Autism and Internalized Self-Abuse
This is either really cringe or my magnum opus.
Trigger warning: This article talks about family abuse, trauma and a lot of other super-not-fun aspects of being autistic.
Dysregulation and its Consequences on the Human Race
I don’t care if you’re neurospicy or neurotypical, autistic or allistic, Hannah Gatsby or the Great Gatsby— everybody gets dysregulated.
The healthiest way to deal with dysregulation is to verbalize it to someone you trust.
Simply telling someone that you’re dysregulated helps you in three ways:
You’re creating a degree of separation between yourself and the mood you’re in.
You’re communicating your mental state to somebody you love, so they don’t take the feelings you’re having too personally.
You and your loved one can strategize ways to bring your nervous system back down to earth.
When we’re in a state of chronic dysregulation, we usually don’t want to engage in healthy coping mechanisms. We’re much more likely to get high, shutdown, blow up, meltdown, or throw up after scarfing down Burger King hot dog fries.
Broadly speaking, most people deal with dysregulation in one of two unhealthy ways:
Externalizing: Cheeto-fingering your way through life, spreading dysregulation onto the people around you (i.e. arguing, fighting, bullying and blaming)
Internalizing: Accepting dysregulation as a sign there’s something inherently wrong with you (i.e. not advocating for yourself, which can lead to depression, anxiety, addiction and self-harm)
Most dysregulation is caused by feelings of helplessness, a lack of control. Externalizing and internalizing then, can be seen as the two obvious ways to take back that control. Something needs to change and it’s either gonna be me or other people. Either I have to stop eating Burger King hot dog fries and start doing sit-ups, or we need to ban six-pack abs on a federal level. There’s no in-between.
This gets into the black-and-white thinking problem that many people, not just autistics, suffer from. It’s hard to exist in an uncertain and nuanced world. It requires work on your part to find that healthy middle ground, between advocating for yourself and taking responsibility for your fuck ups. It requires you to have a flexible ego, one that’s not completely tied to your reputation and position within the hierarchy. Unfortunately, most people’s egos have the flexibility of my right hip after a two-and-a-half-hour car ride.
Most people are physiologically incapable of taking an L. They immediately externalize or internalize anything that goes against their ego, categorize it as a threat, and spiral.
Taken to the extreme, an externalizer becomes an abuser and an internalizer becomes the abused. That was certainly my experience growing up. Alright, everybody put on your trauma dump helmets.
My Supervillain Origin Story
My father has the emotional intelligence of a block of wood, which makes him a fantastic lawyer. When he’s not getting his way, he uses his dysregulation like a bludgeon, increasing the tension in the room, raising the temperature until you finally just throw up your hands and say, you know what, fine. Have it your way, Dan.
You can’t tell this man a goddamn thing he doesn’t want to hear. He’s an impenetrable wall of Midwestern Christian obstinance, smoke-screening as the life of the party, which is great, until the party ends and you want to go to bed.
Sleep is not important to this man. Nutrition is optional. He doesn’t have a primary care physician and he’s only taken his blood pressure once. The result was something he didn’t want to hear.
His conditional love was dangled like a carrot on a ten-foot stick. I tried so hard to meet his expectations. I just didn’t have the fucking stamina to keep up with him.
This man would wake up at 5:30 a.m., drink three cups of coffee, take the train to Chicago, work all day, get home at 7 p.m., throw a Chimichanga in the microwave, run off to Boy Scouts, a swim meet, or basketball practice, come home, drink three Miller Lites and do it all over again the next day.
On the surface, he was Super Dad! A respected member of the community! Very giving to the church! He did everything he was *supposed* to do, at least publicly.
At home, he was a Tasmanian Devil of dysregulation— tornado-ing into my room with a list of demands, every hour on the hour. Anytime I got *caught* relaxing, he’d launch into a laundry list of more productive activities I could be doing.
As a result, I’m physically incapable of relaxing as an adult— so that’s cool.
I’m haunted by a sense of impending doom. A looming other foot that’s always about to drop. Dad will be home any minute. My asshole still clenches when I hear the garage.
In his mind, my childhood was perfectly acceptable, and I’m just being overdramatic, of course. If he ever found this, he’d say, “I’m honestly shocked, I don’t know where this is coming from!”
It’s coming from me, finally, after 31 years, getting up the courage to say, I really wish you didn’t treat me like that.
His idea of parenting is authoritarian top-down control, completely nonplussed by the emotional needs of his children. He loves institutions. He’s obsessed with order. He wants you to follow the rules.
Who gets to make the rules? He does, of course!
And if you can’t follow the rules— perhaps because you’re experiencing sensory overwhelm due to undiagnosed autism— he will scream at you until you have a meltdown and then ground you for whatever you said or did during the meltdown. The same pattern, every fucking weekend.
Why do you think I’m such a good writer?
I spent the first 18 years of my life arguing with one of the finest corporate lawyers in Chicago. You think I’m scared of you?
Your narcissistic mind tricks don’t work on me, Qui-Gon. I’m completely unaffected by your triangulation and gaslighting. I will grey rock you into oblivion while torturing you subtly the entire time. I’m Ted Kaczynski, living rent-free in a remote cabin in the woods of your psyche. I’m a ghost, until one day— surprise, bitch!
Look into my eyes and the abyss stares back at you. I am become death, the destroyer of narcs. I feed on the souls of the un-self-aware. Your lies are my nourishment. Your demise is my feast. Bring me my sacrifice. Bring him to me!
I wasn’t a psychological supervillain when I was eight years old, so unfortunately, I’ve internalized a lot of really negative messages about myself. This led me down a road of emotional volatility, addiction and prolonged periods of suicidal ideation.
I’ve spent most of my life assuming that whatever situation I walk into, the people probably aren’t going to like me. It’s really hard to form healthy relationships when that’s your default mindset. To steal a line from RuPaul:
Top-down vs bottom-up processing
I’ve been abusing myself for 30 years. In the same way my father used to dictate reality to me, I’ve spent my life dictating reality to my body.
“I’m gonna have another beer even though it’s a Tuesday and I have work tomorrow.”
[Wakes up on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. with a broken neck]
“I’m gonna continue taking 15,000 steps a day, pallet-jacking heavy shrubbery around a parking lot, even though I’m only two months removed from a hip surgery.”
[Completely shreds hip, partially disabled now as a result]
“I’m gonna keep doing stand-up comedy, even though every time I’m about to go on stage, I have a mini panic attack, catastrophic diarrhea and I visibly sweat through my pants.”
[Falls into autistic burnout, ends up in psyche ward]
It’s a product of top-down processing. My brain declares something, so it must be so. Rather than listening to the rhythm of my body, I was telling my body what to do, and then grounding it when it had a meltdown.
The pattern becomes the only thing we know.
I’ve had these crazy swings my entire life— never in the middle, always experiencing either euphoria or hell. If you’re a fellow neurodivergent person struggling with addiction, my heart goes out to you, because internalized self-abuse is one hell of a drug.
Internalized Self-Abuse
Abuse becomes internalized when our default setting is:
“I am the problem.”
Whether you’re falling down the self-help rabbit hole, filling your body with poison, or both— you’re operating from a place of:
“I am not enough.”
This is the mindset we have to change, or we’re just going to keep chipping away at ourselves until there’s nothing left.
Pushing yourself outside your comfort zone is one thing, but working yourself to death because you think that’s the only way to be a good person— that’s just stupid. You’re stepping on the same rake over and over again. You’re living in a constant state of dysregulation, externalizing or internalizing, but either way, the result is abuse.
What kind of messaging do we get about people who aren’t willing to endure abuse?
Lazy. Selfish. Entitled. They don’t deserve it. They didn’t earn it.
Ask yourself: Who decides who deserves what? Who decides when something’s been earned? Who benefits by dangling our basic necessities from a 10-foot stick?
It’s all subjective gobbledygook passed down from billionaires who wish to enslave us.
I would argue that all people, regardless of their willingness to suffer, deserve to have their basic needs met.
I would also argue: The people making billions off our labor while 76% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck— they’re the entitled ones.
They expect this arrangement to continue forever. Why? Because that’s just the way it is. Who decides that? They do.
Why haven’t we grabbed our guillotines and Uber-Pooled over to Jeff Bezos’ house yet? (For legal purposes, that was a metaphor.) Well, it’s because too many of us suffer from that internalized self-abuse.
We expect to be miserable. We accept our fate. We buy into the delusion that our lives matter less because we’re lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. It’s a rigged game. It’s a big club. And as long as we continue to recognize this unjust hierarchy, we’re compliant in our own abuse.
Self-flagellation doesn’t make you a good person. It makes you an easy mark. Self-deprecation doesn’t make you funny and relatable. It’s punching yourself in the face so the bully keeps on walking.
The solution is the opposite. Practice self-advocacy. Educate yourself. Take time to self-regulate. And for the love of Christ, don’t let some rich old white guy define the parameters of your existence.
Killing in the Name…
I recently spent a week in Door County with my parents. The idea sounded about as fun as walking into a wood chipper, but I decided to go, after a ton of convincing from my wife.
“I give it three days before my dad gets dysregulated, says something to set me off, and I drive the fuck home,” I told her.
“That’s fine,” she said. “We can leave whenever we want. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do on this vacation.”
I was only half right. He did, in fact, get dysregulated around day three, following a jam-packed schedule of hikes, golf outings and kayaking excursions.
“He’s trying to kill me,” my mom said, several times.
But not only did I last the whole week, I actually left the vacation feeling rejuvenated. We had our battles, sure, but I had more wins than losses.
When we were sitting around the campfire and he threw ice at my dog— I left.
Don’t fucking do that. Hard boundary.
When he told me to get my swim trunks on to go kayaking, I told him to his face, “I’m not going.”
He tried to guilt trip me. I didn’t care. I saved myself the hip pain and spent the afternoon recharging.
When he demanded that I wake up my brother one morning, I said, “I prefer to let people do things at their own pace.”
Boom. Got his ass.
We were on a boat when my sister handed me the aux cord. I couldn’t resist the urge to torture him subtly.
I started off strong with, “Hits From the Bong.”
The boom-bap beat echoed off the rocks as we glided along placid Lake Michigan at sunset.
PICK IT, PACK IT
FIRE IT UP
COME ALONG,
AND TAKE A HIT FROM THE BONG
Mind you, I’m very stoned at this point.
To that end, I played some Sublime and Kid Cudi. The vibes were lip-smacking immaculate. The pontoon was grooving. And then it hit me, today was a good day.
My dad turned it down after Ice Cube said the N-word. He can’t handle black excellence.
Alright, time to send a clear warning shot across his bow. You know exactly what song I played next.
“Turn it up!” I told him.
He reluctantly complied.
The song crescendoed to that one part after the guitar solo. You know what part I’m talking about.
FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.
FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.
FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.
FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.
FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.
FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.
He grimaced and spun the knob until the music was barely audible—
and I felt hope in my heart for America.
"Strumming my pain with his fingers, telling my whole life, with his words".... you're killing me. Softly. Bravo.
Woot!!! This AuDHD daughter of a narcissist father salutes you, good person!