Would You like to experience autism?

Episode 5: Your Non-Response to Others

In this Experience we are going to find out why your loved one often totally ignores your attempts to communicate with him.her.

Who hasn’t been on the receiving end of that heart-breaking blank-expression when you ask your Child a question, or even worse watched another child trying to engage yours, only to be totally ignored by your Child, soon ending in his.her exclusion, then isolation.

To experience why it happens, withdraw deep into your Own World, where you are escaping from a recent Sensory-overwhelm and from your Confusion about everything. Here you are shielded from any further pain from the Real World, distant and numbed.

• In addition, your intense brain is probably far from inactive, firing thoughts at higher-speed than is typical, demanding too much of your own attention.
• Also you might be self-entertaining, thinking of some past amusing event.
• Or you might be in intense self-dialogue, trying to make sense of what is currently going on around you, or trying to make better sense of what happened previously.
• Or you might be distracting yourself with an ‘intense-thought’ in order to more thoroughly numb some recent Oversensitivity-pain. * (*For more on ‘intense-thought’ /self-mesmerising, look at the “You experience” section: “Your strange Sounds and Actions”).

Yours is probably a mixture of both quiet retreat and these intense private thoughts.
And this process can be going on even while you are walking around in the playground, maybe appearing to be “with” others nearby. But you are not.

(To make a parallel, if you were deep into your favourite TV show and someone called on you to pay instant attention to their matters, would you be likely to respond quickly and with interest? Hardly.)

Or, to even better-experience your sensory-overwhelm, and
your preoccupation with your own thoughts,
Picture yourself organising a large party.
It is about to start in half an hour:
– and, you are way-short of finishing your preparations in time!
You are thinking of 3 things you have to do urgently, they all need doing now:
put out the plates glasses and chairs, ring the caterers to make sure they are
up to speed and will arrive on time, find out where the guys have gone
that were supposed to have arranged the music. You don’t know what to do first,
you want to do it all at once, but you are also tired and want to just
hide in a quiet room for a while to get things right in your head.
Feel these sensations. Remember a real-life similar experience of yours…

Someone has appeared in front of you, demanding your attention
and asking you a different question, one less-important.
You might hardly notice the person,
so deep are you thinking about your urgent priorities.
(You might lodge that person’s question in the back of your mind,
and later hear the echo of the question and then attempt to reply,
but it is too late by then.) In general, others’ issues are
just not that important to you.

More vigorous attempts to gain your attention,
standing over you or shouting at you,
might mean you pay the shouter more attention for a brief while
then go back to the more important issues in your mind,
or that person’s persistence and insistence might have finally
pushed you into ‘Overwhelm’ level, so you just go blank, numb,
no sensations at all.
The more the person shouts, the more numb you get.

(The person who asked you the question probably couldn’t tell that you were far away, because your facial expression never displays much, whether you are by yourself or with others. Your face does not express your feelings much, because your feelings and sensitivities have been locked away safe in your Own World, protected from Real World harshness whenever possible.)

I warmly encourage you to contribute your opinions to
my Website!  If you click on this blue line here
you will go to the Mild Autism blog page that discusses this topic,
where you can write YOUR impressions on this Topic.