Shame and Austism

Post Reply New Topic

I had some thoughts this week about shame, which I wrote up in a blog post.

http://www.lunalindsey.com/2013/11/auti ... shame.html

I think shame is an especially difficult problem for us, because we struggle so hard to find acceptance. And in my case, I am especially sensitive to emotions, so I can say I feel it more strongly than NTs do. It's an especially powerful force in my life, and not for good.

Please feel free to comment either here or on my blog. I'd like to see if it fits for other autists, and if anyone else has additional insights or helpful ideas sparked by my post.

No, I can't say shame is a very vibrant emotion with me. I don't really care too much what other people think, so I would say that helps. Guilt on the other hand is something I can identify with.

Interesting! See, this is where studies could help -- how many of us tend to process experiences as guilt more than shame, and can we correlate that with anything, like early childhood environment or ... I don't know what else. Which is why I demand research. ;)

It was interesting - I'm sure a lot of non aspies don't understand that we understand that we are awkward and not always saying the right thing. I think often we are perceived as just being intentionally intrusive. But I spend so much time agonizing over stuff, it's ret*d.

And that early childhood environment stuff - I think if our parents had tried to help us (ok at least in my case) - if they had helped me try to understand what I was doing wrong and why - in my formative years, I would have learned THAT then, instead learning to doubt and criticize myself constantly, which then makes the social crap way worse than just the Aspieness does.

I don't know, did I explain that well? My parents didn't know anything about Asperger's I can't blame them for that, but my whole family was so unkind about my social faux pas, that that as much as anything has formed my personality. That's why when people talk about a cure for Autsim, I question - what does a cure mean exactly?

But yes, I feel shame more than guilt (over the social screw ups that is).

Yes. It's something that is so obvious to them they don't feel like explaining. It's like saying the sun is out.. Even times when I'm grabbing em by the lapel shouting, "I can't see the sun! I don't know if it's out!" they're like, "Well, it's obvious."



I feel the same way about my parents. They didn't know. There is no way they could know. And in my case, they happened to do lots of things that benefitted me, like homeschooling me. But I would like to have been taught things. I would have liked to have known why I was different or even that I was different.

Some of my extended family didn't help. I remember being teased at their houses. They were just as much bullies as my peers and kids at school.

I am also very much against the idea of a cure, but very much for helping us all, especially the kids, learn to cope. Teach them skills and help to protect them from inadvertent trauma. But that's a really hard thing to ask, because often the parent is just as aspie as the kid. I have an undiagnosed 19 year old son who is probably aspie, and I know I did all the wrong things. I'm not sure how I could have done any better had I known, though. I was barely holding up. Speaking of shame!...

You know what's really weird, you know how sometimes a person will figure out that you're different so they jump on you even of you are saying something that's not weird at all, just because they can. Sometime I even feel shame then! Sometimes I just get mad, but other times I want to crawl under something. It feels at times as if, even if my personality is not entirely flawed, the effective sum of it is, so therefore it all really is. But that's when I'm feeling down, I try hard not to let myself get that down.

Guilt drives me to do better. For instance, if I feel bad about reacting in a certain way, I will try to make up for it another time.
As for shame, my sense of who I am comes from myself and my own sense of right and wrong.
I think this comes from not understanding social dynamics or the importance of social dynamics in society, and not having a sense of myself being part of a social community.

I am quite sensitive to shame-I often feel ashamed of myself when I have made social mistakes that have inadvertently hurt people or lost me friends.

I cannot say I've ever been ashamed about anything.

I embrace my weird qualities. In a world where most the people do the same stuff it is nice to be different.

Don't be ashamed. Be proud to be you because you are the only you.

Think about who you want to be and try to be that.

I feel shame a lot. I am good with feeling emotions, and I am hypersensitive to emotions too and I have more irrational thoughts and emotions in me than I do logic. Explaining the differences between emotions like guilt and shame is more difficult.

Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!

Please visualize a brown-haired woman in early middle age bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, flapping her hands slightly and nodding like a maniac.

This rings UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY true with my experience. TOTALLY, UTTERLY, AND COMPLETELY.

I was lucky. My grandmother's subscription to the cult of self-esteem might not have done me any favors in terms of acquiring a realistic self-image (nor did her-- or my probable Aspie grandfather's-- obsession with What People Would Think do my sense of shame any favors) but she loved me, she never gave up believing in me, she praised me daily. I'm sure that gave me some kind of insulating protection.

My father's Aspie detatchment/interest SAVED MY LIFE. There is now NO QUESTION in my mind about that. HE it was who taught me to condemn behaviors, not people-- who gave me the tools to turn the shame I was drowing in into guilt I could manage. HE it was who sat with me and analyzed things in an academic fashion. HE it was who helped me think about what I should have done instead, and what I could do in the future.

HE, and my husband, and my friends. No training, no expertise, nothing-- just love, and time, and common sense. How was this possible, when highly-trained experts who have spent their lives studying the subject (and us like objects) can't unravel Asperger's, much less more profound degrees of autism????

With your permission, I would like to print off a copy of your blog post to take to my therapist's office today. I would like to take it down to the special needs people at my kids' school. I would like to plaster it all over town, but I think you should be getting paid for that. THIS CAN SAVE ASPIE CHILDREN. THIS CAN SAVE AUTISTIC CHILDREN. AND I'M PRETTY DAMN SURE THAT, IF THOSE CHILDREN ARE GOING TO BE TRULY SAVED, IT'S UP TO US TO DO IT.

Can we distill that to a few words and put in on puzzle-piece shaped bumper stickers?? T-shirts?? Can we reduce it to 100 words or less and plaster it to bulliten boards and telephone poles?? Can we take it to a researcher and build a research study and get it documented??

How do we get this OUT?? How do we get this EVERYWHERE?? This is HUGE. At least from where I am sitting-- both with my own experience and the HUGE increase in frustration and defensiveness I saw in my son after I made the horrible mistake of applying shame to try to manage his behavior-- this is MASSIVE. Like, on the level of Eustacia Cutler refusing to give up on the little girl who grew up to be Dr. Temple Grandin.

This can't be hidden on one of 10,000,000 blogs. This can't vanish into the WrongPlanet archives. From an Aspie woman, from an Aspie mother with a probable Aspie child, from my Aspie forebears, for my Aspie descendants, for little girls (and probably boys too) struggling in classrooms all over the developed world right now-- WE HAVE TO GET THIS OUT.

Where do we go????????

I feel guilt and shame, and both sucks. The difference is guilt has positive effects while shames just gives you bad self esteem.

Hehe. I'm glad it rang so true to you and that you had supportive family to help you figure it all out. Yes, please print and distribute to whoever you think can be helped by it.

It seems overall, that there is a pretty big divide over this topic. Either aspies relate very strongly or don't relate in the slightest. I think it's an important question: why?

I wonder if emotional sensitivity is the answer. I consider emotions to be a sense, just like sight and hearing. Some aspies are oversensitive to light, and others have no problem, but are sensitive to sound or maybe undersensitive to everything. (Olga Bogdashina talks about this in her book on autistic communication.)

So I think the same must be true of emotions. In which case, I am emotionally oversensitive. I am more likely to meltdown due to overwhelming emotions than from any other cause. Does it follow that those of us who feel emotions overly strongly are more prone to toxic shame?

I am sure there are other factors. Some of you, like Marybird and Schtizbergers, seem to have an inborn sense of self and calm that overcomes shame influences. Could that be a result of upbringing? Or something inherent inside?

Brene Brown did say that those who felt worthy of love an acceptance, on a deep inner level, were resistant to the effects of shame. It's hard to admit that sometimes I don't feel worthy of love and acceptance, but I guess I do.

Were some of you somehow taught that? Or doesn't have something to do with a resistance to social pressures? Perhaps an inability to see the subtle body language that indicates, "You have something to be ashamed of!" (That's another thing I'm good at, is noticing body language, especially negative, tho I can't always intuit what it means, only that something changed and it's bad.)

It seems like a simple survey done scientifically could answer some of these very basic questions.

I am also wondering about how shame affects non-verbal autists. I feel strong empathy for nonverbals, like we have some very deep things in common. I don't know any personally... I feel like the strongest thing we ALL have in common is our failures to communicate and our propensity to be misunderstood. The idea of being trapped inside a body that can think but not talk, somehow I can relate to that, even though I am very strongly verbal. I can imagine the frustration and horror of it. So shame certainly must play a role there.

Yes, it strikes me that among the many, many things Eustacia Cutler did right was giving Temple a sense of confidence. She has never let anyone stop her. It seems her mother must have also had that same strong center, because she didn't let anyone stop her, either.

It seems that I'd we could create a generation of autists without shame, we'd have an army of brilliant scientists and artists who could do anything...

Which is part of the role of shame as a control device. Lots of people in the world don't want a bunch of confident, brilliant people running about. (The chapter I wrote on shame is in a book on how mind control is used in the context of religion.)

I know a tiny bit about PR from my writing career. It's a long, slow process, that honestly involves alot of meeting the right people at the right time. It also involves just keeping on saying things until more and more people notice.

Sometimes it involves reaching out to existing experts in the field and having a conversation. I don't do that option very often but it is almost always rewarding and interesting. Perhaps when I have the splines, I,e the ability to focus more on this topic (and less on mind control), I will try to contact Olga Bogdashina. She seems very insightful about autism, and like the kind of person who could write a whole book on autism and shame. :)