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identifying triggers for overload
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Autism
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Start expanding your fundamental understanding of what is happening. Words give power over problems, prior to understanding triggers were even a thing you weren't looking for them. Read experiences of others, what triggers them. Consider that you can alter your relationship to the triggers, not just avoid them. I hated almost all music as a kid, that changed once I started playing music rhythm games like DDR and guitar hero. I'll argue that music was information I didn't understand how to process, which dysregulated me. The unwanted information of songs being stuck in my head really upset me. Improved understanding of the sensory input opened ways to stim in response to it.
Expand what you consider to be inputs, expand what you consider to be a stim. Inputs are anything happening to you, including your own thoughts and actions. Stims are your outputs, including thoughts. Inputs you don't understand cause frustration. Your brain expends energy to find the correct response and gets nothing for it. Pressure builds up and if we don't do something in response we blow up. There are so many things that get better once you can understand them.
Consider cilantro, wiki says between 3 and 21 percent of people have a gene mutation that makes it taste unpleasant, I'm in that lucky pool of soapy disgust. Before gaining this understanding I simply could not process how my family enjoyed food with cilantro. In fact, I didn't even know it was cilantro at fault, I just hated some of the food and my family loved it. Lack of knowledge let me believe it was a subjective taste preference, and I would suffer for that, going hungry or being forced to eat soap. Learning in my late teens of this genre mutation empowered me to avoid my own disgust while explaining how others aren't disgusted by it.
So much in life is improved by expanded understanding. I think that's the core of why kids dysregulate more often, they have less tools to explain the world. I think that's why super smart kids with this brain don't dysregulate as often, they pull themselves out of the darkness.
I'll leave you with this link about how words literally grant your brain power to process inputs. https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-language-1102
I agreed with your entire comment up until this point:
Autism is a spectrum. What you are seeing are kids that have a higher capacity to learn maladaptive coping mechanisms. They're still dysregulated, they're just better at hiding it from others. As far as being "smart", this often gets used against them. The number of times my parents were told "She's not applying herself enough" when I was getting Bs & Cs with an A here and there. They all thought I was coasting, but if my sensory needs were ever addressed I probably would have been getting straight As.
Based on your response I'm not clear what we didn't agree on. I'm a former smart kid that only realized he is autistic at 33. I'm hopeful that my kids will have more support in school than I did, and that the world outside of school will continue to become more accommodating for us. The world wasn't built for people in wheelchairs, but it's slowly being rebuilt with accommodations. Our curb cuts will take a lot of different shapes.
The attribution that it has to do with intelligence, when in my eyes it comes down to luck (as far as how severe it impairs someone)? Labelling the existences of 'low-functioning' autistic people as a "darkness"? It feels like this is buying into the concept that if you just try hard enough, you won't be disabled.
The point of curb cuts is that the world was redesigned to accomodate those in wheelchairs. We need society to meet us where we're at, not the other way around.
Ah, thank you for the clarity. My view of things, intelligence comes down to luck as it's a measure of brain capability (not IQ), which I believe is fixed. Darkness was strictly meant as ignorance. Highly intelligent people will be more likely to learn, synthesize new ideas from previous experiences. When faced with the struggles of this existence, high intellect might invent a functioning coping mechanism where low intellect will fail and leave you to meltdown. Considering I believe we also become frustrated over a lack of understanding, not strictly from undesirable sensations, I think intellect plays a huge role in why people say autism is a spectrum. The compounding failure for an average intelligence autistic kid to learn to cope results in daily meltdowns and placement in special needs classes where they are seen as incapable. If society better understood their problems, helped them process and learn coping mechanisms, healthy stims, and what to avoid, they might be able to live a more normal life. That's not what happens today, and it's fucking tragic.
I don't really like any of the words that exist to talk about the issues unique to autism. Sorry if that caused any confusion.