- And that was the trigger point for me when I saw what autism
looked like in real life not just this medical definition, suddenly it was something that I could immensely relate to. When you've spent your whole
life not being believed, to finally find people and a
community that do believe you and do say crazy things like, "I understand," it's absolutely life-changing
to have that validated and to find out other people have had this experience as well. Hi everyone, welcome back to
Asperger's From The Inside, you're here with Paul. So today's video topic is; Are You Undiagnosed Autistic? How to tell if you're
on the autism spectrum. So this is part two in
this three part series for this month's patrons choice topic. So, if you haven't seen last
week's video on the AQ Test, the online autism quotient test, then you may wanna check that out as well. So, in this video today we
wanna answer the question of what does it actually
feel like to be autistic? So I've broken the video
up into three parts. So I'll start with the
trouble with external factors and looking at behavior. Because very often we look at
lists of behavior and symptoms and all of these things to try and tell if someone is autistic and there's that can be problematic. So I'll give you some background as to why that can be problematic. Secondly, I'm going to describe for you the inner experience of
three defining experiences of what it's like to be autistic. And what you will find is, if you really strongly
identify with these things, then that's a very
strong reason to believe that you might be on the spectrum. And thirdly, if this is you, then what should you do next? What are some next steps
that you might wanna take? This video is for you if you are thinking that you might be on
the spectrum yourself. So it's sometimes it can be
helpful to label ourselves as I'll discuss later but very rarely is it helpful to try
and label other people. So if someone in your life is displaying autistic characteristics, then this video might help you
understand their experience, but it should not be used to try and diagnose them from afar. If you wanna help your
possibly autistic friend, probably the best thing you
can do is to take the time to get to know them and what they need and help them to accept
themselves as they are. Okay so number one, the trouble with looking
at external factors such as behavior. So the reason I wanted to start with this is because the diagnosis
criteria for autism essentially looks at behavior and other externally visible
criteria to make an assessment. And while that might
make sense for children who are essentially just
acting on their impulses as we get older, we develop
more and more sophisticated coping strategies to overcome
our natural weaknesses. Right we learn to mask,
we learn to blend in, we learn different ways to
avoid certain situations and overcompensate for other situations. So in short, external
behavior especially in adults, does not tell the whole story. Masking is essentially
covering up your differences so that others don't see them. It's repressing certain behaviors, It's pretending to be normal, it's doing what you think you should do at the expense of what
comes naturally to you. And I don't mean sometimes
doing what you should do instead of what you'd like to do, right? Everyone masks sometimes,
I mean all the time. So it's actually possible
to mask for decades and not even realize that you're masking. So it's actually quite
a common experience that after receiving a diagnosis as an adult your friends and family
might tell you that you're suddenly being more autistic and you never used to do this and you're only doing this now because you've somehow got it in your head that you have autism. Whereas actually it's always been inside you've just been repressing
it the whole time. So, if you are those friends and family, it's important to
recognize that the person is trusting you with showing
you a side of themselves, that they've been hiding for
you know most of their life because they didn't
think it was appropriate to be themselves. So anyway, that's why in this video we'll be focusing on
your internal experience of what it feels like to be autistic, rather than you know looking
at external characteristics on how to spot autism from the outside. Okay so number two, three
defining examples of the autistic experience. So I should be upfront that I'm
talking about these examples from my own experience, so they might not apply
to absolutely everyone, but I have met hundreds of autistic people and these three experiences
are incredibly common. So I would be really interested to hear how you relate, if you
know you're autistic I'd be really interested
to hear how you relate to these and especially if
you don't particularly relate to one or two aspects of them that would be interesting to hear as well, because we are a very
very diverse community. So the first defining experience
is of feeling different. And I don't mean just
a little bit different. I mean when we call Asperger's
wrong planet syndrome sometimes, right? I have a friend of mine
who at the age of about six actually asked her mother like she didn't think, "Oh maybe I'm adopted." She asked her mother, "Am I an alien? "Am I actually a different species "to all of the other kids in my class? "Because I just don't seem
to have anything in common, "I can't relate to them." And as an adult, you know that, no we are part of the same
species, we're just different. But as a child, she actually thought that was a legitimate possibility that maybe she was an alien
and no one had told her. That's how different
she felt from her peers. And another example of this is, if I go to the park and I
see some ducks on the lake, I'm not thinking, "Oh I need to join in," I'm thinking they're ducks on the lake, they can swim around by themselves and I have no compulsion
to jump in and swim around with them. Similarly if I did jump in and try to swim around with them, they'd run away. So, similarly with my
peers when I was in school, especially primary school
and even kindergarten, I'd look at my peers and think, "Wow they're interesting, "check out these funny little creatures "and what they're doing aren't they cute?" But I didn't necessarily
have the urge or compulsion to join in and do what they were doing because it just didn't register
that I was one of them. And the opposite experience
is common as well. If you do want to join in, you don't know how to do that how are they all doing the same thing and joining in this thing? When I run up to these ducks in the park they all fly away. So what am I doing wrong? So a second defining experience is of not being believed. And this relates to the
first one quite significantly in the sense that if I am so different in one particular way, when I share that difference with others, people think I must be joking. So what are some examples? If I hear something that
other people don't hear, they think I didn't hear
that you must be crazy. If I smell something
you know or other senses that other people don't or if I'm affected by something, it's very hard for people to believe that I have trouble reading, right? I have an engineering degree, how can you have trouble reading? Surely that doesn't make sense. What do you mean when I take
away your visual schedule suddenly you can't
remember times and dates and your executive functioning skills fall through the floor. That doesn't make sense. Surely you must be exaggerating. So, when you do share something you know to be true
about yourself to other people and the response is no no no no no, surely you must be exaggerating that can't possibly be true. That can have a very crushing effect on your own self esteem and self belief, and make it even less likely for you to advocate for in the future, because I know that if I tell
someone what I really need, if I tell someone the lights
are too bright for example, they'll just be like, "Yeah, yeah, "I know the lights are bright
everyone has that issue." Well actually no not
everyone has that issue. There's actually a term for invalidating the experience of another person, it's called gas lighting
and the result of it is, a chronic lack of self confidence, because I essentially think
I must be going crazy, because whenever I share
my experience with someone, they tell me that it
can't possibly be true and I must be making it up. Number three, is something that I'll call social confusion. It's not necessarily a
lack of social skills, because some autistic people have learned certain coping mechanisms to
do well in social situations, but it's an over
intellectualizing of something that most neuro typical
people just do naturally without thinking. So I'll give you an example. When I was in high school, one of the things that I just
couldn't figure out how to do, was how to walk with a
group from this class, to this class. How close do you get? Do you walk in front, do you walk behind, can you talk at the same time, there's never any space what do I do? I got a feeling that most of
the other kids in my class, didn't spend most of their time thinking and worrying about how
close they were standing to people and how to walk with the group without feeling like
you're you've been left out of the group. And that's an example of
how I'm trying to solve this social problem intellectually and I'm over analyzing
everything that's happening. And what I can do with that is, I'll instead of actually getting in there and just trying it, I'll
look from afar and think "What can I do, what can I say, "how can I participate in this group? And actually I'm sitting over
here just watching everybody the little anthropologist
as the other analogy goes. And then what happens is when
I do actually make contact with this alien race and
try and interact with them, suddenly it's so distracting
and it's so over stimulating that I lose my ability to
remember all of my preparation and I don't go very well. And then afterwards I'll analyze it again. It means that in the
moment it's very confusing, and in the moment it's very draining because I'm constantly looking
out for what's happening and trying to figure out
what should I say next. When someone says, "How are you?" What are they looking for? (chuckles) And so that's why a lot of autistic people learn coping mechanisms
like scripting for example. An undiagnosed autistic
friend of mine the other day, I said, "Hello" and he
said, "I'm good thanks." Right? That's because like,
"uh someone greeted me, "I am good thanks." its like, I'm not actually responding, I'm responding to my
habits of what I can do to get over this situation. Now, this won't always be
obvious from the outside, as I said before, masking,
camouflaging, faking confidence, it's actually relatively easy to do and well, for some of us
is relatively easy to do, but it's exhausting to
do at the same time. And if you have to put on this mask in front of other people, then when you finally
get to go by yourself and you can drop the mask
and finally just relax and do whatever it is you need to do without worrying about what
other people was gonna think, without having these constant demands, like looking people in the eye, one of the reasons looking
people in the eye is difficult is because when someone
looks you in the eye, they're expecting you to know exactly what they're thinking and feeling and respond to that with your face. And that's really difficult
when you're not sure what the other person
is thinking and feeling or how to respond. Okay, anyway I've probably
gone on enough with that, these were supposed to be short examples. And just again I wanna acknowledge that probably every human being has experienced some level of these things at some point in their life. But I guess the difference here, and this goes especially
back to number two is, when you've spent your whole
life not being believed, to finally find people and a community that do believe you,
and do you validate you, and do say crazy things
like, "I understand." It's absolutely life-changing
to have that experience that you previously
thought no one else had, and no one else could possibly understand, to have that validated, and to find out other people have had this experience as well. That is why diagnosing
yourself as being autistic can be an incredibly powerful
moment in a person's life to realize all of those things. Now, many of us will also
want an official diagnosis and I won't go into that in detail now, but I've also done a
video on the pros and cons of getting an official diagnosis versus being happy with self
identifying as autistic. Okay so, part three of this video, now what to do from here, if
this stuff sounds like you. So if you've been listening to these three defining experiences and it really resonates with you, and you just wanna find
a community of people who understand what you're going through, then you might be on the spectrum and I would encourage you to
look into the matter further. Most adults I know came to the realization that they were autistic before they received
an official diagnosis. So finally in answer to the question, how do I know if I'm
on the spectrum or not? The most definitive answer I can say is, if you find another person and
another person's experience and they know they are on the spectrum and you highly highly
resonate to that person to an unbelievable degree,
then you can be pretty sure that you are also on the spectrum. Now you will probably not have this level of intense connection with
every other autistic person out there. There are many , many many
types of autistic people, we're all different. So I would encourage you to
look for people of similar age, similar gender, similar
culture, similar experience and see if their experiences and especially their
hidden internal struggles and their internal life really
resonate with you to a degree that you thought wasn't possible. If that's the feeling that you're getting, then you're probably on the spectrum. And if you're unsure,
I would encourage you to continue looking and continue getting
your questions answered. Your questions are valid,
they deserve adequate answers and you are the person that defines if an answer is adequate or not, if someone has understood you or not. If you are going to
speak to a professional, I suggest you take as much
'evidence' as possible. Two to make your case and
tell them all the reasons why you're asking the question of, am I on the spectrum in the first place. You may also wanna take a
support person with you, especially if sometimes
stressful situations impede your communication ability, and this advice is especially, yes I know I'm going to
advise mode at the moment, but especially if you're
in a crisis situation if something not good
has happened in your life that is leading you to wonder
if you're on the spectrum, keep looking, look for support, you don't need an official
diagnosis to warrant support. So if you need support go out and find it, you are worthy of getting help. We're probably over time, but another quick warning is that, this is really really big stuff. If you have listened to these things and something has touched
something really deeply, that's probably a sign that
there's a lot more in there that hasn't come out yet. So I just wanna give it like
a bit of a floodgate warning, once you start unpacking
these really deep questions of "Who am I?" There can be a lot that comes out and it can be quite overwhelming, quite literally life-changing. So I just wanna
re-emphasize the importance of having a support network, and if you don't have a support network finding a support network, it could be other autistic people, it could be friends and family. I would recommend trying
to find and make friends with some other autistic people as well especially those who resonate
with your experience, because we don't always resonate with every other autistic person, but when we do it's absolutely amazing. If you're looking for other
resources on my written blog I've published over 20 diagnosis stories, so you can read people
from all over the world, different ages and genders
and different backgrounds and see how different
yet somehow connected our autistic experience has been. In a similar way I've also got a playlist of Aspire interviews, which is another good way to get to know what does autism look like in real life. Because for me that was
the trigger point for me when I saw what autism
looked like in real life not just this medical definition. Suddenly it was something that
I could immensely relate to. There may also be autistic support groups or just social groups in your area, so check online, check Meetup, check other other places like that to see if there's any way that
you can meet autistic people in real life. And I might leave it there,
there's been a lot in this video it's been a huge topic, I've
already broken it into three and they're still going way over time. But I hope you found this really helpful. I encourage you to take
your questions seriously, it's a worthy question to ask, if you think you might be on the spectrum it's a worthy question to
get an adequate answer to. So I hope this has been helpful
and stay tuned next week for the last part, part three
of this patrons choice video where I'll go through some questions that you can ask yourself. And again I wanna put the emphasis on you're asking yourself these questions. These questions are not
to diagnose someone else by looking at them from the outside. So I hope you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting
this channel on Patreon, and I'll see you again next week. Bye.
Aren't we all smart people,a little autistic?
I needed this... thank you! This video has shed light on problems that I've been struggling with for most of my life, that I haven't been able to exactly put my finger on and say "this is the problem I'm having, how do we fix/cope with it?"
That visual schedule thing has been huge for me. I owned a small business for a few years (now back in the workforce, thanks largely to covid) and I struggled immensely until I started using google calendar and google keep religiously. Everything is scheduled and everything is in a list. I'm a go with the flow person, but if I don't have it on my calendar, or in one of my lists... I WILL forget. every time.
im pretty sure being intp by itself makes you somewhat appear autistic at the very least
I'm still debating whether I might be on the spectrum, or have ADHD. This video might help, so thanks!
I literally watched this video yesterday, and I've been asking myself this question a lot. I'm currently looking for a way to get diagnosed as an adult (24). It does feel good tho, idk about you but I often feel misunderstood in general and it's been weighting a lot.