Autistic Honesty?

 It is a fairly known fact that autistic people are more honest on average than most neurotypical people, sometimes described as honest to a fault. This has a lot to do with how much is already going on in our brains and that coming up with a lie and making that lie believable and durable is much harder than just telling the truth and dealing with the consequences. Some people like our honesty while others find it socially off putting.  I had a great manager once that would come to me when she really wanted the truth about things happening in my section at work because she knew that I wouldn't make things up or gloss over anything.  She knew that if I gave a compliment, that I really meant it. But not everyone enjoys that type of honesty from us, especially those coworkers who would have preferred me to tell white lies that would make things more socially acceptable. 

The one area that we autistics have a hard time telling the truth about is internal things about ourselves, like feelings, emotions, and needs, especially if we were late diagnosed and went thru our childhood and into adulthood before knowing why we were so different from everyone else. Telling the truth about what is external and visible is easy, but telling the truth about internal things is hard for many reasons and here are just a few examples.

First, we often don't know what the truth is or how to communicate it properly to others. Communication is one of the biggest things that we struggle with. We are so different from most of society that we struggle to make sense of ourselves when we have no understanding of why we are different and that it is okay to be different and need different things.  When we can't make sense of it ourselves, we have no chance at being able to communicate it to those around us

As undiagnosed autistics, we were taught by society that what we felt or did that was different than normal was wrong. We couldn't trust ourselves because they knew more than us in so many other things, so they must also be right in telling us that we were wrong. In order to try to become right in the eyes of society, we had to conform to their ways and suppress our needs in order to not make trouble and draw attention to ourselves. We are always trying to change ourselves to make life easier for everyone else and we often never have the favor returned because society isn't trained to do that.

We were taught that fidgeting or stimming past a certain age was inappropriate, unnecessary and disobedience. "Children are to be seen and not heard." If we couldn't control our own bodies and impulses and hold still and be quiet in public, then we were being bad and giving a bad reflection on our parents and impacting their reputation negatively. We were never given the chance to learn in childhood that our stimming actually helped us to regulate our emotions, especially in stressful situations. It was never taken into consideration that we have different needs and that society's rules were actually hurting us. 

Eye contact is also an area where we are told that we are wrong. Eye contact in typical society is "necessary " in order for you to be paying attention. For us autistics, forcing us to make eye contact can actually prevent us from paying attention because we are so focused on the eye contact and controlling our behavior that we miss can everything that is being said. Forcing eye contact can actually become physically painful to us. Some associate eye contact with intimacy because it is the window to our soul, so eye contact can be an invasion of privacy unless they are close to you and want to open up themselves to you.

We can actually pay better attention when our hands and eyes are busy with mindless things like stimming and fidgeting. I can do lots of things while listening and paying attention. Why else would we have radios in the car to listen to while we drive? It isn't just for the passengers, but for the driver as well because there is always a driver, with or without passengers. I like to listen to podcasts while working and I am often playing games on my phone while watching TV or a movie. If I do nothing with my hands while listening and/or watching, I will fall asleep, even if my mind is totally engaged. 

So many greetings, like "how are you today?" are insincere because 99% of the time they don't want the truth, they are just being polite, and they just want us to be polite back. If we were to answer honesty, we could be rejected and shunned in a world and society that we are already struggling to live in. We feel rejection deeply, oftentimes more deeply than the average person, because we have been rejected so much and we put so much mental energy into being accepted, but we have very little success in comparison to the average person. 

Having to hide our true selves for so long in order to fit into the neurotypical mold for years on end can and will lead to a breakdown and autistic burnout and a point where we can no longer keep up the neurotypical facade for extended periods of time. We also need lots of recovery time whenever we do have to use that facade. We lose the ability to do certain things anymore, even things that we love and want to be able to do. Our increased sensory sensitivities make life extremely hard in ways that are not visible to the outside world.

We are more sensory sensitive to things around us, so if something is bothering us, but not bothering those around us, we are told to just deal with it and that we are causing problems or being annoying, even though we are trying to cope with so many things in life that make our lives so hard. That one sensory thing could just be the straw that breaks our back and sends us in a meltdown or shutdown tailspin. Too many of these things can lead to autistic burnout which can last for many months or years. Coming out of autistic burnout is extremely hard, especially without help, and I am still stuck in autistic burnout myself. Autistic burnout increases sensory sensitivity, so it is like I am stuck in an endless cycle right now of just trying to survive life.

So, it is hard for us to tell the truth about ourselves internally because society has trained us that we must be wrong if we don't line up with what they say is right. So, we not only lie to others, but also to ourselves because that is the only thing that makes sense because that is how we were trained by society to think and act. When we discover our diagnosis in adulthood and learn what is really happening with our brains, we start to work on overriding our training and try to find and tell the truth about our internal selves. It isn't always accepted by those around us, but now we have the support of others like us who can validate the truth that we learn about ourselves. It is a hard road to travel that most people will never truly understand, but I hope this helps.