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Why childhood autism and ADHD often go overlooked

Reading time: 5 minutes

Childhood autism and ADHD aren’t always obvious…except perhaps for the neurodivergent (ND) child themselves, who comes to the realization early on that they’re different.

It usually begins with other kids calling out our behaviors, telling us that we’re weird, or implying we’re inferior.

People clearly found me strange, but in my view, I was just unique and misunderstood. These two words perfectly summarized what it was like being an undiagnosed autistic and ADHDer in an ableist world.

They also describe why I often felt driven to mask my ND traits, and perhaps why many of them went overlooked.

But suppose I hadn’t masked. Suppose I made no attempt to conceal my supposed weirdness. Would I have received a diagnosis and received the necessary support sooner than I actually did?

Possibly—but possibly not. The lack of general awareness and education about autism and ADHD meant my traits would have continued to have been misattributed to my personality or (apparent lack of) intelligence.

This also comes down to the fact that autism and ADHD manifest quite differently for each individual. It thus requires a discerning eye to identify its presence.

Here’s how autism and ADHD showed up in my childhood.

Stimming: a common sign of childhood autism and ADHD

For years after receiving my autism (and later ADHD) diagnosis, I convinced myself that I had never stimmed. It was only upon hearing the accounts of other autistic people that in fact I did.

When I was living in the tropics, my favorite thing to do on a hot day was to chew on ice. Sure, it was refreshing, but the crunchiness of it was also deeply satisfying.

Another thing I loved to do was to play with chewing gum. Countless hours were spent blowing bubbles or pulling long strings of the stuff out of my mouth.

During long car rides, I would beatbox—it was a practice I never seemed to grow tired of.

When I was 12, I also went through a period of sucking obsessively on a certain toy. (By “toy”, I’m referring here to a balloon stuffed with flour, with a pair of googly eyes and a cap of yarn hair.)

It was a kind of sensory ball, and it lasted all of a few weeks before suddenly exploding and spraying flour all over me. Imagine having to explain this development to my parents!

Another big stimming activity for me was delivering a series of DoggoLingo-style monologues to animals, such as the family dog, in a made-up accent.

For days, weeks, months, and even years afterward, I’ve felt the urge to recite DoggoLingo phrases of affection to myself, at random, for no clear reason, over and over again.

This behavior I previously thought was echolalia, though I’ve since learned the correct term for this is palilalia: the delayed repetition of words or phrases.

childhood autism Essy Knopf — As a child, I was fanatical about animals.

Obsessive interests

My childhood autism/ADHD was perhaps most evident in my obsession with insects and spiders. Collecting factoids about each species proved a source of great delight.

In my teen years, my area of interest shifted to fiction writing. The fantasy worlds I created provided an escape from my confusing and often overwhelming reality.

Where previously I collected bug-related factoids, I started collecting new words, memorizing them straight out of the thesaurus.

There was a certain pleasure to be found in this mastery of meaning. To me, acquiring words represented the acquisition of some kind of secret, important knowledge.

Many of these words had a delicious quality to them. Consider for instance “lignite”. No idea what it means, but pronouncing it aloud just feels satisfying.

More than a decade later, riffling through a box of keepsakes, I would find ratty little lists of words I’d picked out from books, preserved since my teenagehood.

If you asked me to explain why I was keeping them, I’d be at a loss for…well, words. Even now, the very idea of throwing them away evokes pain.

The obsessive collecting didn’t stop there. At one point I received a pocket organizer with a digital address book, which I felt compelled to fill with phone numbers.

Despite the unusualness of my request, many of the people I asked at school obliged me by providing their own. I even worked up enough courage to ask my math teacher—of all people—for her details.

Suffice it to say, my teacher was not all too impressed, and I became the laughingstock of the class.

Social, environmental, and animal rights activism

An interest in environmental and social causes was one trait that’s typical of childhood autism.

I remember being age six and penning a handwritten letter to the Australian prime minister asking him to increase foreign aid to famine-stricken Sudan.

In fifth grade, I used my valuable show-and-tell time to lecture my peers about Captain Planet and climate change. While almost everyone rolled their eyes at me, I of course now have the satisfaction of knowing I was right all along!

My interest in animals also led to me adopting vegetarianism, a phase that lasted all of one year….before my mother tricked me into believing there was no meat in lunch meat.

Fixing things and the problem-solving mindset

When any of my toys broke or stopped working, I worked obsessively to try and fix them.

The most memorable example of this was a special doll that could pee when “fed” milk. At some point, the doll stopped peeing. Concluding that there must be some kind of internal blockage, my six-year-old self decided to clear this blockage using a reed.

Granted, this was not exactly ideal behavior for a would-be future parent, and yet this ability to hyper-fixate—a quality that appears in both ADHDers and autistics—would later prove quite advantageous, especially when it came to problem-solving.

The same probably couldn’t have been said of my tendency to always try and set things right. In second grade, my homeroom teacher one day warned my peers that someone had been stealing food and money from backpacks.

Our school didn’t have lockers. Students instead had to leave their backpacks on racks. Given most of my peers were leaving their bags unzipped, the temptation to would-be thieves naturally was great,

I thought long and hard about what I could do to fix this problem, then spent the following lunch break methodically zipping up every bag I could get my hands on.

I was a self-appointed Good Samaritan, but that wasn’t how two of my classmates saw it. They reported my apparently suspect behavior to the teacher, bringing a sudden end to my brief career as a school crimefighter.

Sensory sensitivities

As a child, I was accused of being a “picky eater”. What the adults around me didn’t understand was that I found certain foods extremely repulsive, usually because of their appearance, texture, taste, or a combination of all three.

One of these foods was yogurt. Another was a traditional Iranian stew my mother would make which contained red kidney beans and lamb shoulder called ghormeh sabzi.

Ghormeh sabzi was one of the few foods I devotedly ate, due to the delicious umami flavors, and yet I was extremely averse to doing so until the beans and lamb had first been removed.

Certain sensations could also make me very uncomfortable. Feeling my toenails against the surface of a pilling bedsheet was one of them. To avoid the possibility of contact, I became a stomach sleeper.

As for sleep, that was an activity that felt next to impossible unless I was under a sheet or blanket. Another requisite was that I needed to have a fan blowing on me—no matter the temperature.

Tags inside my clothes bugged me, and sometimes even my own underwear felt too tight.

One time, a teacher caught me trying to adjust my briefs through my pants and assumed I was having some kind of bladder problem.

Wrap up

As perfectly natural as these preferences and behaviors felt to me, the downside was often obvious and immediate: alienation.

In the eyes of my parents, peers, and teachers, I was either too finicky, too stubborn, too sensitive, too clueless, or too weird. And without a diagnosis, what cause did I have to disbelieve them?

But to view our authentic ND selves in such a light can leave a legacy of shame.

It’s only now, years later, that I realize the problem was less my difference than the ableist system that defined that difference as a problem.

So to all my fellow autistics and ADHDers experiencing self-doubt: don’t shy from authenticity. Embrace it as your fundamental right.

What were your ND traits as a child, and how did others react to them? Let me know in the comments.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

The secret shame of being neurodivergent in a world built for ‘normies’

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 7 minutes

As an undiagnosed autistic and ADHD child, my favorite part of primary school was the weekly show-and-tell sessions.

It wasn’t so much the storytelling aspect of this activity that appealed to me, as it was the occasional chance to present.

But whatever the focus of my presentation might happen to be—dinosaurs, guinea pigs, insects—there was always a good chance it wasn’t shared by my peers.

This was a detail nevertheless lost on me. For all that truly mattered was the presence of a captive audience, bound by convention to listen.

In other settings, explaining to my classmates the, say, minutiae of insect classification, usually earned me a look of bemusement.

To hear someone use the term “bug” to describe a spider for example almost always led to a correction.

Spiders, I would note, were arachnids. What set them apart from insects was that their body had two rather than three segments. They also had eight legs instead of six.

No one else lived for such factoids, and this was a source of perplexity. Worse still, my sharing of them was not meant to be received as criticism…and yet often was.

And perish the thought that it might be interpreted as intellectual showboating. Yet the pearls of knowledge I so casually strew before my peers were received with indifference—or worse.

Essy Knopf Asperger syndrome — My childhood had many moments of joy. But these memories are clouded by the prevailing sense was I was out of sync with the rest of humanity.

How autistic folks’ attempts to connect can backfire

Friendless as I was, I would tend the fires of my passion in quiet solitude, sometimes for weeks, if not months.

The merest of kindnesses—a “hello”, a smile, a polite question—had the effect of kerosene, sending flames bursting outwards.

It seemed irrefutable that others should prize the tender morsels of information I dispensed as much as I did. It didn’t even enter into my mind that the case might be quite the opposite.

Words would rush forward in great exuberant billows, and in my naivete, I would fail to read the blank looks I was inevitably met with.

These attempts to connect ironically had the inverse effect of creating disconnection.

And so the distance between me and other kids would only grow, until we stood upon different hilltops, regarding one another warily through binoculars of mutual unease.

A ‘disastrous’ deed

While my show-and-tell sessions rarely drew more than polite applause, the desire to infect others with my passion remained.

Maybe what was required, I thought, was something of more obvious value. I set my eyes on one of my mother’s rings: a silver band set with a single, brilliant sapphire.

I asked to borrow it, explaining that my purpose was to use it as a show-and-tell prop. Yes, I promised, I would bring it home that afternoon, and reluctantly, my mother agreed to lend the ring.

Arriving at school early the next day, I sat on the steps of my demountable classroom, toying with the ring and the idea of the warm reception that must surely await.

A classmate appeared, depositing her backpack on the rack that passed for school lockers. Accompanying her was a woman I assumed must be her mother.

Joanna was transferring to another school, and today was to be her last day. I considered this tidbit. Joanna wasn’t exactly a friend, but wouldn’t it be nice if I offered her the ring?

After all, this was a special occasion. And wasn’t it considered normal to present gifts on special occasions?

Indecision wracked my mind. I had given my word that I would return it to my mother.

Yet if there was anything I understood about human relationships, it was that they were transactional. If I wanted people to like me, I would need to take the initiative.

My mind made, I stood up.

“Hey, Joanna.” She turned. “This is for you.” Joanna considered the ring, shyly teasing a blonde curl. Not understanding. “It’s a going-away gift,” I added.

“Well, that’s very nice you.” This response came not from Joanna, but her mother. A smirk eased onto her face. It was an expression I could not read, and which nevertheless made me uneasy.

“Joanna, what you say?” Joanna’s blank expression split into a smile.

“Thank you,” she said. And took the ring from me.

Stupidity, not disability

Less than an hour later, however, my doubt had deepened, becoming a dead weight upon my conscience.

Having had the time to consider my impulsive act, I realized that there would inevitably be consequences.

But when I returned home, hangdog, there was no blame and no bluster. Instead, my faltering explanation was met with silence.

It was as if my mother had all along suspected that something like this might happen.

The absence of a reaction stung. It felt like an affirmation of an unspoken truth: that I was stupid.

I promised my mother that I would try to get the ring back. But when I returned to school the next day, Joanna was gone, and my attempts to reach her through one of her friends came to nothing.

The wounds of systemic ableism

This memory remains enshrined not as an act of shameless exploitation by an adult who had undoubtedly known better, but as one of the most disastrous acts of my youth.

When I reminded my mother of the incident more than two decades later, she couldn’t recall ever having the ring, let alone my blunder.

Yet how could she not? Was this possession not as precious as I had long imagined it to be?

To me, this incident reflected a longstanding habit of socially inappropriate behavior, which I would later learn was all too common among those with autism and ADHD.

Yet for something so poignant as this to have had no lingering significance to the one person it should have, surprised me.

Just like the casual dismissals, the way people ignored me or cut in line ahead of me on the handball court, I had notarized this event as just one more proof of my inferiority.

And gradually, I had retreated behind the walls of a crumbling bastion of false pride, manned by sentinels of shame and self-criticism.

It was a lonely existence, but it was safe, in that it was largely unpeopled by those who seemed to so scorn me on the basis of who I was.

In my mid-20s, I received a diagnosis of autism, and later ADHD at the age of 35, and this would crystallize for me that it was not so much who, as what.

At last, the faultline that ran through the foundations of my social life had a source. At last, I knew that I was not broken, but a survivor of a society grounded in systemic ableism.

The catch-22 of being autistic

Yet until the moment of my diagnosis, I had no choice but to stumble my way through the intricate dance of social connection.

This dance was a necessary precursor to the embrace of friendship. And yet to me, it seemed frivolous and a waste of effort and time.

Others did not share this view. Nor did they see the virtues of my info-dumping, my dispensing with social niceties, and my papercut directness.

Without their friendship, there was often no socially acceptable basis for the sharing of interests I longed for.

But I persevere, storming the dancefloor, shirtfronting potential partners, and treading all over on their toes.

With my prospects of friendship on the rocks, I was deprived of the emotional support many individuals who are neurodiverse (ND) need in order to navigate a world built for neurotypicals (NTs), also referred to in some NT circles as “normies”.

I also missed out on the social coaching that might have otherwise helped prevent my missteps.

Without the ND label, my only frame of reference was the one bestowed on me: a belief that I was a person whose lack was the result of choice or some personal flaw.

The allure of the life interior

While I can see now that autism and ADHD were the source of my social cluelessness, memories of my school years continue to pain me today.

One of the earliest and most enduring was being invited to join a game of prisoner’s base in kindergarten.

“Tagged” by a member of the opposing team, I was taken prisoner and deposited in an imaginary cell under the jungle gym. Here I was expected to remain, awaiting rescue.

In my imagination, this did not simply represent a return to play, but rather an acknowledgment that I was worthy. Evidence that someone—anyone—cared about me. But that rescue never came to pass. I was left forgotten until the bell for class rang.

Hurt and confused, I took a vow of social abstinence, using my lunch break to play make-believe on my own or to read.

This solidified my status as an outsider, denying me the warmth of others’ company, of which my own fire was but a weak imitation. Still, what else was there?

When fiction-based escapism was not jostling for my attention, I tended to various projects of my own devising.

The first involved catching and cataloging the myriad insects living in my backyard. This was followed by a compulsive desire to write sprawling portal fantasy novels.

During another period, I populated a length of green marble A1 card stock with designs for an adventure board game of my own devising.

The game was meant to be played with at least four friends; that I was entirely lacking this requisite was a consideration I chose not to dwell on.

It was, for the most part, a life interior. But eventually, it became a prison of self-narration.

“You are worthless. You are unloveable,” went the familiar refrain, a refrain seemingly substantiated by my continued isolation.

Freedom by diagnosis

My life is sharply divided between two very distinct periods: before I came into my ND identity, and after.

“Before” resembled a black-and-white etching. But in the months and years that followed, this etching became saturated with color, slowly assuming the richness and depth of an oil painting.

Liberated of one label—being a “bad” person—and awarded another—”neurodiverse”—I began to consider myself in a new light.

The critical dictator in my head was dethroned, his antique reign gave way to a democracy of thought grounded in self-compassion.

I came to understand that the shame I carried was undeserved. That I was not at fault for the unusual architecture of my mind. That I was a person of value. That I needn’t live a life sentence of “if only”.

The skills I lacked could be learned. As for the friendships that had failed to take seed—these could be nourished into new life.

With enough effort and persistence, the connection I had once craved when standing before my class during show-and-tell could be mine.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Autism/ADHD Identity

So what is autism, exactly?

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 8 minutes

What is autism spectrum disorder? To fully understand this phenomenon, we have to employ the medical model.

Big disclaimer: the medical model is far from perfect.

According to this model, there is something inherently wrong with autistics. Historically, this rationale has also been used to marginalize and oppress us.

For most people, the social model is preferable, as it argues that the issue lies not with neurodiversity, but with society’s failure to accommodate it.

The social model aims to destigmatize autism, whereas the goal of the medical model is to diagnose and treat.

Pathologizing aside, getting an ASD diagnosis can open the door to disability-related legal protections, supports, and services. This is one example of how the medical model can be of use to those with autism, and their loved ones.

So, what is autism spectrum disorder?

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological developmental disability.

Autism is characterized by ongoing deficits in social communication and social interactions in a range of contexts. Other criteria for autism include “restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities”. ¹ ²

Autism symptoms manifest in the early development period and typically cause clinically significant impairment in key areas of functioning.

To receive a diagnosis of ASD, these symptoms must not be better explained by the presence of intellectual disability or global developmental delay.

A diagnosis of ASD is typically accompanied by a severity measurement of “Level 1”, “2”, or “3”. Level 1 means the individual requires some support, Level 2 substantial support, and Level 3 very substantial support.

(Remember how I mentioned the medical model is pathologizing? An example of this is the DSM-5 terminology I just used, such as “disability”, “deficits”, “symptoms”, “impairments”, and “severity”.)

Autism often appears alongside other conditions, such as epilepsy, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, sleep problems, gastrointestinal symptoms, anxiety, and depression.

Who gets diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder?

Males are diagnosed with autism at three times the rate of females, but this doesn’t necessarily mean autism isn’t as common among females.³

One study found that autistic females as a population are better than males at hiding their autistic traits. This results in fewer diagnoses, later diagnoses in life, and misdiagnoses.

It’s also been argued that autistic females may present autism in a way different from their male counterparts.⁴ And due to many measurements being male-centric, females may be overlooked by current diagnostic measurements.⁵

Additionally, autistics from racial minority groups are typically less likely to receive a diagnosis of ASD.⁶ Instead, they are more likely to receive other diagnoses such as ADHD and conduct and adjustment disorders.⁷

Many conclude that reflects medical disadvantages experienced by minority groups as a result of structural inequality.⁸ But it’s important to note that autism traits can also go overlooked or can be misinterpreted, depending on the sociocultural context. ⁹

Why are some people autistic and others not?

There are no clear answers here, however, some studies point to a range of environmental risk factors and protective factors.

These include advanced parental age, low birth weight,¹⁰ ¹¹ fetal exposure to the epilepsy medication valproate,¹² intake of certain vitamins,¹³ maternal autoimmune disorders, environmental toxins, and breastfeeding.¹⁴

Links have been made between unique gut microbiota compositions and the development of autism. Other studies have indicated strong genetic influences, concluding that autism is highly inheritable.¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷

How does one get an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis?

To get an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, you need to be screened by a trained professional.

For children, there’s a range of tools. For example, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers Revised, the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, and the Screening Tool for Autism in Toddlers and Young Children.¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰

For older adolescents and adults, the gold standard for autism diagnoses is the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-2) module 4.²¹ Professionals typically use this tool alongside direct observations and taking patient history.

The Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) is another gold standard autism diagnostic tool that is suitable for both children and adults.²²

Again, I want to point out here that these diagnostic tools may be gender-biased and thus more likely to detect male autistics than female autistics.

When seeking out a diagnosis, it is worth checking to see that the person doing the assessment is using the most current, research-backed screening measures.

If seeing a professional is not an option, adults can also use self-reporting tools such as the Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition: Adult form (SRS-2).²³

Additional tools are available for assessing how autism is impacting one’s activities of daily living and quality of life.

How is autism spectrum disorder “treated”?

There is no biomedical treatment for autism spectrum disorder, however, psychotropic medications are available and often prescribed for those who are experiencing symptoms such as anxiety or depression.²⁴ ²⁵ ²⁶

For autism specifically, there is a range of therapies, the most commonly used being Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).²⁷

ABA is designed to help autistic children with the development of social, communication, and expressive language skills.

The dominant strain of ABA has been heavily criticized by autism advocates for violating individual autonomy and even doing direct harm to clients.²⁸

Critics have also pointed out that there are conflicts of interest among researchers who publish scientific literature in support of ABA as an autism intervention.²⁹

Clearly, there is room for improvement when it comes to current ABA intervention. However, ABA is one of the few treatments that remain widely accessible.

In many US states, health insurance providers are required to cover ABA-related expenses under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

One alternative to mainstream ABA is Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBI). NDBI is more child-directed and provides intrinsic rewards for learning and participating.³⁰

Other available interventions support the development of core skills among autistic children, such as social communication.³¹

Additionally, programs exist for young adults, such as the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS®).³²

For autistic young people and adults, psychotherapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are recommended for those who experience comorbidities such as anxiety and depression.³³ ³⁴

These are available in both individual and group formats.³⁵

Wrap up

So there you have it, my brief introduction to autism spectrum disorder.

Again, I want to stress that much of the content I shared is presented using the medical model.

But remember: viewing autism exclusively through this lens is not only limiting—it also fails to give consideration to some of the strengths of being neurodiverse.

Check this blog post to learn a little more about some of the benefits of being autistic.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Autism/ADHD

Why modulating, not masking is key to neurodivergent social success

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 4 minutes

Achieving social success as a neurodiverse (ND) person isn’t necessarily about mastering certain skills. At its essence, it’s about bridging the neurodiverse-neurotypical (NT) communication divide.

This divide stems from the fact that NTs often demand that NDs observe and conform to social norms. Some even demonstrate ableist privilege by painting ND approaches to communication as somehow lacking or inferior.

Rather than treating difference as a source of enrichment, they reject and punish NDs. This attitude stems from a deficit-based approach, which involves focusing on the apparent shortcomings of NDs rather than our strengths.

A strengths-based approach acknowledges that many NDs are endowed with unique qualities that can actually help us shine in many social contexts.

Autistic social strengths

Here’s one example of unique ND strengths. Autistics are widely recognized to be hyper-systemizers, interested in learning and mastering the complexities of our world. Marrying this thinking with one of our “special interests” can actually make us super interesting conversation partners.

For example, our extensive knowledge of these topics and our enhanced powers of analysis allow us to discuss topics in great detail. Many of us are exceedingly eloquent, sporting rich vocabularies and speaking with surprising exactitude.

We autistics are renowned for being truth-tellers and straight shooters who are compulsively honest about our thoughts and feelings. We bring an authenticity to our interactions that many NTs find refreshing. (Assuming we don’t feel compelled by society to mask.)

Autistics can challenge social conventions in other positive ways. For example, we prefer not to speak in subtext. We don’t infuse our communication with secret meanings, so as to avoid confusion or misunderstanding.

We also inherently trust others, taking them at face value and believing their stated intentions rather than ascribing hidden motives.

Social challenges

But there are some downsides to operating outside of the bounds of social convention.

Many NDs know what it’s like to unwittingly say something that is insensitive, inappropriate—or outright offensive—only to receive a swift rebuke from an NT.

In such instances, many NTs will condemn our behavior and even shun our company. These reactions can leave NDs feeling misunderstood, attacked, excluded, and abandoned.

Realizing that we may not always be treated with grace, we remain perpetually on guard, ears pricked in anticipation of criticism.

In some cases, we may even go on the defensive, thus deepening the relational rupture.

In others, we shut down and withdraw. When a world of pain can be just one interaction away, it is easier to absent oneself, internalize others’ criticisms, and self-stigmatize.

An overprotective reaction makes sense—at least initially. But what starts as adaptive quickly becomes maladaptive, at least when it comes to achieving autistic social success.

Socially shapeshifting, or “masking” in order to present a version of ourselves that is more acceptable to NTs means stymying spontaneity, swallowing our emotions, and stuffing our authentic selves out of view.

Worse still, when we withdraw, we deprive ourselves of opportunities to build and refine our social skills. And it prevents others from getting to know our true selves.

Ruptures happen

What’s important to recognize here is that misunderstanding and conflict play out in all relationships, whether NTs or NDs are involved.

Years ago, a friend offered to make some tea for me. As he didn’t have a kettle or a stovetop, he proposed microwaving my water instead.

While my friend saw this as a convenient solution, something about the idea of blasting water with microwave particles rubbed me the wrong way. So I expressed my discomfort, suggesting we skip making the tea altogether.

Rather than listening and respecting my request, my friend decided he would try to persuade me to agree. Drawing upon his background in physics, he explained in great detail the mechanics behind the microwave.

When I again declined his offer, however, my friend grew angry, telling me I was just “choosing to be stupid”. But what he failed to understand was that my initial refusal was rooted in fear and anxiety.

The breakdown in our communication began when my friend decided the remedy for this fear and anxiety was logic. When logic didn’t work, he concluded that I was stubborn and illogical.

As an autistic, I have often resorted to logic instead of empathy. This is of course not to say we are wholly incapable of it, an incorrect charge that has been leveled against autistics in the past.

But what strikes me most about this story now is that while I was hurt by my friend’s allegation, I understood where he was coming from. As our minds functioned in similar ways, I inferred (correctly, I believe) the source of his frustration, but also his ultimately good intentions.

Had I been NT however, the case might have been quite different. Rather than absorbing my friend’s words in thoughtful silence, I might have lashed out at him or stormed out of his apartment.

The double empathy problem

Previously, it was believed that autistic individuals suffered from “mindblindness”, the inability to understand others’ thoughts, emotions, and intentions.

Researchers believed “mindblindness” impaired autistics’ social cognition, resulting in behaviors that are potentially inappropriate, insensitive, or offensive to NTs, and inhibiting autistic social success.

They now acknowledge however that the reality is much more complex; that mindblindness may in fact be a mutual phenomenon, what is referred to as the double empathy problem.

This concept acknowledges that both autistics and neurotypicals experience mindblindness when it comes to reading one another correctly. It goes a long way to explaining the source of the struggle many autistics—and ADHDers—face in social contexts.

And it demonstrates that the difficulty people experience communicating across the NT/ND divide is mutual. Neither NDs nor NTs bear full responsibility for misunderstandings.

It follows, therefore, that the onus is on both parties to do what they can to bridge this divide.

Modulating, not masking to create ND social success

In a series of subsequent posts, I will discuss a range of ND behaviors I myself have exhibited.

I acknowledge these behaviors have on occasion been a source of misunderstanding and conflict during social interactions with NTs. But I want to stress that my focus here is not problematizing ND behaviors, but rather problem-solving the resulting communication breakdowns.

For this reason, I will refer to these behaviors as “challenges”, while presenting some “alternatives” that fellow autistics may consider engaging in, as they see fit.

These alternatives represent hard-won lessons from many years of personal struggle. They are not concerned with “masking” one’s autistic identity or interests; their focus instead is “modulating” one’s conduct.

Modulation—that is, selective and strategic presentation of the self—is a practice all individuals engage in during everyday interactions. Modulating helps to win the acceptance of others while bolstering an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect and preserving social order.

In my experience, NTs have an easier time modulating than we do as NDs, given our unique neurology. But I’m a firm believer that with enough observation and practice, we can match—and even exceed—our NT peers in this regard.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Autism/ADHD

Don’t avoid social mistakes as a neurodivergent. Lean into them.

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 6 minutes

Neurodivergent (ND) hypervigilance—that is, always being on the lookout for danger—involves the careful observation of neurotypicals (NTs) in an attempt to appease or minimize their negative reactions.

It’s a common response to having to navigate social interactions with NTs; interactions governed by complex and unspoken rules.

Should we fail to follow these rules—inevitable, given they’re never directly explained to NDs—we’re often punished.

NTs may label our remarks and behavior as odd, tangential, patronizing, confusing, incomprehensible, inappropriate, or excessive.

They’ll tell us we came off harsh or insensitive or that we’re being too critical. They may even accuse us of playing dumb or showing off.

Misunderstandings such as these however are not solely the responsibility of the ND. NTs also play a part, as has been argued by researchers who support the double empathy problem theory.

And yet the blame more often than not gets laid at the ND’s door. Blame however does not teach skills. Rather, it imbues NDs with an unhealthy paranoia.

So much so that we end up spending our days watching every little thing we say and do, for fear we might unwittingly offend someone.

Living in shame-prone cultures

This paranoia is a direct product of the fact we live in what author Brené Brown calls a “shame-prone” culture.

In “shame-resilient” cultures, Brown argues, self-worth is unconditional, thereby enabling us “to be vulnerable, share openly, and persevere”.³⁶

In shame-prone cultures, however, leaders and other authority figures “consciously or unconsciously encourage people to connect their self-worth to what they produce”.

This link between self-worth and productivity stems largely from capitalism, and drives people to behave in ways that are “small, resentful, and afraid”.

A classic example of this is the NT preemptively defending themselves or their position, retaliating against a perceived assault with an accusation or criticism, or cutting off communication with the ND.

The legacy of living in shame-prone culture is that we all carry around with us some measure of internalized shame that is automatically triggered when we feel our worthiness has been called into question.

The NT’s hostile response to the ND serves not only to fend off a perceived attack but to deny the implication that they were somehow deserving of this attack in the first place.

In such instances, the NT has failed to give the ND grace; to entertain the possibility of a misunderstanding, ask clarifying questions, and work to repair the social rupture.

The shame of ableism

When NTs respond this way, they may in turn trigger the ND’s own hoard of internalized shame.

The source of this shame isn’t just that we also live in shame-prone societies, but that these societies are ableist and privilege NTs while oppressing the neurodiverse.

What follows often is a descent down a spiral of self-guilt-tripping. We tell ourselves that we’re “stupid”, “inferior”, “unlikeable”, “terrible company”, and “always messing things up” because that is the message we are routinely sent by NTs.

But unless we are provided constructive opportunities to build and hone our social skills, free of criticism and judgment, we’re likely to continue making mistakes and spiraling ever deeper into shame.

When fight-or-flight goes awry

When our shame is triggered, the ND may similarly marshall their own defenses, launch a counterattack or flee.

NTs and NDs who react in such a fashion are experiencing a “fight-or-flight” response. As The Happiness Trap author Russ Harris explains:

The fight-or-flight response is a primitive survival reflex that originates in the midbrain. It has evolved on the basis that if something is threatening you, your best chance of survival is either to run away (flight) or to stand your ground and defend yourself (fight)… So whenever we perceive a threat, the fight-or-flight response immediately activates. In prehistoric times, this response was lifesaving.³⁷

Fight-or-flight may be an ingrained evolutionary response, but it is also exacerbated by shame-prone cultures, which provide narratives justifying our reactions.

Given the comparatively safe conditions in which many modern humans now live, the fight-or-flight response today is more maladaptive than adaptive.

Why? Because when it is engaged, it can lead to us developing unpleasant feelings. It results in the negative reactions detailed above, usually with destructive results.

Neurodivergent social challenges

Misunderstandings between NDs and NTs largely occur because of inherent differences in cognitive and social styles.

Autistics as a population for example have been found to exhibit egocentric (self) bias, as opposed to altercentric (other) bias when it comes to social interactions.³⁸

That is, we tend to ascribe our feelings, thoughts, or needs to others, rather than intuiting, reading, or asking.

This tendency may result in part from developmental prosopagnosia, which is more common among autistic individuals.³⁹

Developmental prosopagnosia refers to impaired face identity and facial expressions recognition, a skill that is essential for correctly gauging others’ emotions and intentions.⁴⁰

These differences leave autistics less capable of realizing we have made a social blunder, which can in turn make the task of overcoming them appear almost impossible.

The downside of ND hypervigilance

Accidents and misunderstandings are par for the course when interacting with NTs, and the most we can ever do as NDs is to proceed with caution.

Taken to its extreme, caution can become ND hypervigilance, as we work to compensate for perceived threats with strategies such as masking.⁴¹ Hypervigilance and compensatory strategies are common resorts for the overly-conscientious NDs.

For years, I myself employed hypervigilance, scanning strangers during social interactions for friend/foe signals, subjecting every conversation to extensive analysis.

Hours were spent trying to decipher the meaning behind a particular facial expression or a specific choice of word as if doing so might protect me against future mistakes.

And yet for all this effort, I continued to put my foot wrong, with NTs often distancing themselves from me despite my attempts to explain myself or apologize.

ND hypervigilance is what happens when fear monopolizes our psyche. It leaves us frozen; incapable of feeling and expressing our emotions; unable to engage in spontaneity, jokes, and laughter.

Such expressions can’t happen without vulnerability, and to be vulnerable in a hostile social environment is to open oneself to attack.

To remain in a hypervigilant state, however, constitutes a complete betrayal of both ourselves and our needs. It puts the onus on us to do whatever possible to ensure our social interactions are successful—an expectation no one can reasonably meet.

And it deprives others of the opportunity to get to know our authentic ND selves.

Empathy as an alternative to ND hypervigilance

As discussed in a previous post, modulation—selective and strategic presentation of the self—is a practice all individuals engage in during everyday interactions. It is key to generating social harmony and cohesion.

Modulation as a practice is highly advantageous to NDs. It is not a compensatory behavior, not an attempt at appeasement, but rather concerned with meeting the other person where they’re at.

Social interactions, whether they involve Nds or NTs, are a dance that must be navigated carefully, patiently, and kindly. Both partners must regularly check in with each other to ensure the other party is doing okay.

Ruptures in these relationships happen when:

We don’t ask our partner’s permission before initiating the dance
We insist on not following the tempo of the music
We fail to match our partner’s pace or to coordinate our steps with theirs
We step on our partner’s toes—and don’t apologize

The good news is that these ruptures can be repaired through acts of consideration, kindness, and empathy.

Openness and vulnerability: the way forward

NDs need not live in a perpetual crouch, terrified of negative consequences when we commit a social mistake.

Rather, we can approach these ruptures with an attitude of openness. When others offer complaints or requests, we have the option to listen without immediately reacting.

If someone shares that they have been genuinely hurt or harmed by something we’ve said or done, we can create a space for their feelings, without taking them on, while braving any discomfort that might result.

We can lean into our mistakes by acknowledging, apologizing, and pledging to do better—while also asking the other person’s advice, when appropriate, on how we might do so.

As someone who is both autistic and ADHD, I have found that interpersonal conflict rarely continues if I admit my errors soon after they are brought to my attention.

For those of us with a history of being criticized during past social interactions with NTs, such an admission might not come easy. But if we are to triumph over our internalized shame, we must be willing to reach for self-compassion.

Practicing self-compassion means choosing to accept our fallibility and to love ourselves regardless. It means embracing our vulnerability and having “the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome”.⁴²

Steps to overcome ND hypervigilance

Vulnerability is a key ingredient for empathy, an approach that forms the basis of all solutions I will propose to common ND social challenges.

These solutions typically involve one or more of the following actions:

Assessing needs
Asking permission
Seeking clarification
Listening reflectively
Admitting mistakes
Sharing intentions
Adjusting behaviors

I share my approach here with the caveat that these actions are not exclusively for ND folks.

NTs are equally capable of making mistakes and equally responsible for taking action when it is brought to their attention. The fact that many choose not to, instead of pinning blame exclusively on the ND for a misunderstanding, is a reflection of neurotypical privilege.

It’s perfectly fair to expect NTs to practice the actions I’ve listed above. Arguably, ND hypervigilance wouldn’t be necessary at all, if NTs indeed did so.

But, as in any social interaction, we should strive to focus on only that which is within our control. Namely: whether or not we choose to take the high road, and the rigor with which we apply ourselves to this effort.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Autism/ADHD Identity LGBTQI+

Gay autistics exist, and we need a name

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 3 minutes

As a gay autistic, I wasn’t really surprised when I learned that gender identity and sexuality happen to be more diverse among autistic people.⁴³ ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹

What really surprised me, however, was the fact that people like me didn’t yet have a name.

When you’re autistic, you’re usually described as being “on the spectrum”. Sex, gender, gender expression, and sexual orientation have also been portrayed as existing on a spectrum.

That said, the gender spectrum model has been criticized for being limited in its representation of the full range of sexualities, genders, gender expressions, and sexual orientations.

To explain: when you argue that male/man and female/woman occupy two points on the far ends of gender expression, you exclude other identities that may not entirely exist between these two points.

For example, intersex people might feel their sex characteristics are outside of existing categories of male or female.

One alternative to the spectrum model created by the organization Trans Student Educational Resources is the gender unicorn model.

The unicorn model is a lot more open-ended than the spectrum model when it comes to defining gender, sex, and physical and emotional attraction.

The five categories used in the unicorn model are gender identity, gender expression, the sex one assigned at birth, whom you are physically attracted to, and whom you are emotionally attracted to.

So rather than describing people like us as being on two spectrums, I’m going to roll with the term “spectrum unicorn”.

I think using this label can be a great way to identify those of us who are both autistic and LGBTQI+. It also opens the conversation to exploring some of the unique challenges we might face.

The theory of intersectionality is all about, well, intersections—not of traffic, but our identities.

But let’s say we use the traffic metaphor. In this case, the cars are our individual identities and intersections the contexts that define how they interact.

For instance, as someone who is gay and autistic, I sometimes felt stigmatized and oppressed on two fronts by wider society. This means I experience double the minority stresses.

Growing up, I was mocked for both my interests as a gay boy and for my autistic behaviors.

And even within the LGBTQI+ community, I have felt excluded and marginalized for being autistic.

For instance, as someone who has sensory sensitivities, gay nightclubs, and circuit parties are incredibly overwhelming and thus unpleasant.

This means therefore I can’t easily participate in some aspects of mainstream gay culture, which reflects the ableism of wider society.

Conflicts between LGBTQI+ and autistic identities are a pretty big topic, and one I plan to explore in a later post. But if you at all relate to anything I’ve said today, let me know in the comments.

Do you identify as autistic and LGBTQI+? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced due to these identities? Have you experienced conflicts between them?

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Identity LGBTQI+ Wellbeing

Is there a place for the graysexual identity within the LGBTQ+ community?

Essy Knopf3 Comments

Reading time: 4 minutes

Apparently being LGBTQ+ also means being hypersexual. At least, that’s what many of us have been led to believe.

But human sexuality expresses itself very differently from person to person.

Today, I want to talk about two forms of this—gray asexuality/graysexuality and demisexuality—and the struggle many of us experience fitting in.

LGBTQ+ hypersexuality

At 18, when I was just starting to explore my LGBTQ+ identity, I found myself drawn to nightclubs. This seemed like the best venue in which to meet other gay men and hopefully make friends.

Each club usually had a cover charge, but as a poor student, I often found myself balking. One time a bouncer laughed at my reaction.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll get laid.”

I remember feeling absolutely mortified. How could he have so mistaken my intentions?
Yet it was, as it turned out, a fairly normal assumption to make.

Inside these clubs, I frequently saw people sizing each other up across the dancefloor.

And when I tried to make small talk with strangers, I’d catch them looking over my shoulder at the latest person to walk through the door. Many people I met appeared to be solely looking for casual sex.

Frankly, I was so bored by this idea, that I’d often end up sitting in a corner and browsing the free LGBTQ+ publications.

The articles and advertisements I saw within seemed, again, to speak to this hypersexual facet of the LGBTQ+ identity—a facet that is often quite narrow in its definitions.

Being a graysexual in the LGBTQ+ ‘monoculture’

The LGBTQ+ community is, at least in theory, an inclusive one. In practice, however, it can lean towards being a monoculture.

The term “monoculture” refers to cultivating one kind of crop at a time. This is compared to polyculture, where one cultivates multiple crops at the same time.

The LGBTQ+ monoculture promotes the idea that all gay men should be hypersexual and openly discuss their sexual preferences with one another.

Sexuality for me on the other hand has always been personal and private. I’ve rarely felt any need to disclose my preferences with anyone, friends included, nor to actively pursue sex.

When I met other gay men online or in person, I’d explain that I wanted to be their friend and get to know them. For me, the familiarity and safety provided by a friendship were necessary before progressing the relationship.

Intellectual connection and interpersonal compatibility were also important, and I couldn’t be sure of either on short acquaintance.

But many people received my request to get to know them as a rejection. I was, in their view, friend-zoning them.

It seemed I had failed to grasp a common but unspoken belief: that when two gay men come into contact, sex must result.

What are graysexuality and demisexuality?

Given casual sex in the LGBTQ+ world is often treated as a kind of handshake, this expectation makes sense.

This is not to say that LGBTQ+ culture is monolithic. It arose after all as a response to the constraints of heterosexuality.

But this tendency to lean towards a single expression of sexuality can be marginalizing and oppressive to those who don’t and can’t follow it.

It’s only in the past few years, after coming to identify with the gray asexual and demisexual labels, that I’ve understood why hypersexuality never sat right with me.

What does it mean to be gray asexual, also known as graysexual, gray-a, and gray-ace?

Graysexuals according to the Demisexual Resource Center:

feel sexual attraction infrequently, of low intensity, to few people, or in specific circumstances
feel sexual attraction, but have no desire to act on it; have confusing or ambiguous feelings of sexual attraction
feel that sexual attraction is not a meaningful concept to them personally

Graysexuality clearly has many possible definitions and is experienced differently by each individual.

Demisexuality on the other hand involves “feeling sexual attraction only after forming an emotional bond”. Some consider demisexuality to be a subset of gray asexual.

In my case, I relate to both labels. I experience sexual attraction, but in limited circumstances, and at a low intensity.

These feelings are often ambiguous, aren’t that important to me, and I usually have little desire to act on them.

And if I do, full enjoyment is rarely possible unless I have first formed an emotional bond.

Quite a lot of fine print. And not exactly something one drops in a casual conversation.

When being graysexual conflicts with allosexuality

Allosexuality—that is, feeling sexual attraction—is often treated as the norm, so graysexuals and demisexuals like myself may thus find themselves pushed into the margins.

For example, we may often feel like our lack of sexual interest and/or drive is a problem and that something is wrong with us.

If we don’t indulge in hypersexuality, we may feel like we’re somehow failing the LGBTQ+ acid test.

Another fact to consider is that in LGBTQ+ culture, being sexually desirable is, unfortunately, often tied to self-worth. Having a lack of sexual interest in others may thus be interpreted as rejection.

Not wanting to engage in sexual activities may be perfectly comfortable for you. But failing to meet allosexuals’ expectations can create discomfort, if not frustration, for some.

Many a time, I’ve found myself in situations where another person clearly wanted a sexual outcome. When that outcome didn’t happen, some individuals would only pressure me further.

Sometimes I froze, and sometimes I gave in. When I did manage to find my voice and refuse, hurt and anger could result.

Wrap up

It’s hard not to feel somehow wrong or at fault in these situations. You get to thinking that maybe it’s on you to be more upfront about your preferences.

But even when we are upfront, there’s always the possibility it might be explained away.

I’ve had more than a few people tell me that I “just hadn’t had the right sexual experience or partner” yet. Ironic, given that’s an argument that’s been used against LGBTQ+ people for having an interest in members of the same sex!

It isn’t fair that allosexuality is treated as a default and alternate sexual expressions as abnormal. We gray-aces and demisexuals feel blamed or shamed for failing to meet some kind of sexual mandate.

This is, after all, a fundamental part of who we are. And our diverse identities are just one variation of many that exist within the LGBTQ+ community.

So enough about me, I want to know: do you identify as graysexual or demisexual?

If so, what’s it been like for you? Let me know in the comments.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Autism/ADHD Identity LGBTQI+

Be kind. Stop the oppressive cycle of internalized gay shame.

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 6 minutes

My lack of body coordination has always been a painful fact, evoking a gay shame that stems from my school years.

Raised in the stoic, sports-oriented culture of Australia, I often felt that my value as a male – at least in the eyes of my peers – was ultimately tied to my athletic prowess and sexuality.

It was not until my diagnosis with Asperger syndrome (autism) at age 26 that I found myself able to shrug off the feelings of masculine “inferiority” that had dogged me for so long.

Where previously I’d treated sports as a high-risk arena for failure, I now decided to turn this arena into a sandpit of experimentation.

After dabbling in cycling ended with me lodged in a stranger’s windshield, I turned to kickboxing instead.

While waiting for classes to begin, I’d watch the invite-only advanced members amble out of the ring, self-assured in a way I could never hope to be.

Coveting the brass ring corroded my enthusiasm. All it took was one badly aimed kick landing in a stranger’s family jewels for me to decide to pack it in.

Judgment and toxic masculinity

My next stop was an LGBTQ+ recreational dodgeball league. Despite being a lousy aim and an easy mark, I was determined to commit to at least one season of play.

My team members proved for the most part friendly. Longtime players seemed unsparing in their support of newcomers, doling out praise and tips.

But what had begun as something casual very quickly into an exercise in extreme competitiveness, as gay judgmentalism – normally grounded in the assessment of other’s physicality – now found focus in player’s on-court capabilities.

It was present in how some league members ignored friendly overtures, in the way cliques closed ranks upon approach.

I witnessed team captains actively scouting games and handpicking members, choosing some while excluding others. Never mind that this was a recreational league.

Worse still, players would yell at one another for failing to catch balls. While dodging one ball, I found myself on the receiving end of a rude shove from another team member.

Then there were the players who strutted about with an air of superiority, engaging in dizzying displays of skill and berating first-time players for not knowing the rules.

The behavior grew more ugly from there. Some players flagrantly defied the rules while the coaches weren’t watching, refusing to take their “outs” as if it were a matter of survival.

This inevitably led to verbal clashes, taunting, and the exchange of obscenities. Par for the course with any competitive sport – and yet an LGBTQ+ league was the last place I’d ever hoped to endure toxic masculinity.

Some people, it seemed, were replaying far older battles, where the stakes weren’t so much team ranking, as they were self-worth.

A secret legacy of gay shame

In any LGBTQ+ sports league, there’s always an argument to be made for the commonality of our struggles.

As many of us have endured exclusion and bullying over our sexuality in the past, this is probably the last thing any of us would want to inflict upon others. So why does it continue to happen?

Society historically has regarded gay men with contempt, constructing our sexuality as either a despicable choice, a weakness of character, or a moral flaw.

Our way of coping with this atmosphere of psychological, social, and even physical danger according to The Velvet Rage author Alan Downs is by adapting, chameleon-like, to our surroundings.

We conceal visible expressions of our gay identity, such as our interest in members of the same sex. And we suppress expressions of traditionally “feminine” traits, such as emotional vulnerability, while muting our authentic selves.

In short, we make ourselves more acceptable to others, at the expense of our own wholeness. And in so doing, we internalize others’ judgment.

Being told our “perversity” is a choice, and believing this not to be the case, we are faced with an internal dispute. We find ourselves harboring what feels like a terrible secret. Other’s contempt thus becomes our shame.

As young adults emerging from the repressive social environments of our childhood, we may leap headlong into expressions and declarations of self-acceptance; “wrapping ourselves in the gay flag”, as it were.

Such expressions and declarations however represent a destination that can only be reached after a certain internal journey requiring some degree of excavation, examination, and healing.

As Brené Brown explains in The Gifts of Imperfection, “Shame needs three things to grow out of control in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment. When something shaming happens and we keep it locked up, it festers and grows. It consumes us”.

Gay shame, when left unaddressed, may even find expression, contrarily, in the form of more contempt.

Calling out shame

The behavior I witnessed – the exclusion, the general disrespect towards others, and the desire to win at all costs – meant that old traumas were being exhumed.

It also meant that players who had once themselves been oppressed were now unwittingly assuming the role of the oppressor, perpetuating a cycle of gay shame.

It’s possible in saying this, I may be projecting my own internalized gay shame. As someone who was usually the last to be picked for any school team, I’ve grown especially sensitive to situations that drive home old beliefs in my being deficient in “masculinity”.

But even if I wasn’t merely indulging my insecurities, I was certainly within my rights to be hurt by how I was treated, and how I saw others being treated.

This left me with two choices: either remain in the league and try to ignore the toxicity or quit a potentially shame-triggering situation.

Then again, quitting hardly guaranteed complete freedom from the contempt of other gay men.

Self-compassion heals gay shame

When faced with feelings of shame, inadequacy, and inferiority, we adopt one of three tactics: we don the armor of grandiosity as compensation, we crumple, or we employ self-compassion.

To quote eighth century Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva:

Where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world? With just the leather of my sandals, it is as if the whole world were covered. Likewise, I am unable to restrain external phenomena, but I shall restrain my own mind. What need is there to restrain anything else?

Thus, rather than attempting to soften all the world’s painful surfaces, we would be better served by accepting the sensitivity of our figurative feet and finding more practical ways of protecting them.

We do this firstly through self-compassionate inquiry. In the words of Buddhist Pema Chödrön, if we are to attain a new, more empowering view of our suffering, we must embark upon “a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings”,

(becoming) familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? … We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic, or uptight about this investigation.

Having put a name to what I was feeling in the dodgeball league, I was now able to pay attention to the script it was activating and to query its accuracy.

Hardening into anger, or adopting rigid convictions about other people would not serve me. What then was the alternative?

By abandoning my fixed conception of reality, of right and wrong, by leaning into the discomfort, I could learn to be truly present with my own feelings about the situation.

Being present enabled me in turn to self-soothe, an action Self-Compassion author Kristin Neff says is crucial to the process of healing.

The peace of mind ultimately arrived at was a natural outgrowth of such self-compassion. In my case, that transition was facilitated with the guidance and insights of a therapist.

Using kindness and humor to defeat shame

Pema Chödrön’s suggestion of employing humor when investigating your own patterns of thinking can be particularly helpful, at least where shame is concerned.

Humor can help dissolve armor and deflate puffed-up defenses. But humor is only possible once we learn to recognize our cognitive and behavioral scripts as they are being activated.

Confronted by subtle and oftentimes not-so-subtle expressions of contempt from other dodgeball players, my instinct was either flee or fight.

On one hand, they could be viewed as reasonable coping strategies. But on the other, they offered no true grounding against these perceived threats. What was required here was the development of resiliency: the ability to tolerate, rather than avoid, adversity.

So I began to actively laugh off my own mistakes, gently poking fun at other’s egotism or aggression, while striving to show others the generosity of spirit I’d witnessed in the more seasoned players.

In cultivating inward and outward kindness, I found myself forging friendships with other players that served as a bulwark against the toxicity surrounding us.

When I eventually decided to quit the league six months later, it was motivated not by anger or hurt over the conduct of others, but by an on-court injury.

This accident aside, looking back, I realized my decision to remain in the league was a kind of victory. No – I hadn’t mastered the game. And no – the demons of childhood past remained.

Rather, what I had achieved was the greatest freedom that a person can desire. Namely, the freedom of learning to let go.

Takeaways

Identify “shame scripts”.
Practice self-compassion.
Use kindness and humor.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Autism/ADHD LGBTQI+ Wellbeing

Four ways gay men can triumph over the inner critic

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 5 minutes

From an early age, my inner critic made me conscious of how different I was from other kids.

First, there were the niche interests, from learning the Latin names of dinosaurs to cataloging insects. I didn’t understand social nuance and was often direct to the point of being rude.

Labels inside my clothing chafed. I would lie in bed at night, disturbed by the feeling of pilling bedsheets against my toenails. All problems that seemed exclusive to me.

In second grade, I noticed my peers had mastered the art of tying their own shoelaces.

For me, it felt like an impossible task, as if the necessary neural connections just weren’t there. It took me a full year longer to acquire this basic skill.

My feeling of incompetence was deepened by the fact I scored poorly in handwriting and physical education.

I became acutely aware of my shortcomings, to the point I avoided playing sports, knowing it meant putting my coordination problems on display for all to see.

The terrible legacy of the inner critic

For 26 years, I labored under three contrary beliefs: that something was inherently wrong with me, that I was unfairly judged because of it, and that the problem must, therefore, lay entirely with others. My conscience self-righteously embraced the latter.

But as the cruel words and criticisms accrued, and I defensively pointed the finger right back, I subconsciously internalized them as the truth.

Then I received an official diagnosis: Asperger syndrome (autism). The pillars of my self-perception were shaken.

I knew now that there was indeed something different about me. I was not, as I had come to believe, an inherently bad person deserving of the scorn, mockery, and rejection I’d received in my school years.

This diagnosis enabled me to separate my sense of self-value from the limitations of my disability.

In so doing, I was able to abandon the blindspot in which I had lived; to accept that I had room for growth.

I experienced something similar with my sexuality, learning to accept that being gay did not make me a defective person. These revelations should have liberated me. They didn’t.

My inner critic remained, attacking me on an almost daily basis. So long as I took its tongue-lashings, I figured everything would be okay, and my self-esteem would remain intact.

But the critic proved a power-hungry tyrant, demanding constant achievement, perfectionism, and workaholism – what I’ve called three faces of grandiosity.

essy knopf gay identity grandiosity achievement perfectionism workaholism

What began as a means of survival had become the greatest obstacle to my wellbeing.

1. Resist ‘preemptive suffering’

While you may not have a disability, as gay men we are likely to have experienced marginalization, persecution, or invalidation. We may have even suffered neglect, abuse, or trauma.

These experiences teach us to adopt self-criticism as a means of protecting ourselves. The insidious whisperings of this inner critic may not always reach your conscious awareness.

You may not even exhibit obvious signs of its influence, such as grandiosity. Yet sooner or later, these signs surface, sometimes in the form of catastrophizing, or what I’ll call “preemptive suffering”.

People who preempt are their own worst enemies, operating by the principle that they would rather cut themselves down before anyone else can.

Popular culture leads us to believe that negative self-talk can be countered by building positive self-esteem. But self-esteem is by nature delusional, or contingent. To quote Self-Compassion author Kristin Neff:

To always feel like you’re awesome you need to either divorce yourself from reality or be on a treadmill of constantly proving your value. At some point you won’t measure up, which then craters your self-esteem. Not to mention relentlessly proving yourself is exhausting and unsettling.

Is there a better alternative? According to Neff, yes. Instead of manufacturing an inflated image of yourself or “slaying dragons every day”, we can opt instead for self-compassion.

2. Avoid the blame game

When we fail, when often feel inferior or inadequate. Rather than acknowledging our pain, we go into attack mode, using blame to displace our feelings of guilt, shame, or humiliation onto others.

Venting your feelings may feel great at that moment in time, but it often triggers an escalating, zero-sum conflict. Forced to defend their pride, participants dig in.

Hostility poisons the pool of mutual understanding, and before long both parties have plunged headlong into interpersonal trench warfare.

In the words of Man’s Search for Meaning author Victor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.

So rather than reacting, take a moment to pause and reflect. What has this person said/done? How did this trigger the inner critic? What familiar scripts is it resorting to?

3. Be OK with imperfection

If we don’t blame others, we will most certainly blame ourselves.

When we make mistakes, the inner critic is always there, waiting to pounce. “See?” it says. “I told you so. You’re irredeemably bad. You should feel ashamed. You’ll forever be a failure – that’s a fact.”

Living under the yoke of the inner critic can be incredibly taxing. But rather than refuting such accusations or challenging them with contradictory evidence, we can sidestep them entirely.

We do this by acknowledging our fallibility as a fact. This disarms the inner critic. Finding truth in criticism robs it of its power.

Try repeating this handy syllogism, paraphrased from David Burns’ book Feeling Good:

Humans occasionally make mistakes,
I’m a human being,
Therefore I should occasionally make mistakes.

4. Be your own comforter

When something goes wrong, we can offer ourselves comfort and consolation. We do this by verbally affirming our own worth and assuring ourselves that everything is okay, that we did our best given the circumstances.

Here are three self-compassion tips by Nonviolent Communication author Marshall Rosenberg and Kristen Neff you can consider practicing:

Call your inner critic out. One trick therapists recommend for dealing with unwanted thoughts or emotions is to wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time they surface. Use one word to identify what you’re feeling, e.g. “shame” and repeat it as an acknowledgment. Identify your inner critic’s intentions in trying to protect you, while offering some gentle course correction.
Reframe your inner dialogue by asking yourself four questions: What am I observing? What am I feeling? What am I needing right now? Do I have a request of myself or someone else?
In moments of emotional distress, find somewhere private and adopt the role of a comforter, speaking to yourself in the tone of a mother trying to soothe a baby. Caress your arm. Hold your face in your hands. Hug yourself.

These nurturing gestures can help trigger a release of the powerful chemical oxytocin, which will, in turn, improve your mood and shift the tone of internal dialogue towards kindness.

By cultivating self-compassion, we can take steps towards achieving the healing we all deserve.

Takeaways

Recognize when you’re engaging in preemptive suffering.
Rather than blaming others for our feelings, simply acknowledge them – then offer yourself the comfort and reassurance you’re really seeking.
Disarm the inner critic by accepting your imperfection as a fact.

Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.

www.essyknopf.com

Identity Social work

The first step towards an anti-oppressive social work practice? Understanding intersectionality

Essy Knopf Leave a comment

Reading time: 9 minutes

Intersectionality teaches us that identity is complex, made up of a variety of factors including race, gender, class,⁵² ethnicity, age, sexuality, and physical ability.

How these aspects of self interact with power structures and cultural interpretations⁵³ and shape our experiences of privilege and power, oppression and disadvantage, are the crux of discussions about intersectionality.

Critical Race Theorists argue that having a minority identity, such as being Black in a society in which White dominance and structural racism is the norm, will lead to some level of oppression while being the dominant identity—White—will result in the opposite experience.⁵⁴ ⁵⁵

Racism, just like ableism, ageism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, transphobia, and sexism are all forms of oppression. They are not universal, but reflections of power differentials produced by those with dominant identities. In North America, these typically are “White”, “male”, “heterosexual”, and “Christian”.⁵⁶

The oppression experienced by a Black person is only further exacerbated when they also share additional “targeted” identities such as “having a disability” and being lesbian, which brings its own share of minority stresses.⁵⁷

But say you were all three of these things and a member of the upper-class. This would complicate matters by adding some degree of privilege to the power differential equation.

Selfhood thus is the result of “potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances”.⁵⁸ This is the puzzling truth of intersectionality: nothing is ever as clear-cut as it might seem.

In the following paragraphs, I will use my own experiences as a case study about the intricate—and sometimes contradictory—nature of having intersectional identities.”

An introduction to intersectionality

I identify as a person of color and someone who has a disability (autism). I also identify as a gay male.

My identity thus is neither single nor unitary, but the product of innate traits such as genetics, gender, and sexual preference, as well as self-selection and social construction.⁵⁹

To elaborate: while I was raised in Australia, I never felt anchored to this nationality, nor to that of my parents, given I had limited access to their home countries and cultures: Iran and the US.

I was raised in what I perceived to be a White dominant culture, and knew that my olive skin color led people to view me as non-White, or at the very least an “honorary White”.⁶⁰

My awareness of being non-White was only heightened through conflict or oppressive microaggressions—“small acts of racism, consciously or unconsciously perpetrated”⁶¹—such as being called a racial slur by a stranger at age six.

In the wake of 9/11, some high school peers began altering my name until it resembled either “Saddam Hussein” or “Osama bin Laden”.

While motivated by the desire to order the world, these categorizations marked me as both inferior and outsider, imposing upon me a racial identity that conformed with a racial essentialism stereotype.⁶²

According to this stereotype, all Middle Easterners are Muslims, and therefore terrorists, patriarchs, misogynists, and anti-Western.⁶³ These post-9/11 racial scripts⁶⁴ were reductive and failed to respect the unique and multifaceted nature of my identity.⁶⁵

My racial identity, in this case, was not an “objective, inherent, or fixed” quality corresponding to a “biological or genetic reality”, but the product of social construction;⁶⁶ a shaping through “social and cultural contexts, public discourses, national myths, and intergroup relations”.⁶⁷

In being identified as Middle Eastern, I was grouped with a devalued “target”, to be dominated, oppressed, and marginalized by “agent” groups.⁶⁸

The social construction of oppression

The oppressive experiences I described here were not the product of mere individual prejudices and attitudes, however, but rather a cycle of socialization designed to reinforce racist patterns of privilege and oppression.⁶⁹

This socialization triggered in me a sense of shame and guilt about the way I looked, in turn giving rise to internalized racism. Those drove me to shun all aspects of my own perceived “otherness”⁷⁰ during future social interactions.

Growing up in Australia, I learned in school that these racist patterns were the product of legislation, such as the cultural assimilation policies of the 1940s and 1950s.

There was also the White Australia Policy, which limited immigration of all non-British people and was only abolished in 1975 with the Racial Discrimination Act.⁷¹

Despite the Australian government’s subsequent embrace of multiculturalism, it seemed to me that the commonly held social expectation remained one of assimilation.

If you failed to speak English with an Australian accent or to use Australian slang, if you subscribed to “foreign” religions such as Islam, or if you refused to embrace tokenistic aspects of Australianmui culture such as enjoying barbeques, the beach, and sports, you faced possible mockery and marginalization.

This I now understand was more than standard “ingroup” behavior, whereby members’ identities are reaffirmed by their exclusion of “outgroup” members.⁷²

It was, rather, a process of socialization oriented towards sustaining “White, male, heterosexual, Christian institutional and economic power”.⁷³

The tyranny of heteronormativity

This process began in school, with the daily enforcement of rigid gender scripts.⁷⁴ Males were expected to have a keen interest in sports, to regularly prove their athletic prowess, to speak in clipped, monosyllabic sentences, and to limit their facial expressions.

Any kind of weakness was not tolerated. Expressing emotions or empathy was frowned upon. Judgment, dismissal, or exclusion among boys and men were the three methods by which I saw this toxic masculinity socialized.

In this sense, one’s gender “membership” often felt uncertain—prone to being retracted by one’s peers at the slightest infraction.

Every aspect of how one presented or conducted oneself felt open to scrutiny. If you had a lisp, gestured too much, or walked in a certain way, you could be declared “girly”, “pansy”, or even a “f****t”.

To be called gay was to be ruled an abject failure as a male, a dirty sexual deviant, and a threat to the social order.

Once accused, you would invariably find yourself pushed to the bottom of the social pecking order.

Given my various autism-related traits, such as my unusual gait and style of speaking, I found myself excluded and bullied by members of privileged agent social groups; specifically, White, neurotypical, heterosexual boys and men.

How oppression can accumulate

This “othering” I think was also the product of ableist assumptions that those with disabilities lack intelligence and are helpless and incapable of assuming care for themselves.⁷⁵

In a culture that codes masculinity as being self-sufficient, people with disabilities accordingly fail the acid test.

Consider that when my impairment was revealed—upon committing a social gaffe, for example—some people would respond by calling me “stupid” or “r*****ed”.

While my disability might seem mild to some, my different style of thinking and behaving was nevertheless picked up by the finely attuned senses of agent group members, who would cut in line ahead of me at the cafeteria, turn away upon my approach, and exclude me from social gatherings.

Where I had internalized racism as a survival mechanism, I also learned to internalize ableism and homophobia, hiding my struggles and my sexuality where possible.

I endured sensory sensitivities that made sitting in a classroom difficult, but fear of inviting victim-blaming⁷⁶ however kept me from ever complaining or seeking support.

For to be perceived as disabled or gay would mean I would lose certain privileges, such as the social acceptance afforded to my “normal” and straight peers,⁷⁷ and even incur their hostility and oppression.

A toxic masculinity cocktail

My aversion to revealing any vulnerability was the product of a socialized script of self-sufficient masculinity.

This script in turn stemmed from the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps/equal playing field” beliefs that have come to define both North American⁷⁸ and Australian culture.

Australia for example has long conceived of itself as the land of the “fair go”, where everyone has a chance of getting ahead, with the nation priding itself for its apparent egalitarianism.⁷⁹

The bootstrapping/equal playing field beliefs value self-sufficiency, as well as a formal conception of equality, whereby everyone is entitled to the same treatment.

That same conception however fails to acknowledge that people operate within power structures that either inflict disadvantage or fail to make adequate accommodations for those who face it, such as people with disabilities.⁸⁰

While I reconciled with my sexuality in my early 20s, it was not much later, after my autism diagnosis at age 26, that I was able to name the problem identified above.

By calling out this ableism for what it was and recognizing how it pervaded all aspects of my life, I was finally able to embark on the road to liberation as described by Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire.⁸¹

My reality was no longer grounded in the belief that I was a bad person who deserved rejection. Instead, I now saw that I was someone who had been oppressed and disadvantaged.

Without a diagnosis, I had never had an adequate way of explaining my difference, or of receiving the therapeutic interventions that might have otherwise helped me overcome my interpersonal challenges.

Intersectionality: sometimes a target, sometimes an agent

I recognize that for all these difficult experiences, there were instances in which I nevertheless enjoyed some power and privilege.

In some instances, I was a target, but in others, I was treated as an agent. As a male, I had unearned advantages and conferred dominance over females⁸² which, historically speaking, had enabled the former to objectify, sexually harass, and menace the latter.

Besides never having to fear such treatment, I enjoyed other privileges, such as never having to devote much attention to maintaining a gender normative appearance. Nor did I ever have to fear that the way I dressed might be blamed for my later rape.⁸³

My male gender identity has also meant that where it comes to employment, I have a better chance of securing higher pay and a managerial role. As someone with lighter-colored skin, I also enjoy skin privilege.⁸⁴

Identifying as cisgender means I have never been subjected to the kinds of everyday and major discrimination and prejudice that many trans individuals have faced,⁸⁵ sometimes even from within the LGBTQI+ community.

For instance, I can successfully “pass” as my chosen gender and can use public facilities without fear of intimidation or attack. The humiliation and hurt of being dead named or having my gender identity questioned have never been a reality for me.

Growing up as a member of the middle class, I enjoyed other privileges such as a stable home, three meals a day, the occasional vacation, and so on. My parents at one point were even able to secure a private education for me and my siblings.

As an Australian, I never had to endure disadvantages and dangers other people of other nationalities might, such as extreme poverty, civil rights abuses, war, famine, water/food scarcity, natural disasters, genocide, totalitarian dictatorships, energy shortages, a lack of public infrastructure, rampant corruption, deadly pollution, and environmental degradation.

Like other Australians, I have been blessed with a home country renowned for its cultural diversity, fresh air, intact natural environments, low population density, strong public healthcare and welfare systems, low-interest government college loans, a low unemployment rate, and low crime rates.

My nationality has granted me the comfort of knowing there was always a safety net there, waiting to catch me in the event of personal disaster.

The conflicts and contradictions of intersectionality

In short, I experienced disadvantage as a person of color who had a disability and was gay, while also enjoying privileges as a lighter-skinned cisgender male, a member of the middle class, and an Australian.

Understanding that we can have cumulative disadvantages, or simultaneously face privilege and oppression, is what intersectionality is all about.

The contradictoriness that appears during intersectional inquiry reveals the problem with assuming what it is like to walk in another’s shoes.

Intersectionality invites us to ask and to listen, to adopt a position of humility.

From such a position, we all stand a better chance of truly understanding and empathizing with one another’s experiences.

Such an understanding is crucial to our struggle as human beings for collective empowerment.

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Essy Knopf

Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.