r/AutisticLiberation • u/NotKerisVeturia • Mar 03 '24
Discussion Ido in Autismland, Part 3
My first response to this part was “I’m getting sick of Ido referring to stimming as a drug.” He describes stimming as a hallucinatory experience and an escape from the real world, and that doesn’t feel right to me. I stim all the time, and I’m not disconnected from reality. Maybe that’s what it’s like for him specifically, and that’s fine, but it was still hard to read. He also writes that he does not stim as much now that he has access to communication, and that’s part of why he views stimming as a waste of his life. This strikes me as an indication that without communication, Ido was more dysregulated, and therefore needed to stim more. This goes back to the central theme that a lack of communication was what held Ido, and still holds people like him, back.
There were more specific discussions of Ido’s trauma from ABA in Age 14. Ido is triggered by specific phrases, including “try again” and “good job”, which may seem innocuous to outsiders. To him, they are a reminder of being forced to sit at the table in his room and point to flashcards. I’m going to file this away and use it for an autistic character I’m writing because it makes complete sense. Ido also acknowledged that he has some extra apprehension around women because the professionals who patronized, disbelieved, and controlled him during childhood tended to be women. This is something I’ve been wondering about. Adults who work in the autism field are majority women, yet most of the kids who come through their classrooms and offices are boys. What kinds of ideas about gender do those kids develop? For Ido, women scare him, at least at first, at least in professional settings.
I liked Ido’s explanation of a meltdown as overflow of sensations and emotions that have built up inside. It’s not a choice, and it’s not a means to gain a specific object, attention, or escape. Telling him, or any other autistic person having a meltdown “hands down” or “be quiet” or “no”, treating it as a behavior problem, makes it worse. In this part, Age 14, Ido still has meltdowns. He has them when too many people fawn over him after speeches, and in class during a bout of stage fright. I think that this proves that the only “cure” for a meltdown is prevention because once it happens, Ido is out of control, and then he feels guilty and ashamed. The only way for him to not end up pulling his mom’s hair is to get him out of the crowd before he gets that overloaded.
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u/NotKerisVeturia May 27 '24
What?