Severe Autism - related derealization

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Also, there are gears that cause me to exhibit some very ritualistic Howard Hughes - like behavior. I would like to be free from these gears, but they are too intertwined with gears that I dont want to be altered in any way

Yeah I think you need to go back to your natural way of processing thing- all your normal gears so to speak. I think if you try to weed out some and make the rest fit together now you will cause yourself a great deal of distress.

I think you need to go back to your routine before this happened, as closely as humanly possible, and work on chilling out as much as you can. I know that's easy to say and hard to do, but those are time-old methods for re-centering yourself, especially if you are autistic.

Like, have you ever put together IKEA bookshelves? They're international, so the instructions are super simplified and all pictures. If you do something wrong, leave out one little piece (which is easy to do), everything else goes to h*ll. You're like, why did I buy this piece of trash? It doesn't work at all! Then you see what you're missing and you're like, OHH... I think if you go all the way back to the beginning, let yourself process things in your old way, you will have that "ohh" moment.

Going back to the way things were before isn't going to be so simple. For one thing, it would require the use of much more "black or white" cognition than I am neurologically capable of right now. Also, like I said before, my ability to use multiple gears at once was completely annihilated, and the only gears that still work require me to filter out and distort things - that's not something you can just snap your fingers and fix. Plus, there are lots of very important biases that come from after the derealization started that I dont want to lose, but they could be completely incompatible with the old me, not because they are less autistic, they were just never designed to be used by the old me

Even though the new biases might seem to be the exact same thing as the old ones at first glance they still seem incompatible

There is a spot in my autobiographical memory, right about the time where the derealization started, that contains biases that feel "natural", but still feel irrevocably disjointed. It's hard to say weather I was fully derealized yet when those biases were created, weather or not there is an exact point where the derealization officially begins might not have an answer

Lastly, there are 3 more pieces of this puzzle that are too complicated to describe. All I can say is that one piece has to do with categorical perception, one piece has to do with being too rigid about thr future, and one piece has to do with clockwork - like behavior. If there is anyone on this board who knows alot about cognitive science, I could really use your help

Sorry, I wasn't online during the weekend.

Okay so you could check out a couple of things:

Mindfulness/five senses check (I like this guy because he's not a hippy type):



Do the mindfulnessness thing as you are returning to your regular routine. It might "refresh" your mental browser. Remember, I am not suggesting you return to your regular thoughts- just return to your regular actions!

Richard Feynman- here he is with an example of logic (he also has written many books, which are readable):