Is This The BEST Theory Of Autism?... | I'm Autistic, Now What? Reaction 

I was overestimated as a child. I loved learning and did well in school. But I couldn't cope after age 14.

I don't like routines. I like doing one thing until it is finished no matter the time. I often eat the same things for breakfast and lunch but I don't eat them at the same time every day.

1:09:09 Shutdowns vs. Meltdowns: I have actually been thinking about this very thing. I grew up in a very restrictive household. I think I may have internalized these restrictions more than my sisters did because I felt it so deeply when my parents were disappointed or angry with me. Outbursts were 100% unacceptable. (I also think my Dad is on the Autistic spectrum, so his own intolerance and strong reaction to our emotional outbursts guided his laying down the law of "That's Wrong") So my strong feelings, which would lead to outbursts that I learned quickly to tamp down would be turned inward. It'd be so painful that I just ended up dissociating. This is so real. The quiet implosion was huge inside me, and I eventually ended up with a seizure disorder. Neurologically tested for epilepsy, I came up negative. No one knows why I was having seizures. Deemed "idiopathic." I'm convinced to this day that I had short-circuited myself due to internalized meltdowns, which forced me shutdown or go mad. To this day I struggle to identify strong emotions or even to act them out. I spend hours on the couch playing g games on my phone because I can't do anything else. Monotropism+Special Interest+PDA due to a very demanding career = BURNOUT. Playing the game redirects my attention from the feelings of anxiety and allows me to stimulate my brain without feeling the pain. Sometimes I think it'd be better to just scream and shout and rock, then nap, then get back to work. But I'm too tired to do that, lol. I'm in a yearslong burnout from decades of trying to live in a neurological world based on the restrictions that were placed on me as a child. Good grief. ASD life is a DOOZY. 🫠

PDA can also be demands you put on yourself. I love the alternative: Persistent Drive for Autonomy

Stimming does help people many people with ADHD focus. It sort of calms down the overactive internal chatter so you can maintain one thought process.

Taking things literally, intentionally, as humours. So I guess a lot of folks in the community must really love Monty Python skits/movies?

My father wouldn't respond when he was reading the encyclopedia. We would say, "daddy",pause, "dadDY",pause, "DADDY!!!" We would have to yell before he heard us.

The irony and pain of focusing deeply on this video, interrupted by perky, cheerful ads for food and socials :-)

I met an Autistic woman who was an Army vet. I'm a Navy vet. She made serious eye contact almost rigidly but we were talking about our special interests so I might have been doing it just as much. lol. I'm hypersensitive to a lot of things but so much to pain.

I so wish I had videos of me as a child like Meg does. It would be so validating and interesting to see how it looked from the outside

imagine having more than one special interest that compete for attention ^^" *coughs* though with competing i mean, me getting annoyed at wanting to do one but because of some trigger becoming obsessed with doing the other and not able to switch ^^"

I struggle with PDA as well. I'd describe it as an extremely anxious state that is triggered by expectations, because I have been "a disappointment" and punished for not meeting expectations, despite of trying to do everything right. and even more so: because expectations were often surprising me and so I didn't see the "danger" of not fitting an expectation before it was "too late". So, I think that is not an uncommon experience for autistic people, and I also think it makes sense that a person with that experience might develop a kind of hyper-vigilance for expectations. Criticizing an individual with PDA is a nightmare.. even though we try to be open for suggestions.. it is.. hardly ever.. possible to find "the right moment" or way to tell us we should make a change, because we have had our fair share of criticism in our lives and easily feel misunderstood... and we get triggered because of that. Trying to get better, but... definitely still going into panic mode quite easily around (suspected) expectations.

I had quite allot of people tell me I walk like a duck 🦆. I'm currently in the process of getting a diagnosis.

I have had a few obsessive special interest, and some of them have involved hyperfocus. I was quite a good classical pianist even as a kid, and that involved a lot of concentration. The weirdest one was staring at specific stars and trying to concentrate my entire consciousness into the light of that star. I did this a lot when I was about 12. I am a piano tuner by profession, and that involves focusing in on the beat-rate of one specific overtone. Still, I'm not that bad at changing my focus from one thing to another.

I do also think it's hilarious sometimes to intentionally respond to peoples phrases as if they were literal XD it used to be something that i used to get into trouble for when it happened accidentially, but nowadays with the people i chose in my life and us using phrases, it's just funny cause they immediately know and i usually put some effort into changing my tone to make it super obvious that i know it's not meaning that ^^"

The thing about taking things literally as a joke reminds me of that time years ago when my brother and I rewrote the first 3 chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to make the figurative language literal. Like Uncle Vernon's head literally becoming a beet with a mustache and it being a serious medical condition. We thought it was hilarious. We're both on the spectrum. 😊

hmmm... my daily hygiene routine starts at exactly 05:35 AM on work days and 06:45 AM on days off.

I don't want to assume too much, but do you think one reason you are able to "not mask" as much as, for example, her is because of a difference in expectations of gender? In my experience, it's not that easy to just "be direct and find people who will accept that" as a woman, even among groups of women or people with similar interests.

This can lead into spoon theory and energy needed to switch tasks. Also, as a child, I was given hearing tests because I didn't appear to react when I was engrossed in what I was doing.

Have you heard of Andy Clark's idea that autism is when you rely too much on sensory input and not enough on your internal model of the world? It really rings true for me. It's easy to see monotropism and sensory issues emerging from that.

Drama and exhausting. I have to slow these young people down.

Thomas, thank you for your podcasts. I really appreciate your information and how calm and focused you are. There are many autistic podcasters that I can't listen to because of all the energy they put into them. Some even add sound effects, and I can't stand that. They are obviously great people, but they try so hard to be entertaining that the content gets lost in the noise. Also, I'm not referring to Megan specifically. I like her, but she talks too fast for me anyway.

Or... She could just listen. Some things are masking behavior, and some things are just learning. 40 plus years being very confused, but it all clicked eventually. So many girlfriends doing the chatterbox thing and then didn't address me by name... So.. she wasn't talking to me? We're all humans regardless of our differences, and reasonable accommodations can be made for anyone, while expanding the scope of what's reasonable. Monotropism is yes a tendency or is developed, or preferred, it in no way means that we're absolutely stuck with each challenge that we experience.

In a strictly superficial sense I'm just interpreting monotropism as hyperfixation, with the tendency to establish energetic gradients that lead into a small set of primary sinks. However that doesn't mean the establishment of narrow channels of attention, without diffusion. I think hyperfixation is just a facet, or an overarching modifier within the individual's inner constellations that can be triggered or applied to certain matters. It's a type of machinery, essentially, not a fixed and uniform constant. And it also may not even be primary.... it could easily be either tangential to a particular void or avoidance (compensatory, conditioned behavior) or downstream of a broader phenomena (a shadow of sorts). My own model is pretty straightforward, though I think it's more geared toward dissociation and schizotypy than autism. Basically there are two "macro: types of minds. The singular mind, and the divided mind. The singular mind maintains a relatively solid "default anchor reality", and in daily life, it weighs all incoming information against this. It does this because it's fast and "good enough", it's shallow, first order, kind of reflexive on the level of an animal, but when you chain it together and cobble together a few of these at once, it generates what appears to be complex and adaptive behavior. The singular mind is linear convergent dominant (deductive, interpolative). Due to only having one internal "box" to work with (the others are invisible, they can't use them consciously) they are highly stressed by and resistant to congitive dissonance. What this means is that when presented with a piece of information, they weigh it against the default anchor reality and try to mark it as absolutely true, or absolutely false. If they cannot mark it as true within a certain time after receiving it, it is simply marked false and discarded. They don't keep loose ends. This makes them highly programmable and basically designed to be cast into a mental prison which they have neither cause nor means to escape, and they will never desire to either, due to their core emotional framework and strong sense of ego. The divided mind was splintered into pieces for one reason or another. It contains a core self, a higher self, and then a bunch of pieces working in parallel. It doesn't maintain a default anchor reality (it builds several and merges them as needed, to scale to a broader possibility space). It is biased towards non-linear divergent (extrapolative) and the balance will vary. It has little to no response to superficial cognitive dissonance. And that's where it goes awry. It really requires a well formed higher self, strongly connected to the core self, or it loses track of all the pieces and how they're drawn from to produce coherent outpuit and generate the experience of a sense of self. Apart from this, you have the core sense of identity and the emotional framework. I think people get way too hung up on the introvert extrovert thing, these are both nonsense and irrelevant, they're shadows on the cave wall. You have to find their basis and genesis, and the means by which they can be distorted,a dn so on. Black box testing basically. At its most stripped down and extreme, subhumanity is tripolar. There are three states that the being can be divided into. 1) Solipsistic. Oneself is either the only conscious being, or all is part of self. Or otherwise flowing forth from self, as it would from a fountain. This could be called a sort of neotenous mind blindness, pre-object permanence. 2) Dissolved. Oneself is part of, or one with, everything. This is a state of uncontained identity diffusion. You are the world, the world is you. Move something in the outer world, move in in your inner world. The type of rearranging behavior which follows from essentially being a mirror and having no reflection in the world, can be easily imagined. 3) Materialistic. There is no interest in the others, they're basically objects and scenery. There are "shoulds" when reasoning about them. Ultimately scale is ignored, a building full of people is not all that different from a person made of cells. Only combined do you get a complete being. If either of these is amplified, or made diminished, the being is made lopsided. It behaves accordingly. And then there's just the obvious stuff about early childhood development. I don't know why it's so controversial to consider the role of infant trauma and deprivation, and likewise being autistic leading to compensatory narcissistic defenses. I see this frequently. There this notion that in autism you have naivem gullible, pure souls. Well you know, maybe so, but some of them get to be total pricks too. And I understand it entirely. So a lot of the higher behaviors can be acquired during development through either conditioning (enhanced or altered trauma response) or compensation (difficulty with XYZ learn to do it this way instead to mask it).

I love that your gentle and calm. The other autism channels including the woman on here are so hyper, jarring, annoying. Too blunt??

10:47 - I'd argue that shedding these things isn't as easy as just not doing them when you were raised in an environment where you were punished for not masking or it was unsafe to not mask. Even now it's not always safe for everybody to unmask. 50:27 - taking things literally as a joke is one of the funniest things ever 😂the webcomic Strange Planet is great for this! 🥰 1:08:09 - That could be learned too though. I know I do that because it was never ok to have a meltdown so now that's my only outlet. I feel like with masking not everyone can just turn that on and off especially if it's a survival tactic

What's the difference between a stem and a tick?

let's see the childhood footage!

What about being at work. You usually told what to do there?

Excellent IMHO as a late diagnosed autistic person.

😮😮😮😮

46:38 at some point does autism morphe into ocd?

Yes show yourself as a child please.

Monotropism is NOT A PANACEA CONCEPT. It's just another word for "total intellectual masturbation on a theme"; and as such, can ruin your life every bit as well as an actual addiction to m. Still happy with it, as if it were an achievement ??

Skydiving is the ultimate stim

Monotropism is a theory about symptoms, not causes. I was disappointed by that video, I thought she was going to discuss the Neanderthal genocide.

9:53 - 10:49 doesnt everyone have to do all these things? Is this trying to say that neurotypical people dont have to pay attention during conversations? I understand the special interest and focus issues, sensitivity to sensory inputs but all of that other stuff is just what everyone has to do to carry on a conversation. Right? Maybe I am missing something

1:14 I think you ruined you presentation here. I did not get that monotropism excitement of hers. But know when I try to understand what you are saying there. 'Monotropism is a theory that attempts...', ghghghg interruption, 'from the community of autism', wait what?, 'how autistic mind works', ghghghghghm, 'which is quite interesting'. What is interesting? That the Monotropism is a theory that attempts to explain how autism mind work from the community of autism. Yeah, I would say it is quite interesting. Firstly I do not think monotropism explains anything. It just does not click with me. Secondly I do not understand what is your implication about community here. Are you trying to alienate a group? I don't really like Megan, she speaks too fast, fills her presentations with lots of water. I wish she spoke slower, more to the point and spent more time considering what she is saying. Anyway, that is my opinion and there are other youtubers I can watch. What is your grievance there. BTW, I feel it painfully contrastic that you put your meaty shoulders in front of her. You could probably meet her in a park at night and flash her for that matter. I will watch you for another 5 minutes. 2:00 Really, you felt like a need to explain it? Like mono, one, thropos, path. Just let her get on with her useless explanation. 2:30 What is presented in autistic community? You sort self-satisfactory smile. What are you saying. It appears that you have a train of thoughts before you started the video and now expect everyone *know* what where you thinking. And what occurred to you. Indeed very interesting. 4:10 I do realise as well that um you know the information that just presenting sort of contradicts what I said apparently. Apparently yes, OK. Ha-ha!