Tag: asd

I’ve been working on this book for about 6 months and in the last couple of weeks I completed an ASD Clinical Specialist certificate, which was 30 hours of lectures or presentations having to do with Autism.  Some of it was new, and not all of it was stuff I agree completely with (like the effect of polyvagal therapy on diagnosability).  It favored ASAN ethics (As of 2022) on how Autism would ideally be treated.  That is, behavioral goals need to be based on benefit to the autistic individual versus extinguishing traits of Autism because they are autistic.  Eye contact, for example, could be motivated by co-regulation, versus lack of eye contact being inherently regarded as weird.  What is the difference?  Whether co-regulation is occurring.  Is the eye contact feeding you or eating you.  Are you curious about a person, and looking at their eyes is giving you more information, or are you being tricked into it with some other reward and it is drawing on your resources to do it.  Now I don’t know if I’m actually autistic, so I don’t know to what degree I may be masking and what it might be costing me.  But masking is associated with increased depression and suicide ideation.  I relate to Martha Well’s protagonist Murderbot who observes that autonomy can be terrifying, but having a module in your brain that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying. (Network Effect). 
I was able to have ketamine treatment one time and there was some part of me aware throughout which knew what I was experiencing was weird.  Positive psychology and ACT both rely on the experiencing self vs. the remembering (or thinking) self.  Afterward I thought of how I was like the nucleus of a seed, though eggs have more familiar layers to consider.  And so I consider my career masking to be like the shell of an egg, my blogging personal (peer advocacy) is like the membrane, and then there’s the air bubble, the white, the noodly bits, the yolk sac, the yolk, and on the yolk is the nucleus.