Unmasking Autism Diary #2: Just Change Your Thoughts?

Read now (4 mins) | Thought work: from inside Angela's Autistic mind

January 3, 2023

Dear Diary,

When I first joined a life coaching community I had a lot of complaints about the people in my life. Family. Co-workers. Strangers at the gym.

In coaching speak, I was a “victim.”

Whenever I’d complain about these things to fellow coach friends it would get turned around on me. “How are you doing that?” “How are you like that?”

It was, honestly speaking, miraculous. I could see how I was creating all these negative situations around myself with my own actions and attitudes. I ate it up, and soon I was the old pro showing people how their victim mindset was keeping them trapped. It felt like I was giving out keys to political prisons: “Go out and live your life! You are free!”

This freedom allowed me to expand in ways that my struggling and my
wishing-life-were-different never did. It was a wonder.

But not everyone seemed to want, or take, the keys I was so generously distributing. ‘I guess they want to stay stuck,’ I thought. 

Then in the fall of 2020, I fell into autistic burnout. Now you might think all burnout is the same, but for autistic people burnout is much more intense. To function in a world designed for neurotypical people, autistics create routines and safety structures to minimize autistic meltdowns which come from overstimulation.

I had created a world that had very few triggers for me comparatively speaking. The pandemic changed that and the uncertainty of when the pandemic would “end,” and how things kept changing and getting canceled, and shifting timelines—it was too much for me. My executive functioning tanked, my anxiety skyrocketed. My special interests—which I had been using to self regulate—were inaccessible. I became extremely suicidal. This darkness led to losing relationships because who wants to be around all that…I get it. 

So, why not just change my thoughts? I had the keys to this prison! Why couldn’t I, or wouldn’t I, use them??

This just compounded my self hate. I knew what to do and I was actively choosing not to do it. What the fuck was wrong with me?

Now I was beginning to sound like those people I had given the keys to who refused to use them. How could I—a teacher of this magic—not conquer my victim mentality? 

When coaching failed me, and death felt like the only good option—day after mother fucking endless day—I tried therapy and pharmaceuticals which didn’t touch it.

I couldn’t write. Talking was exhausting and not always accessible. There was literally no battery left for anything. Ever. 

Now all those coaching turnarounds I was so trained in became weapons of self-harm. “You first!” “How are you creating this?” “Thoughts are things!”

It all felt like a dangerous brainwashing cult I had been indoctrinated into. I could see the harm I had done by putting this message into the world.
And that, of course, made everything compoundingly worse.

Also this thing I believed in more than anything, and that had shaped my entire identity, was just gone for me. It’s not surprising I was suicidal, this huge part of who I was was gone. 

Not only was, ‘just change your thoughts,’ not enough in some circumstances, but it was harmful—murderous even. And it was a weapon I had wielded against myself and others. How could I know whether someone could access these tools? I hadn’t been trained in that in coaching school. 

Yes, I knew to look for mental illness to refer out clients, but was this mental illness? Could I recognize autistic burnout in others when it took me months to recognize it in myself (with coaches and therapists and doctors also missing it)? And what other conditions that I didn’t know about were also like autistic burnout and made this “mind over matter” approach more harmful than helpful?

My coaching training was about six months long and didn’t include any guidance for situations like the one I was in. Now, I looked at people I had taught these tools to differently. What if the keys I handed just didn’t work on their jail cell? It’s not that they weren’t using them—it’s that they didn’t work. 

I rewrote all my classes and trainings. I changed how I taught.

“Try this…It might work for you, but who knows?” became my mantra–which is a much harder sell than “I guarantee this will work if you do it.” I knew the tools could work, but I also knew they could do a lot of harm.

Hello shame. Hello regret. Hello doubt. 

Anyway, why am I journaling about this this morning? Something triggered these thoughts an hour ago, but now the sun is up and I don’t even remember what the trigger was! In any case writing it down makes me see how hard it was to lose this identity I was so proud of. It was the only way through that burn out, but the cost of survival was high. I guess that’s true for all of us who have made it through a dark night of the soul.

***

The Dear Diary Project is a public journaling project where I’m publicly sharing my diary entries as part of my annual goals. No harm is intended by these posts. My goal is to gain clarity for myself and hopefully help others, especially autistic adults, who are trying to make sense of the communication challenges we face.

“Masking is a common coping mechanism in which Autistic people hide their identifiably Autistic traits in order to fit in with societal norms, adopting a superficial personality at the expense of their mental health. This can include suppressing harmless stims, papering over communication challenges by presenting as unassuming and mild-mannered, and forcing themselves into situations that cause severe anxiety, all so they aren’t seen as needy or ‘odd.’”
—Unmasking Autism, Dr. Devon Price

*Background note: Most people only have a vague (often, highly stereotyped) version of autism in their minds and believe that autistic children need (traumatic) ABA therapy to "overcome" their disability and appear "normal."  After receiving an autism diagnosis in her thirties, Dr. Angela Lauria realized that she too had been mostly unaware of what it means to be Autistic.  Like so many people, she started her journey by first gathering information and resources from the omnipresent (and problematic) Autism Speaks, but eventually moved away from the 'autism community' in favor of the 'Autistic community,' where she found kinship with other Autistic individuals and learned to let go of pathologizing language like 'autism spectrum disorder' and 'Asperger's Syndrome.'  This autism blog (and her autism podcast, "The Autistic Culture Podcast") is meant to share her lived-experience insights to support others on a similar journey of diagnosis, understanding, and community. Embrace Autism--differences are not deficits.