isn’t

I knew that this wasn’t a very nuanced argument. I knew there were holes. I knew that it was based on my own particular autism, my own particular need for supports, etc.

BUT….core traits, right? CO-morbidities, right? Trauma, right? These are NOT autism. They’re either something that occur with it (they can occur in people who are not autistic) or something that is the result of my “autism,” that core trait of feedback sensitivity, playing for a long time in a very dirty sandbox.

I hope this helps someone, somewhere.

Written by

Ken

in

When I write, I either spend too much time explaining things people already know (which frustrates them) or I say things without explaining them properly (which frustrates them). I can never find find a happy medium.

I’ll try to explain what I mean by “feedback sensitivity.”

When I was diagnosed, I spent months watching the same videos and reading the same books most people watch and read after a late diagnosis. I had the same feelings (probably).

I wanted to know WHAT MY AUTISM WAS. At its core. People say these particular traits are not really autism–they’re co-morbidities. Ok. Let’s put those aside. Therapists say these particular thought / behavior patterns are the result of layered trauma (i.e. decades of being autistic in a “neurotypical” world). Fine. I can see that. Let’s put those aside, as well.

What’s left? What’s at the CORE of this label people give me (autistic/ADHD/OCD/etc.)?

I was left with a pretty short list of what I started to call core traits. Black-and-white thinking, a need for routine and predictability, a need for a certain level of novelty, deep focus, etc.

But lists don’t do much for me. They never have. They taunt the part of me that needs to reason inductively, to find a larger explanatory model. I wanted to know what was common to all of those traits. Where do they come from? What explains them?

(Like anyone would, I applied my own existing knowledge, biases, and frameworks to the task. I’m heavy into permaculture, ecology, evolution, anthropology, and a few other fields. These have always been my “special interests,” as the clinical lingo goes.)

I went down a lot of paths. Some of them were just wrong, and I had to double back. Some led me to the ideas you read about in my book work as it stands, but they sounded different at the time.
They weren’t completely wrong, but they were juvenile or incomplete.

For example, I toyed with the idea that I have a DRIVE and a NEED to seek out species-appropriate stimuli and environments (things that are good for humans, in general), and the extent to which I succeed…I’m FINE. The extent to which an environment or stimulus is NOT species-appropriate (not good for people, in general), I’m NOT fine. In fact, the parts of me that were just fine, strengths sometimes, in healthy environments, became disabilities. I still believe this…but I wasn’t happy with “species-appropriate.” Because it didn’t take long for me to realize that what I was talking about were things that were good for ALL forms of life (animals, plants)…not just people.

In the end, what I found to be common to all the traits on my list was: sensitivity. They were all forms of sensitivity. More or less sensitive to change than a neurotypical person. More sensitive to contradiction. To unpredictability. To sounds and smells. Still with the species-appropriate idea firmly in mind, I felt strongly (and still do) that the change I was overly sensitive to wasn’t a level of change that was good for any person…those people were just somehow less sensitive to it. The same went for contradiction. Contradiction doesn’t benefit anyone…it leads to most of the problems we see on the news. The sounds and smells I was “overly” sensitive to? They were the smells and sounds of activities that are harmful to all people (and all living things, really)…engines, synthetic perfumes, etc. So I’m sensitive to harmful things. But shouldn’t I be? Why isn’t everyone else?

I started to think about what allows a living thing succeed in an environment, and what causes it to fail. And I came back to a pretty fundamental principle: an animal succeeds depending on how well it can figure out the rules of a place. The better and faster it can understand the rules of a forest/prairie/pond/etc., and the better it can change its behavior to match those rules, the better it will survive and reproduce.

Break the “rules” of the forest, and you will be “corrected.” Walk through a patch of poison ivy, and you’ll be in discomfort for a week. Go out at the wrong time of day, and you’ll be eaten alive by mosquitoes. These “corrections” the forest is giving you are known as feedback. It’s sort of a strange thing to say because we think of “feedback” as something a person gives to you. Something that’s given to you on purpose. But in ecology, the consequences of your actions in a certain ecosystem are just that: feedback / correction.

So, on the whole, the more sensitive you are to that feedback, the better you’ll survive and reproduce. The better you can read signals and adjust your behavior by them, the more success you’ll have. It’s evolution 101.

With that in mind…I came back to my experience in the world as an autistic person. I’d established (in my mind, anyway) that my level of sensitivity is the right level of sensitivity for a living thing. I didn’t have to come up with hypothetical scenarios to prove this to myself, I spent a lot of my early years at my uncle’s or grandfather’s…remote off-grid places where I just…lived.

But here in this place….I AM dysfunctional. It doesn’t “feel” like I’m dysfunctional, I really am. And it’s that trait, that feedback sensitivity, that is doing the disabling. But that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? How could THE trait most responsible for a living thing’s success lead to disability?

So I tried flipping the narrative. What if it’s the place? What if every single one of my core traits are really just indicators of what’s wrong with this place? “Deep” focus? There’s nothing deep about my focus when I’m in the woods. It’s just focus. “Black-and-white” thinking? In nature? Are you kidding? That’s the only kind of thinking there is. Something is either true or it isn’t

I knew that this wasn’t a very nuanced argument. I knew there were holes. I knew that it was based on my own particular autism, my own particular need for supports, etc.

BUT….core traits, right? CO-morbidities, right? Trauma, right? These are NOT autism. They’re either something that occur with it (they can occur in people who are not autistic) or something that is the result of my “autism,” that core trait of feedback sensitivity, playing for a long time in a very dirty sandbox.

I hope this helps someone, somewhere.

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