The Alphabet of Autism: A is for…Anxiety (and Some Tips to Help It)
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This article is the first in a series of autism-related explorations, following the alphabet. What better topic to start than…anxiety?
“I am not anxious,” I said. I said that for a very long time, because I was annoyed at my emotions. Why would I need to be held back by fears that don’t make sense? I can do better than that. I can be free from that. I can very well see that there is nothing to be worried about, so c’mon, let’s just do this thing.
Not only was I annoyed at my emotions holding me back, but I also had some frustration about the popularization of words like “anxiety”, “depression”, “trauma”, and so on. I do think that these words are often overused nowadays to indicate what are just regular life occurrences. Sometimes they are…just the right word, though. Constant dread is not a regular state for a human being, and “anxiety” happens to be the name for it.
So having established that I was not anxious, and having a very strong willpower, I just went on and did “the thing” — I actually did a lot of things, and I felt like crap the whole time. My body/brain was dreading so many things that I wanted to do. So I just ignored the body. Why? Was there another way?
It turns out, that deciding not to feel something is usually just a way to ignore it, rather than to address it. Dang. What to do now?
An Enlightening Email
Being the alexithymic autistic that I am, identifying anxiety (or its lovely cousin, The Dread) is not always straightforward for me. I can easily be convinced that I am experiencing none whatsoever, while at the very same time being caught right up in anxiety’s mouth, like prey in the jaws of a lioness (male lions don’t hunt).
Two days ago, however, I received an email from my former coach, Heather Cook from Autism Chrysalis, who was promoting her new for autistic people. The email made me stop in my tracks for a second. It said:
There’s two major ways of anxiety tends to express itself. There’s a physical component, and a cognitive component.
The physical stuff is the feeling of overwhelm, the shutdowns, the meltdowns, the feelings of panic, the intense stress, the knot in your stomach, the clenched jaw and hunched shoulders, the sleeplessness, the erupting at other people, the getting stuck to your phone, or video games, the eating disorders or addictions.
The cognitive stuff is the ruminating thoughts, the worrying, the “I can’t do this!,” the vicious cycle of negative self-talk, getting trapped between “I have to/should do this” and “I don’t want to/can’t do this,” the catastrophizing, the painful thoughts about yourself and the world and the situation at hand.
“For someone who claims not to be anxious, I’m oddly familiar with a lot of these things,” I thought.
3 Action Motivators: “Should”, “Want”, and “Can”
Let’s imagine a scenario: you have been invited to a wedding by your friend (it could also be a relative).
Scenario 1: Your first reaction is “Oh, no. I am already dreading it”, followed closely by “but I really think that I should go. I would be a bad friend if I missed the wedding.” So you pick yourself up, force yourself into a nice attire, force yourself to be sociable at the wedding, hate it the whole time, but you don’t have to feel guilty about missing it. The main drivers of the should motivator are guilt, shame, and fear of consequences.
Scenario 2: You get the wedding invitation. You feel somewhat ambivalent about it. You do feel a creeping sense of dread in your body, as your mind subconsciously anticipates all the noise, the small talk, and the amount of people that will be there. And what if you say something wrong in front of all of those people? What if they don’t like your wedding gift? Yet you really want to attend. You also anticipate your friend being happy, good food, the laughter and cheerful mood. Yet, if you listen closely to your body, you don’t get much of a yes physical response. On your way there, you jump at car horn noises in traffic, and you get stressed about being late. The want motivator is tricky: what we want isn’t always what our body wants — or what we truly feel capable of doing. You are happy to attend the wedding, but you did so in spite of your anxiety about it.
Scenario 3: You get the wedding invitation. You are genuinely happy to attend. You tell your friend that you may not stay for more than an hour or two, and you ask her if there will be some quiet corner to recharge. You choose an outfit that does not give you sensory overload. On your way there, you feel relaxed, and looking forward to it. You feel like you can attend, and it will be manageable. You don’t anticipate something going wrong, and if it will, you trust that you can manage it. The can motivator is driven by a feeling of positive anticipation, trust, and realistic confidence.
(Scenario 4: Attending the wedding is not within your abilities. You let your friend know and you explain that this is not in your control. You feel a bit sad that you can’t be there, but you decide to make up for that by celebrating your friend in another way. Your friend takes some time to reply. You do not spiral into wondering if they have decided that you are a terrible person, or into wondering if they would be right. You can set boundaries without anxiety.)
Now, let’s swap the wedding with a new job, or a phone call, or a new project…which motivators are you acting on? Learning to distinguish our motivators can be a helpful first step to recognize and address anxiety.
“But Autistic People Have Good Reasons to Dread Things”
Yes, we do. That is the tricky question of autism: how do we discern legitimate concerns from unnecessary fears? After all, don’t a lot of us have a lifetime of experience of worst-case scenarios becoming reality? Don’t we have to deal with the narrow limits of tolerance of our nervous system, and navigating expectations that are still neurotypical-centered?
I don’t really have a clear answer (you would need to do Heather’s course for that, she’s the one with answers), but what I do believe and have been reflecting about, is that fear creates a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies. Anxiety reduces our nervous system capacity even more, shrinks our self-esteem and our ability to plan, and exacerbates autistic social difficulties.
The tendency many of us autistic people have to look for certainty, enter somewhat obsessive thought loops, or predict future based on past pattern recognition can create anxiety loops in which past failures are taken as evidence that there are no possibilities for growth. Acting on shoulds and even wants can only work for a limited amount of time before our bodies refuse to go on, like unhappy domesticated horses stopping in their tracks to remind their “owners” that they are alive beings, rather than objects.
Reading Heather’s description of how anxiety can manifest got me wondering: What would the autistic community look like without unnecessary anxiety? What if we had ready access to both physical and mental ways to deal with anxiety, that actually work for our brains? What if we did learn to better distinguish between what deserves and doesn’t deserve our mental resources, and how to better process our anticipations?
For a lot of us autistic people, anxiety has been an adaptive way to get through a world that we find difficult, in the absence of better alternatives. But perhaps learning alternative ways to address our concerns is what opens up to us the possibility to focus on what we actually both can and really want to do, and get a sense of accomplishment from our victories.
Disclaimer: I am an affiliate partner for the program I mentioned. I deeply value both my writing and authenticity, so I mean everything I wrote in this article. This is by no means intended as a sales post but as a way to give visibility to an autistic-led initiative, and to encourage other autistic people to find the support they need, in whatever form works for them.
Thank you for reading! Leave a comment if you like.
