Slowly recovering
In your later identification autism journey, as you’re healing from old communication wounds and learning new, healthier communication patterns, sometimes things will go well between you and another person.
And that’s when you have an opportunity to give hard evidence to those parts of you that are afraid that no one will ever accept you, that you’ll never get what you need, and instead form new neural pathways that trust that things can sometimes go well, that it is possible for people to be okay with who you really are.
One of the ways that we form new neural pathways is by trying something when there’s a reasonable chance of success, taking a little bit of a leap, being a little bit vulnerable with someone who’s more likely to be reasonably safe, and hopefully it goes at least neutrally and maybe even well.
It’s teaching that part of you that there is another option available.
The part where you form the new neural pathways is by reflecting on that interaction and going, “Hey, look, I just did that. That actually went okay,” rather than skimming past it because it wasn’t bad enough to set off the danger alarms, and then it gets lost in all of the things that happened in the day.
But if you think about it, and I mean literally talk to yourself, in your mind or aloud, and go, “Hey, I said that I need this, and she didn’t get mad at me. She didn’t get upset. She didn’t argue with me. She was just like, ‘okay’ and that worked. It was okay.”
And that’s teaching that part of you that gets so freaked out about ever expressing a need, because someone got mad at you sometime, or many times. But it’s teaching that part of you that there is another option available, that there are people in the world who are not going to react like that.
You already have this immense ability to rehearse and review all the things that have happened to you, this is a way to use that for your own advantage. Instead of only thinking about the things that went wrong, reinforcing those already existing neural pathways, you can use it to review and reinforce the things that went well, or at least neutrally.
What progress looks like
It’s a sign of success when you are letting down the mask, portraying a different way of communicating, or expressing a need when you otherwise wouldn’t. Anytime, you try a bit of healthy communication and no one has a bad reaction, that is a resounding success. The other person doesn’t have to come out with overwhelming, unconditional support, ego-stroking fawning support for it to be counted as a success.
In fact, the ultimate goal is for the interaction to be entirely ordinary, not a big deal, isn’t it? It really should just be completely ordinary, a run-of-the-mill interaction, for you to express your need and for the other person to be like, “OK” and respond appropriately.
So just a couple more examples of what this self-reinforcement can look like. And yes, I will actually talk to myself like this. I don’t care if it’s corny, it helps me.
So I’ll say to myself something like, “Okay, I was afraid that if I said this thing, it was gonna go like this, and then this would happen. But actually, really nothing happened. It was fine. It can be fine. It’s going to be okay. It was okay.” And reinforcing that helps.
Or, for another example, “Okay, when I was just talking to him, I directly expressed what I needed, and he didn’t get mad. He didn’t argue with me. It went just fine. He took me seriously, and I got what I needed. See, it can work!”
This is just one technique that I’ve found helps when I’m healing from those kind of old communication wounds.
