let's explore the abstract idea of how being Autistic is inherently linked to Ego Death

let's talk about the autistic experience and how that correlates with ego death all right you guys I'm fully prepared to dive in deep in today's video I don't know how long this is going to be but I would not be surprised if I'm just jabbering for an hour straight I wrote down all of my main points that I'm going to be going through I'm ready I feel like I've come to class and I'm ready to give my lecture just to go through the points that I'll be talking about in today's video video I will be talking about the ways that autistic people go through ego deaths specifically and then I want to end the video in how it positively impacts some of us just because I don't like to be completely existential and depressing in all my videos cuz I know some of my topics could be very overwhelming I always like to round things out with a little bit of positivity not in a toxic positive way like woo woo let's meditate and act like everything's okay but just in a way of like life is really hard life is difficult but also there's beautiful things as well that we can experience you know got to have that Duality there I wanted to talk about how ableism and being a scapegoat leads to Ego deaths I also want to talk about how our hyper self-awareness comes from the fact that we are constantly forced to perceive ourselves from so many other people's perceptions I wanted to talk about how ego death is essential for mascul I wanted to talk about the constant recalibration that we have to go through when we process other people's perceptions of us I also wanted to talk about how having so many ego debts throughout your life kind of obliterates your ego altogether and you end up having no sense of self because of that or no sense of identity because of that I wanted to talk about how for a lot of high masking autistic individuals it's a common experience as you grow old older and older to hit these points where you have to almost intentionally integrate your ego back into your life and how ego is not necessarily a negative thing all the time it's actually very necessary to have a sense of ego so we have to often times in our adult lives begin to learn how to set boundaries for ourselves learn how to be empathetic towards ourselves learn how to ask for accommodations and integrate accommodations and learn how to express our ourselves again cuz sometimes we even lose sight of who we are and what we enjoy because we just don't pay attention to that ever and I also want to talk about how when you recover from having so many ego deaths and you learn how to integrate a little bit of healthy ego back into your life you can begin to healthily hold space for everyone's truth simultaneous to each other and how that in turn allow allows you to have a clear idea of the collective Wellness due to that dissolved ego but before we get into today's Deep dive let's take a productivity shot together for those of you who do not know I struggle pretty intensely with chronic pain I've had 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go of their sense of self and identity so some people describe it as eye openening cathartic Blissful and sometimes even scary and terrify in sometimes people can describe that as also feeling like you are one with the Universe I want to continue to highlight that ego is a neutral term here it's not necessarily just all negative there's a lot of psychologists that will say that there is a healthy sense of ego because it's good for a person to be able to know who they are to know what they stand for to be able to set boundaries and to be able to take care of themselves right the downside to having no sense of ego is that you just Lose Yourself self all the bad but also all the good there's a lot of autistic individuals who end up unal living themselves because they're struggling so intensely with their mental health it has to do with a lot but I feel like going through so many ego deaths throughout your life it makes it so that you just don't care about yourself anymore and you're just suffering right so it makes sense that you just don't want to be here anymore I've heard so many autistic people Express how they don't necessarily want to un alive themselves but they don't necessarily want to keep going either like there's no place for them here and I feel like if we were to really abstract all of these very real objective consequences of being autistic it comes down to the fact that there is a lot of ego death that we are constantly experiencing because of how poorly integrated autism is to our Society both objectively and also subjectively in our ideas of autism I feel like the first place we experience ego deaths is often times in our family Dynamics because as children that's the first thing we're exposed to the next significant area of our life where we experience that ego death is schools and around our peers I feel like adolescence and childhood is so difficult for autistic people because one like everyone else you don't know much about the world around you or life or yourself and you're supposed to be learning that information from the people around you your mentors your teachers your parents and I feel like our society doesn't give enough advice or set neurodivergent kids up well enough we're constantly learning to use inappropriate tools for ourselves we go through this process of needing to switch ourselves over from our original programming and our original tool belt over to a different programming with different tools and I feel like that's kind of where we experience that first ego death of like I don't know why I feel so different I don't know why I feel wrong but I am and I'm going to learn how to exist correctly and appropriately so that I could be more accepted and integrated into society or I don't want to be punished all the time right I feel like that has a very significant effect on children because from an early age you're learning already that your existence is wrong and that's a very simplistic way to put it right because of course like wrong can mean many things but you're essentially learning that the way that you think is not right the way that you operate and like to get things done is not right the way that you socialize with people is not right the way that you express yourself is not right the way that you would want to learn is not right you're constantly being told don't do this that's not okay do this instead why can't you just follow the rules why can't you just do this and so that feeling of being wrong is deeply ingrained in us and in our bodies and in our nervous systems from an early age before we could understand why and so as we grow up into adolescence and young adulthood we begin to deal more with the cognitive aspect of ego death now we develop that sense of wrongness in our minds and in our thoughts of ourselves to be able to match up with the feeling of being wrong and this is where the layers of ego death begin to pile on top of each other so when you move into high school college and when you start to work in your adult jobs you're constantly being reinforced of the nuances of how Society operates and how that doesn't come naturally to you you're constantly learning through messing up based basically in social situations and in many different situations like oh I didn't know this before but now that I messed up I can show up better next time but you still take that hit to your sense of ego because you're constantly having to learn the hard way and that does not feel good right it it really just obliterates your sense of selfworth to always need to learn after messing up and to have to suffer the consequences and accept those negative labels even though you weren't making those mistakes on purpose and you were genuinely just existing only to find out after the fact that you were perceived as selfish or you were perceived as incompetent or ignorant in all of that stuff you begin to add layers of Shame and guilt to that ego death so not only are you constantly suppressing yourself but now you're feeling ashamed of yourself when you are not doing it good enough I have been having meltdown after meltdown for the past like two weeks over the fact that I have a lot more support needs than I realized I don't want to have to struggle I don't want to have to rely on people so heavily and it feels so awful to have these realizations and on top of that I continue to Gaslight myself and tell myself that I must be faking these struggles because how the hell did I go the first 20 years of my life not knowing I was autistic and not getting any help and support and then I remind myself that being in this state right now is the consequence of masking and not getting help and support for the first 20 years of my life I feel this way right now because I pushed myself so hard to fit in and pretend like I didn't have struggles and this is the consequence this is where it got me I worked so hard to show people that I didn't struggle and convince myself that I didn't struggle and I thought if I continued to do that that at some point I wouldn't have those struggles anymore but all it got me was here right now I feel like a failure I feel like a burden and I feel like this is never going to go away like I'm always going to feel like this and I know not I'm just sharing I feel and you begin to truly despise your sense of self and even if we're not aware enough to realize that that's how we feel cuz I don't think everyone is sitting there thinking I hate myself and I despise myself but at least you feel it in your core like in your body for me throughout my young adult life it just felt like I was constantly cringing all the time when I was trying to see myself through other people's perceptions of me I would in these moments play out what happened but through other people's eyes and I would watch myself through their eyes knowing that they were thinking certain negative thoughts of me and I would just genuinely cringe and think to myself I hate myself I am so gross I'm so disgusting I'm so cringe how can I just keep existing like this I I just want to disappear and I feel like this kind of goes into why a lot of autistic people hate being perceived like it's not just this cute thing of like I don't want to be perceived it's like it genuinely causes your nervous system to activate so intensely cuz you don't feel safe in other people's perceptions of you cuz rarely are you perceived accurately or positively you know and I feel like there's so many autistic people who talk about how when they go to talk therapy or when they're talking to someone in general they get feedback from other people like oh you're so self-aware that's so amazing you know so much about yourself and other people's perceptions of you and they talk about it like it's this positive thing when in reality it's absolutely debilitating for a lot of us to be that self-aware when I've been to therapy multiple times throughout my life there's so many times where I'll share something in hopes of my therapists being able to give me some sort of feedback or share some sort of advice with me that I never thought of only to be disappointed by the fact that anything they say is something that I've already asked myself or said to myself any advice they give is something that I've already realized myself and I've always been disappointed time and time again with how little feedback I can get that actually gets me to realize something new and I feel like this very experience comes from the fact that we are forced to perceive ourselves from other people's perspectives all the time in order to mask better in order to assimilate better we're just always memorizing in how we have to exist so that we could hopefully do it correctly the next time around and that responsibility is so tiring oh I'm getting emotional just talking about it it's so exhausting to constantly feel like you are always messing up and to never feel like you could get a break and to never feel like you are doing good enough and that's another aspect of how ego deaths are essential for masking and this is why I will always say that masking is not a blessing I think I read this in a comment in one of my last videos where someone was saying how higher support needs autistic deals with direct harm from society for not being able to mask but High masking autistics have to deal with harm in their personal lives and with their personal mental and physical health and I feel like I totally resonate with that a lot of the times autism can be mistaken for borderline or bipolar disorder especially if you are a woman a minority of any sort we are constantly needing to recalibrate our sense of self and identity because we're constantly needing to process other people's perceptions of us what this can look like is you become a perfect person for all these different situations and people to a point where your sense of self is never able to come out and I think sometimes that looks very much so like borderline and I think this kind of ties into the concept of how autistic people sometimes can seem like The Uncanny Valley you know like you just kind of feel off around us because you could tell there's just so many masks there and scripts there that it it's like who is underneath that surface and that's the sad and ironic thing about this is that we experience these ego deaths we mask in order to be perceived accurately but in order to be perceived accurately we have to become as inaccurate to ourselves as possible so if you are a welcoming warm generous caring empathetic person if you were to just show up as yourself people are not going to see that or get it or perceive you as that you have to figure out how to view yourself from their lens and how to then adjust your settings to show that you are all of those positive attributes in a way that they can understand but get that in times 20 or times 100 that is what it's like to be a high masking autistic who is constantly going through ego death and the thing is a lot of autistic people don't have the luxury to not mask and to not have to go through these ego deaths because you kind of have to choose between one poison and the other you could either continue being yourself and not masking being authentic and suffering the consequences of ableism so missing out on job opportunities being phased out of jobs because everyone is alienating you or you're judged more critically or you're suffering the consequences of being alienated and less included in your friend groups relationships family life or you could learn to assimilate mask and figure out how to be liked and included by becoming everything and everyone else other than yourself and I feel like all of this is rooted in the fact that our society is just so ableist like if you think about all of the attributes of being autistic those attributes are not accepted understood or liked in Social settings we've been trying for a while now and we're pregnant why when we Grant is not here anymore oh she's dead oh well yeah I guess we ended up taking the stairs because I didn't know there was a lift um and bless her she was she was struggling a little bit um but was she disabled oh no no no no oh she was teeny tiny she had these tiny little shoes why was she so small well she was four it was a doctor killed what kind of doctor was she what I've been beside myself since my cat died yeah it's crazy things die you know my dad used to call me Jim G is dyslexic oh being someone that doesn't know how to reciprocate other people's energy the way that they expect or want you to not knowing how to show up for someone in a way that could be understood so not being able to express yourself in a way that other people can understand or Express how you care for someone in a way that they can understand saying certain things that might offend someone when you genuinely weren't trying to like asking a question when you want to understand something but but everyone takes that as passive aggressiveness or having flat affect and everyone perceiving you as being intimidating and mean you know these are attributes where people absolutely despise we are in so many instances the scapegoat because of ableism everyone can sense that there's something different about you or off about you because you can't mask perfectly every time right and sometimes it comes off a contr or sometimes the mask slips I feel like so many times people don't know how to coexist as different individuals or they don't know how to resolve issues peacefully so if there's a lot of tension between people and they don't know how to resolve it within themselves and they don't know how else to get along and coexist it's easier to let's say alienate that one autistic person and for everyone to kind of Target all of that tension or that negativity on to them and then whatever energy is left over that's positive is able to be utilized for each other what makes this even worse is if you do have genuine connections with one or two people within these groups you now deal with the fact that they only talk to you or interact with you when everyone else is gone so how many times have you guys been in spaces where you have one friend that is in the main group but they only really pay attention to you or hang out with you when it's just you two and no one else is around to see it how many times have you brought something up to them about the group and they actually agree with you and say you know what I see that too that's wrong I don't think it's okay but they turn a blind eye to it once the group is together and they turn their back against you and you look like the crazy person you know experiences like this make you go through another layer of ego death where you feel like you're just crazy like you take your perceptions of the world and your observations you try to reflect it back to other people that you trust in order to get some sort of validation of like does anyone see this too and especially when you're simultaneously being scapegoated and everyone's turning their back on you it genuinely makes you question your reality it not only hurts you on an interpersonal emotional level but it often times threatens your sense of safety because when everyone else in the situation in your relationship or at work when they're all turning their backs on you you feel like your sense of stability your foundation is just gone like you have nothing to depend on you don't feel safe you feel like all of it could just be ripped out from under you and that is a scary feeling it's also just really hurtful to go through that sense of betrayal there was so many times where I would have observations of unhealthy things of like a group of people or a work life situation I would be very genuine and open about communicating it to someone I thought I could trust they would relay back similar sentiments only for them to turn around and continue assimilating to that same toxic cycle and act like I'm the outlier crazy one the one friend that I did have I don't feel safe with them anymore and so I now have to choose to either continue being friends with them knowing that they're going to continually turn their backs on me and enable others to scapegoat me or I could choose to genuinely just do everything by myself and have no allies and that's another aspect of the ego death is just traversing life on your own even if on the surface you may be able to maintain some sort of interaction with some people that's not the same as genuinely being by yourself in every aspect of your life like coming home to an empty house not having anyone to spend your downtime with not not having anyone to talk to to share your ideas or observations with to talk about anything with and especially when you're someone that has such an active mind that is like a personal hell to have such an active mind but no one to reflect that off of and bounce back and forth off of and feel that much more lonely and crazy and gaslit like there's so many layers to this and all of those layers don't feel good you could either genuinely hate yourself and be like I'm always wrong I never make accurate observations I am crazy or to be like I do see things that no one else sees or everyone refuses to see and I'm just alone in that but with that being said I do want to now get into the more positive aspects of all of this there's another aspect that not everyone gets to reach in their lifetime where if you Foster enough peace in your life enough regulation enough genuine strong connections with people and yourself you begin to return that healthy sense of ego back into your life I feel like you could create a potential for you to be the person that can hold multiple truths at once and to be able to validate everyone's experiences including your own so making space for the fact that you might make observations that is accurate that is a hard truth to swallow being able to accept that most likely everyone else is not going to see what you're going to see and that is okay with you not cuz you want it to be okay but because that is just a truth that is just a fact of life and you have taken time and effort to make peace with it and that is that is like the ultimate ego death you know to be able to know and accept that everyone is valid with without needing to question yourself and without needing to question everyone else I feel like I've only started to round out into that aspect of my life in my late 20s I'm 27 now where I could see a truth and instead of needing to confront it or talk about it or get other people to realize it I could just accept that truth on my own feel valid in that and not question myself and if anyone in this situation ever were to bring it up to me that's when I'm like yeah I agree with that and I've been seeing it for a while and to not feel offended if no one sees it or if people turn their backs on that same observation after the fact I kind of understand at this point that everyone is on their own journey of realization of understanding the world and themselves and I could kind of make space for all of that I feel like being able to arrive at that point is extremely freeing because you're not feeling as if you're holding the weight of the world anymore you're not feeling like you're constantly fighting against the current or sinking in the quicksand you could kind of just create this peaceful space for yourself and exist on that island and I feel like that's not something that is commonly achievable for people to be able to hold multiple truths most of the time people are so binary people are so defensive they're just constantly trying to defend why they're doing something why they're valid and in turn invalidate other people in order to prove a point or to prove something to themselves and that is just such an ugly cycle and I feel like people don't see that until they've gone through multiple ego deaths of like do not understand that you could see the guy as blue but I could also see this guy as cyan blue you know like both could be accurate no one's wrong here I feel like a really good example example of this is the other day my partner was sharing an experience with me and then my response to him was to say yeah and then he got offended cuz he was like do you agree with that and I was just like um no I don't agree with that but I could see why you feel that way and then he got really annoyed and confused and was just like why would you say yeah if you don't agree because when you say yeah that means you agree with it I kept trying to explain to him like just because I say yeah doesn't mean I agree with him and that's my opinion it just means that I heard what he had to say I heard how it impacts him and I could see how that impacts him and I feel like it was just really hard for him to understand that and I feel like I've been through this so many times with people where upon sharing something with me I just say like okay I could see that some people may feel really uncomfortable with that because they are so used to people either completely agreeing with them and relaying the same experiences or being extremely defensive because they have different opinions and experiences and I feel like this is also why a lot of autistic people are able to have such good pattern recognition and why we're able to have a clear idea of the collective Wellness because when you have that dissolved ego you develop this capability to put yourself in everyone else's shoes to hold everyone's truth to understand it and to learn how we could do better or what needs to be changed or integrated because you deal with having to integrate that within yourself right and I think that's also why a lot of the times it's easy to make autistic people the scapegoat because much of the time we are that mirror to other people not mirrors in a way where you reflect the same energy back to them but mirrors in a way where what they put on to you isn't being reciprocated and so they are left to almost see their own flaws and what's not working out and be faced with those choices that they may not necessarily feel good about or attributes that they may not feel good about all of this to say not every autistic person is going to be completely egoless I'm not saying every autistic person has ego deaths I'm just saying that the autistic experience for a lot of people out there does naturally elicit multiple ego deaths for many of us and I just wanted to make a video that kind of talks about these very abstracted ideas and just like catalyze it into some sort of physical format if you are an autistic person that resonates with having multiple ego deaths throughout your life and you if anything might struggle with having no sense of ego no sense of self I want to encourage you to pay attention to the advice and the content that you're ingesting because a lot of the times the advice that is being put out there for everyone to follow doesn't necessarily apply to people like us and so I might make a video separate from this that kind of goes into that in more depth you know going through advice that we commonly hear online and from other people to follow because it's going to benefit us and it's good for us when in reality it might be counterintuitive for people like us I hope this video was interesting for you guys it's such an abstract idea and to be honest it took many months for me to kind of put together these thoughts in order to talk about it because I thought about this so long ago but I just didn't know how to make clear all the points and figure out how they interconnect with each other so I feel like I finally kind of reached a point where I could talk about it let me know in the comments section down below what your experiences with ego deaths have been like from one person to the other that's also been through many ego deaths I not only empathize with your experience but I encourage you guys to begin to figure out how to center yourself back into your own life and I want to reassure you that it is not selfish to do so it is not selfish to set boundaries it's not selfish to express yourself it's not selfish to empathize for yourself but yes thank you guys for tuning in on today's video and having this very nuanced discussion with me again go check out magic mind in the description box down below take some time to regulate today and I will see you on the next video take care

Channel: The Thought Spot

Views: 198,418

Keywords: asd, autism, autistic, actuallyautistic, autismawareness, autismacceptance, onthespectrum, neurodiversity, neurodiverse, nd, adhd, pdaautism, demandavoidance, executivedysfunction

Id: eJdVTSmYX8s

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023