Month: January 2020

I updated “Autistic Burnout: The Cost of Masking and Passing” with a selection from “Autistic Burnout: “My Physical Body And Mind Started Shutting Down””.

Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs.

Source: Autistic Burnout: “My Physical Body And Mind Started Shutting Down”

One of my favorite bands, The Warning, is crowdfunding their new album.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thewarningrockband/new-album-and-23-date-northamerican-tour

Check out their Live at Lunario CDMX set, and then go give them some money so they can keep rocking us.

It’s been 5 and a half years since they caught our attention with their cover of Enter Sandman.

They have since put out an EP and two LPs (not a bad song among them) and are working on their third LP. They’re all still teenagers. Amazing and awesome. I can’t wait for the new album or the videos of the live sets from the upcoming North American tour.

BTW, check out Pau of The Warning along with a couple of other drummers I’m binge listening in this piece:

https://rnbn.blog/2020/01/21/1829/

“These findings suggest that social interaction difficulties in autism are not an absolute characteristic of the individual,” Sasson said. “Rather, social quality is a relational characteristic that depends upon the fit between the person and the social environment. If autistic people were inherently poor at social interaction, you’d expect an interaction between two autistic people to be even more of a struggle than between an autistic and non-autistic person. But that’s not what we found.”

Source: Study Challenges Assumptions About Social Interaction Difficulties in Autism – News Center – The University of Texas at Dallas

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

Source: Laurie Penny | Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

Via: The “Care” in “Self Care”

It is radical to care about yourself in a society that tells you, incessantly, all the reasons why you are not enough.

Source: The “Care” in “Self Care” – Accidentally in Code

This study on autistic burnout from the Academic Autism Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education at Portland State University notes this distinction between autistic burnout and depression. Autistic burnout…

Notably did not include anhedonia (not caring/feeling); if anything there was a pervasive frustration because people continued to care and feel but felt incapable of taking action on their feelings

Source: Autistic Burnout: “My Physical Body And Mind Started Shutting Down”

That aligns with my experience. Pervasive frustration indeed.

What is autistic burnout?

Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs.

…behaviorism represents a reductive, experience-denying caricature of science that is still trapped in the century-old ideology of logical positivism. It gives real science a bad name.

Source: Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn

If their theory collapses the richness of human experience into measurable behaviors and their practice relies on objectifying children, is it really surprising that the widespread antipathy for ABA expressed by people who have had it done to them doesn’t seem to faze its practitioners and proponents one bit? Behaviorists see only behaviors. The experience of those to whom they’re doing things is, if you’ll excuse the expression, outside the spectrum of what they’ve been trained to detect and address.

Source: Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn

ABA is rooted in an ideology that proudly stays on the surface, committed to reinforcing whatever behaviors the people who control the reinforcements endorse and extinguishing those they don’t. This focus on behavior — on that which can be seen and quantified — isn’t just problematic theoretically (reflecting a truncated understanding of human psychology) and ethically; it also fails from a practical perspective, as has been demonstrated repeatedly. If you train an autistic kid to stop rocking or squealing or flapping his hands, you have done exactly nothing to address what elicited that self-regulating or self-stimulating behavior and its emotional significance to him. Kids need to feel safe; ABA just eliminates the (unusual) ways he tries to attain that safety — for example, by elaborately praising him for “quiet hands.”

Source: Autism and Behaviorism – Alfie Kohn