I posted a few days ago that I’d be coming back with some different content.
When I started this blog, I had made a lot of personal break throughs, but a lot was in flux. A lot still is in flux, but things are becoming clearer.
I’m still learning how to fully experience a lot of nuances that are inherently intuitive for most. I still struggle to give people compliments that might make them blush. I still often am confused by social situations.
Even though I, for the first time in my life, am having moments of clarity where I get to experience many of the emotions that I couldn’t conceptualize a year ago, a lot is in progress.
The “feelings first” writing style is therapeutic for me, but it’s not natural, and it also leads to a lot of uncomfortable internal debates over how detailed I should be when writing about some of these things. It’s still a very raw thing to do.
I think, instead, I have a format that can be therapeutic for me and potentially helpful to others.
As I have said prior, I work in technology. I am also neurodivergent. Unfortunately, I’m also learning that many of the issues I chalked up to autism or other things have been PTSD. This has been life-changing – it’s like I have a key to certain rooms for the first time. Another major break through has been ChatGPT and AI.
I’ve been using a premium GPT subscription to help me work through many of my biggest issues. Many have differing views on AI, including whether it should be used for mental health assistance. That is fine. Let me be extremely transparent and clear that any AI can give patently wrong answers (“hallucinations”), and anyone using it needs to keep that in mind. It also is not a replacement for therapist.
I am very systems-based in how I think. For example, instead of memorizing where the bowls and plates are in the kitchen, I know that they go in alphabetical order form left to right. I can almost intuitively feel when code or data are right. If I have an autistic super power, that’s probably it.
Given this, I have found the use of AI to be life-changing. It’s the ultimate pocket accommodation tool for me. I’ve had some amazingly helpful rabbit hole conversations with ChatGPT in which I’ve been able to have exchanges about my past, my future, and, most importantly, why I feel and think certain ways. Please note, I also have been working with a phenomenal therapist who has encouraged this approach and even helped me come up with new prompts and topics.
ChatGPT has served as both a researcher and as a first line coach during particularly difficult moments, when I might be experiencing an acute PTSD attack.
What I’m planning to do with this blog is to summarize some of these exchanges into privacy-friendly conversations, explain what I learned, and potentially start laying out system frameworks for some of these.
This also, conveniently, happens to line up perfectly with my blog’s title, Debugging the Spectrum.
Just an update. I’ll be getting back to posts soon. A lot of things have shifted, and I think my content should too. My personality is better suited to discussions describing experiencing the world through a neurodivergent lense. This will be from both a sensory perspective and even some of the mental automations I’ve used. I’ll also talk about the difficulties they have caused despite being a necessary crutch at times.
someone you trust asks you for a favor because “I’m counting on you!”
Someone responds to criticism by laying out all the ways your criticism hurt them (victim blaming)
You’re asked to do something unethical or unreasonable at work because “we’re a family and families have to do what needs to be done sometimes!”
These are emotional “hooks”. I am not a therapist, so do not consider this a formal definition, but a hook is something that will reliably work to tap into your emotions. This makes you less rational in the face of choices and decision making. They are used by everyone (yes, everyone – no one is immune!) at times, but particularly manipulative individuals understand how to weaponize them.
The manipulator also understand that well-intended people face moral dilemmas that they don’t. If you tell me, “do this for me or I’ll be really hurt”, I, like most of us, will have a fight or flight moment. How we respond next is crucial. We have four options:
Fight:
This is what happens if we’ve been going along with toxic behaviors for way too long.
Ever “have enough” and explode in an irrational way that was wrong?
Flight
Get out of the situation – do this if possible. When you feel that fight or flight response kicking in, don’t engage. Find a neutral way to end the conversation and find some space to process it.
Freeze
Do not engage, but do not address it. You’ve decided your best bet for survival in this moment is to play dead, hunker down, and wait for the crisis to be over so you can regroup.
Fawn
“if you can’t beat em, join em”
This is the pattern familiar to anyone who’s been in toxic relationships.
Pretend nothing is wrong, concede to the other person
No one can tell you what the right response is. What’s right for a struggling worker with 4 kids who can’t tell their boss no may be different from what’s right for somebody with more economic resources.
But knowing about these responses and being intentionally aware of your choice is the key to enormous empowerment.
Fawning to avoid immediate harm to yourself but knowing exactly why you are doing it – to survive while you figure out how to get out of the situation – puts the decision making back into your court. Don’t underestimate that. We cannot make competent decisions in any area when we are trying to make sense of a situation. We are just reacting and hoping something works.
Contrast that with realizing you are being abused and working toward an exit strategy while protecting yourself. It’s quite different. Now, while you don’t have control over the situation, you do have a plan. Plans are the difference between hope and hopelessness.
As an example: Employers in the US have no idea what is about to happen economically, and as a result, they are shifting all risk and anxiety to their workers. They want their employees to believe that it somehow is on them if giant corporations fail because worker morale was low.
That was a bit of a detour into fight or flight, but here’s why it matters – recognizing when we’re going into that mode can prevent anyone from “hooking” us with manipulation.
Google “fight flight freeze fawn”. Now, read about all the common symptoms.
If any of those symptoms start, there’s a good chance you are being manipulated. This is very different from getting objectively bad news. Bad news evokes an immediate negative reaction. Fight or flight is much more subtle. You feel absolutely paralyzed by a situation you don’t yet fully understand. that is ok.
Now you know what do to. You’ve been here before. You are being manipulated. Manipulative people operate on a shockingly small number of rules. You can use this to your advantage.
Now, figure out whether you should fight, flight, freeze or fawn based on the danger level in the moment.
Don’t get hung up on choosing the “right” answer. Just start being more aware and making the choice yourself. What you will find is that just like interest, confidence and power compound. Your decision the last time will help make the decision the next time easier. It will always be break throughs and set backs, but you will start finding that even the choice you are able to take in the moment becomes the one you couldn’t make earlier on. Maybe the first time, all you could do was fawn again but tell yourself “Not forever”.
Don’t wait for an outcome. Outcomes are the result of a thousand small moments. You can start having those moments right now.
In one of the final scenes of the film, Henry Hill testifies against the Mob. He describes his excessive, materialistic life before he was arrested.
Then he looks at the camera and says “Now it’s all over”.
Although I’ve never been in the Mafia, I recently had my “It’s all over” moment.
First, a bit of background.
I’m a male in my late 30s living in a Midwest city in the US. Today, I work in the tech industry. On the surface, I don’t have a bad life. I’m married to a wife of many years who I love, and we have pets that we adore. We have a decent household income. We have a decent house with a reasonable mortgage. By traditional metrics, we are doing well.
Yet it didn’t feel that way. Something has felt “wrong” for a long time. I am analytical and tentative to a fault. It took me over a decade to find peace in admitting that I hate the traditional Western career. I do not share the values of modern corporate society. I spent years afraid of letting down others around me by not being able to meet their material needs, but instead I was isolated, exhausted, and letting down the very people who I had catastrophized about letting down.
Although I studied an artistic field in college, I pursued a non artistic career out of school. I did this for a number of factors, all being logistical. I’m unsure what the right choice was then, but the end result, years later, was an increasingly empty existence.
My only way to cope with the pressure of feeling like I had no option but to keep pushing forward in this career was either unhealthy stimulants or emotional blunting to the extent I felt nothing. This was severely impacting my relationships. I was losing the ability to even experience anything other than an endless drive to pursue the next thing.
I had used the “superpower” of neurodivergence (more on that shortly) – hyperfocus and the ability to go deeply into a field of study – to achieve a pretty decent level of career accomplishment.
The only problem was, I didn’t care. The couple of times I have traveled abroad, people with far less were far happier.
As with anything, there have been ups and downs.
The ups:
COVID WFH: you mean I don’t have to be visible and ready at a moment’s notice to have a verbal conversation? SIGN ME UP
My work: I legitimately enjoy the work I do.
But the downs:
You’ll only be doing that meaningful work if it suits the employer. No matter how much they speak of professional development, your role is a cog in a machine. If that machine needs you to do way (or less) more than your role suggests, that’s what you’ll be doing.
As I said, I’m neurodivergent. I love good conversation, but I hate small talk, especially when I can sense that the other person doesn’t care any more than I do. The amount of energy that those sorts of exchanges have drained out of me is immeasurable.
I’ve lost so much energy from shutting down to cope with stress and from expending every ounce before 5 PM that I’ve been unable to enjoy hobbies or leisure even when I’m doing them. I’m always either recovering or thinking about the next goal.
Despite a strong relationship with my wife, I was there for her in the logistical sense – I would even make any accommodation I needed to for defined, objective needs. But I really didn’t know what a functional relationship dynamic looks like.
This has left me a hollowed out human – or humanoid at least – objectively successful but unable to get anything positive out of my existence. Coincidentally, I see this in a lot of world leaders. They’ve reached every “peak” they could have imagined and they’ve “won”, yet they are obviously miserable.
I kept myself so vigilantly on alert all the time to “be a good adult” and never mess up any detail that I was starting to lose cognitive abilities. I was forgetting things. I was frequently getting tension headaches and other signs of severe stress.
About the neurodivergence – I had all the typical early life experiences of autistic adults. I never quite understood conversation timing. As a kid, sometimes I’d get lucky and “succeed” in conversation, but I often wouldn’t. I’ve always had attention issues. I often feel “trapped in my mind”, especially when fatigued, as if I’m interacting with others through an intermediate layer of information processing. I recently was told by two qualified professionals that I’m almost certainly autistic. That initiated a new journey of self discovery beginning about a year ago. There was also a massive amount of PTSD I was hanging onto unaware.
About six months into this journey, I was dealing with a lot before a major illness made me question and re-evaluate a lot of things. During my convalescence, I saw for the first time how miserable I had been, and how miserable my peers were. I really, truly faced, for the first time, all the ways that living for societal expectations and not for myself was destroying my life and my wife’s.
I had to make a change.
It’s easy to make important decisions in moments of duress. For this reason, my “change” has 100 percent been internal. Rather than quitting my job today and declaring the new me to the world, I am starting from the inside .
We are conditioned to immediately find the right job to “fix” our burnout. Sometimes that’s wise. But my career does and should not define me, and it’s going to be a secondary focus.
What I am focusing on is undoing years of neglecting myself and those around me. My focus is:
Learning to be unashamedly human
Learning to be a better spouse by being emotionally present
Learning to appreciate the moment
Learning to navigate the world with a brain that works a little bit differently
….Learning about trains? a joke
As far as career, I have no line in the sand date after which I’m out. What I do know is that this is not the long term path for me. I also know how cold and broken Western society has become, and I no longer have to wrestle with my conscience when others try to gaslight me into prioritizing loyalty to a company over myself or my loved ones. I do not have a career death wish, but I will no longer be complicit. When I see something, I will say something. If that causes consequences, so be it. We’re all going to die, and we’re all going to have regrets. Basic needs matter, and I recognize the economic privilege of living in the Western world despite its flaws, but it’s pretty safe to say that no one regrets not spending more time with their “office family” when they’re on their death bed. Knowing you contributed to someone’s mistreatment, however…that lingers.
Between my autistic traits and my profession, I like analogies. I will use a tech analogy.
I am debugging. Right now, the code is rough, but I at least have some logs working. I know now some of the time what’s wrong. Now, it’s time to use all that data. This was never about “arriving”. It was about filling my years on this earth with fulfillment for myself and love toward others while having fulfilling experiences along the way. If you don’t figure that part out, eventually…you will implode. Put it off and push forward, and you will still implode…just later and much more dramatically.
So this blog is a place to get my thoughts out while I figure out who I am. I’ll try to post regularly, but in the spirit of focusing on the process and not the outcome, I’m not going to follow a schedule. Posts may vary, but topics will include late diagnosed adult autism, navigating modern professional life, and PTSD. I will reference personal experiences, but I will keep details generic enough to protect my privacy.
I made this a blog in case it can be helpful to anyone else.
If I was able to generate income writing content while hopefully helping people, that’s amazing, but I’m realistic, and this is first and foremost a therapeutic outlet and nothing else.
Debugging the Spectrum 