Hi Donna, I wonder if you could answer a quick question. Do auties experience feelings of love? If so can they experience trauma through loss of a person, attachment or object? Many thanks.

Here’s my reply:

Hmm

good question,

I’m sure this autie can.

And that’s in spite of

* face blindness (prosopagnosia),
* inability to read facial expression, body language, intonation (social emotional agnosia),
* a degree of meaning deafness (auditory verbal agnosia),
* problems processing body feedback cohesively (tactile agnosia),
* great difficulty reading my own emotions,
* struggle until my 30s to perceive or hold a simultaneous sense of self and other,
* mood, anxiety and compulsive disorders
* including acute Exposure Anxiety which causes involuntary avoidance, diversion and retaliation responses to one’s own sense of existence and wants,
* and significant health struggles with gut, immune, metabolic disorders
* with a good measure of PTSD
* and Reactive Attachment Disorder from years of abuse growing up and the aftermath of sexploitation by men.
* On top of that I’m a majorly solitary personality with four of my five dominant personality traits being solitary ones.

And yes, I feel deep empathy (sensory perceptual issues made me more reliant on sensing), have formed deep attachments (which is quite strongly expressed in Somebody Somewhere), fallen in love (which is clear in Nobody Nowhere and Everyday Heaven) and married someone I love in a strong marriage of almost 10 years now (ultimately with a healthy sex life dare I add, which I wrote of in Everyday Heaven including what it took to get to that).

But I do feel my nervousness of emotional closeness, my aversion to fuss, gush or too much attention, my aversion to touch from most people, my struggle to express closeness to most people verbally or physically, my social phobia issues, a degree of Exposure Anxiety (see Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage), an aversion to being overtly cared about by most people, preference for pragmatic rather than obviously empathic responses, all those things are still present to a degree. I can also say I was capable of loving in my world long before it was clear in the external world that I had this capability (which was clear in Autism and Sensing; The Unlost Instinct).

Saying all that there were times I was so busy with my own challenges that loving anyone, even me, took a seat way way way back in the queue. There was a time when I was about 12 where I became so apathetic and withdrawn and Catatonic for 6 months and I would say that I was incapable of love at that point.

I also went through I phase of trying to be like non-spectrum people and detesting my own challenges lead to such a degree of alienation and self loathing that I was incapable of loving myself, even liking myself and I truly feel that one can need others but not love or care for them until one first has learned to like, care for and become attached to themselves.

I also fall deeply for structures, routines and symbols associated with people as much as the people themselves. I feel anxiety makes it easier for me to love people indirectly than directly. I also find it far easier to express personal feelings through typing than verbally and that I am most expressive about love, empathy, etc through arts than interpersonally.

In Nobody Nowhere I wrote of the loss of my grandparents who were my main carers when I was 4. I never cried directly over it, couldn’t ask after them, never tried to cling to anyone else. But for the next 3 years I would spend hours in their old shed they lived in, in a corner doing long echoed strings of their voices to myself to ‘keep them existent’. If that’s not grief, loss, trauma, I don’t know what it.

I also wrote in The Jumbled Jigsaw in a chapter on grief and loss, about deep attachment to objects, to places, their sensory experiences and layout, and the strong emotional loss in moving house or losing valued attachment objects. Obsessing, dreaming about and fixating on similar and related objects, places, sensory experiences is one expression of loss.

I feel my mother generally thought I was incapable of feeling deep trauma or loss and it’s my view this fed her justification of abuse, sometimes even its overt use as a motivational tool and her desire to see me directly express tears, need, loss, emotion was sometimes very clear. This was, however, also the era of a shocking 1970s book called For The Love of Ann in which the mother of an autistic girl bashed her child into submission (in the name of ‘love’) and this was also the general belief in homes for emotionally disturbed children in the 60s and 70s, that you could manage them through great harshness. So you really have to think of these things in the context of their cultural ignorance. A Blessing and a Curse by Caiseal Mor described very similar.

Those who know me have learned that the most disrespectful thing you can do to someone with my struggles with intimacy is to force the point. The more people need or demand I express or prove closeness directly the more they ensure my access to that ability becomes contorted, problematic, more impossible. Hence those who chill out and are more indirectly confrontational tend to be rewarded with my intermittent hit and run expressions of closeness.

It’s important to remember that attachment and loss aren’t just externally expressed realities. They can also be internally sensed ones, even preconscious ones long before we understand our feelings and even longer before we find emotional safety, want need or reason to share the expression of that.

🙂 Donna Williams *)

author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
http://www.donnawilliams.net
ever the arty autie.