The Empty Autism Theory

There’s an idea I’ve been tossing around in my head for some while, which I’ve been calling ‘The Empty Autism Theory’.

It’s about how many neurotypicals view autistics – ie, that they see us as somehow ‘empty’ of all the things that NTs have, whether that be intelligence, thoughts, feelings and emotions, empathy, social sensitivity, a sense of humour, communications worth listening to, the capacity to feel pain or to love our fellow human beings, or even just basic humanity.

So in their eyes, we’re devoid of anything worthwhile, or if we do have anything inside us, it’s a sort of echoing chaos of misery, from which NTs need to ‘rescue’ us. So their job, as they see it, is to ‘fill us up’, to ‘give’ us these things, after which we will be ‘fixed’, and ‘just like normal people’. It isn’t always explicitly framed or stated that way, but the underlying message is pretty clear.

I see it in many areas, in the attitudes of schools, government programs, in books and movies and TV programs about autism, and hence also in the public image of autism. It’s in all the assumptions made about us, eg that we don’t look people in the eyes because we ‘have no interest’ in other people, or that our meltdowns are somehow ‘just random’. It’s in how they don’t bother asking us what we want or need, even if we can talk, because they’ve already decided that we don’t have anything worth listening to, we’re simply to be filled up with whatever they’ve decided we lack.

It’s also evident in the professional language and research, where we’re described as ‘deficient’ in this, or ‘lacking’ in that. We don’t have ‘theory of mind’, or we display ‘weak central coherence’, and so on. The diagnostic criteria focuses almost exclusively on our lacks and deficiencies and abnormalities. It’s even in areas you wouldn’t expect, for instance the infamous ‘research’ project which deemed autistics as ‘lacking in social reputation management’, rather than simply as more honest than their NT counterparts. 

Moreover, this view of autism has been there from the start. Kanner first described us in terms of ‘disturbances of affective contact’, ie we ‘didn’t care’ about those around us. He was the first to suggest the ‘refrigerator mom’ theory of autism which others like Bruno Bettleheim later took up. Even Asperger described us in terms of our ‘deficiencies’ in social/communication skills. 

And then there was Lovaas’ infamous characterisation of us as ‘not fully human’, when he said that “you start pretty much from scratch… with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense… but they are not people in the psychological sense… You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.” Thus ABA from the start was based on the ‘empty autism’ idea – push the autism out of the kid by filling them up with NT-type ‘skills’, and hey presto! No more autism!

It’s evident too in how, whenever autistics challenge ‘warrior’ parents of autistic kids about how they regard and treat their children, we get shut down and attacked – the whole ‘you’re-not-like-my-kid’ and ‘you’re-too-high-functioning-to-know-what-real-autism-is’ stuff is based on the idea that the ‘real’ autistics are somehow ‘different’ (read: empty/deficient) from those of us who can talk, or at least communicate online. Even at the same time as some of them are defending themselves by claiming we’re ‘lacking in theory of mind’, so ‘unable to understand’ where these ‘poor parents’ are coming from! At a very basic level, it’s a profound ‘othering’, a psychological theft of our humanity. 

It’s also evident in the presumption that we simply need to learn how to ‘behave like normal people’, and our problems will all be magically solved. So if we do a social skills course, and we still have problems, it must be because of some resistance or ‘deficiency’ on our part - because, after all, they’ve “done all they can for us”.

Now we know that we’re not empty. That in fact we’re full – full of sensory reactions and unruly emotions that demand our attention and sometimes interfere with our learning, wonder at the physical world around us (even if we’re not budding scientists or computer programmers), joy in our ‘special’ interests, a straightforward honesty, puzzlement at what seems like bizarre behaviours of other people, priorities that don’t include things like small talk, not to mention distress at the way we’re treated, whether or not we can vocalise it. And more. Much more. 

I don’t know what to call the opposite of this ‘empty autism’ theory though. I’m hesitant to label it ‘the fullness of autism’ theory – it’s not only that we’re ‘full’, it’s that we’re both complex and under stress. But I don’t want to call it ‘complex autism theory’ either – as this would undoubtedly be twisted and pathologized and used against us. So I’m not sure what to call it – once again, the language of NTs fails to adequately describe the autistic reality.

What I do know is that, once again, I’m forced into the realisation that nothing less than an entire reframing of the public understanding of autism and autistics is necessary. Only when it’s seen that we are not ‘empty’ of all the things that make people human, can real progress be made. Because as has recently been noted, the public image of autism is based on us in varying degrees of distress, and is thus distorted, the signs of our distress taken as symptoms of our autism, ie as givens with our ‘disorder’. And that stress can be traced back directly to the Empty Autism theory, and the resulting misunderstanding and pathologizing of autism and autistics.

And it’s time for all that to stop. Time for the empty autism theory to be laid to rest, and for our humanity to be seen and accepted, and for our part in the full range of human diversity to be embraced. Our very survival depends on it.

Things I Don't Understand - Normal

I don’t understand ‘normal’.

I’m thinking of two types of ‘normal’ here, though they blur at the edges.

The first is who or what is largely still assumed to be the social norm, the ‘standard’ for others to live up to, emulate, or to be measured against. And that norm is the white, Western, middle-to-upper class, cis-heterosexual, able bodied, neurologically typical male or, as one commentator calls it, ‘Default Man’.

And yet is this really the ‘average’ person? Just looking at statistics says no. Most of the world’s population is non-white, for starters. Even if you only look at, say, Europe, in most of its countries, more than half the people are female. Even looking at just the men, setting aside those who are gay/bi/trans/gender neutral/etc, those who are not white, not middle or upper class, those who are not of the majority religions, and those who are not able-bodied and neurotypical… I’m betting that what’s left is actually only a very small proportion. (Ten percent, according to the writer of ‘Default Man’.)

So how did this minority become held up as the ‘standard’? The answer to that lies with history. Men have been dominant for millennia. Add in all those colonisers, slave-owners and plunderers of non-European countries who didn’t think non-whites were even truly human, centuries of religious and social condemnation of non-cis-heterosexuals, a power imbalance in favour of the rich, screwed-up attitudes to the disabled coupled with lack of understanding of science… And you have the perfect storm for a narrow slice of the population to be able to hold themselves up as the benchmark group for everyone else to envy, compare themselves to, and wish to belong to – or to made to feel as though they should wish to.

We can’t change history of course. But some of these attitudes are still with us. Witness the bias towards male experience in the diagnosis of autistics, for example, that sees many females not diagnosed because they don’t fit the stereotype. Or how black kids are not allowed to wear their hair in ‘black’ styles in some schools. Or how people react to Muslim women’s head-coverings. Then there’s the pressure to not be ‘obviously’ gay, or to speak ‘standard’ English, or for immigrants to speak English instead of their own language even amongst themselves, or the recent attempt of a certain Australian politician to have a motion passed that it’s ‘okay to be white’ (apparently, if it wasn’t passed, whites would be the ‘victims’ of ‘genocide’, yes, you can roll your eyes now).… You can probably think of more examples, but you get the picture.

So I understand the historical reasons for the current situation, what I don’t understand is this clinging to the old standard, when it’s so obviously not actually ‘standard’, or even ‘average’. I can only assume it’s fear – fear of ‘the other’, fear of change, fear of somehow losing white privilege (which too many of them view as their ‘rights’). They’ve been thinking of themselves as the ‘norm’ for so long, they’ve come to feel they really are it. Or the best thing to be, or however they justify it to themselves. And you can almost watch the scrambles going on in their minds, as they try to do so. The mental blocks and torturous reasonings they have to manoeuvre around, the gaping holes in their arguments and world views that they refuse to look at.

I can tell you that as a person of European ancestry, I don’t feel fearful of ‘white genocide’ any time soon. I am more concerned with the actual genocides and wars and oppressions already going on, the plight of autistics everywhere, of gays in some countries, of immigrants fleeing terrible situations, the effects of climate change, etc, etc, etc. Not to mention all my own day to day difficulties of course. You know, real problems.

So I don’t understand this insistence on a group who never have been the majority, being able to keep their power, their wealth, their privilege, at the expense of those who actually are the majority. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t understand reactionary people.

The second ‘normal’ I don’t understand, is a category of people I don’t even have a name for. They’re the ones who simply …do things. Like, they get out of bed in the morning, go off to work or school or wherever, come home, eat, relax, and then go to bed and fall asleep. Straight away. And then wake up and do the same over again the next day. Without thinking twice about any of it.

And on their weekends or days off, again, they simply get up and do things like mow lawns, catch up on housework or schoolwork, tinker with their hobbies or take themselves and their loved ones out to places like movies, shows, amusement parks, the beach, and so on. During their holiday breaks, they crowd to places where lots of others go, and don’t seem to mind that at all, or even like it.

And if you ask them, how do you just do these things, they look at you like you’re crazy, or simply say ‘I never thought about it.’ And shrug. And go on doing it.

I get that people do this, I just don’t understand how.

How they do it without stress. Or at least not the kind of overwhelming stress that us ‘not-normal’ people suffer. They never worry about things like sensory challenges, social challenges, transition challenges, executive functioning issues, mental/emotional states and triggers, stairs, wheelchair access, exhaustion, blood sugar levels, allergic reactions, pain issues, will-there-be-food-I-can-eat issues, whether-X-activity-will-make-me-dizzy issues, and all the thousand-and-one other things that those of us with ‘conditions’ stress about. Not to mention those of us who have the anxiety of possible exclusion or even threats to personal safety because of race, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion or lack thereof, etc.

These ‘normal’ people just …do things. Without a second thought. No agonising, no scattered thoughts, no intense pre-planning, no I-did-this-yesterday-so-I-have-no-spoons-to-do-anything-today, no double and triple-checking everything, no fretting over whether you’ll get a park close enough or will the accessible parking be all taken or will some dipstick give us hassles because we have an invisible disability and park in a disability space, no worrying about potential meltdowns or shutdowns, no ‘at what point does it get too much and we bail out’, no ANYTHING.

I used to read accounts of these people’s lives, only half-consciously looking for any sign of this, but it just wasn’t there. And then it finally hit me - that they don’t worry about these things because they don’t have to. So I understand that now. But I’ve been struggling with so much for so long, that I have no conception, no understanding at all, of what a life without that struggle would feel like.

But what I do understand, is that, if all of us ‘not-normal’ folks got together, we may find that, like the non-‘Default Man’ people, we’re actually the majority – and that it’s actually normal to be ‘not-normal’.