Bee.In.Harmony

Happy Autistic Pride Day!!♾️🌈

A day chosen for Autistics BY Autistics 💝

Wednesday Affirmations:

Are you moving a little slowly today?

Joints creaking more than usual, not quite getting that satisfying crack or stretch you need to get going?

Muscles feeling stiff, a bit cramped, a little sore? Shoulders feeling tense, like you've been carrying around the weight of the world? Facial muscles feeling suddenly heavy, like you just can't be bothered to lift them into your neutral face?

Brain feeling sluggish, like you've been burning coal faster than normal and even so, you feel the gears in your brain grinding against each other as you try to stay on top of your game?

It makes sense;

You're grinding in a world that preaches holistic health but doesn't actually give you the resources to do so;

You don't have enough

Time.

Energy.

Money.

Patience.

Endurance.

And some days, that just hits a lot harder, especially when it feels like there's no hope in sight.

If that day is today, this might be your cue to lean into it.

To say to yourself, "how can I embrace my human needs?"

To resign the day and say "You know what? I DON'T have the resources to pretend I'm okay."

Either way, I hope you see this and remind yourself:

Taking a stretch is not a crime.

A 5 minute meander should not be punishable by your self or by a boss.

Grabbing a drink or a snack is fuel for you to keep going.

Sitting an extra couple minutes on the toilet to just close your eyes should not need an excuse.

Please, take care of yourself 🫂

Welcome back to Masking Monday!!

We did a 7 Part Series on Defense Mechanisms...

And now we're doing a MUCH shorter series on Unmasking.

Part 4 of 5 incoming!
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PART 1: What Does it Mean to Unmask / What are Neurodivergent Needs?

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CzbSG582d/

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PART 2: Sensory Needs

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Hk2u1wGHs/

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PART 3: Processing Needs

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Gzs6Mvejg/

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PART 4: Communicative Needs

There is so much involved with communication people take for granted;

we don't realize how much it's influenced by the culture of where we're born;

we don't realize how much it's influenced by neuronormative expectations,

or for that matter,

capitalistic, cishet, yt, gendernormative expectations...

and I haven't yet mentioned the disconnect between styles of communication,

active versus passive,

figures of speech...

Plus, when you're a neurodivergent brain, many of these needs may be influenced by your other ones that fall under processing, sensory, or social.

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Location of Birth Matters

I have a good friend of mine who moved from a French speaking part of my country to my English area;

in their area, their "inability" to pick up the regional language

- potentially as a result of language processing differences, extreme likelihood of PDA kicking in -

meant loss of financial access, despite their total competence.

It meant relationships between themselves and others outside of their family home were tense and difficult to navigate;

a LOT of coping mechanisms found, many aligned with people-pleasing, even as this friend did a decent job advocating for their needs with loved ones and setting boundaries.

But imagine if they'd been born in a region that practiced the family's language?

To be fair, the family DID speak both languages,

but my friend's brain gravitated to one and not the other.

Answering "why" has delighted linguists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists in their research.

I'd love to know the holistic assessment, rather than individual conclusions.

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Where you're born also dramatically changes how you see communication;

in the West, it is considered the responsibility of the SPEAKER to "do better" if there is a communication breaking down,

but in the East, It is considered the responsibility of the LISTENER to "do better".

What can these methods look like of "doing better"?

- asking questions to clarify what the other person meant

- asking questions to clarify what the other person missed or didn't understand

- rephrasing complicated concepts in everyday terms to ensure there is no misunderstanding

- putting the other person's statements into your own words to better absorb their message and confirm if there was what the other intended

- focusing on lip-reading or hard enunciation to ensure words are not missed

Note that pointing out these methods is not to say they are neuroaffirming techniques

but rather they are based on what is expected in neuronormative culture,

and some of them are more clearly neuroaffirming while others are ambiguous or not.

Information is processed differently based on how you need to access the data,

whether you need to get on board with the other person from a receptor angle or if it's from a communicator angle.

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Communication Methods and Adaptations

The way that you as a human being process received language and then communicate language is unique and, especially if you are neurodivergent, flavored by all your other neurodivergence.

- if you are autistic you may need communication delivered to you in such a way that is direct

- if you are dyslexic and learning a motor skill, there's a chance you may need to be near your instructor in a different direction than they'd normally teach so you can keep your body's orientation in alignment with theirs

- if you are epileptic and you're driving along a stretch of road with endless trees with gaps of sun coming through them, such that the speed of the car combined with the flickers of light becomes a trigger, you may need to stop communicating entirely to focus on orienting and accommodating yourself

- if you are deaf and overstimulated by your environment because visual stimuli affects you the most, sign language is not necessarily going to be the most accessible for you - you may instead need a tactile sign language, or prefer to use a combination of speech-to-text devices and learn to verbally communicate despite being deaf (for the hearies who don't know that, yes, this is a thing!)

- if you are ADHD and find noise is just too distracting to focus, you may opt into wearing headphones to minimize that distraction and provide stimulation while engaging in non-speaking communication methods like pointing and gesturing

I could provide a million examples where communication is affected, but you know me, this post is already going to be too long.

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How to Unmask our Communicative Needs

Well, there's a reason I put this one after sensory needs and processing needs! (And there's a reason social is coming last 😉)

As you saw in the examples above, they were tied to the others.

If you can think of a communication need that DOESN'T have anything to do with processing or sensory, absolutely hop in the comments and I'll give it an honorable mention here.

In other words...

learning about your communication needs will happen after you start to uncover the needs that are directly affected by the way you experience the world
..as opposed to the way the world experiences you 😳

Like how I mentioned earlier about the region where you grow up, the world that goes on around you while you grow, etc.

We will touch a lot more on this in Part 5.

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What Communication Changes Can We Enact?

- direct versus passive language

- spoken versus unspoken languages

- written communication instead of interactive communication

- communication that has no language element

- slower versus faster

- harder or clearer pronunciation

Sometimes people aren't able to meet these communicative needs we have...

and that's okay.

It does mean that part of unmasking communicative needs means acknowledging that the people in our lives may not be able to meet those needs,

and that may mean we push ourselves to continue masking for them because a mutual alternative can't be found,

or it may mean letting them go to find other people who can or do meet our communicative needs.

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When we allow our brains to sit in these communicative needs that go unmet,

we're really just putting off other needs in favor of masking...

a state that certainly is not ideal,

but in an ableist world where people DO take advantage of vulnerable people,

it can be necessary to protect ourselves.

Even if it means killing ourselves.

IT'S INHUMAN. It's not morally just or ethically right.

And it's why disability advocates fight so hard to have able-bodied people understand;

disability rights, protections, and advocacy create safety for ALL.

Because it's not a matter of "if you are or become disabled,"

it's a matter of WHEN.

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A person can only decide for themselves which communication adjustments are going to help them get their needs met,

and they're also the only person who can make the call as to whether it's worth the cost;

there is truly no right decision that can be made in this world that refuses to understand human needs.

We can only look at the relief that comes from accommodation and paying the ableist cost, and compare that to the masking cost that comes with a temporary feeling of safety through assimilation.

A question for you though, one that helped me really understand for myself that these two were NOT equal:

Are you really capable of assimilation?

Or did you just spend your entire life trying to assimilate, but still somehow ultimately failing in a way you couldn't quite figure out?

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Having this conversation with ourselves over the course of months and even years can help us understand what is potentially navigable and what is truly unable to be compromised...

Which will lead to shifting circles and environments.

It's a high cost, letting go of hobbies, environments, and people we truly care about

in order to hopefully build a lifestyle in healthier environments with better equipped people to help us...

and that's not a guarantee either;

you have to be willing to do a LOT of work to recognize that you might not be finding the neuroaffirming people to help you

if you have neuronormative mindsets, which are inherently ableist.

All this leading up into Part 5; Social needs

Stay tuned next Monday!

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How are you enjoying the series so far?

What communicative needs have you recognized for yourself?

Did it come as a result of your other needs, or did you accommodate your communication needs before you even realized your other ones?

It's Signing Sunday!!!

Join us on Discord at 6:30pm EST, every other Sunday to link up with other signers and say hi!

https://discord.gg/xBVVgHN4f

"ADHD and depression can be a difficult combination because each condition can amplify the challenges of the other. Depression can reduce hope, energy, and motivation. ADHD can make task initiation, consistency, organization, and follow-through more difficult. The result is that many people begin blaming themselves for struggles that are far more complex than a lack of effort. Sometimes what looks like laziness is actually exhaustion. Sometimes what looks like procrastination is actually overwhelm."

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Advice like this kills me;

It's incomplete;

It doesn't understand the full picture of what is happening for neurodivergents;

It focuses on traditional definitions of the two neurological experiences rather than looking at the lived experience...

Which is ironic because that's what op was trying to do... And as a self-described DSW, MSW, LCSW, ADHD-CCSP, C-PD, CRS,

failing to do.

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It's important to note that what may look like depression in ADHDers can also be unrealized autism,

that when autistic needs go unmet in ADHDers we often feel a sense of hopelessness and incompleteness...

Our communicative,
sensory,
social,
and processing needs

go unmet because of the way autism and ADHD both pull at each other

and compensate for each other,

which leads to a current of unease lying beneath the surface in our bodies, a tension that contributes to what we think is

only ADHD paralysis but in fact is also

autistic inertia.

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Here's another reality:

In neurodivergents especially, depression - and anxiety -

are in fact trauma responses as a result of living in a world that refuses to accommodate anyone who is even remotely different.

Depression specifically seeks to help us avoid pain by pulling us away from the world,

particularly a world that moves too slow for our ADHD and too fast for our autism,

a world that has a significant amount of sensory input increasingly so,

a world that demands we communicate verbally regardless of our auditory processing disorder that is common for most of us,

a world that demands we ignore our needs in order to participate in its social constructs.

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Depression gives us the opportunity to retreat from the world,

to force ourselves to slow down to the speed we need, to avoid the sensory input that is overstimulating...

And as long as we continue to treat depression in neurodivergents as if the two are unrelated,

we will continue to medicate depression in desperate attempts to remove this defense mechanism that is trying to serve a purpose

and cause further distress to a nervous system that is continually being thrown into chaos.

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***Please note, I am not saying that living in a state of depression is a good thing!

I am pointing out that we don't engage in depressive or anxious responses because there is something wrong with us;

We engage in them because there is something we need that has been going unacknowledged,

and truly managing depression requires understanding why it is there in the first place instead of just medicating it or therapizing it away.

Wednesday Affirmations:

You are allowed to be imperfect.

You are allowed to be messy and chaotic.

You are allowed to make mistakes,

to get things wrong,

to do your best and still fail.

💜🐝

It is okay to fail;

it doesn't mean you're a bad person,

it doesn't mean you're unworthy of love,

grace,

compassion,

forgiveness.

💜🐝

It just means you were wrong,

and that's not a death sentence

it's a life sentence.

💜🐝

It's a call to action,

an opportunity to examine your subconscious mindsets,

your neurodivergent needs,

your ability to take accountability, set boundaries & follow through, and self-advocate

to ask yourself...

How can I do this differently in the future?

💜🐝

And then, when you've done all that work...

You move forward.

Differently.

Omg, if I have to see one more apologetic autistic for something that is OUT of their control... 😡😤😮‍💨

Okay folks.

We need the accountability talk.

Why?

Because there are TWO methods to accountability that people don't seem to realize,

and it hurts disabled people the most when we don't honor both of them.

This is such an important discussion, if you saw it yesterday on my personal page, I get if you skip this one,

but seriously, it just had to be mentioned again.

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The first is the kind that's discussed the most often:

a) acknowledge the harm that's been done,

b) consider subconscious mindsets that influence the decision-making process and rewire them so that

c) we see changed action in the future

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HERE 👏 IS 👏 THE 👏 PROBLEM 👏 WITH 👏 THIS 👏 KIND 👏 OF 👏 ACCOUNTABILITY:

It doesn't take into account whether a person is able or willing to make that kind of change.

And here's a big shocker to some people:

Sometimes, you SHOULDN'T!!!!!!

What??! What do you mean I shouldn't take accountability Bee?

Well first that's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is that sometimes taking accountability includes NOT changing, either because that change would be harmful to you or because you recognize that you can't change a particular aspect.

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In the case of the autistic person I mentioned earlier,

they needed to really ask themselves:

"CAN I change? Can I really make sure that I don't hyperfixate like this again? Can I yank myself away from the task I'm hyperfixated on in a way that doesn't cause my brain discomfort?"

Spoiler alert: it's not really possible for autistic people to yank themselves away from their monotropic focus...

not without extreme discomfort.

Should autistic people do it anyway?

It depends on the situation, and it depends on the method, and it depends on the individual person's ability to find an alternative.

But guess what?

NONE of that is in another person's right to control, and only the autistic person can say for themselves whether or not they can!

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And guess what?

You have a right to exist in a way that is comfortable FOR YOU.

"But what about other people-"

Stop.

You have been socially conditioned into people-pleasing so hard that you will neglect your own neurodivergent needs for the sake of "other people's comfort",

which by the way comes from their own cognitive dissonance in seeing another person move through life differently.

You 👏 are 👏 allowed 👏 to 👏 center 👏 yourself 👏 around 👏 your 👏 needs 👏 while 👏 still 👏 considering 👏 others 👏

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

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So to return back to the topic at hand:

THE SECOND KIND OF ACCOUNTABILITY:

a) I acknowledge how you are affected

b) I do the work to go into my subconscious mindsets... only to realize that changing my mindsets would potentially harm me,

or recognizing that my behavior doesn't come from mindsets but instead happens as a result of my neurodivergence;

and after doing the work I truly realize there is no alternative method I can use to meet or reroute that neurodivergence without serious consequences to me...

c) I go back to you and I let you know of my results.

Instead of me changing something that is within my control, I ask you to accept something that is out of my control or that I'm not willing to control

and to let you know that I will respect your decision to accept it and go, or accept it and stay.

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This second kind of accountability doesn't just apply to neurodivergents and disabled people by the way;

There are toxic partners out there who want you to change your behavior because it makes it easier to manipulate you.

In the moment their requests appear fairly reasonable so it's easy to ignore what red flags they are,

and the truly manipulative people will gradually increase the unreasonable demand until you're a year in deep in the chemical cycle that is narcissistic manipulation and abuse.

There are plenty of GOOD reasons

NOT to change your behavior or your mindsets,

and it's important to learn how to factor those in

when taking accountability for things that ARE within your control

and letting go of things that are NOT.

Welcome back to Masking Monday!!

We did a 7 Part Series on Defense Mechanisms...

And now we're doing a MUCH shorter series on Unmasking.

Buckle in for Part 3!
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PART 1: What Does it Mean to Unmask / What are Neurodivergent Needs?

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CzbSG582d/

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PART 2: Sensory Needs

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Hk2u1wGHs/

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PART 3: Processing Needs

To put it as succinctly as possible,

Everything our brain does, both subconsciously and consciously, is a process:

- moving our limbs

- analyzing situations

- forming thoughts

- responding to situations

- communicating

We take it for granted how instantaneous all this feels,

but in fact many processes the brain engages in overlap with each other, and there are multiple points that signals can be

interrupted,

detoured,

rerouted,

or compensated for each other.

To explain better about how complicated processing can be, I'm going to focus a little bit on the last one, which will lead us into next week's part 4.

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Communication is such an involved process; you have to be able to

- hear - that means sound needs to hit the outside of your ear hairs and be directed by your ear folds into your inner ear - travel along the canal - bounce off the eardrum to convert into a signal - and that signal has to travel properly to the brain's auditory processing centers

- auditory, language & social processing - your auditory processing center must now analyze that signal correctly before passing it along to social and language processing centers - analyze the situation and the response to give - and create a new signal that will be sent over to motor processing centers

- motor processing - your centers must then receive the signal, intact, from language processing - convert the signal into one that can be understood by the muscles in your body - and then send out the signal back to the part of your brain responsible for sending signals to the rest of your nervous system - the signal must then travel that nervous system down to the correct muscle group and the muscle must respond accordingly

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IT'S INSANE!!

Beautiful, so intricate...

And so many opportunities for breakdown to occur, at numerous points

- if your ear has damage

- if your processing centers are larger or smaller than expected, they function differently

- if your processing centers are susceptible to distraction

- if you've been compensating for audio input difficulties by using visual cues like lip reading and THOSE are compromised (also perhaps by something like distraction)

- if any of your nerves have damage - so many nerves!!!

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A Nod to Auditory Processing Disorder

APD occurs because of what is medically seen as a breakdown in the process.

It can occur at the very edges of the ear, where even your ear folds serve a purpose in telling you which direction a sound is coming from...

In the ear canal that may be differently shaped and so sound travels differently...

At the ear drum, if it has been damaged by outside influences like infection or outside interference like aggressive use of Q-tips...

Along the nerves carrying the signal to the auditory processing centers...

And there the signal must be analyzed "correctly"...

Having an ear infection as a child could even have influenced you during the stages of language development,

where because you couldn't *hear properly, your language processing and motor processing could have been affected.

These are often explained as treatable in sessions with a speech language therapist.

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The "breakdown" that occurs at the brain is known as Central Auditory Processing Disorder.

This is where my APD occurs;

My brain interprets sound as incredibly overstimulating, to the point of painful;

I don't really want to listen to sound.

Then there's also the fact that sounds are distracting;

If I hear a new sound, my brain is immediately yanked to the new sound,

and I miss completely whatever sound I was supposed to try and pay attention to in the first place.

Now on top of being distracted while doing the act of listening,

I also just straight up get distracted during the act of processing;

my brain wants to process too many things at the same time,

so in the middle of processing sound and trying to focus on what response I'm supposed to send...

I'm bored. Brain seeks distraction.

Now that last type of distraction is not as bad for me as it is for other ADHDers;

my autism grips me harder and using anxiety to compensate.

Still, it doesn't mean that I don't feel the pull from ADHD to let myself LET GO,

which creates strain on my brain, culminating in pain and later exhaustion from energy and pain management.

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A Nod to Dyspraxia

Yep, this is a new one for me that FINALLY explains for me why I'm not just "clumsy"

(Aka struggle with proprioception due to distraction),

but well, to reference a term that is offensive to multiple disabled communities, I experience "spasms."

It happens verbally far more than it does in the rest of my body,

but it doesn't change the fact that my motor planning won't always account for the size of the container I go to grab,

and I lose my grip on it in such a way that my hand shakes back and forth as it loses control of the item it didn't properly prepare for.

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But verbally?

Oh this happens multiple times a day.

I'll be ADHD distracted, language processing thinking of two responses to say to someone, like

"That's nice."

And

"Great."

Between those signals either getting welded into one signal and then sent over to motor processing,

or both signals being received separately at motor processing,

my facial muscles are then instructed to communicate anywhere from

"That's great",

to

"That's grice,"

"Thaneat,"

"Thusifnrj,"

or even a grunt of "Th."

Have I mentioned that moving my facial muscles themselves feels EXHAUSTING?

For a deeper look at verbal dyspraxia, I highly recommend following Fighting for my Voice: My life with Verbal Apraxia.

Since realizing my verbal dyspraxia, I've been finding myself mispronouncing words... and just no longer caring to fix them.

The energy cost is too much to mask.

Speaking of which,

time to get to the part of unmasking our processing needs!!

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When we allow our brains to sit in these needs that go unmet

- when we don't give ourselves the speed or time our brain craves for analyzing and reacting

- when we don't accommodate any of the numerous points where we could be experiencing breakdown in the process

We allow ourselves to sit in discomfort

for greater periods of time which contribute to

our nervous system being dysregulated,

which in turn affects our ability to stay emotionally regulated and able to process events around us.

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In this category, we can ask ourselves questions proactively to manage our processing needs:

- do I need to slow down a situation or my response to a situation so I can give my brain time to catch up?

- do I need to speed up a situation or my response to a situation so I can feel more comfortable going at the speed my brain wants to go?

- how do I navigate contrary speed needs where my brain wants to move faster, but also is kicking and screaming at the need for time?

- do I need to see a specialist about my processing needs to see about accommodating myself better? Speech language therapist? Occupational therapist?

- do I need to change the way I communicate or physically interact with the world to accommodate my processing needs better?

- what parts of my processing do I need to accept and embrace as they are?

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We can answer all these questions and meet these needs,

which will allow us to navigate interpersonal relationships with less roadblocks in our way,

rather than waiting to feel extremely dysregulated and THEN realizing...

Oh.

THAT'S why I'm struggling.

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Fun fact:

ASL helps me. The more natural word order and decreased need for mouth engagement (compared to verbal language, ASL still requires a lot, but differently) relaxes my processing centers.

Still, giving myself lots of time where I don't have to do ANY language processing or communication is key.