Ways Ableism towards Neurodiversity can be missed and how it's just as harmful

let's talk about if it's possible for someone to become more autistic after they are diagnosed now if you guys already can't tell I'm honestly not looking forward to talking about this because there's just a lot of harmful ideologies that goes with this rhetoric and I'm gonna do my best to break down why it's problematic and harmful but I am just a human so I'm sure even though I've written down all of my talking points I will forget to say certain things or upon editing I'll probably think about more things that I would want to add but it's too late so if I do miss anything please respectfully leave them in the comment section down below and let's have an open discourse about this very nuanced complicated topic another reason why I feel wary is because I myself am affected mostly negatively by something like this and a lot of other autistic individuals especially autistic adults are affected negatively by this as well so I do feel very passionate about this topic I'm gonna try my best to not get super emotional and just talk through everything as logistically as I can although some may argue that even me trying to do that is a result of years and years of trauma and ableism that's rampant but that's just like the society that we live in today I'm not going to be as peppy as I may be in my other videos even though I don't really think I'm peppy but when I talk about topics like this I tend to really need to connect with my thoughts and so my masking levels will go lower than it already is at I just don't have enough spoons to also manage my tone of voice and manage what I look like and how everything comes across so that is why I look and sound like this but yeah I posted a few days ago asking you guys to give some video suggestions on things you want to hear me talk about one of the suggestions that I got was from Celeste and they said I'm not sure if you have spoken about this topic before but I would love to know if after you were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder you noticed your behaviors and traits seemed more autistic in other words did you find yourself behaving more stereotypically autistic I only asked this question because I've been thinking a lot about masking and have been trying to evaluate which masks I want to continue presenting I hope this made sense you've been such an amazing autism resource for me over the past few months thank you so much Celeste for your comment and for anyone who leaves comments like this thank you guys for giving your suggestions keep them coming so I think it would be helpful for me to start this whole conversation off by giving examples of what it could look like for someone to look more autistic after their diagnosis just because I think sometimes when we hear things like ableism when we hear things like this person seems more autistic out of nowhere we take it so literally and we don't know how to dissect that concept abstract it understand it philosophically and understand how that applies in our own personal life with how we carry ourselves in all these different types of situations and so examples of what it could look like is let's say someone is diagnosed later on in their life with autism and all of a sudden they're going through this process of unmasking for the first time in their life you start to see that they're wearing headphones a lot more for example and in inappropriate situations so let's say your autistic family member is all of a sudden going to the grocery store with you and they have their headphones on or they're going to family events and they have their headphones on or they're going to any sort of public space and they have their headphones on and you're thinking to yourself why are they all of a sudden wearing headphones everywhere they didn't used to do that it didn't used to be an issue so why is it all of a sudden something that they're picking up after they're diagnosed oh they're just wanting to see more autistic than they are or they're just putting on an act things like that right other examples could be if someone is feeling extremely dysregulated they could start stimming in order to try to self-regulate so maybe they're rocking back and forth maybe they're humming to themselves maybe they're blinking really fast maybe they need to start pinching their own skin or pulling their own hair or things like that and let's say you as the family member or the loved one aren't used to seeing that you think to yourself where is this Behavior coming from you didn't used to do this why are you all of a sudden more dysregulated when in reality perhaps this autistic individual were hiding their meltdowns from you hiding their shutdowns maybe they were stimming behind closed doors when they were absolutely alone maybe they've closed themselves off to their stems so much so that they haven't stemmed even though they desperately needed to in order to regulate their nervous system so they themselves didn't even know that that's something they needed access to there's so much that goes into this that I think like honestly when I talk about it it gets me so frustrated I think because I was in ABA therapy and I was for a short amount of time working with kids and essentially teaching them to not be autistic it makes me really frustrated that we live in a society that is still so backwards in trying to understand what autism is and the nuances of autism it hurts that there's people out there even if they're not intending to right who think that someone who's finally diagnosed and finally understanding what their needs are not just like subjectively but objectively speaking for their own body regulating their nervous system instead of being happy for this person we think to ourselves they're putting on an act or we start to be skeptical of them and think oh why are they all of a sudden having all of these more stereotypical autistic traits when they've lived their whole lives not having these traits it's really not that simple it really is not that simple I feel like research has yet to catch up to the population of autistics that are only now starting to get diagnosed I oftentimes find myself trying to call people like me and those out there like me the Lost population of autistics because we have for years and centuries not had access to educational resources and resources in general to help us understand the depths of autism and how that applies to us as autistic people who don't necessarily stereotypically exhibit the DSM-5 symptom criteria and this is another reason why I will always encourage people like me to go and get the official diagnosis because even if it doesn't affect your validity on a personal level which is totally fine you don't need the official diagnosis in order to feel valid but on a systematic level I think it's important for people like us to be diagnosed because that will reflect in numbers and that will get the attention of researchers and that is what we ultimately need as a society and for future Generations is for research to finally finally finally catch up to people like us to finally catch up to what autism really means right we need the DSM to be more inclusive of what the Spectrum looks like we need the symptom criteria to be updated ways we could begin doing this is by taking the initiative into our own hands in our personal lives to start to get official diagnosis I know it's expensive I know there's a lot of barriers there but I know a lot of autistic people do think on systematic levels and we recognize patterns and stuff so I know there's a lot of you out there who understand exactly what I just talked about and understand the importance of having the numbers be reflected in the research and and the need for more research and things like that so that is just something to keep in mind right but back to the topic I consider myself a high masking autistic because for most of my life I have come across as relatively normal to the people around me and the people I came across and that is something that other autistic individuals are not able to do is to camouflage and mask and I don't necessarily think it's a luxury to be a high masking autistic it is just a different set of struggles and I think in general the way our society is set up no matter what level of autism you have we all struggle right and one doesn't negate the other's validity of struggle I didn't necessarily look more autistic after my diagnosis and the reason being is I was unknowingly unmasking already the years leading up to the diagnosis and I didn't know I was doing this from my knowledge at the time I did didn't know or suspect I was autistic at all I just felt chronically burnt out like intensely chronically burnt out I could not function outside of just going to work I couldn't maintain like a personal life I couldn't maintain friendships and because I had such low energy I couldn't put as much energy into masking as much as I would have in the past and so yes I think a part of it was objective right I didn't have the energy to do so but also on a spiritual sense I had started to awaken to wanting to be more authentic to myself this was kind of after college so I think from the ages of 23 to 25 ish I started to go through this process of I just want to be me I want to show up as myself and people could take me or leave me I don't care it is what it is because at this point in my life I was getting constantly misunderstood by so many different types of people for so many different reasons everyone always thought they knew who I was based off of what I look like or whatever conceptions they have of me or stereotype I fit under physically and then once they got to know me were completely baffled by my personality and how it had nothing to do with what I look like you get so tired of being misunderstood and misconstrued usually for negative reasons I hit a point where I was just like I am going to be myself and I don't care you could say that's an autistic trait of mine right because that's the social deficit I don't feel the need to be liked and accepted by everyone and I don't feel the need to put myself In Harm's Way in order to be accepted by everyone it still hurt it still felt very lonely and very alienating but I did not want to sacrifice my own well-being to just be simply accepted by other people and I'll get a little bit more into that later in the video when I talk about ableism but I was already doing what I needed to do on a personal level to just show up as Irene whatever that meant to me I knew I was more monotone than an average person I knew that I was more low energy than an average person I didn't go out of my way to be bubbly I didn't go out of my way to compliment and fawn after someone I didn't go out of my way to talk to someone if I didn't want to talk to them and none of these things mean that I dislike a person it just meant I didn't want to so I'm not going to I didn't go out of my way to follow social norms when it came to dating for example if I like someone I would message them right away I would reply with within one second if I like them and I wanted to see them I would say it I wouldn't think to myself what's normal is to wait a little bit and then text them or what is normal is to wait a little bit and then see them or move at this pace is what's normal compared to this pace I just kind of started to follow what felt right to me and move in my own specific beat of the drum and I knew at the time it was different I knew at the time I wasn't normal or like in the average person but I didn't necessarily think that it was attributed to anything bigger like autism and so when covid rolled around and I started to be exposed to other high-masking autistics and I started to realize deep within myself that there are these questions and and unknowns that could be linked to something more and I went on the Journey of getting diagnosed and I was finally diagnosed I started to realize not necessarily all the ways I was masking because I was already unmasking for years leading up to it but what I really realized was all the ways I was shamed for honoring myself and my autistic needs when I was finally diagnosed it wasn't necessarily that I was finally allowing myself to be more autistic and exhibit my autistic traits it was more so the fact that I finally got answers as to why I am the way I am and in a sense it gave me more permission to be myself and not feel like there was something intrinsically wrong with myself for being Irene all of a sudden instead of feeling like I'm just not going to talk to this person because I don't feel like it I guess because I'm a I would instead say something like I don't really want to talk to this person I'm not going to talk to them and it's just because I feel non-verbal right now I feel over stimulated and I'm gonna honor that I found myself feeling more empowered after my diagnosis to say yes and no because I knew where the yes and no was coming from and I knew why I needed to say yes and no whereas before the diagnosis I feel like a lot of autistic people struggle with their yeses and no's because they either honor their yeses and no's and feel bad about it and feel like they're a horrible person because of it or they dishonor their yeses and no's and are accepted by society and those around them but to the detriment of themselves it's like you can't win let's just take a deep breath together you guys I want you to put your hands over your stomach and I want you to feel your stomach expand as you inhale so what this is called is a deep belly breath and we don't practice this enough we usually breathe into our chest which is shallow breaths so let's practice bringing that breath all the way down to our stomachs feel it expand ladies and gentlemen if you have to unbutton your jeans in order to get your stomach to expand fully you do it if you have to pull your waistband down and let your stomach hang over in order to take that deep breath you do it okay but let's take a deep breath together and let's exhale all of that tension that we may have in our body right now because I know this topic is a lot right okay foreign the reason why a lot of autistic people reach a Breaking Point in which they are coming across as more autistic with or without diagnosis is due to the fact that we were born into a world where a neurotypical holistic user manual was shoved into our hands and we were told to shape our life and to shape ourselves after this user manual we were not provided with a user manual that matches our own system the autistic the neurodivergent system and so throughout the years across our lives we learn to manage all these little parts of ourselves our Behavior patterns our responses to A system that is almost in so many ways completely opposite of ourselves this for some is doable this is kind of going into the high masking High camouflaging type of autistic but to an extent because it does begin to affect you it begins to affect your mental health it begins to affect your physical health which is something I have yet to talk about but is very real is that it begins to affect your health there is a reason why a lot of autistic people struggle with a lot of health issues there's a reason why a lot of autistic people have autoimmune disease or chronic illnesses because we are taught to operate in a system that is not meant for us if you tell a fish to survive out of water it's not going to survive for long if you tell a bison to go swim in the ocean it is not going to survive for long but if you allow every single organism and animal to thrive in the environment and in the way that they were meant to thrive it will be able to do all sorts of things it'll be so much more capable when you see someone who is starting to be more autistic it's not because they're trying to convince you it's not because they're putting on an act it's not because of anything other than they are finally honoring what they were always meant to be they are finally accommodating for the struggles that they've always needed to accommodate for they are finally doing things in a way that feels right to them and in a way that doesn't take away from them now I kind of want to talk a little bit more about ableism and why these ideologies are ableist and why that is so harmful so what is ableism let's read the textbook definition of what ableism is ableism is discrimination and social prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities ableism characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and it also classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people what are the ways that I have experienced ableism in my life surprisingly I experienced ableism more before I was diagnosed than after I know everyone's going to have a different experience but for me I experienced a lot of ableism before the diagnosis and oftentimes I find myself thinking would I have experienced as much ableism if I had a diagnosis and people knew at the time that I was simply autistic and it's not Irene is a or Irene is this or that right and in many instances I do think I would probably experience less ableism but I'm not gonna let myself really dive too much into these hypotheticals because it's not very helpful but I will explain to you guys what type of ableism I experienced in different parts of my life and how that affects me the ableism I mostly experienced was in Dynamics involving women and work there were many experiences is in all different types of work environments where because of my autism and because I had social deficits I wasn't able to understand and blend in seamlessly to a lot of social dynamics with co-workers specifically because I wasn't diagnosed with anything and because at the time everyone thought I was just a neurotypical person they attributed a lot of the things that I struggled with or just simple personality traits or autistic traits to me being a me being hard to get along with all of these very negative traits that they thought that I was choosing to be just because I was a bad person and this hurts on a personal level yes it hurts me because I feel alienated I feel like there's something wrong with me but it also hurts me in a very objective systematic sense because it affects how I'm able to be perceived at work and how I'm supposed to function at work I just wanted to drop in and quickly add that threatened in this context could mean something different for everyone threatened could be very literal like someone is literally threatening your job or threatened could be a lot more nuanced in sort of like these microaggressions and you guys will kind of see examples of what these different meanings of threatened mean when I start to give you examples of all the different ways I was discriminated against at my workplace in the more microaggression type of way it could be through your interactions with a certain type of co-workers that doesn't make you feel safe or welcomed it could be in ways that your co-workers treat you different or your co-workers go out of their way to alienate you or the rules that you are held accountable to don't really apply to certain co-workers as they would apply to you things like that I wanted to take a lot of care and it's explaining these types of microaggressions because for many many years I didn't know how to even process some of the experiences I've had at work I just knew that they felt very intense and traumatic for me and I know some people might think it's dramatic because it might not be a big deal but it always felt like a bigger thing than it was for me I would have nightmares about some of my work experiences and I feel like it wasn't until I made this video where I realized how much deeper those experiences went and how my invisible disability which is autism kind of made me a Target in many of these workplace environments I feel like it's important for me to come on here and try to explain those little microaggressions that some might miss or some might not know how to understand or interpret themselves I hope that's me saying this and me giving my own personal experiences and examples is helpful for some of you guys in trying to understand some of your experiences if you've had similar experiences but yes back to my examples for example I've worked shifts where all the girls put me into the back by myself as they were all rotating amongst each other talking to each other and working and even though I was supposed to rotate with them because that's how the company Works they would just rotate me into one or two positions that was off by itself and wasn't able to interact with other people and that affects how my mental health is at work right it makes it so that I don't want to necessarily show up at work because I feel bullied and I feel like I can't have the same work experience as everyone else I've been in situations where let's say as a waitress we were all told that we have to help each other bring food to their tables if they're busy and you're free I was in many situations where all the girls would help bus and run each other's food during a rush and they would go out of their way to leave my tree of food lying in the back of the kitchen getting cold while I was busy greeting a table and serving a table and then I had to go to the back and run my own food while simultaneously running other people's food because that was the rules everyone just decided altogether to not run my food even though it was against the rules things like that and that affects you know my performance at my job because now my tables are getting cold food and that affects you know my feedback and that could go to my managers and my managers might tell me things like Irene why is your performance low blah blah blah they might even be able to fire me because of that and these are things that I've now realized affected me a lot more severely than I thought the ableism right in many cases it threatened my job and my livelihood I literally had a job before where because I didn't necessarily go out of my way to befriend my co-worker that I was working with so I would show up to work and I wouldn't necessarily talk to her I would just do my own thing do my job and leave she developed all of these personal opinions of me throughout our time together that led her to go out of her way to Target me at work she was constantly reporting everything I did wrong to our manager she was constantly trying to essentially get me fired like all the time and she wouldn't have done that if I was non-autistic or if I masked more and I came across as more friendly and more neurotypical to her and she wasn't doing it because she knew I was autistic because I wasn't diagnosed at the time but it was because of the autistic treats this is why a lot of autistic people whether they're conscious of it or not mask their autistic traits because they're just trying to survive is what it is so when someone is diagnosed with autism or they're starting to honor their autism and integrate the autism back into their lives and people are just saying things like why are you all of a sudden and like more autistic this is just like not how I know you or this is surprising it's very hurtful and harmful because what it essentially communicates to us is who you're becoming although is good for you is not good with us and the systems that you have to show up in we recognize that you are different we are not accepting of that difference and so what that also tells us is you need to make a bigger effort to hiding that because the attributes coming out right now is not something we want to deal with it's not something we want to look at it's not as admirable or advantageous as all the neurotypical traits you might have been forcing yourself to have I really hope that we could get to a point one day where people don't have so many ableist ideologies interlocked with their own perceptions of others and how they carry themselves and this is why I try my best to in my own personal life not just judge someone when they're different like if I ever catch someone pointing out a certain type of trait that someone has in a negative way like for example something I come across a lot in circles with women is just like a judgment of like them being mean or standoffish or not nice and things like that and I always go out of my way to challenge that person in their viewpoints and be like well why do you think they're a mean person why do you think they dislike you or they're ignoring you what if they're just wanting to keep to themselves and it has nothing to do with you why did they owe you all of these things to make you feel good and reassured with yourself because they don't this is a time for you to evaluate yourself and why you're insecure instead of accusing them of being a bad person because they're not going out of their way to stroke your ego and make you feel comfortable with yourself and I'm not saying this to like make the other person feel bad I'm not saying that they're bad people right A lot of people unknowingly do this because ableism is so contingent and entrenched into how we're raised to be I just want that person to have some sort of understanding and empathy that there's other ways to be a good person and that could look many different ways right instead of this one set way someone might not go out of their way to ask you how your day was or to have a conversation with you but they might be the type of person that will remember that you like tomatoes and they'll go drop off Tomatoes at your front door because they're thinking of you and maybe they just want to like find other ways to be a loving human in a way that feels comfortable to them a good way to understand whether or not you might be ableist in the way you think and carry yourself and hold others accountable is to ask yourself how often are we forcing someone to be a certain way or else that's the main thing here or else are we forcing someone to be more social to manage their tone all of that stuff or else their job is threatened their relationship with you and the group is threatened how free is this person able to be themselves and still function properly within the system or the dynamic of the group is this autistic person able to be their autistic selves and still get the job done and I say this because I feel like with all of the people that I have come across that I feel like have straight up like Bully Lead Me In all these different work environments I don't think they're horrible malicious people the irony is that I feel like all of the female bullies that have ever come across in these situations would probably consider themselves feminists would probably feel really bad if they were to learn I was autistic in many ways they would have probably went out of their way to be nicer to me and inclusive of me if they knew I was autistic but the truth of the matter is is that they have internalized misogyny still they have internalized ableism still so when someone like me came across their radar they went out of their way to be mean to me and to alienate me and they thought that it was justified probably because they just attributed my autistic traits to just me being a bad person and I deserved that treatment because of that you know I hope that your loved ones are taking the time and efforts that they need in order to learn more about autism and neurodivergency in a non-ableist way in order to under stand you more and in order for them to grow as people as well because it tells a whole new history of autism but also if you look at the subtitle of his book he talks about the future of neurodiversity and his book in many ways is a sort of Manifesto for this new concept of neurodiversity which as psychiatrists and clinical psychologists we should be paying a lot of attention to because it's really the idea that there are many ways for the brain to develop there isn't a single way to be normal there are individual differences in the population which may be there for reasons of natural selection were not all made the same that we all have our strengths and our weaknesses and autism may be just one example of neurodiversity in the environment Silberman chose as the front cover design for his book an image of biodiversity and we're all very familiar with that related concept of how important it is for us to preserve diversity in the Amazon rainforest or elsewhere and he really argues the same should be true for neurodiversity I encourage you guys to honor the way your brains work and the way that your systems were made to work and to begin to replace that neurotypical user manual with a neurodivergent one in the comments section down below write your unique neurodivergent trait that you are going to highlight this week or this month and through that I want you to encourage another person to see your difference as a positive and to encourage them to allow their differences to come out and shine as well let's all encourage each other to be unique let's all encourage each other to be ourselves other than that thank you guys for tuning in on today's video don't forget to take care of yourself this week and I will see you on next week's video bye guys

Channel: The Thought Spot

Views: 44,796

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

Id: sBY3X5NYWE4

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023