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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bianca Toeps
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December 23, 2021 - January 2, 2022
As an autistic, I often feel forced to code-switch, to switch between two different types of behaviour: my own and that which is socially desirable.
the autistic brain is hyperactive.
According to the Markrams, more connections are being made in the autistic brain and brain cells respond more emphatically to each other. There’s a stronger response to stimuli, thoughts run rampant quicker. In short: the world is extremely intense for autistics.
Typical autistic symptoms, such as averted eye gaze, social withdrawal, and lack of communication, may be explained by an initial over-awareness of sensory and social fragments of the environment, which may be so intense, that avoidance is the only refuge.”
The notion that people with autism might experience more stress due to a day that’s been planned down to the hour (because the more that’s been planned, the more that can go wrong) is lost on them.
One of the reasons girls often get diagnosed late, is that parents and doctors don’t perceive a girl who knows everything about horses as autistic.
Autistics will never ‘learn to cope with it’. The only thing they will learn is to ignore their own body’s signals. And that can be incredibly harmful.
This is also referred to as the autistic burn-out: someone who was previously able to speak in coherent sentences, suddenly can’t utter a single word or bursts into tears at the slightest change. It’s the result of years of asking too much, of hiding and of “acting normal”. The person in question shuts down and seems to become more autistic. But that’s not the case: The person was always this autistic, they just ran out of energy to hide it.
Usually the person who seems to be functioning just fine, the one who appears to be doing well in society, is fighting to just keep their head above water.
Autistics who get better at learning how to “act normal” only end up spending more and more energy doing so.
People who have recently been diagnosed with autism often don’t even know their own boundaries anymore; the uncomfortable feeling is so omnipresent, that listening to it seems like an impossible task.
As you might have understood by now, many autistics disapprove of Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) therapy. They describe it as useless and downright abusive.
A study by Henny Kupferstein found that children who underwent ABA therapy have a higher risk of PTSD than their peers.
Are you looking for ways to prevent your child from experiencing sensory overload, or are you trying to teach your child how to endure it? Because the latter can be very, very harmful.