Lesson #4: The Path to Nonconformity
29 Aug 2018, 2:24 pm
Fearless
If you are an adult Aspie then learn to manage fear. The more fearless you become, the more you will be able to shed stress and many of the Aspie negative traits. These negative traits include: hypersensitivity to senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch), sensory overload and shutdowns, gastrointestinal problems related to prolonged stress, and mental health problems/psychological disorders (depression, self harm, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder).
At a very early age I became fearless. I think the reason why this happened is because I almost died. When I was a wee little one, a thousand pound bull kicked me in the head. I fell unconscious to the ground and later my parents found me. In those days there were no 911 emergency calls. My parents simple picked up my limp body and took me back into the house and laid me on my bed and waited. I might die or I might regain consciousness. When I recovered, I sensed the magnitude of what happened and I had, at a very young age, to come to grips with the concept of my eventual death. It was very frightening, probably beyond terrifying. Over the next several months I was haunted by terrible visions. Then I accepted my death and soon afterwards I became fearless.
In a way Peter Pan summed up my philosophy. As the tide came up in the Mermaids’ Lagoon, Peter and Wendy were trapped on Marooners’ Rock. The tide was rising and they would soon both be drowned. Peter found a way to free Wendy from impending doom but was unable to save himself. Peter then shudders for a brief moment at the thought of his death and then a thought flashed in his mind and he said, “To die will be an awfully big adventure”. Peter was fearlessness in the face of death and had the capacity to turn every experience into a grand adventure. That is a key traits of Peter Pan – not desiring death but able to look death straight between the eye and not flinch.
In my opinion all those negative Aspie traits listed in the first paragraph are caused by intense prolonged stress and fear. Because I was fearless, I never experience any of those specific traits. Without that extra baggage, I was able to quickly recover after the bullying ended. But it also made me closer to being almost a neurotypical. I still retained my other Aspie traits but they were fairly minor in comparison to the stress based Aspie traits. The normal Aspie traits do not cripple me.
As Brian Caplan wrote, “Despite everything, the world has more greatness than you can savor in a lifetime. And in the modern world, finding greatness is remarkably easy. Stop complaining, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and suck the marrow out of life.”
When you stop worrying about what everyone else thinks, you can begin to shed your fears. Without fear your stress levels will diminish. Without stress your body can begin to heal.
These negative traits are like extra baggage. When you heal, you reduce the detectable anomalies that separate Aspies from NTs. As you lessen the severity of those negative traits, it is much easier to reintegrate back into normal society. A nonconformist Aspie can be a loner (a hermit) and many do or they can reintegrate back into society as a nonconformist and expect society to accept them exactly like they are with all their other strange traits. It works.
A Suit of Invisible Armor
Now I cannot teach you to how to become fearless. But I can start you down the path in that direction, a path towards becoming a Nonconformist Aspie. To protect my children from bullying I fashioned for each of them a suit of invisible armor. From the time my daughters began to walk and talk, my wife and I relentlessly began to teach them Life Skills.
Consider this, most children start with the same box [Asperger and neurotypical]. But every time an Aspie child is ridiculed, they are told they have no common sense, every time they are told they are stupid or worthless, an idiot, their box gets a little bit smaller. If the box gets compressed too small, the box breaks and explodes. The goal is to help the child expand their box, to be everything possible that they can be. One approach to expand their box is to give them skills, hands on skills, real life skills.
Every time an individual learns a new life task successfully, the individual becomes more confident, feels greater self worth and value, is better able to withstand non-constructive criticism and psychological abuse. Essentially, the individual is expanding their box.
Life tasks are normal tasks that individuals (such as parents) use in their normal life. Life skills can be almost anything. They can be making a scrambled egg, or making a sunny side up egg, or driving a nail into a board, changing a flat tire, washing the dishes, balancing a checkbook, using a cookbook, making cherry jubilee, ironing their clothes, fixing a broken dishwasher, answering the phone, unclogging a toilet, changing a light bulb, making a cup of coffee or grinding coffee beans by hand, coloring Easter eggs the old fashion way or finding Easter eggs buried inside or at the end of a movie, grinding grains of wheat to make flour and then using the flour to make a loaf of bread, creating a spreadsheet or sweeping a floor. These life skills can be a mundane or very intricate task. There are millions of life skills that can be learned. They can be outdoor survival skills taught in boy scouts or girl scouts. Every skill makes their armor a little bit stronger against psychological abuse. When my daughters stepped into the classroom for the first time; they had a thousand real life skills under their belt.
Now I cannot teach each of you life skills but I will give you a few tips so that you can fashion your own suit of armor. To begin with go buy a blank journal. Every time you complete a new life skill successfully, write it down in the journal. “What, you are too old to learn!” Nonsense, I am almost 70 and I learn new things each and every day. The “The Fine Wine Theory” roughly translated means some wine becomes better as they age. From my perspective, this also applies for the unique brains of an Aspie. My mind absorbs knowledge like a giant sponge and my ability to absorb knowledge seems like it only improves with age.
There are many tools that you can use to evolve your skills. There are cookbooks, how-to books, and YouTube tutorials. You might even find mentors. For example, if you learn to drive a nail into a board, you might volunteer on building a house for Habitat for Humanity. While you pound nails, you might befriend another volunteer who will teach you the other skills of carpentry. This is a way of turning one small life skill, pounding a nail into a board, into a marketable occupation.
When an Aspie learns a new task, it is like performing an experiment – he must complete the experiment and measure it success. He is measured on how well he accomplishes a task – has he met the standard to claim proficiency in the life skill task. If he does, he makes himself more useful to the outside world. But accomplishing the task also provides self-worth, expands his box, and his circle of influence.
Failure is part of the process of learning. If you fail a task, try again and again, learn by changing variables, and learn how to accept guidance and constructive criticism, or use out-of-the-box thinking. Only don’t give up.
If you drive a 3-inch nail into a board and it bends over, that is a failure and it doesn’t go into the journal. But then one needs to learn from their mistakes. The nail needs to be removed in order to try again. If I remove the nail without damaging the board, that is a success and that task goes into the journal. If you have to hit the 3-inch nail twenty times in order to drive the nail into the board that is not really a success. A good carpenter can do it in 2 or 3 strikes. But a good carpenter has years and years of experience behind them. If you can do this task in 4 or 5 strikes, then that is an acceptable win. If you hit your thumb with the hammer then that is a failure. But if you realize they make high impact gloves that will provide protection for your hand and you buy and learn how to use the gloves then that is a success.
Each of these tasks should be done with precision and perfection. The completed task needs to meet acceptable standards with a vision for excellence. Once the task is completed successfully, it does not need to be repeated but rather pick another different task. As you grow, increased the level of difficulty of the tasks. For example I taught my daughters at a young age how to bargain shop and determine the cost of a discounted item. This suit of armor was constructed by their exceptional capability to function in the real world. They knew more things, important life skills, than any of the kids in their peer group beginning on the first day they entered school. If anyone ever called them dumb or stupid or worthless, they absolutely knew otherwise.
One of the greatest lessons I learned early in life was “that I could do anything, accomplish anything, so long as I put my mind to it”.
Once you have enough wins behind you, you will have built up a proven track record of successes; then you will be able to step out into the unknown and experience the world as a nonconformist. And you will have a coat of invisible armor to protect you.
Shedding Stress
It is very important for Aspies to learn techniques to quickly shed stress. Overwhelming stress can lead to distress.
A book by Gary P. Moberg and Jay A. Mench titled "The Biology of Animal Stress: Basic Principles and Implication for Animal Welfare" reads:
For most stressors the biological cost is negligible because the stressors are short-lived. During prolonged stress or when stress is severe, the biological cost is significant and the work of stress becomes a significant burden to the body. It is during such stress that the animal enters the next stages of stress: prepathology and pathology. The prepathological state occurs when the stress response alters biological functions sufficiently to place the animal at risk of developing pathologies. The most obvious example is infectious disease. The change in biological function occurring during stress response may suppress immune competence, rendering the animal susceptible to pathogens that may be present in the environment. If the animal succumbs to these pathogens and becomes ill, it enters a pathological state. The longer an animal is stressed the longer the animal is in a prepathological state and the greater the opportunity for a pathology to develop.
Disease is only one type of pathology that occurs during prolonged stress. When metabolism is shifted during stress, growing animals no longer grow normally. Stress can suppress reproduction or can result in deleterious behavior such as tail biting in swine or self-mutilation in monkeys. All are the pathologies of stress.
Animals have a natural way to shed stress quickly. Peter Levine studied the physiology of stress and trauma. He observed, “animals will complete the full sequence of a response to danger, by noticing, reacting, and recovering from the threat. Humans often interrupt it. When in jeopardy, animals will access and expend enormous amounts of energy providing the” fuel” to escape the danger. Dr. Levine observed that, once the threat has been successfully overcome, there is a discharge of excess energy through the body. The body returns to [its natural] baseline by allowing a chemical discharge to move through the nervous system—for example by trembling, shaking, bucking, or running further than necessary simply to escape the predator—which resets the mind and body and prepares it for the next challenge. This became a basis for a type of trauma therapy known as somatic experiencing.
According to several Aspies, some types of therapy are very beneficial. Therapy targeting fear and stress such as programs that treat PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) help. These include somatic experiencing, beam life coaching, Tipi emotional regulation therapy, and exposure therapy.
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Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
Last edited by jimmy m on 29 Aug 2018, 3:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Thank you jimmy m!
