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time_and_waterI made a Dreamwidth account a little over a month ago, and made a few private posts. I held back from making public posts because I was undecided on the scope of this account: would I talk about my professional life? My creative life? My mental health? How much should I compartmentalize?
Yesterday, I had a realization that pushed me to find a specific use for this blog.
I'd been seeing a dietician to treat my ARFID (an eating disorder) and she helped me a lot, but eventually I started to feel like we were spinning our wheels. I knew what I wanted to be doing, food-wise, and it was just a matter of working around executive dysfunction to actually do it. So I made an appointment with a therapist at the same practice. I realized about midway through our second appointment that not only was this therapist probably not a good fit, but I may have gotten all I'm going to get out of talk therapy for the time being.
You see, I had been imagining a mutual deep dive into the psychology and even neurology of why I have trouble initiating tasks. The therapist instead started right off the bat dispensing fairly standard ADHD advice. "Just try adding one thing to your routine this week! Like filling the pill counter so you can take your meds right when you wake up! Just one thing!" And I bristled at this. Intensely. To the point where I started tearing up, not out of hurt feelings or anxiety, just frustration (and the fact that I had gotten about four hours of sleep). I told her that the weak points on my routine seem so intertwined with each other that changing just one thing wouldn't do much, and she clarified that it could be two or even five things; she had just started with one because she thought it would seem the most manageable. I still bristled.
I realized the issue wasn't with the actual advice. After all, the Standard ADHD Advice probably became Standard because it works at least some of the time. The issue was with the idea of someone prescribing particular strategies to me and then me reporting back a week later on how it went. To be clear, this therapist did not have any power to force me to do anything, but if I were going to get anything out of therapy, at some point I would have to voluntarily take some of her advice. Which would leave me feeling like she was looking over my shoulder any time I filled my pill counter or changed into my pajamas.
Even the idea of setting explicit self-care goals for myself feels wrong. Like it would be too much pressure, and attach too much significance to one little thing, but it would also feel... artificial? Childish? Stifling? I have goals, but I feel like I have to sneak up on them, or let them sneak up on me, or... I haven't come up with a metaphor that really conveys it yet.
The closest concept that's currently floating around in the neurodiversity discourse is "pathological demand avoidance" (PDA), but I have a lot of issues with that framework. Several actually autistic people have written about their dislike for the concept of PDA, and I'll try to link to some of them at some point. What I will say is that I think the psychological phenomenon I'm describing led me to be a rule follower in my early childhood, because if I followed the rules without being told, no one would ever have to tell me! So "demand avoidance" doesn't exactly get at the heart of it.
Exposure anxiety, as described by Donna Williams, may prove to be a much more useful framework. It seems to have been collectively forgotten; the few times I've seen the words "exposure anxiety" together in modern autism discourse, it seemed like people thought it just meant "fear of being Perceived". Which is part of the original concept, but it's a lot more complicated. This post by Mel Baggs, which quotes Williams extensively but also critiques some of her suggested solutions, is a good introduction. (Also, unlike PDA, exposure anxiety is described as primarily but not exclusively affecting autistic people, so I feel a lot more comfortable talking about it as an autistic cousin. To use another term from Ye Olde Neurodiversitie Movement that very few people my age are familiar with.)
A while back I read part of Williams's book Exposure Anxiety: Unlocking the Invisible Cage, partly out of general curiosity, partly wondering if I could apply any of it to myself. The book primarily focuses on extreme cases, in which a person's social interactions and attempts at self-care are almost entirely defined by exposure anxiety and various associated coping mechanisms; but if I remember correctly, Williams says in an early chapter that everyone experiences feelings similar to exposure anxiety sometimes. I suspect I fall somewhere in the middle: chronic, but mild. It's hard to point to what exactly I relate to in these descriptions, but the more I read about it, the more the shape of the emotions felt familiar, even if the degree was so different that I couldn't really see myself in the outward manifestations. There's not a lot out there about mild exposure anxiety; in fact, there's not a lot out there about exposure anxiety at all, at least that I've been able to find. It doesn't help that it's impossible to Google--you end up with a lot of results for "exposure therapy for anxiety".
The point is, something similar to exposure anxiety is a factor in my difficulties with planning and initiating tasks. So while I have been able to handle the "directly confrontational" environment of talk therapy for certain things, using it to make sure I brush my teeth regularly seems likely to backfire. If I want to make any more progress, I'm going to have to be my own therapist.
But I need something to keep me on track. So I'm going to blog about it. The possibility that someone else might read about my attempts to negotiate with my brain and find something helpful or interesting in it is a great motivator for me, even if nobody does end up reading it. (I was kind of doing something similar on Tumblr for a time, but now I want to commit to it, and committing to regularly logging in to Tumblr is the last thing I need to be doing if I want to fix my daily routine.)
So that's one thing I plan to do with this blog. There will definitely be other types of posts.
Yesterday, I had a realization that pushed me to find a specific use for this blog.
I'd been seeing a dietician to treat my ARFID (an eating disorder) and she helped me a lot, but eventually I started to feel like we were spinning our wheels. I knew what I wanted to be doing, food-wise, and it was just a matter of working around executive dysfunction to actually do it. So I made an appointment with a therapist at the same practice. I realized about midway through our second appointment that not only was this therapist probably not a good fit, but I may have gotten all I'm going to get out of talk therapy for the time being.
You see, I had been imagining a mutual deep dive into the psychology and even neurology of why I have trouble initiating tasks. The therapist instead started right off the bat dispensing fairly standard ADHD advice. "Just try adding one thing to your routine this week! Like filling the pill counter so you can take your meds right when you wake up! Just one thing!" And I bristled at this. Intensely. To the point where I started tearing up, not out of hurt feelings or anxiety, just frustration (and the fact that I had gotten about four hours of sleep). I told her that the weak points on my routine seem so intertwined with each other that changing just one thing wouldn't do much, and she clarified that it could be two or even five things; she had just started with one because she thought it would seem the most manageable. I still bristled.
I realized the issue wasn't with the actual advice. After all, the Standard ADHD Advice probably became Standard because it works at least some of the time. The issue was with the idea of someone prescribing particular strategies to me and then me reporting back a week later on how it went. To be clear, this therapist did not have any power to force me to do anything, but if I were going to get anything out of therapy, at some point I would have to voluntarily take some of her advice. Which would leave me feeling like she was looking over my shoulder any time I filled my pill counter or changed into my pajamas.
Even the idea of setting explicit self-care goals for myself feels wrong. Like it would be too much pressure, and attach too much significance to one little thing, but it would also feel... artificial? Childish? Stifling? I have goals, but I feel like I have to sneak up on them, or let them sneak up on me, or... I haven't come up with a metaphor that really conveys it yet.
The closest concept that's currently floating around in the neurodiversity discourse is "pathological demand avoidance" (PDA), but I have a lot of issues with that framework. Several actually autistic people have written about their dislike for the concept of PDA, and I'll try to link to some of them at some point. What I will say is that I think the psychological phenomenon I'm describing led me to be a rule follower in my early childhood, because if I followed the rules without being told, no one would ever have to tell me! So "demand avoidance" doesn't exactly get at the heart of it.
Exposure anxiety, as described by Donna Williams, may prove to be a much more useful framework. It seems to have been collectively forgotten; the few times I've seen the words "exposure anxiety" together in modern autism discourse, it seemed like people thought it just meant "fear of being Perceived". Which is part of the original concept, but it's a lot more complicated. This post by Mel Baggs, which quotes Williams extensively but also critiques some of her suggested solutions, is a good introduction. (Also, unlike PDA, exposure anxiety is described as primarily but not exclusively affecting autistic people, so I feel a lot more comfortable talking about it as an autistic cousin. To use another term from Ye Olde Neurodiversitie Movement that very few people my age are familiar with.)
A while back I read part of Williams's book Exposure Anxiety: Unlocking the Invisible Cage, partly out of general curiosity, partly wondering if I could apply any of it to myself. The book primarily focuses on extreme cases, in which a person's social interactions and attempts at self-care are almost entirely defined by exposure anxiety and various associated coping mechanisms; but if I remember correctly, Williams says in an early chapter that everyone experiences feelings similar to exposure anxiety sometimes. I suspect I fall somewhere in the middle: chronic, but mild. It's hard to point to what exactly I relate to in these descriptions, but the more I read about it, the more the shape of the emotions felt familiar, even if the degree was so different that I couldn't really see myself in the outward manifestations. There's not a lot out there about mild exposure anxiety; in fact, there's not a lot out there about exposure anxiety at all, at least that I've been able to find. It doesn't help that it's impossible to Google--you end up with a lot of results for "exposure therapy for anxiety".
The point is, something similar to exposure anxiety is a factor in my difficulties with planning and initiating tasks. So while I have been able to handle the "directly confrontational" environment of talk therapy for certain things, using it to make sure I brush my teeth regularly seems likely to backfire. If I want to make any more progress, I'm going to have to be my own therapist.
But I need something to keep me on track. So I'm going to blog about it. The possibility that someone else might read about my attempts to negotiate with my brain and find something helpful or interesting in it is a great motivator for me, even if nobody does end up reading it. (I was kind of doing something similar on Tumblr for a time, but now I want to commit to it, and committing to regularly logging in to Tumblr is the last thing I need to be doing if I want to fix my daily routine.)
So that's one thing I plan to do with this blog. There will definitely be other types of posts.
