Autistic Encapsulation----Protecting The Self From Pain

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I found this link on another wp thread today.

http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuros ... 00224/full

Here is a quote from it:



I never heard of this theory before you mentioned it, and thank you so much. Yes, this does describe autistic encapsulation, though I was not able to realize it from just reading (some of) the interview from the other link. However from what I have read, which is still very little, it does not seem to cover certain aspects, such as, for example, regarding a solution. It seems to be a comprehensive theory, but in some ways not not be as comprerhensive as it appears. More to follow....:-)

To continue with another quote from this article:http://www.wrongplanet.net/article419.html

The theory does make a lot of sense in some ways, and imo merits some kudos, but there are some flaws. It does not deal with the subject of a human being in terms of object relations, and this is how a person's relationship with the world is actually formed. If you read the entire presentation of this theory (which they themselves point out is just a theory), this is clearly left out, and I can see why it might be, as they are trying to approach from a strictly scientific angle; however, this is not how things works.

Secondly, I hypothesize that there are different kinds of brains...and that certain kinds of of brains have more of a tendency toward encapsulation (in terms of data processing) as a thinking device, and this is actually what makes such people so smart. These people would therefore be more likely to employ encapsulation as a protective device. This seems to fit in with their theory, but does it really? In any case, they are talking about severally autistic children who are seriously cut oif at a very young age, and by their hypothesis, the situation can only get worse as the condition is likely to become reinforced by daily living; however, with many of the people here on WP, the situation generally gets better as they grow older, though I know this is not always the case, as in some ways it can get worse........

It is particularly saddening to me to see some people here on WP trying to sort out their own lives and their own selves from such an angle of this particular theory..Yeah, we already know that everything is very intense--it is for me, too, but I suggest we lighten up and sprinkle a little salt on it, and no, I am not saying that we should salt our own wounds.......

This is a difficult topic to write about.

I really don't think we need a specific word for autistics. The term "dissociation" will do just as well--and many autistics do dissociate to deal with intense sensory input.

Dissociation is simply removing yourself mentally from your immediate surroundings. Most people do it; they call it daydreaming or zoning out. When it's used long-term as a coping strategy, it can get to be automatic and even intrusive, and create dissociative disorders. And, of course, if you are autistic and very young, it can interfere with learning.

If sensory overload is such a problem that an autistic child is zoning out to deal with it (and I mean really zoning out, not just the lack of facial expression or lack of communication that adults sometimes interpret to mean that they are not aware), then the only real solution is to deal with the overload in some way, usually by removing the sensory irritants and possibly doing some OT/sensory-integration work.

Callista wrote:

Last edited by littlebee on 03 Nov 2013, 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

Depends. With some kinds of sensory input, if you try to force yourself through it you just burn out and eventually become incapable of functioning. Other types, less intense ones, you can deal with by relaxing at night. If you get to work the next morning still stressed out from the day before, then burnout is inevitable. Many autistics have had the experience of being unable to keep a job except by spending every spare minute relaxing--and I don't mean doing fun things; I mean doing next to nothing, lying down or stimming or zoning out. The first full-time job I had was so hard on me that I couldn't muster the energy to eat dinner or breakfast, and only ate lunch because that was part of the work day.

I prefer The Intense World Syndrome because the researchers don't prattle on without getting to the damn point.

Ooh. Bossy little bee, ain't cha?

And how is this trolling?



If anything, I'm subtlety trolling. Although, what I'm really doing is defending a person who got unfairly shut down.

This thread disinterests me. Bye.

I think we need to get phenomenologists on this, pronto. They focus way too much on depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, especially schizophrenia. (BTW, by (psychiatric) phenomenology, I mean it in the European sense, that of the study of the structure of subjective experience as it is affected by mental disorders. The way they go about doing this is, building on a foundation of philosophical phenomenology, the study of the structure of subjective experience, they look at lots and lots and lots of self-reports by patients and from that start to paint a picture of the common ways that patients with that particular disorder experience themselves, others, and the world.) I'd say that for autism spectrum disorder, with the multitude of reported experiences in blogs, books, speeches, websites, web forums, etc., there would be a lot of phenomenological material for the phenomenologists to work on.

And to underscore the controversy in this thread, this is a related discussion, if a bit tangential:

http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjour ... 1/108.full

From the abstract (emphases added):

That would be an amazing thing.

I remember one psych student I knew actually scoffed at the idea that subjective experiences like this could be of any value. But then, he also hates the autistic community and doesn't really view us as people (the things he said right in front of me. ugh).

Oh, so because I'm not "severely autistic" - i.e. I'm verbal, I don't deserve help.

NO, just forcing through it DOES NOTHING when you are discussing severe enough sensitivities that people dissociate. You do not start processing data eventually. Your body cannot start processing it eventually. It doesn't understand it.

In my case, actually, it gets worse if you try to "force me through it" like all of you inept people who think that sensory processing is unimportant and just something to force through and maybe something to care about for those who "really need it", not the verbal adults.

Sorry. No. I deserve better than that.

And luckily the people around me, including my state government agree with me. Because you don't know what its like to live in a body like this.

(And yes, I am extremely emotional about this topic)

Also - yes, people with disabilities SHOULD BE ACCOMMODATED FOR THEM. Whether a private room in a call center is a reasonable accommodation is dependent on the situation. You don't have the call center build a room specifically for giving to someone who might need it - that wouldn't be reasonable. But many buildings do have empty rooms that are unused. Giving someone one of those empty rooms instead of expecting them to be with the others, is entirely a reasonable accommodation.

The point of accommodations is to allow people who otherwise wouldn't be working effective to do so; and yes it should be done. And yes some of us on here would need something that you think is absurd, if you think that we should just push through all of our sensory processing needs. There are absolutely great accommodations for sensory processing - where what you do is match the individual's needs to what the company can provide so that it is not unreasonably hard on the company either.

If I got a job in a company where most people worked in cubicles, one of my accommodations would need to be that I'd get an office instead of a cubicle despite the offices being for the higher level people generally. Because in an office we'd then change the lighting for what I can handle (my processing drops drastically as soon as you put me near the overhead florescent lights, I've had this tested on multiple occasions and my occupational therapist was surprised by how extreme the response was.) And you want me to be capable of doing the work, not of trying to survive in the environment. (And for other reasons and I'd have other accommodations too but that's an easy to explain thing that has already had two different doctors tell me how I would need accommodations in such a situation; and not me "pushing through" it.)

In that call center scenerio, the same idea comes up. You want someone to do their job, not to just be surviving in the environment. The goal is for people to be effective people doing jobs. If a call center job with the person in a separate room is a good job for someone, why not give them a separate room? The company probably has a separate room anyways. If they don't, then its a thing to discuss about if there's a better solution. But they probably do, as most companies have unused rooms.

And thus, putting someone in that room, not unreasonable for the company. Makes the person capable of working despite their disability interfering normally. Better and a good accommodation.

Now, you can't ask for anything and get anything. You can't ask for working in a quieter room in a job that has to be done in a clean room where they are running machines in the clean room too. That's not reasonable, because that'd mean either getting another clean room or turning off their machines. So that isn't a reasonable accommodation even if you have a hard time with noise. And you really just shouldn't take that job.

But finding things that help, generally a really good idea.

And when I say you can't force through it - that doesn't mean you can't make progress. But no progress is made by forcing it.

Progress is made by WORKING at it. Which is entirely different.

You don't make progress by taking someone and saying you are going to deal with this and throwing them at something they're uncomfortable with. You do not desensitize. You do not get used to it.

Instead what is done is carefully taking what the problem is and slowly building up training the body how to process information. And doing that you can get better - not necessarily good ever, but better.

For example, I have an exercise I need to do where I look at the letter B, and turn my head while standing on foam. This difficulty was too much for me when I started, but I've worked up to here. What is being done is training my vestibular sense and ocular sense (i.e. vision) to work better together.

But, to actually get progress in me I've worked with 2 different Occupational Therapists and a Physical Therapist - and actually need that help. I cannot do it by doing "face the pain of it".

Because doing that, no progress is made, I'll end up incapable of knowing where I am, and I might end up walking into the road if nobody stops me, or falling to the ground, or just vomiting because my head is spinning that badly because I dared to walk in a circle.

Because facing the pain of it isn't training the body. It's just hurting, and the body isn't learning. You need to be working very carefully to be making progress.

In some senses, you can make progress. In others, you can't. In many of my senses, through training exercises, we've made progress. I've done training exercises for tactile (including in my mouth), vestibular, vestibular-ocular working together, propioception, noise sensitivity of many different styles, motor planning work, internal body knowledge (like if I'm hungry or need to pee). I also have major compensation strategies like glasses that allow me to process vision better through color rather than through any prescription (tinted lenses are great if you need them).

But, that's not nearly the same as any of what you were suggesting.

And even with all of this I still dissociate. I've learned how to dissociate purposefully as a defensive mechanism actually even because its so easy to make me dissociate from too much sensory input. (Which I use going into an MRI because its better for the image and me for me to have done so beforehand.)

But, I'm "high functioning", and I'm "Asperger's", and my OT "isn't medically necessary", and all of that, right?

Because I'm verbal and spoke early?

No, I think people should actually work on their issues instead of use them as excuses.

But even more than that, people should be given the ability to work on their issues and have their issues taken seriously.

We should be the best we can, no matter what diagnosis we have. (And best doesn't mean "fit society the best", but actually best. But, therapy to help the individual is almost always in support of being best we can. We want to be the best autistic people we can, not the best neurotypical imitators.)

We should be the best we can, even though we're told we have these disorders. Which means we should put in a lot of work ourselves into it. AND that others should help us too.

And then we should do what we can with it.

littlebee wrote:

Thanks foir sharing, Tuttle. When I wrote the above I was not speaking of physical pain, but emotional pain, and yes,as Callista said, things cannot be forced too much, and this is surely true also with emotional pain. The intent of this thread is to look at things more from the angle of emotions, but of course this all interconnects with physical and thinking aspects of any particular person. It is all highly individual. That is one of the problems.

Anyway, maybe I have gotten it wrong, but it seems to me that most who have written on this thread so far kind of agree that the intense world theory is too black and white, so missing certain subjective nuances of human behavior behavior. This subject would be interesting to go into.

The reason I keep mentioning the call room scenario, which was originally brought up on another thread by Verdandi, is that it a situation, just like some kinds of ethical dilemmas, that is not so black and white. Personally I am extremely sensitive to (some) kinds of noise (depending somewhat upon whether or not I am making this noise myself:-), but I have observed that this also does to some degree go up and down depending upon how I am feeling about myself, such as whether the glass is half empty or half full (except this line of reasoning would not be so significant if I am in the glass half-empty mode and some noise starts to disturb me so much I literally go crazy:-) But what is also interesting is when I realized that my noise sensitivity was going up and down, then this helped me to be less sensitive....I also noticed the same in regard to sensitivity to perfume and some other sensitivities...This is NOT to discount any kind of discomfort that any particular individual is experiencing.
...

There have been studies showing that sensory issues include different brain structure and different autonomic nervous system responses than those without these issues. (This has been tested in people with and without autism - I don't have all the data to present, I can provide some citations here, while some (i.e. some that is autism specific instead of looking at people with sensory issues in general) was presented at conferences I went to and they didn't provide us all the data, but if you want to distrust presentations by MIT grad students that I still have sound recordings of the presentation of for me to listen to (they're very jumbled and not worth it for others to listen to because of how the presentation was set up), then you can do so)

These are not emotional issues, and are not to be treated as emotional issues. They are neurological issues.

Now, the autonomic nervous system controls things like "fight or flight" and "rest and digest" - and those of us with sensory issues do have impaired autonomic nervous systems. One of the things that hypersensitivities go with is an impaired parasympathetic nervous system - the part that causes "rest and digest" - get out of the "fight or flight" mode, and calm down, and digest your food, and be in the relaxed state.

When you are in an aroused state to begin with - higher in the fight or flight, because of being anxious say, then it would take more to get to the relaxed state.

The thing is - dealing with the moods, only deals with the moods. It doesn't deal with the underlying issue. It brings you to baseline.

Anxiety and sensory issues do associate in some people, but they're not innately connected. And sensory issues can exist without the anxiety.

My dad's sensory issues - they are entirely connected to his anxiety. Control his mood and you control his sensory issues.

Mine, mine aren't. Control my mood, and it doesn't change how I react. Or at least, they are so minusculey that its not very visible. That's much more likely.

But how this is related is because we actually have different nervous systems. And our nervous systems actually react differently. It's not based on the moods. It's not about the moods.

And in the cases where someone is needing an accommodation based on sensory issues - its because they need it, not because they want it.

If you can control things in other ways, you do so. If the increased elevation from anxiety causes worse reactions because you cannot calm down because of an impaired parasympathetic nervous system and a spike whenever you hear noises (which is approximately what happens - your body hasn't learned that the noises aren't threats so thinks they are and then the parasympathetic nervous system is impaired so can't calm you down as fast as normal people, so when you are started from an aroused state, it takes longer to calm down, so the reaction is worse and you feel greater pain).

But you don't tell other people what they do.

Because our bodies aren't built the same way.

My nervous system is not the same as yours.

And its nothing to do with emotional pain. There's no emotional pain involved at all with sensory stuff. It's not "I deal with this emotionally".

But there's not even emotional pain in dealing with it, because there's not even anything to "go against the grain". At least not to me. It's just "Oh, yeah, I actually go through and learn how to make myself not in as much misery every time I do anything."

It's learning. And that's all.

Tuttle, I do not have time today to reply in detail to your response, but will do so in the future. For now, in short, I am speaking about my own personal experience, as I have stated very clearly, and am not imposing my opinion on anyone, but what I think/feel about others experience is of course based on my own experience and my own subjective tabulation and assessment of it, which may have some wrong ideas, reactive emotions and various illogical correlations mixed in, as probably is the case with many people. The aim of enquiry, as I see it, is to try to sort some of this stuff out, primarily for oneself, but we are also helping each other see things in a different way, so good...

As I have previously stated, imo, there are different kinds of brains and certain kinds of brains are more likely to employ encapsulation as a protective device. I did not reply to your message on the other thread yet as I was quite excited to read it and want to leave it as the last message on the queue of that thread, as you have given some important ideas for people to think about, so thanks,and let's go slow....

The reason you keep mentioning the call center scenario is because you simply do not understand what I said and have substituted some other thing for it and are employing that as a straw man to dismiss the idea that anyone would actually truly need this accommodation.

The rest of this post is not directed at any single person. If it's not about you, it's not about you. If you think it might be about you, maybe think about why that might be the case.

I used the call center example because I have worked in a call center and it strained my coping skills well past the limit. I didn't desensitize over time, I became worse and worse until I was unable to work at all - and that this coincided with a week during which I would have worked six days in a row and gone to training from days 2-6, meaning I'd have four hours of training, three hours off work, and six hours working. And I was already taking "too many breaks" because I'd have to get away from the noise and the lighting and the constant calls coming in and dealing with scenarios that didn't fit into the scripts I was given.

And that call center room was surrounded by empty offices and a conference room. It would not have cost anything to provide one of those otherwise empty rooms to me had I known to ask for accommodations (or understood that I might need them).

And I need to reiterate because these objections to providing reasonable accommodations are fundamentally incoherent arguments that rely on societal notions that people should "suck it up" when uncomfortable or that just because people face greater challenges that we do not deserve consideration for those challenges. And that when we want them, it's treated as virtually pathological or an excessive degree of entitlement to just want to be able to work at the same level of efficiency as one's neurotypical or able-bodied co-workers. I realize that people may have rationalized these opinions to the point of sounding reasonable, but the fact is that such an argument is intended to assert that disabled people should just cope with challenges and not expect or assert any need for assistance and accommodation to minimize them, even though doing so would make them a better student or employee.

And somehow the fact that at least in the US legislation exists to provide people a recourse for having accommodations. That's a part of what the Americans with Disabilities Act is all about, and frankly I don't see the point of even trying to argue accommodations when someone's trying to come at this from some kind of "common sense" perspective rather than any degree of familiarity with what the ADA states. The ADA is not a good piece of legislation, and it complicates things when they should be straightforward, but it does allow for accommodations.

Unfortunately, lately, many posters on this forum do not seem to have a very positive or reasonable perspective on disability, and people who do seem to have their views dismissed and not properly understood. I would say there is probably also a lack of willingness to understand. I mean when I see people arguing against things like reasonable accommodations or dismissing the difficulties that sensory processing issues represent or saying that because something doesn't affect them it doesn't bother them even though it may impact many others, possibly in extremely negative ways, it makes me wonder what this forum is all about. It seems like it's currently mostly about supporting privileged perspectives of Aspies who have had careers, families, moderately "successful" lives, who can't relate to those who have more severe issues (and even openly dehumanizes and dismisses those with more severe issues), or those who deal with co-morbid conditions as well or who deal with other intersections that are typically targeted for other kinds of institutionalized discrimination - such as being a person of color, being trans, being queer, being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, being working class or poor.

A lot of the members here are members of one or more of those groups as well as being autistic, and having co-morbid conditions, but whenever anyone tries to say "You know, it'd be reasonable to respect people who deal with these issues" one gets accused of being "politically correct." As if it is just too damned hard to treat people like human beings when they're not sufficiently like you (that is a general you, not a specific you). Like this one guy who said that most bisexuals were bisexual because it's "trendy" but when I pointed out that he was wrong, he chose to focus on the word I chose to use (homophobic) and said he couldn't believe I could be so politically correct. Really? I wish I could say it was hard to believe that someone on this forum might say disrespectful or worse things about people not like them, informed by nothing more than basic ignorance, but the evidence says otherwise. Daily.

Many of the autistic people here, I can't relate to. Some of the few I can relate to seem to end up in the position of arguing against the stuff that's been going on here over the past several months, just as I have been (and have been losing interest in). Some are much better at addressing these things than I am, and I respect them for it.

So being told that one doesn't deserve accommodations because being autistic shouldn't require them, then I wonder if I even actually really belong here. Because I'm not here to be told the same things that the majority (primarily neurotypical) population seems to delight in telling disabled people. Despite the fact that this is a rather pervasive tone around here lately, I can't imagine most are here for it. I imagine people come here because they have difficulties or need a sense of community. I don't imagine they come here to set other parts of themselves aside for the comfort of the privileged majority or to remain silent in the face of openly declared prejudice.