Tag: trauma

Abed’s Autistic Abandonment Experience Supercut

In this blog I will summarise selected episodes and then show and analyse scenes that depict common autistic experiences. My main focus will be on Abed’s fear of abandonment and his striving for relationships and, well, community.

Source: Abed’s Autistic Abandonment Experience Supercut – Wibbley-Wobbley Minds

This blog is wonderful. I’m crying. I am reminded how good it felt watching such fully-developed and compassionate representation. I’m also reminded of the intense feels as Abed processed trauma that hit close to my own experiences.

When I first watched the show, I was thrilled to have found autistic representation, that didn’t make me cringe or feel like I had to correct it all the time. But I soon found out that with accurate representation comes accurate depiction of trauma.

Source: Abed’s Autistic Abandonment Experience Supercut – Wibbley-Wobbley Minds

We dream of the accepting community, and Abed found one.

Community is magic.

Source: “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century“

Via:

“Autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.”

Hyper-plasticity predisposes us to have strong associative reactions to trauma. Our threat-response learning system is turned to high alert. The flip side of this hyper-plasticity is that we also adapt quickly to environments that are truly safe for our nervous system.

The stereotypes of meltdowns and self-harm in autism come from the fact that we frequently have stress responses to things that others do not perceive as distressing. Because our unique safety needs are not widely understood, growing up with extensive trauma has become our default.

Because of our different bio-social responses to stimulus, autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.

Source: Discovering a Trauma-Informed Positive Autistic Identity | by Trauma Geek | Medium

“Autistic people have significant barriers to accessing safety.”

“We also adapt quickly to environments that are truly safe for our nervous system.”

That really resonates and calls to mind this passage of mine from “Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism”:

Since reading NeuroTribes, I think of psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work as “Cavendish bubbles” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privileges of nobility afforded room for his differences, allowing him the space and opportunity to become “one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.”

Let’s build psychologically safe homes of opportunity without the requirement of nobility or privilege. Replace the trappings of the compliance classroom with student-created context, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and BYOC (Bring/Build Your Own Comfort). Let’s hit thrift stores, buy lumber, apply some hacker ethos, and turn the compliance classroom into something psychologically safe and comfortable to a team of young minds engaged in passion-based learning. Inform spaces with neurodiversity and the social model of disability so that they welcome and include all minds and bodies. Provide quiet spaces for high memory state zone work where students can escape sensory overwhelm, slip into flow states, and enjoy a maker’s schedule. Provide social spaces for collaboration and camaraderie. Create cave, campfire, and watering hole zones. Develop neurological curb cuts. Fill our classrooms with choice and comfort, instructional tolerance, continuous connectivity, and assistive technology.

In other words, make space for Cavendish. Make spaces for both collaboration and deep work.

Source: Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism

There isn’t much psychological or sensory safety to be found in schools or workplaces. I spent a lifetime trying and ended up helping start a fully distributed company built on written communication so I could work from home in a sensory space and communication culture curated to my needs.

Create Cavendish space in our schools and workplaces. Create safety accessible to autistic people. Neurological pluralism makes for good, universal design.

Previously,

Autism Acceptance Month Is Nerve-racking and Traumatizing

We’re enduring the worst Autism Acceptance Month ever as society rallies around the common cause of our abuse, control, and extinction, complete with celebrity extravaganzas. We can’t be online at all and not be faced with eugenics and behaviorism. It’s traumatizing.

My acceptance month blogging:

A passage to ponder:

We are marginalized canaries in a social coalmine and Rawlsian barometers of society’s morality. It is deeply subversive to live proudly despite being living embodiments of our culture’s long standing ethical failings.

Our non-compliance is not intended to be rebellious. We simply do not comply with things that harm us. But since a great number of things that harm us are not harmful to most neurotypicals, we are viewed as untamed and in need of straightening up.

…

If we were not threatening to the social order in some way, there would not be therapies designed to control how we move our bodies and communicate.

One of the best things that could come out of this is a wake-up call, because concepts like eugenics reassert themselves in every historical era-whether it’s Nazis talking about “life unworthy of life,” geneticists in Iceland talking about “eradicating” Down syndrome through selective abortion, a presidential candidate mocking a disabled reporter from the podium while bragging about his “good genes,” or autism charities framing autism as an economic burden on society. Resisting institutionalized violence requires perpetual vigilance.

Source: THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: On Hans Asperger, the Nazis, and Autism: A Conversation Across Neurologies

And community tweets to explore: