Taboo Topics – 3. Inappropriate Obsessions

I confess, I’m starting to lose motivation for this series of posts. (What on earth did I hope to achieve by airing all the worst Asperger faults in public??) But hey, I feel committed now, so might as well see this through. I only hope people find it informative or enlightening.

And what a gnarly one I have for us today! Trying to work out how to approach this one is giving me a fine challenge to start the new year.

Firstly, this one needs a really big disclaimer at the start, which is: please do not assume that all autistics indulge in the types and degrees of behaviours I’m going to be mentioning, we are all different. And in particular, please understand that spectrumites in general have no less moral sensibility than the general population. So, with that out of the way…

Topic 3: Inappropriate Obsessions

You’ve probably heard that autistics have their “special interest”. I dislike that term. For one thing, some of us Asperger-types do not stick with a single “special” interest throughout our lives, but shift from one interest to another much like anyone else. For another, and I’m going to step straight into the minefield of public opinion here, I maintain that they are not just interests but (to varying degree) obsessions. The truth is, we don’t have “special interests”, we have autistic obsessions.

What I hope to achieve here is understanding that, despite my using the term “obsessions”, these are not necessarily something to be hidden away or feared. Once again, understanding is the first step towards acceptance.

So why do we develop obsessions? It’s related to the way autistic brains are wired – and the way we cluster over at the “sytemising” rather than the “empathising” side of the E-S field. Our brains are, by nature, constantly working to understand the nature of the things around us by seeking patterns and categorising. The way we learn things is from the bottom up – gathering all the data and seeing if it clusters in ways which allow us to draw conclusions.

Take the stereotype of the child who will sit for extended periods reading the telephone directory. OK, yes, it seems weird. But consider all the connections a telephone book opens up to a brain at a certain level of development. The child may come away from their study that having learnt how to sort words into alphabetical order. They may now know the names of all the suburbs in their area, including their locations and postcodes. They may have started categorising surnames into the common and uncommon, into standard spelling and alternative spellings. Would it not be fascinating, to learn all this for the first time?

I believe what happens is that every time we make a connection between one piece of data and another, our brain neurones fire up in excitement. We get a dopamine hit. This is what keeps the child’s head buried in the telephone directory – it is almost an addiction.

Can you see why autistics have a tendency to get hooked on train timetables and route maps?

In the past, females tended to be overlooked for diagnosis because our interests were less “out there” – animals, maybe, or novels. Never mind that the girl has been learning the colours, weights and temperament of every breed of dog, or has been storing in memory the behaviour and dialogue of fictional characters to help make sense of the real world.

I’m not saying this method of learning is limited to autistics, but I think the autistic brain tends towards a stronger craving for it. Many of us can drop easily into a state of hyper-focus. This is a bit like the concept of “flow” – being so completely absorbed in an activity that one is aware of nothing else. From personal experience, I would even postulate that we cannot maintain our mental health without regular ‘fixes’ of our obsessions.

Problems arise when we develop an obsession which is inappropriate in type and/or intensity. It is very common, for example, for a young adult to get into trouble at work for spending too much company time indulging an obsessive interest. This could be enough to lose them their job.

There can be legal consequences of inappropriate obsessions also. There’ve been famous cases of transport-obsessed autistics stealing trucks or trains out of their need to indulge their interest. (For an example, check out a guy called Darius McCollum). Unfortunately, it is quite common to develop an obsessive interest in a particular person. Combined with autistic social and empathy deficits, this can lead to stalking and harassing behaviours (though often with no intent to harm).

You can see why this is a taboo topic. There is a very real, and probably justified, fear that to admit the existence of autistic obsessions would be to paint us all as undesirables and potential criminals.

What I would point out is the flip side of obsessions. The classic example would be Albert Einstein. However gifted he was at maths, would he have developed the general theory of relativity without a hefty dose of autistic single-minded focus? What about Greta Thunberg? Do you think she would have achieved global recognition without an autistic degree of obsession over climate damage?

What I’m saying is that autistic obsessiveness, of itself, is neither good nor bad. It acts a mental driver, pushing a person to a deeper and more intense level of application to whatever has grabbed their interest – whether that is higher mathematics or the novels of Jane Austen or the history of the diesel locomotive.

This is a power, a gift to society, if only people had the wisdom to see and harness it. The challenge is only in the recognition of autistic obsessions when they occur, and the steering of them in positive directions.

My sad conclusion is that society still has a long way to go. Maybe we’ll be getting somewhere when the rail companies and legal authorities decide not to lock up the would-be train drivers turned thieves like Darius, but to employ them instead.

Taboo Topics – 2. Relationship Troubles

I’m going to crack on with my expose of Asperger issues (before I lose my nerve. And because it’s raining roos and emus here so there’s not a lot else to do…)

The same caveats apply as in my previous post – even when I’m generalising, I can’t speak for all those on the spectrum, and many will have different issues and alternative viewpoints to mine. This is just my take based on my own experience, readings about autism online and in autism forum posts. Here we go…

Topic 2. Relationship Troubles

I’m going to limit this discussion to close personal relationships, here – romantic partners and spouses. Even so, this is a big and complex topic, it’s hard to know where to start or how to do it justice. Let’s just say that (a) most autistics desire close relationships as much as anyone else; and (b) multiple autistic traits act together to make initiating and maintaining relationships far more difficult than it ought to be.

Oh, I have to be careful here, this topic is so sensitive. There are websites and books out there written by ex-partners of (often undiagnosed, inferred) aspies with the sole purpose of exposing the reasons why we make terrible partners. And WE HATE THEM. They misunderstand our motivations, they conflate our behaviours with those of narcissists and sociopaths, and the message is always the same – run a mile!

The usual response from autists (after we recover from the meltdown) is to stress that many of us can and do maintain close personal relationships. Which is the truth.

[Some figures here, in case you are interested, from a poll on autism forum Wrong Planet asking about the relationship status of mature adults. Of 130 respondents, 34% were single but only 16% expected to remain so. 40% were currently in a relationship (though for 6% either themselves or their partner were not happy with it). 19% were separated or divorced. So the stats, while a little skewed, are not as dire as those sites would have you believe.]

Such sites are dismissed as spreading hate speech and some lobby to get them shut down… but they remain. As I see it, they are likely to remain in place until we autists are sufficiently well understood by wider society that such misrepresentations are exposed for what they are.

Simply stressing that autists can and do maintain relationships is not enough. It’s the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. The fact is, autism can make relationships harder and if we are to fully accepted, people need to know why and how and what can be done to help. If we are not to remain misunderstood, we have to be willing dive into these frigid, turbid waters and examine the truth of our relationship troubles.

So, here is a list, off the top of my head, of some of the various autistic traits which muck up relationships for us :

• social skills deficits which reduce the likelihood of meeting someone and making a good impression
• difficulties in initiating and maintaining a conversation
• empathy deficits as per my previous post, which makes us seem less connected and emotionally supportive to our partner
• ability to be attentive in the short term, but unable to sustain the effort required in a long-term relationship
• alexithymia – difficulty in recognising or verbalising emotions. Having emotional needs one can’t express
• trying to resolve issues through logical argument without recognition of the emotional impact. Appearing insensitive
• being unable to tolerate emotive situations (such as involving conflict)
• the need to frequently retreat into solitary interests and pursuits, which can be seen as neglectful
• the need for order and routines, and lack of tolerance for disruptions of these
• inability to pick up on unspoken clues or read between the lines to determine how a partner really feels, if they don’t tell us

I think I’d better stop there. It’s amazing, looking at that list, that we manage relationships at all – yet we do! Humans are remarkably adaptive. Once both partners recognise that their relationship issues stem from Asperger deficits, they can find ways to work around them. Sometimes the result may seem unusual (you would be surprised to know the number of aspies who maintain a happy marriage while living in different houses, or who have a schedule for intimacy, for example) but with sufficient will on both sides it can definitely work.

What is the common denominator in those sites which warn people away from relationships with aspies? It is that these were people who either did not know their partners had Aspergers, or did not understand what that meant. Maybe, if they had known and understood a little more, their experience would have been completely different.

Taboo Topics – 1. Empathy Deficits

This might be a really bad idea… I’m thinking to write a series of posts about Asperger-type autism topics which we on the spectrum generally prefer not to discuss. Either the topic itself, or my personal view on it, is not usually aired in public. These are issues which autists tend to be highly sensitive about – they are the things we find difficult, our deficits.

So why break the taboo and risk a backlash?

My thinking is only that we can hardly complain that we are misunderstood – the common AS lament – if we do not open ourselves up enough to enable understanding. Sometimes that means admitting the areas in which we fail. Maybe fail is too strong word, too negative? But it certainly feels like failure when I am unable to meet the behavioural expectations of others, and myself. It would be good to re-frame this sense of failure and find a way to accept the limitations inherent to my neurotype – but first I feel I must shine a light on the actual nature of those limitations.

In order to write from experience, I’ve chosen topics which affect me. The spectrum being as broad as it is, not all will have the difficulties in these areas that I do; equally I’m sure others will have difficulties in other areas which I don’t mention. It’s possible some may be issues with my personality rather than autistic traits as it’s hard to separate the two. And I present only my own opinions and can’t claim to speak for anyone else. So with those caveats out of the way…

Topic 1: Empathy Deficits

Naturally, this one is a sensitive topic – because who wants to be known as the person with no empathy? Ugh. It feels like being labelled a psychopath.

Some get upset when this comes up and will automatically deny having an issue. The common, knee-jerk response tends to be: “That’s not true! I feel plenty of empathy.” Certainly, for myself, I can have a very strong emotional response to others’ distress, I can really feel their pain. Do not doubt this.

But the denial of deficit is based on a misunderstanding of the full meaning of empathy. It is more than an emotion, it is not only about feeling others’ pain. Empathy also involves: (a) timely recognition of what someone else is feeling; and (b) understanding (and demonstrating) an appropriate response. Or perhaps I should say a “neurotypically appropriate response”.

Autistics generally have deficits in these areas due to our difficulties connecting with others. Some might assume that your reaction to a situation would be the same as theirs when it is not (I’m not upset, so I assume you aren’t either). We also have varying degrees of difficulty picking up on the clues that someone is in distress, unless it is visibly obvious.

Personally, I don’t do too badly on recognising others’ distress but even once I know, however badly I feel about your pain, I may not know the appropriate response, or may feel uncomfortable enacting it. I may stay silent out of fear of saying the wrong thing and I may be wary of touching in case it crosses boundaries. I may assume you would wish to deal with your distress without my input and walk away, or else, my feelings of empathy may be so overwhelming that I just freeze up.

The commonality with psychopathy, then, is that with both conditions one can appear to be uncaring towards others.

The type of empathy deficit is actually completely different between these conditions. Psychopaths have a deficit with “affective empathy” – that is, sharing and being affected by the emotions of others. Autistics have a deficit with “cognitive empathy” – that is, the ability to know another person’s state of mind.

The psychopath may know that you are upset but does not care. The autist typically cares very much, once s/he knows, but may react inappropriately.

This is not exactly a taboo topic, in so far as many have described the different types of empathy in order to deny the implication that autists lack feelings or compassion. It is my personal view on the issue which is controversial.

My personal view is that it matters very little what I am feeling inside, what matters is how I behave on the outside. I can have all the affective empathy in the world, but what use is that if I am unable to act on it appropriately? I might not deliberately harm people as a psychopath might, but I’m still going to let people down, I’m still going to fail to provide them the emotional support they need in a way they can use. It is by our feelings and our actions that we express our humanity.

I understand why my view is unpopular. To present autistic traits in a negative light may seem at odds with the neurodiversity paradigm, the idea that our differences should be accepted, or even celebrated. But I am not against the concept of neurodiversity, and certainly I agree that autistic minds can have great strengths.

The way I see it, we all want better inclusion of autistics in society, and acceptance of our differences in the way we interact, whether within personal relationships or at work. To gain to acceptance, however, first we need to understand why we have those interaction difficulties. How can we expect people to accept our divergent behaviours with no explanation? That is why I believe we need to start with open recognition of our deficits, however uncomfortable this may be.