*"Me too, me too!" Reactions?*

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I started this thread because of a link posted in News and Current Events a couple of weeks ago, to an article in Wired magazine, at:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/mag ... /ff_autism

At the end there are a dozen or so comments; the last one provides a link to a thread on Autism Speaks in which someone called D says that she first became suspicious of an autist's authenticity when they began engaging in "Me too, me too!" reactions to D's descriptions of her own behaviours/functioning, before moving on/escalating to what D saw as "Me more" responses.

I found the accusations "disorientating", because they cast doubt on what I had been perceiving as reality, ( anbuend presents/describes herself/life as AS very eloquently and in a way I often deeply identify with).

On the site last year where someone suggested that I might be introvert, which pointer led to my discovering aspergers, someone/a few then accused me of imagining things. And yet to me it had been like a revelation. It explained so much.

But after reading the above "story" I suddenly felt very insecure about my own "me too" tendencies, as if they might be misleading me, signs of mental illness, etc.

Last edited by ouinon on 11 May 2008, 10:09 am, edited 6 times in total.

Maybe for some, ( that includes me ), impassioned and relieved/grateful "Me too!" reactions are a result of experiencing a "self" in early infancy deeply disturbed by sensory processing differences/difficulties and/or a profound perturbation of their body-boundaries by premature weaning, which caused damage/perforation of the skin known as our intestines.

I think it's possible I put as much concentrated energy/capacity into registering and copying the behaviour of people around me as some, usually male AS, put into their savant feats, ( perhaps because I am a woman ). For years I reproduced minutely exact imitations of the exteriors of people, their gestures, their speech, etc.

But it had very little to do with my interior ( and did not take into account other people's interiors either!) . It was in only very limited ways an expression of my inner activity/processes, except in so far as it would falter/deform momentarily at times of increased physical stress, ( fatigue, puberty, illness, certain food consumption, etc).

To cut long story short, physical breakdown after years of stimulants to keep this performance up-and-running caused cracks, and it finally fell to bits revealing a "mush/muddle"/an [i]unknown", ( hyper sensitive to noise and smells, seriously hermit tendencies, gaze-avoiding, with obsessive interests etc ).

So I seek/home-in-on, other's clear expressions of bits of their "insides"/inner functioning to see if it matches, and like Belfast says, it is very piecemeal.

Last edited by ouinon on 11 May 2008, 9:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

Not me.

It's a natural human reaction to be somewhat happy or excited when finding someone who has had similar experiences to you/does the same things as you. It's natural to want to tell someone that you've shared that thought/action/experience. It's a way of connecting to others. To find something in common with another person is a global goal, no matter who you are...AS, NT, or anywhere inbetween or around. ...atleast I think it is!

I am the "me too!" type of person.

Well that's it; I don't know if it is. I haven't noticed most other people doing it like I, and so many on wp , do, as if it is a clue I am picking up in the forest, or for reassurance, which is why I think it may be something to do with minority status. Most NTs find people like them all the time; they are reflected and reaffirmed constantly in their mode of functioning.

Whereas not only are people who aren't like everybody else much more excited about it when it happens, but because it happens so rarely perhaps we carry on needing it for much longer, sometimes so long that the revolutions which can ensue from such fruitful/affirming encounters can look absurd/artificial/contrived, because it seems barely credible that someone could only be discovering their own mechanisms in their thirties or later.

Does everybody, NT or not, in fact feel as if they are in a minority? The NT father of my son does not spend any time thinking about who he is, why he is like that, etc; he just "is".

Does everybody frequently experience other people as providing pointers to their own identity? I don't think so.

Last edited by ouinon on 11 May 2008, 9:30 am, edited 3 times in total.

Im not entirely sure what the 'Me to' reaction is, well, what would count as it.

If it means that somebody describes something you have or experience then maybe on here because this is the first place I have ever met anyone else who is remotely similar to me.

But in real life that is not me at all, in fact im the opposite, im forever trying to explain something to a member of family only to have them say oh me to! I have that, but everyone does to some extent. Then I give up.

I'm a 'me too'.

It is the very reason why I like WP. It it not so much about complicated personal back-and-forth interactions and more of an encyclopaedia, that just tries collect everything and offer the possibility to learn more and discover new facets of autism.

There are some personal relationships of all kinds of course, but I sometimes have the impression that they go about a different way than relationships between non-autistic people usually go. Not that they're not as intense or fun, but more that take a different way to get to the same destination.

I'm definitely a 'me too' person.

That is what makes me think that it can not be purely the result of being in a minority though, because my parents and sister are strikingly similar to me in many ways but I felt like the odd one out/black sheep from age ten onwards.

Something about my very capacity to "recognise"/delineate/define my "self" was, (still is?) compromised/confused, in just the same way as my body makes mistake ( auto-immune disease) of attacking itself when it is attacked by what it perceives as invaders, even when/especially if these are only food molecules.



Actually I'm back to thinking the problem is language itself, like a virtual reality game that I'm addicted to, because that's how "Me too"s are mediated after all.

Me too (not the specifics, but the overall pattern)-feeling doubtful of self when another person disagrees, then feeling validated/confirmed/relived when someone agrees with me (or vice versa). Merely reading some kinds of comments gets me ridiculously upset & I take them personally (cannot help it despite "knowing better" than to do so).

That's a thing for "me, too"-having not been dx'd until age 30.

I get inconsistent reactions to this. My counselor will say things like "everybody does/thinks/feels that"-yet my NT bf is (I dislike this phrase, but it sums up well) "happy-go-lucky". He doesn't much get bogged down in details, feeling confused or wondering why.

I was suddenly wondering, after a rather discouraged remark in my last post about language, whether in fact it is not so much that we are deficient in some "normal" human capacity to define ourselves etc, ... ( remembering what you said about "piecemeal", and "perceiving an aspect at a time", being unable to see"a bunch of factors simultaneously"), ... because I was reminded of recent'ish theories about the "self" not being a solid or consistent thing through time, that this is just another illusion that most people live with, but in fact we are nothing but a series of behaviours/causes and effects, ( queer theory etc ), which only tend to re-occur in similar combinations but in fact there is nothing fixed about the "cluster" at all.

That's a bit waffly, sorry, will try to rephrase but want to reply to you while you're still around!

So in fact the difficulties we experience about our identity, in seeing our "selves" clearly, may be in trying to reconcile the illusion of this kind of solid entity, ( which may have been easy while was attached to a "performance" personality, if we ever had one) , with the reality which we sort of know/understand is an ever changing collection of behaviours, inextricably part of the flux of the universe.

And even the inevitable use of language in so doing is going to "form" the reality which we can describe.

Last edited by ouinon on 12 May 2008, 2:07 am, edited 2 times in total.

The books I read about the brain & consciousness repeatedly say that a person isn't just one thing, a mind isn't a single unified creation-it's made up of several simultaneously running systems/modules within the brain. Consciousness is multifaceted & consists of multiple functions within the brain that we perceive as being (usually) smoothly seamless. Yet in the engine room (metaphor), things are messy & crazed, with all sorts of stuff going on in order to generate the illusion of "me-ness" (self). It's easier for me to read & understand than to try explaining coherently in my own words, though.

I recommend Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens":
He lists several co-occuring levels of perception/awareness such as: "verbal report, specific actions, specific emotions, focused attention, low-level attention, background emotions, and wakefulness". Also: the autobiographical self, the core self, and "neural patterns that represent the state of the body"-the 'proto-self' (unavailable to consciousness).

Thank you.

I found the following very readable review of Damasio's book " Descartes' Error", by Daniel Dennett, who is one of my favourite thinkers about human mind/evolution etc, ( tho' I don't always agree with him by any means! ) at:

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/damasio.htm

Linking auto-immune disorders, ( in which the body has difficulty identifying/recognising that which is itself, ... and therefore what to attack and what to leave alone... and from which AS people suffer from more than general population...) , with difficulties in seeing one's own self clearly, for example, or leaky gut syndrome, being a significant perforation of part of our "skin" which compromises our sense of integrity, with a fragile/permeable/fuzzy sense of self, makes sense according to what he seems to be saying.


Dennett quotes from Nieztsche's "Zarathustra" at the end of review:

"On the Despisers of the Body".

Mmmmmm !

Last edited by ouinon on 11 May 2008, 11:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Saying "Me too!" to someone about something fairly unusual is like saying that you recognise their body, ( that your bodies function similarly).

Last edited by ouinon on 11 May 2008, 11:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am a "me too!" sort of person. On this forum it seems like every day someone writes a comment that I could have written myself. I often feel vain because I say I understand/agree/me too and then I often give an explanation of what I do. I often feel vain when I do it, talking aobut myself, but when you have no one to talk to in RL who understands than it is easy to do.

Have read Damasio's "Descartes' Error" (1994) & "Looking for Spinoza" (2003) as well. Will read the paper to which you link...

There are some things that you draw conections between, to which my response is "ummm, I don't know"-because I can't extrapolate (as far as you go) across disciplines or levels of reality. So I neither agree nor disagree.
Here's some stuff I typed out from 1999's "The Feeling of What Happens"
pg. 174
pg. 175
pg. 318
pg. 284
pg. 285
Not sure if any of that makes sense out of context...