7 Autism Myths BUSTED by an Autistic
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- čas přidán 4. 06. 2024
- When I began learning about autism after my late diagnosis, I found that a lot of common conceptions of autistics, especially from my experiences, are just not true. Today I want to bust 7 myths about autism that are very commonly repeated but just not true, not only from my own lived experiences, but also from many I have read about and other autistics I have talked with. I want to share these today to help with better understanding of autism from the perspective of someone who only recently learned they are autistic.
If you have a friend, family member, colleague, or loved one that has autism - I hope this can help you better understand that person. If you have ASD, ADHD, or both - you're not alone. I'm here to help people better understand me and other AuDHDers in order to help us all live and work better together in a neurodiverse world.
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📌 Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:24 - Myth No. 1: Relationships with Others
01:37 - Myth No. 2: Need to Be Alone
03:01 - Myth No. 3: Lack of Affection
03:56 - Myth No. 4: Eye Contact
05:19 - Myth No. 5: Autistics Look a Certain Way
06:09 - Myth No. 6: ADHD or ASD, Not Both
07:00 - Myth No. 7: Socially Awkward
07:52 - BONUS: Empathy
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My psychologist told me I couldn't be autistic because I'm highly empathetic. Fortunately, she was open minded enough to make some research after I explained her mistake, and she ended up telling me she probably had way more autistic patients than she thought. And she was kind enough to help me adress the right people to ask for a diagnosis.
that´s great!
@@anjachan Sure, she's a good therapist. It's important to keep learning with time.
I am glad that she was willing to learn. That is a good quality!
So happy to hear this - it’s so important to keep learning and growing and your therapist sounds like a good one with an open mind! I hope more of them will follow her lead
Definitely sounds like a keeper!
AuDHDer here, I see you 👀
I’d like to add, it’s not only possible to have both, it’s quiet common! Love to see your channel growing, you’re killing it. 😊
Thanks a bunch! I love reading all of your comments. Some of them really make me giggle. 😂🤣😂
I'm betting that at some point, executive functioning difference (formerly ADHD) will be under the umbrella of autism
I got ASD diagnosis in October 2023 so I'm kinda getting to know myself all over again, and your videos have been a huge help in that process, thank you so much.🙏
Oh yes! Rediscovering yourself is quite a roller coaster of an experience. I’m glad my videos are helping!
I was diagnosed the same month. It's mind-blowing. I'm 49.
Can’t hide it anymore. These days people tell me they can tell I’m autistic
"You AuDHDer's know what I mean"
Aaaah, YES, I DO!😊 I appreciate your list. All spot on.
I even have empathy for inanimate objects!
That is anthropomorphism, not empathy. By definition, you cannot sense or feel the emotions of an inanimate object because there’s nothing to sense. It’s all projected. Closest thing would be sympathy. But empathy is not applicable here.
Me too!! In the anthropomorphic sense.
me too. inanimate objects appreciate our attention 😅
I do too. As a kid, I remember feeling horrible for a spoon that fell behind the stove and couldn't be retrieved. 😔
A particular setting where eye contact is so hard for me is a crowded, noisy room resonating with dozens, even hundreds of conversations at once, the kind of setting (like a high school reunion with a cheezy retro-band cranked up to ear-shattering decibels) where you have to shout to the person right in front of you to understand each other (and this is an environment that people actually consider "fun"--they're NUTS). In that setting eye contact is torture. Trying (hopelessly) to cope with the insane-making sensory-overwhelm AND register what the person is saying AND...good grief...make eye contact TOO (which alone makes me half-deaf) is simply--well, no, it's not going to happen. I'll be excusing myself to visit the restroom long before I manage that. And in most likelihood I'll make a sharp right turn at the restroom door (checking to make sure nobody sees me) and execute my "Irish goodbye." To my car in the quiet of the night, and then the nirvana-like solitude inside the car, and the vaguely guilty (but not so much) glee at my masterful escape, mingled with bewilderment over why I even attempted the scene to begin with. So yes, like you, quite regularly making eye contact in a casually social fleeting way is not a stretch. But then there are those instances where it's the last, impossible, straw. Not all of this AND eye contact too!
Reading your description made my head hurt just because I know exactly what you’re talking about! I’m lucky that I realized even before my diagnosis that those settings bothered me immensely and rarely went, but now it’s even harder to get myself through something like this so I’m sure I’d be just ahead of you for a quick exit 😂
I was basically with you until the last one. Some autistics experience empathy, some don’t. I’m very low on the empathy scale. Having alexithymia doesn’t help.
Yes, you're absolutely right that autistics vary greatly with this one. I was hoping to just make it clear that it isn't a fact that ALL autistics struggle with empathy in ALL situations, as this one is one that made it hard when I was going through the diagnosis process. I'm also learning more and more about alexithymia and the connections to empathy too. But thanks for pointing this out - definitely not trying to speak for the entire autistic community but trying to help everyone out there understand how complex and varied autism can look. Thanks for letting me know how the rest of the video connected with you too
@@ChrisandDebbyit would have been nice to acknowledge that low empathy autistics actually do exist and we aren’t a myth that needed to be busted. The only actual myth here is, “all autists lack empathy.” Some do, some don’t. And it doesn’t make us bad people.
Going through burnout right now. Your videos make me feel better. I appreciate your sense of humor and thank you for the much needed laughter.
Ps: it took me an insane amount of time to write this comment. 🙈
I’m so glad you did write this comment!! It brought me joy 😊😊😊
I would be very interested in hearing you address something I've heard nobody else even verbalize or examine. I've dubbed it the I'm With Him Syndrome. It's just one of the things that have leaped out of the murky fog into high resolution. After my own ASD discovery last April, the "movie reel" of my life has been replaying on my mind's screen through a radically new lens, isolating, highlighting and clarifying experiences I never had a word, a defining principle, for before. The Aha!'s have just cascaded incessantly and, yes, wonderfully. "So THAT'S what was happening there!" Paradoxically, all these Aha!'s have had the effect of letting myself off the hook when it comes to feelings of guilt, stupidity, interpersonal cluelessness, inappropriate blunders, etc., AND they have also let other people off the hook in my memories and feelings, too. I didn't know, and THEY didn't know. Sure, some people could have tried better with me, but I can't help feeling magnanimous toward their ignorance, since I was just as ignorant of what was really "wrong" with me. And that it wasn't really so "wrong," just seriously different. Anyway, one of the things that has come into sharp focus for me is this "I'm With Him Syndrome." What I mean by that is, I recognized a series of intense friendships along the path of my life (the "best friend ever and forever" kind of intensity) had a LOT , not all but a LOT, to do with the sense of safety these friendships provided me socially. I might not know why else I was in a particular social setting or how else to cope with the mind-jumbling input but...at least..."I'm with him." That was my ticket to feeling part of things yet without having to be totally "me." I could just be "his friend." And that made me both special, welcome, yet wonderfully off center stage. Center stage in an informal group situation is a prospect of horror to me. I can deliver a prepared speech extremely well, seemingly spontaneously, to an audience of hundreds. But a living room packed with twenty or thirty raucously chattering human beings is a miasma of cognitive chaos and panic to me. In such situations, "I'm with him" was my ticket to relative definition and self-awareness, an identity that cut through the noise. I wonder whether others on the spectrum can relate to this "'I'm With Him Syndrome"?
Thanks for leaving your thoughts here. This is really interesting. I can absolutely relate to the “I’m With Him Syndrome”. The only social situations I ever felt normal or comfortable in were when I was with my best buddy.
I want to think about this a lot more before I create an outline and make a video about it. Other themes that this makes me think about are the deep deep relationships we autistics form with our good friends, and the important role those friendships have on our lives.
@@ChrisandDebby Yes, absolutely on that last point. I'm single, never married, never in a "relationship" of the sexual kind, but the emotional-affective jewel of my life, what keeps me going at times, is that cherished friendship that's "home." Even with long, unavoidable gaps and distances because of life's various exigencies, it's still the knowledge that bond is there that sustains. And, with maturity, it grows into much deeper places than "I'm with him." At 66 years of age, and especially since my ASD discovery, I am more at peace and feel more confident than ever with "I'm with me" in various social and sensory environments. Which is, of course, wonderful. Like coming into a new world.
Yes, I am a woman but I can relate to I Am With Her. In certain situations I may have been that person to someone else as well.
@@ChrisandDebby Seconding that I would find a video on this topic really interesting. Of course, take your time -- appreciate how thoughtful you are in your analyses!
This is me... The empatheticness, especially for animals.
I often feel that animals are way easier to be around than people.
@@ChrisandDebby This is my belief 100% also.
Great job, Chris, thank you! 🎉
Glad you liked it!
this is a great video to share with people if you are breaking the news to them about a diagnosis.
I become self conscious when I make eye contact with someone. Even before I knew I was autistic I was conscious that I was making eye contact. It got weird. Like it was too personal. Like intimate or something and it was just really uncomfortable. I tend to look around the face. Between the eyes or at their mouth. Sometimes, I wonder if people think I am hard of hearing because I fixate on people's lips a lot when they talk.
I hate making eye contact even with my partner.
Tip: Look at the person's eyebrows. It fools them into thinking that you are making eye contact.
This won't work for everyone but ut is worth a try!
😂😂 I’ve tried that but I get so distracted with the eyebrows, especially if the person has really dark bushy eyebrows. If I’m looking at anything on the face that moves, it’s a hot mess and I struggle to focus on what the person is saying if they talk for anything longer than 3 minutes. If they’re boring I start twitching and making up all kinds of stupid scenarios in my brain. One time I just burst out laughing in the middle of a conversation because of my brain and made up some stupid excuse about how what they said reminded me of something funny my wife said… which was a complete lie… but I felt good about because autistics aren’t supposed to lie…. Another myth busted baby!!😂😂
@@ChrisandDebby Different things work for different people!
I can lie but I avoid it. However, I knew one autistic guy who lied non-stop. He wanted so badly to fit in that he would lie to be similar to whoever he was talking to.
I look at people’s mouths. If I look at their eyes I can’t hear them. I thought I had a hearing problem for years before I realized that looking in peoples’ eyes made me very anxious. And no one has ever said anything about me not looking at them when they’re talking. I asked a couple friends if they noticed and they did not.
Another one: All autistics are introverts. I am an extroverted autistic (with ADHD).
Yes! I can see that - I think it’s hard for many people to understand that combination. I wonder how much the ADHD contributes - I feel like it’s a bit of why no one (including me) realized I was autistic for so long due to my ADHD brain pushing me to do many things that seemed to go against the stereotypes for ASD (because even I didn’t connect that the overwhelm and needing to recover for days after was more than just being “tired”)
@@ChrisandDebby Yes, the ADHD definitely kept me from realizing it sooner. A counselor thought I was autistic in 2006. So I read about 5 books on autism. One seemed to fit me but the rest only somewhat or not at all. I am interested in how the world works so that covers a lot. So my interests are not narrow and the ADHD side makes routines hard. Some of the books were about children. They didn't know much about autism in adults or women back then. I didn't have Internet access either. So I thought that I didn't have autism.
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What is this in your hand? it looks like something nice to hold
It’s a Nee-Doh cube! And yes, it’s amazing - I have a growing collection. You can get it here: amzn.to/3RkRsoA
@@ChrisandDebby thank you 😊