'Chameleon Aspies' - A Painful Gift?

Post Reply New Topic

I have read many posts here at WP from aspies who talk of having developed highly adaptive tools , that has resulted in them obtaining quite an advanced level of social competence. Many of these people say they have 'Chameleon' type qualities, in so much as they have learned to adapt to many encounters.

I am interested in how some aspies can mimic, copy and adapt in this way, and some aspies can not even get to first base on this one.

After a life time of refining the art of the Chameleon, with all it's complex non-verbal nuances, I became severely depressed. The depression eventually lead me to the understanding of myself as a man in the autistic spectrum.

I learned the art of the Chameleon in my childhood, for if I showed any 'aspie-ness' I would be humilated and abused. It was a matter of life or death.

Now with my dx, I am slowly starting to build real self worth and hope. The dx has given me permission to love myself for who I am and not to 'die' for love through the eyes of the other.

Being so 'other-ly' focused was essential survival skill, but I am curious as to how others whose life's have not been traumatic, and how they develop the art of understanding non-verbal information?


Could there be any connection here with having a strong artistic or imaginative element?
Chris

I also learnt to manage social interactions better, especially at work where my job is all about influencing people without formal authority (consulting).

Even before I became conscious of AS, I think it was mostly a conscious decision to adapt:
When I was a teenager, I saw which of my behaviors did not "work out" well in society (i.e. did not bring me the result I was hoping for) and decided to change them. I also went to study and work in the USA, where it is expected to be constantly enthusiastic, exhuberant (sorry) and loud, so this was an additional stretch.

I noticed that I was lacking in my ability to read body language, so I read books about this and NLP. Same for influencing. Reading Robert Cialdini's book for example, I thought "I would never be convinced by this type of arguments", yet it worked for people around me in and outside of work.

However, this "acting" recently became extremely tiring and since I became aware of AS, I decided to limit this "chameleon" behavior to work.

I have also taken acting classes recently and found it was a very familiar feeling. Even less tiring because you know what is expected and don't have to improvise / think on your feet that much It can actually be quite fun.

I think this, like other pronounced differences between different Aspies, must have to do with the exaggeration of our multiple intelligence profiles through deficiency in central processing

I am not formally dxed with AS, but suspect I may be since the dx of both my sons.

As a child I can remember very systematically trying to figure people out and interact with them. I read a lot of fiction stories, and then used the information in day to day life (sometimes with comic results...kids don't talk like middle class Victorian era adults anymore, now do they?). My parents were ministers in a local church and I was taught manners and social rules rigorously by them as well. I remember often feeling somewhat detached, like an actor in a play.

As a teenager, I made figuring out social norms and how to fit in my #1 priority. I got very good at it, but after awhile my friendships and connections would always start to slowly crumble. Luckily we moved every 2 years, so I would get a fresh start to cultivate the social facade of my choice. I still remember the exact moment when I discovered that other people were actually emotionally invested in the friendships that they made. This surprised me! I viewed friendship as mostly utilitarian...it bought you entrance into certain groups and activities, made you less vulnerable to ridicule and was expected. I continued to read everything from philosophy and psychology to fashion magazines, in my passion to figure people out.

And yes, I am artistic and creative (writing, mixed media and acrylic painting etc.). And yes, I also have had two breakdowns from stress, trouble with anxiety (ongoing) and substance abuse (past), which I am beginning to attribute to the constant stress of trying to be different than I am (partly).

I can see one of my sons (dxed AS, ADHD and GAD) beginning to follow my path of intense self consciousness, self scrutiny and social experimentation. He has already figured out that he must hide who he is in order to be accepted at school. It is painful to see. We are working to counter this with messages of acceptance, and strategies for being who he is and still "getting by" at school. He is also highly creative and imaginative.

This is my greatest fear for my oldest daughter who has only recently been diagnosed with AS.

The school counselor / shrink yesterday cornered me and attacked the AS diagnosis (and myself) because she didn't beleive there was anything wrong with Annie.

I said there is nothing wrong with her, she just thinks differently. Nothing wrong with that.

Annie has been really depressed, at 6yo she is regularly packing her bags to run away from home, building coffins in her bedroom - this is NOT GOOD.

Since the diagnosis and telling Annie about it she has been much happier, she gets why, we get why. Letting Annie be herself has just made such a massive difference that I can't believe anyone would want her to go back to hiding who she is.

Thank you everyone for contributing so far.

For those that have an interest in this subject, you might like to read my book, 'A Painful Gift- The Journey of a Soul with Autism' I can give you all full contact details of how you can obtain the book, but for those on little or no income, I would be really pleased to send you a pdf file with the complete book. However, I would need you to PM me your email.

Go well

Chris

I will be interested in the file, and can sadly own up to 'appropriate financial' characteristics...

I have always known that I was 'other', there are simply way too many biographical details about be to have ever considered being 'one of X'..., and as many on this site, i have been painfully made aware of it.

In my self-centered self-irony I managed to survive... but I would never have put it that way.

And that would be my main point of entry into this discussion:
how is it that everybody keeps phrasing these things so.... as if...
it was an intended process, this 'adaptive' thing.

[private note: oblio, why did you automatically start writing the above - this - in 'proper' grammar; you know that is not 'your' language... so... tell me: why did you assume proper dress..., to what was it in this thread, or subject' that i had already adapted, IN spelling my first letter capped, and then the ONE letter which in my private language always goes uncapped - as a matter of principle]

[[just asking]]

My biography simply does not require for this kind of 'adapting' with intent of acceptance. I have just always taken note of myself in social situations, sort as if i played the leading part in the film of me - but in that situation sort of paradoxically [or contradictory, mind you, there is a difference!] - still as 'spontaneously' as i ... 'were'...

In a way, my adapting was no more than making myself suitable for the environment to be in... whatever 'suitable' might entail, and this is where my age comes in, with a little help from the biography, which puts me in touch with the youth cultures just preceding, far more so than most of my social environments.

Borne in 1956, I would be assumed to be a child of the seventies rather than the eighties, and yes, when it comes down to it, and the eighties indeed felt like revival [re an operative affix]. But my first parties had been the ones at my parents' picking up on true original rock 'n roll and twist as we lived in an American [Armorican, says oblio sharply, in corrective manner of speech, with Joyce] compound in Liberia at the time.

So, maybe a child of the seventies, I am very much a very aware embryo of the sixties, babe! And there was no 'norm' to adapt to..., not in terms of 'social acceptability' that is... In that context, 'adapting' becomes merely being... 'taking form'.
I, 'we', have been refused entry to so many discotheques, you wouldn't believe - but my little group of assumably hippy-clad variety did not fit in with the tea-drinking pot-heads - too cynic were we for that.

However, where one's differentness becomes norm, there is a problem with authenticity [[and consistency, robert, with sharp surprise reminds me oblio]]. So, who was I, when in a social situation not with 'my grouping'?

Well, THAT is what I have always noted about myself, and in fact the individuals that made up my little group of friends... "Jongens waren we. Maar aardige jongens." These are the very applicable opening words of the debut novella by the Dutch writer Nescio: Lads we were. But nice lads.

In fact, I have always been sort of proud how well-behaved I can be in a great variety of social circles WITHOUT pretending to be anything other than 'me' - mind you: did I mention before this awareness of playing myself...

I am not just making this up, a number of people have independently remarked on this or related matters. My adaptiveness is [also] a matter of versatility in behaviour.
It's also linked with what I now know is my very specific autistic talent: language... although [[as oblio notes]] I maybe coming to think it may not be 'language' but quite specifically 'SPEECH'.

It JUMPS at you when you hear me speak... or rather, after you, as an Englishman, Chris, have talked with me for say half an hour... when you start realizing there is something strange about my English, and you ask me how long I have been abroad... and I'll leave you puzzled for a bit just for my ego to get some more of this..., when finally I state with some surprise... Oh, you were not aware I am Dutch...

I simply pick up the sound of my environment... I become my environment. It is how I perceive and learn... I become the part, and quite naturally, automatically so...
although I would be prepared to contemplate rephrasing that into 'second-naturally'.

I have totally accepted this trait of mine as very mine, and very much me, and since I can't remember when referred to myself in the picture of my self-mockery as The Pink Chameleon, which off course relates me with The Scarlet Pimpernel (They seek him here, they seek him there &c &c) ---
oh there is NO END of applicable references...

The persona of Zelig, by Woody Allen
Der Mann ohne Eigenshaften

Additionally and remarkably, as an individual, I have always FELT a different person in English, always... Spoken English somehow makes me feel much closer to myself (whatever 'myself' may be, the question includes that of the other spelling: what '(my) self' may be]


I suppose I'll be back...

cheerio,

robert

From kindergarten to second grade, I played a constant game where I was an alien sent to live among the earthlings. It is how I felt,feel. To do that, I had to study and mimic them, the way they acted and interacted, comunicated. I tried to make my behavior as much like theirs as possible. As I entered third grade, this stopped being a game and became a survival skill. As I got older, I got better, although my sucess is limited. Although I may live among them, I am not one, I am very obviously different.

I have simply become a "crowd pleaser" as my doctor put it. I'm actually feeling very sad over some of her comments. She said that I've become so obsessed with fitting in that I've completely smothered my personality. I've spent so long pretending and trying to survive that I no longer know who I am. She also said she would have loved to meet me when I was YOUNGER because I sounded so fun and alive. I know she didn't mean this in a nasty way, her comments only hit a nerve because they're true. I can no longer differentiate between my own impulses and learned responses. I'm wound up so tightly and the mask is superglued to my face!! I wouldn't know how to be me if I tried.
I guess that's the price you pay for fitting in. You lose yourself.

I think I am a pretty good actress. I also am very right brain oriented. After a while the acting gets tiresome and even lonely.
I think that my life is more meaningful when I can connect with other people. However, many times I still hide much of my true nature because it is just weird in comparison to the norm. After having kids my self esteem sky rocketed because I had to accept myself, put myself forward, force myself to interact genuinely for the sake of the little ones. Yes, it is way better to be real and given a queer eye, but in my experience most people will accept eccentricity more so than make fun of it as when I was younger. I don't have the time to care for those who don't anymore. Even when I do care what others think sometimes, it's tempered by mundane duties that force me to get up and interact again. Overall, it's better now and even though I can still act I don't, just because I'm too exhausted these days.

I recall going to my assessment re AS (this is after 41 years of refining the art of 'unaffectedness' to such degree that my 'act' had become more akin to a relational style. I remember saying to myself just be yourself, emmm, it was confusing. However, I was lucky as my assessor new all the tricks and I was finally understood and found.

But I can really relate to you Trystania when you say, " I can no longer differentiate between my own impulses and learned responses".......I feel I am slowly able to make some headway on this, but it is still a rather confusing affair. At times I feel like some mystical puppeteer, standing outside myself, pulling all the strings to make the appropriate facial and Non-verbal expressions.

I talk a lot about this confusing drama in my book, 'A Painful Gift', and getting it all down on paper and out there in the world has helped me, through I now feel I am walking through life, unprotected from my over-attachment to my persona, for it seems at times, that my very social self had a nervous system completely independent from my deepest self.


Wishing you all well

Chris

I think I might be one of these chameleons, and I feel like I've been forced so hard into a mould that I don't know what's me anymore. Everything I do, I've learned to do to avoid pain and alienation. There's always veto-ing, a sadly necessary awareness of 'I must do this in order for them to do this'. I just want to be less selfconscious and be real, but nobody around me knows much about AS and it's hard to act as I naturally would and not gloss over.

Sadly I can tell you that it isn't only Aspies faced with this problem. I came from a very smothered background. I am now 32 and still trying to work out who I am. It gets better. It is a matter of asking yourself the right questions.

I came across this poem a couple of years ago on WP, I do not know who wrote the poem, but I feel it beautifully conveys what many of us are talking about here.


Masquerade

I have a little secret I wear upon my face
I keep it very near to me in a most convenient place.
I hope you do not guess it, you might take me to task
I take it out and put it on, it's my "normal" NT mask!

It keeps the world from pressing in; it makes me look like you!
I wear it so easily you won’t believe that it's not true
I laugh and nod and make my mouth do what passes for a smile
I walk and talk and do the stuff that makes me rank and file.