Sunday, 03 January 2010
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Why We Are Invisible
I hope this explanation takes some of the sting out of the way we are treated by others. We are perceived as less than fully human or part of the furniture, if we are noticed at all. We lack something I call "personal presence".
Compare pictures of faces of neurotypicals to people with with ASD. The neurotypicals get and hold your attention; the ASD people do not. I have been searching for 45 years for the reason that I am isolated from others by an invisible wall. It was was so mysterious that I thought it was something supernatural. Now I know!
Connecting with others is normally an automatic process that happens in a split second, many times each day. It is a feedback loop between people that involves the senses, the brain and expression through the face and voice. The brain has evolved to recognize and respond emotionally to espressions that are SPONTANEOUS, SUBTLE and often FLEETING in the face and voice. The brain has also evolved to express emotions through thousands of tiny muscles around the eyes and mouth and through variations in pitch and prosody of the voice. This is how people connect emotionally with one another.
The "social brain" is a very complicated network of brain centers that pick up on expressions of others and respond emotionally to them with our expressions. It is so complicated that if even one part doesn't develop properly or there is a connectivity issue between parts of the network, the ability of a person to set up the feedback loop is impaired.
Despite any progress we may make in learning social skills and making adjustments I warn you to never expect to connect as naturally and easily as do neurotypicals. We will always be just a little "off" in the eyes or the world. Double whammy- we will never receive the compassion that people with easily understood handicaps such as being blind or crippled do.
But ask yourself: "would you rather be blind or crippled?"
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- From: Bonyfish
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Comments (2)
Funny really, reading your post and remembering back in my youth when I "still" got on with people a bit, I went to an interview in a job agency and the woman said she couldn't employ me because there was a wall between us. I didn't understand it, I do now, sort of. Its not so much like a wall as standing up close to a one-way mirror. The people can see me through the one-way mirror but I am shadowy and distorted looking to them, not like them at all, and not like I see myself either.
I don't know if I have Asperger's or a weird personality or the endless years of child abuse warped me, but the Asperger's thing seems to fit.
I think people have trouble with the perpetually puzzled or curious look I have. They misread it all the time and think that something is wrong or that I am unhappy. I cannot keep the "processing" look off of my face either. People use phrases and idiomatic speech that I have to reinterpret to make sense of it. They respond to that passing puzzled look and think that it is something else... many misunderstandings have resulted.
Or I have to keep a response in check to a picture that is hysterically funny. (Raining cats and dogs... or talking until you're blue in the face... or picturing some people literally "running to the store" even.) It would sometimes be insulting to explain "What's so funny?" so I try to keep that response in check... it is obvious apparently that something is being "checked" though.