All kinds of adult people can for
various reasons suddenly develop even extreme challenges with:
- obsessive compulsive behaviours
- behavioural tics
- attention problems
- phobias
- acute impulsivity
- extreme withdrawal or mental
preoccupation
- sensory heightening
- emotional hypersensitivity
- Exposure Anxiety
- the visual perceptual challenge
of Scotopic
- Sensitivity
- reduced ability to process
receptive visual or
- auditory language
- reduced ability to simultaneously
keep up with a
- sense of self and other
- increased anti-motivation
countering the voluntary
- use of verbal language
- progressive social withdrawal
- shutdowns in left brain or right
brain processing
- immune dysfunction
- gut dysfunction
- nutrient deficiencies
- clumsiness
- disorganisation
- memory differences
Conditions such as substance abuse,
head injury, stroke, breakdown, chronic stress, epilepsy, severe viral
infection, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, Multiple Sclerosis,
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Myalgic Encephalitis, Tourette's,
Alzheimer's, eating disorders, MPD, Schizoid Personality Disorder,
Schizophrenia even an extreme 'Spiritual Awakening' might potentially
bring on SOME of the experiences which can also occur in Autism.
Furthermore conditions like Munchausen's or some personality disorders
might well lead some people to identify with all kinds of experiences
which occur in autism whether they in fact have these or not.
What's more, someone with autism
could also have or later develop any one of these other conditions or
none of them. As a well known person in the field, I've heard from all
kinds of people who have had autism-like experiences in adulthood and
I've had some of these people come to see me because the strategies
some people with autism use to manage their issues have also helped
others who have never had autism.
When a person has a range of
conditions amounting to the same challenges seen in Autism this is sort
of like an adult onset 'Autism'. The major difference is that when you
have a range of conditions in early infancy compounding to cause the
developmental condition of Autism, you don't know any other world and
the impact on development of communication (both receptively and
expressively) can be extreme so it's so hard for the world to 'get in'.
You take your stuff as 'normal'. It IS your normality. Unless it is an
uncomfortable place (and some aspects can be very uncomfortable and
imprisoning and others wonderful, mesmerising, and an altered reality)
you don't find any reason to fight it or change it and many people with
autism both fight the prison and defend the sanctuary of their autism.
So the psychological impact on sense of self and perspective on the
world is very different to those who are suddenly 'visiting'. For the
person with autism who leaves much of their old world behind, there can
be great loss (as well as gain) in becoming 'less autistic'. So the
emotional reality is also different. For the person with autism taking
on the world of interpretive meaning and directly confrontational
interpersonal interaction can be like a second language, foreign and
whilst now 'part of the mainstream world' perhaps never 'at home'.
My challenges began in infancy
(first hospitalised at age 2 1/2) or before that but I had moved into
the interpretive world around the age of nine and as much as I was
curious about the new world of interpretation I also mourned for my old
world of pure sensing. By the age of thirteen I could speak in litanies
(drove people nuts) and, in spite of being still so behaviourally
effected I was thought disturbed (and still often thought deaf because
of the meaning deafness- I had by then progressed to understand 50% of
incoming words), I felt I was now equally part of the world as in my
own world. Having come from a background modelling alcoholism I soon
discovered that alcohol could take me back to where I'd come from
(until I learned better by the age of seventeen). By the age of
twenty-five, after a life time of constant bugs, I had made a lot of
progress in managing much of my behaviour and communication when my
health broke down into what was by one clinic called Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome and another M.E and this severe physiological breakdown
brought back so much of the severity of the earlier sensory perceptual
and information processing problems. So I have seen autism from many
angles.
Being open to the stories of people
with all kinds of conditions, we better understand ourselves. Autism
has relevance in understanding not just the aliens who have it, but
those visitors, the Gadoodleborgers, the bridge keepers, who encounter
some of its component parts.
