Telling reality from fiction during childhood

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I believed in father christmas as a kid, right up until I was 8, when my mum told me.

I remember one christmas eve when I was about 6 my dad teased me and said 'father christmas isn't coming tonight', and I cried my eyes out. My mum told him off for saying that to me. She had to reassure me.

So yes, kids are vulnerable with fantasy.

I believed in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, & stuff like that when I was little too. I also loved making up my own fantasy situations involving the characters from Star Trek. I'm pretty sure I always knew it was just a show. But I fell in love with the idea of living in that world with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc. I didn't have friends & so I made my own. As I got older, my infatuation for all things Star Trek went literal....I bought every book on the subject I could get my hands on. My parents thought I was nuts, but it kept me somewhat out of trouble & out of their hair. Some of the books were non-fiction, stories of what went on behind the scenes, with photos of the actors in & out of character. I never had a problem with seeing anyone not in character...not even Leonard Nimoy. So based on my memories, I believe that I knew the difference between a tv show verses the actors who portrayed characters. But I enjoyed living in my own fantasy world (watching Star Trek episodes fueled my imagination), because not only did I feel safe, but also loved & accepted as I was there. I think it was one of the things that kept me going while my RL was so painful & I felt completely dejected/rejected by everyone I knew. Had I not come up with my own alternative reality, chances are I would not be alive today. There just wasn't much incentive for me to live. I think I also heard stories that POWs survived their imprisonment by pretty much doing the same thing...or something quite similar.

My reality was that I was often punished physically/emotionally, both at home, in the neighborhood, & on school grounds. I felt safe nowhere, nor did I feel loved or wanted. So I would say that my personal fantasy world was a survival mechanism.


Tomboy

I had read a study that focused on the brain hemispheres. They had mapped two seperate and distinct verbal centers in the brains of the schitzophrenic and theorize that this is the cause of 'voices' and hallucinations. The study was careful not to draw conclusions since it is just preliminary findings but the impression I got was that both voices and hallucinations were just an overload of activity in a redundant neurocenter.

If that holds true, than the naiviete of those on the spectrum, in not being able to distinguish fiction from reality - is a very different thing. I think this is the distinction I'm seeing. Fiction and nonfiction is just a concept like everything else. I can see it being just another concept to be learned, like humor, or sarcasm - not 'magical thinking'. I think the preprogramming that NT's come with makes it difficult to grasp the concept that those on the spectrum just come with various levels of the same preprogramming. Where I simply see someone on the spectrum as not having been taught real from unreal - I think an NT may see it more as a disconnection with reality - a hallucination. It may just be too difficult a concept for someone completely preprogrammed to understand HOW someone cannot be similarly preprogrammed.

I know that was completely unscientific. It was just an opinion. I can reference the original study I noted but beyond that I have no 'PROOF' just supposition. I'm not good at operating 'inside the box'.

Thank you, this was what I was trying to get at. It's not really delusions or magical thinking, it's not yet having the skill to separate fact from fiction. Or other possibilities, and I think over time autistic people can learn these things, whereas someone with schizotypal personality disorder may not.

Anbuend uses an analogy where, say, neurotypicals start with skills at level 8 and can push them to 10, so they see 8 as "0." But someone with autism can have these skills at many different levels below 8. If it's at 5 or 3, then being able to function at the same level as an NT takes a lot of work, and sometimes it is not possible to sustain that higher skill, and it has to be relearned every time. Sometimes it's not even possible to achieve that 8, let alone push to 10. This is perhaps one of the reasons burnout happens.

So having to explicitly learn things that NTs absorb and take for granted is pretty normal. Sometimes having to work hard at it or starting at a place that NTs don't understand is to be expected.

It's strange to have to point this distinction out. I had to put lots of thought into what I've been doing with my daughter and why. Since she was small, I've just been doing things in a 'second nature' sort of way. My daughter has been labeled 'high functioning' by several of her doctors. Yes, she gets along very well - but I still think that label is nothing but a shallow surface description. Since she was small, I've been translating for her as a matter of habit. When she was small and conuised by the interactions on Sesame Street I explained what was going on and why people reacted the way they did - talked about facial expressions, when someones eyebrows go way up it means this... I do it for everything, all day long, since before she was able to even talk. Now that she's older we discuss when girls react to boys the way they do, and why commericals say the things they do and why.

I never realized that other people didn't do this with their kids. My husband called it 'babying' her, insisting that she wasn't stupid. No, she's not. She's quite bright actually, but that doesn't mean she has the innate ability to understand. I can see the confusion on her face, hear it in her voice - and I address it, usually with a quick and quiet few words of explanation. He cannot wrap his head around why she doesn't understand when he's joking with her and gets even more furious when I explain it to her. Somehow, he feels guilty for making her cry when he had no bad intent and cannot understand the reason why - my explanations to her seem like a condemnation to him. On a very fundamental level, he does not get it. My daughter has more challenges than her doctors realize because they don't get it either. They see a happy well adjusted kid - and she is - but she still needs support in a very real way.

Bottom line - kids on the spectrum are some of the cleanest slates you'll ever find. And most are sponges, ready, willing and able to learn to varying degrees. Once people grasp that concept real change can happen.

The way I read your first post the first link was about schizotypal behavior and magical thinking and the second link that referenced fiction was related to a different topic "social challenged communicator". I think it is common for an adult to display schizotypal behavior/magical thinking and to also understand the difference between fiction and reality.

From Wiki: In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities.

They go on to say that magical thinking and OCD are related in reducing anxiety and by exerting psychological control over the environment.

My wife has OCD, and checked the stove five or six times, because of an irrational fear of the house burning down. However, it just calmed her general state of anxiety over not having control of the unexpected. She could control checking the stove to ensure that wouldn't be the cause, and it reduced her fear.

I never thought of OCD in terms of magical thinking until I read the article from Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

We are expected in our lives to have magical thinking about somethings and not about other things because of cultural norms. In the chaotic world that we live in, it's not too surprising that many people develop a number of "superstitions beyond the cultural norm to deal with their own personal realities. I think with Autism, and the fact that life may not seem as predictable, since so many things don't come natural, may cause a much more chaotic complex world, that naturally would lead to a greater level of anxiety, and the need to exert control over whatever it is possible to exert control over, to maintain a sense of order.

Perhaps why so many Autistics turn to special interests is they can exert control over objects and hobbies, to a much greater degree than human behavior, that can seem so unpredictable for one that has a hard time understanding it.

I also remember reading an article in discover magazine that continual stress can change the structure of the brain and create a compulsion in some to seek ritual and repetition to resolve anxiety. The brain loses it's ability to cope with complexity; the result is tremendous anxiety.

So in general it seems that magical thinking is a mechanism to reduce anxiety and impose order on the environment. Perhaps there is a connection there with magical thinking as defined in Wiki, Schizotypal behavior, and Autism.

In a child there can be so many sources of anxiety. A single parent household, and the anxiety that a child my have by learning appropriate gender roles, abusive parents, financial difficulties, so many possible sources of anxiety that may influence the brain and it's long term ability to cope with stress and also influence our coping mechanisms for stress. I don't think any of this causes autism, but I'm sure it affects the degree of how well the child will eventually be able to cope with life. Particularly with reference to how stress can affect the structure of the brain and influence our behaviors to cope with anxiety.

I was using these two things to illustrate where I was going. The schizotypal traits often include "delusional magical thinking," whereas the autistic child who fits the category of "challenged social communicator" is sometimes unable to determine that fiction is fiction. I was using these to suggest the possibility:

1) That this is one of the traits that may be labeled as schizotypal
2) That despite not fitting into the category of "CSC" as far as I know, I did have this trait.

and I wondered:

3) If anyone else could identify with it.



My example of the kind of magical thinking common in Schizotypal Personality Disorder is closer to what I've read in the literature. They tend to be religious and supernatural in nature, may believe that other people are supernatural or paranormal influences in their lives, may believe they have supernatural or paranormal abilities, these beliefs are at odds with subcultural norms. It is not difficult for me to see a psychiatrist taking my belief that Wonderland, Narnia, or Beyond the Looking Glass were real places and seeing them as examples of magical thinking, even though it was just a matter of believing what I read to be true, and understanding that it was not true because it was a matter of understanding and information, not an actual form of magical thinking.

I have identified actual examples of magical thinking in my own routines in the past, but since I like the routines I don't really worry about them, even though I know nothing will come of not doing them, and actually doing them doesn't do much.



Perhaps. I do not know. I tend to fixate on special interests because doing so is an almost euphoric and stimulating experience that can sustain continued attention and interest for long periods of time. Plus, I love the subjects of my interests. Plus, they are definitely more interesting than people.



Perhaps there is! I do not know. The comparison I was looking for was more in terms of surface appearances, as autistic people are routinely judged almost entirely on surface appearances by professionals. Not that what you're saying isn't interesting - it is.

I think that there are just too many variables at work here to make any sort of conclusions. OCD, anxiety and 'magical thinking' aka delusions can all be at work alone, or in combination in almost anyone for a long list of reasons. Just becasue these these can also occur in autism is not indicative of it being BECAUSE of autism. The environment created around someone on the spectrum may be more indicative of these sort of disordered thinking issues than the autism itself.

I'm not sure I agree with your thoughts in special interests. I see them more as a result of detail thinking vs generalized thinking. A baby enjoying the spinning wheel on the truck versus pretending to drive the truck. I think, as we grow up, that laser focused on detail expresses itself in learning the details of our favorite subjects instead of just admiring it from afar in a general sort of way. Someone who loves Disney Princesses loves the imagery, the fairytale, the romance, the floofy girliness of it... someone with AS will also know the animators names, the studio where it was produced and how the stories were adapted from the original fairytales. They still love all the same aspects a NT might but they take it to a level of detail that NT's can, at times, find almost frightening. There are NT's who delve this deeply into a special interest as well - it would be interesting to learn the differences in thinking because, in someway, I feel there must be one.

I think the condition of Autism may lend the propensity towards more problems with issues like OCD, but I don't think it is a direct cause or that an environment of anxiety is a direct cause of autism.

I was surprised to see that definition of magical thinking from a psychological clinical perspective; I always thought of it more like believing in extra terrestials, paranormal, and that type of thing. I never considered myself as OCD, because I didn't have to wash my hands repeatedly or do the things you commonly hear about as OCD. I have come to understand though that I had a rigourous mechanism of rituals that made me feel safe in the world, after I lost the ability to perform them. I think that is the way it is for most people to one degree or another, just different among individuals based on many variables, as you state.

The other childhood example they used in the wiki article was a child thinking it rains because they are sad. This to me relates to the issue of learning the difference between fact and the reasoning we come up with on our own to understand our internal and external environment. I think that is related, also to our ability to actually understand that TV is not actually real.

For a long time TV was very ordered, structured and predictable, even in content; comfortable for me in reducing anxiety and an escape from the unpredictable nature of reality. I don't think it brings that level of comfort to people, the way it used to. Escape, stimulation, yes, but comfort not as much.

At that time I new TV was not real, but thought that TV was an accurate representation of real life; I didn't have a whole lot to compare it to. Still though, it seemed real when I was watching it and was always real to me on a deeper level than my cognitive understanding that it was all an act. I think that is the way it is for most people, though; some more than others.

I watched a recorded soap opera with my wife for many years, and remember thinking many times, when do these people work, all it seems like they do is have a social life. How do people do this?

I think it is normal for people to judge their life based on what they see everywhere. TV can raise those expectations in unhealthy ways, I think, for some people.

I don't think special interests are only associated with problems dealing with people, but maybe just a factor that reinforces the propensity that is already there. And yes, there may be structural differences in the brain that lead to that level of attention to detail. In general I think people relate it to left brained dominance, but it is probably much more complicated than that.

Sorry, I got a bit off topic there. I was surprised at the clinical definition of magical thinking, when I looked it up and found the relationship there with anxiety, and the need for structure, interesting.

No, it's fine. It's all relevant. I just got caught up in explaining my intentions.