Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Caetextia: A New Definition of Autism and Aspergers behavior
SilverLining:
--- Quote from: PhoenixRising on February 10, 2012, 04:48:59 PM ---"I was a mess" you said...
does that mean you can notice an improvement now? That things are better, more often, than reminding you of "what was"?
--- End quote ---
I'd say as time goes on and I continue working on these issues, that things have definitely gotten better, and the relapses have gotten less intense. Maybe not all the time, but at least some of time, I can put things in perspective and see some humor in the whole thing. Also maybe I'm getting better at recognizing and not getting sucked in by the usual triggers.
I'd say this is another sort of self test for us. I wonder about my own condition, but compared to what goes on with the other FOO members my progress seems pretty clear. Things don't appear to be getting better for any of them. They just get deeper into craziness, chemical cures, ritual behaviors, and other non-solutions. Nothing ever really changes.
sKePTiKal:
Well, that's very good news, SL!
You know, my "theory" is that it's precisely that we were so affected by the toxicity in our FOOs that makes us "normal". If you expose a healthy person to a communicable disease... our immune systems go into over-drive to fight it off. Sometimes we get ill, too, for a time. But it's not permanent - we recover. For me, I got into the auto-immune cycle... where my silly body got programmed to believe everything it came into contact with was toxic... and started to attack itself. This is a bit harder to bring back to balance... but I think I'm getting there.
The hardest part was teaching myself to start from where I'm at, right this moment and to not compare myself to the end-result, the ideal or goal that I'm working toward. Where I'm at right now, I need tinier goals... the building blocks and the routine repetitions so that it becomes my day to day, automatic, don't have to think about it kind of "stuff in my life". I needed to learn to tell myself - that's good enough for today, try again tomorrow. And to take that moment to appreciate what I was able to do today, without beating myself up about how far away I am from where I want to go. That reflex to constantly berate myself for x, y, and z... is one of the toxic "hangovers" of being me in my FOO.
It's message is "I'm not good enough, I'm never gonna be good enough, look how out of shape, fat, old, addicted you are... it's hopeless... why try?" and that's exactly what has stopped me from getting started in the past. I don't need a sign on my back that says: Kick me... I've got that covered! Thanks very much. And since being kicked was about the only time I got undivided attention... well don't you know? That's how I validated myself.
Lately, I've been reminding myself that if I'm so deprived, neglected, etc. then I'd best take every opportunity, every good thing that comes my way - whether it's a chance to get know new people, help someone else out, snuggle with my honey, or eat something healthy and yummy or to run up & down the steps - take every chance I get and make something bigger (and hopefully better) out of it. Coz I have no idea, no one can predict, how many more chances I'm gonna get.
SilverLining:
--- Quote from: PhoenixRising on February 11, 2012, 10:27:35 AM ---It's message is "I'm not good enough, I'm never gonna be good enough, look how out of shape, fat, old, addicted you are... it's hopeless... why try?" and that's exactly what has stopped me from getting started in the past. I don't need a sign on my back that says: Kick me... I've got that covered! Thanks very much. And since being kicked was about the only time I got undivided attention... well don't you know? That's how I validated myself.
--- End quote ---
And those messages get programmed in all sorts of subtle ways. In recent years I see how my father went into a mid life deflation stage (starting when I was about 10), and then started passing off his own toxic programming onto the offspring. It was along the line of, "I'm a failure, you are related to me, biology is everything, therefore you don't have a chance". And I think he gets some sort of narcissistic kick by repeating this type of message. I was well programmed with this by the time I hit adulthood.
The stuff sure gets deep in our toxic FOO's. Lately I've sometimes had the weird feeling that I am watching a sort of drama with these people in which I am no longer really involved. It's weird but also liberating, because it finally seems to be something outside myself.
SilverLining:
--- Quote from: Leah on February 13, 2012, 10:18:11 AM ---[‘Context blindness’ — the inability to switch easily between several foci of attention and track them — is clearly seen in autism (the child transfixed by spinning the wheels on a toy car has no sense of a car’s real purpose, for instance) but is the most dominant manifestation of autistic behaviour in high-achieving people with Asperger’s syndrome. We have therefore named it ‘caetextia’, from the Latin caecus, meaning ‘blind’ and contextus, meaning ‘context’. We are suggesting that caetextia is a more accurate and descriptive term for this inability to see how one variable influences another, particularly at the higher end of the spectrum, than the label of ‘Asperger’s syndrome’.
--- End quote ---
I've been mulling this article over for a couple of weeks and I think they are onto something (although the presentation needs work). I'm thinking the minds of other people are an especially challenging piece of "context" for a person with this affliction. At an intellectual level, they might know the other person is a complex, and intelligent person with their own experiences and perspectives. But in the day to day process of interaction, they cannot efficiently access their intellectual knowledge of the other. So their modes of interaction tend to be literal, one dimensional, and often insulting to the other.
Of course I've been trying to apply the idea to my FOO. My father at age 78 could probably sit down and pass a college algebra test without studying in advance. He has a prodigious memory for this kind of stuff, which made him successful as a career engineer. But he is a complete bumbler when it comes to taking into account the mind of others in conversation. The multiple streams of information going into his brain seem to instantly overwhelm his processing ability and he reverts to monologuing and explanation, his preferred modes of interaction.
So maybe it's not so much "mind blindness" as an inability to quickly process and act on what he knows intellectually. Where others intuitively and routinely access their knowledge of others, someone like my father can't do it. He can only easily and efficiently access his own (often random) stream of consciousness and this is becomes his main mode of interaction.
BonesMS:
--- Quote from: SilverLining on February 15, 2012, 12:08:39 PM ---
--- Quote from: Leah on February 13, 2012, 10:18:11 AM ---[‘Context blindness’ — the inability to switch easily between several foci of attention and track them — is clearly seen in autism (the child transfixed by spinning the wheels on a toy car has no sense of a car’s real purpose, for instance) but is the most dominant manifestation of autistic behaviour in high-achieving people with Asperger’s syndrome. We have therefore named it ‘caetextia’, from the Latin caecus, meaning ‘blind’ and contextus, meaning ‘context’. We are suggesting that caetextia is a more accurate and descriptive term for this inability to see how one variable influences another, particularly at the higher end of the spectrum, than the label of ‘Asperger’s syndrome’.
--- End quote ---
I've been mulling this article over for a couple of weeks and I think they are onto something (although the presentation needs work). I'm thinking the minds of other people are an especially challenging piece of "context" for a person with this affliction. At an intellectual level, they might know the other person is a complex, and intelligent person with their own experiences and perspectives. But in the day to day process of interaction, they cannot efficiently access their intellectual knowledge of the other. So their modes of interaction tend to be literal, one dimensional, and often insulting to the other.
Of course I've been trying to apply the idea to my FOO. My father at age 78 could probably sit down and pass a college algebra test without studying in advance. He has a prodigious memory for this kind of stuff, which made him successful as a career engineer. But he is a complete bumbler when it comes to taking into account the mind of others in conversation. The multiple streams of information going into his brain seem to instantly overwhelm his processing ability and he reverts to monologuing and explanation, his preferred modes of interaction.
So maybe it's not so much "mind blindness" as an inability to quickly process and act on what he knows intellectually. Where others intuitively and routinely access their knowledge of others, someone like my father can't do it. He can only easily and efficiently access his own (often random) stream of consciousness and this is becomes his main mode of interaction.
--- End quote ---
For Aspies, multi-tasking is nearly impossible and a source of frustration. Multiple streams of information can be a source of sensory overload.
Bones
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