Jennifer Cook O’Toole
Autism Asperger’s Digest | Online Article March 2013
Flip through the geek chic categories on Pinterest, Tumblr, Etsy, and Google, and you’ll see a definite trend: Dr. Who, Twilight, Star Wars, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Harry Potter—all stories of far from perfect, you-and-me-against-the-world heroes. Misunderstood, marginalized, well-meaning underdogs.
Folks on the spectrum know what it is to feel that the odds are never in our favor. We love losers like Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood. We “get” them. Heck, we are them! After all, for those of us on the spectrum, “otherness” isn’t fiction. It’s reality. The way we think, speak, dress, feel, and even move may be a little different. And if it’s not, that’s probably because we’ve learned, through a lot of trials and a lot of errors, how to “pretend to be normal.”
Our deeply felt connection with unlikely heroes makes sense. We’ve been hurt. We want to protect ourselves. To feel safe. Maybe even empowered. But real, humdrum, day-to-day life isn’t soap opera drama or outsider fantasy fiction. In fact, too much protection can do us more damage than good. When we self-identify as the perpetual “other,” we build up walls against real friendship, authentic love, and basic human kindness. We protect ourselves right out of the best things life has to offer.
Evolutionary scientists say animals respond to fear in the way their successful ancestors learned to cope with threats. Generally speaking, mammals will first try to avoid danger, which translates for Aspies as avoiding social situations (parties, dates, job interviews), then comes depression, emotional withdrawal, keeping to ourselves at school or at work, and at home. We may feel that our futures are constrained. And often, we try, as hard as we can, to fly under the radar to be unnoticeable, or to be so perfect and so commendable that no one will criticize, condemn, or chastise us.
If we can’t get away from social rejection, we get aggressive. It’s the old “your best defense is a good offense” plan. What looks like an angry outburst or a zero-to-sixty temper may actually be a protective reflex built upon emotional scars and real insecurities. Heightened memories of past threats will increase the wish to disappear, hide, avoid the conversation, or just flat out quit (flight). Those same memories—of feeling like a failure, unwanted, or hurt—also make us quicker to anger, and with greater intensity. That’s our shield. We are trying to immediately stop what feels like a threat.
This isn’t crazy talk. Our fears are born of repeated exposure to very real threats either to our bodies, our minds, or both. Most Aspies or spectrumites have been bullied (often many times over) or at least ridiculed for our differences. We mess up without realizing it, and then have to deal with the fallout just when we may have thought we’d finally gotten our act together. Without a clear understanding of the why’s or when’s, we negotiate daily social situations that seem random and chaotic, building families, marriages, and incomes upon the relationships we are able to reap in those environments.
It’s easy to see why we’d feel as though we need to keep our guard up. We’re walking through a social minefield with blinders on. Trouble with theory of mind (i.e., reading emotional tones, interpersonal cues, understanding perspectives, and detecting hidden motivations) means that danger feels random, chaotic, and ever-looming.
Traumatized by real experiences, we end up using coping mechanisms that are not in line with present circumstances. We detect threats when none exist, avoiding the unfamiliar to avoid danger, hearing challenge and accusation in the voices of loved ones, and interpreting sincere offers of assistance or kindness as insults and ridicule.
As the saying goes, we are listening to “old tapes playing in our minds” rather than to the present situation. We think we understand others’ intentions, so we are curt or avoid social situations altogether. No one will get the chance, we reason, to disappoint or hurt us. Nor, unfortunately, will they get the chance to delightfully surprise or encourage us.
Why? The truth is that we don’t really know what others will say or do in any given situation. We just think we do. So, we don’t bother to communicate. We assume. We misinterpret. We push them away. And in the process, we cause heartache (for others and for ourselves) that needn’t exist in the first place.
Last week, my son and husband (both Aspies) were playing Legos together. Well, my husband thought they were playing together. Our six-year-old had asked his dad to “play with me.” Dad agreed, heading immediately off in search of Christmas decorations for their Lego castle: bells, lights, that sort of thing. He returned with all sorts of adornments, hanging holly in one place, stringing the bells in another. And the whole while, our little guy sat there, fiddling with a Lego knight and horse, looking as if he would cry.
Gently, I tried to tell my husband that something was amiss. But he didn’t want to hear it. From his perspective, I was interfering, meddling, trying to control things. In other words, my input, though kindly spoken and well-intended, felt like a put-down to him. And he got annoyed. That’s when I used our magic code and said, “Green Shirt.”
OK, brief but important digression. The phrase green shirt came out of a video game my husband used to play. In the game, you act as an American soldier fighting against an urban guerrilla insurgency. Surrounded by enemies who act, dress, and speak just like the good guys, you often cannot tell whom to trust. So, the game can help you out a bit. Occasionally, it will show a red light above a foe to distinguish him from the crowd. Or, it will display a green light above a friend, meaning “Do not shoot! I’m on your side!”
That scenario translates really well to those of us on the spectrum. We need a little help identifying who is, in fact, on our team and is not a threat. Even then, we may need reminders in the moment that those who love (or even genuinely like) us are not out to do us harm. They deserve our attention, our calm, our trust. Green light became green shirt in our all-Aspie house, and a code was born.
I saw my husband bristle when I piped up; he felt under attack, or at least, criticized. That’s hypervigilance. He saw enemy combatant instead of teammate. Now, by saying, “green shirt,” I didn’t make his aggressive feelings evaporate. The code just acted as a sort of reset button to alert him to the intensity of his response and remind him to hear me out with trust. And he did.
I asked our boy why he was upset, based on some body language his dad had missed. It turned out that, as is often the case, neither Aspie was communicating his own mental picture well to the other, which meant that no one ended up happy. Although my husband was running around the house with great love and enthusiasm for decorations to play with the Lego castle, he didn’t realize that our little guy wasn’t actually part of that search.
Our son, however, had envisioned re-enacting a battle from his Lego Kingdoms book; unfortunately, he’d never explained that to his dad. Neither one communicated his ideas to the other, and as a result, Dad felt unappreciated in his efforts and our little guy felt ignored, lonely, and left out. However, once they understood the problem and each other, the kingdom erupted in cheerful Lego craziness.
I get it. It’s very hard to know where people are coming from and to fight the fear that they mean us harm. But if, based on everything you’ve experienced over an extended time, a person makes you feel consistently safe, respects your wishes, and tries to accommodate your feelings, he or she probably deserves a green shirt pass. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything he or she says or believes. It means that, in an imagined battle against the rest of the world, this is someone who is on your team. Do not allow past hurts to cloud your present experience or to see an enemy where none exists. Don’t avoid. Don’t fight. Just “press reset” and listen.
The green shirt code has become our family’s version of “check yourself before you wreck yourself.” Without it, my husband would probably have believed that I was acting as the ever-present Parenting Coach, ready to point out and improve upon any of his imperfections. He would have felt resentful and been snappish, not so good for his self-concept, our relationship, or our son. With the code, he felt loved by his wife, valued as a partner, and adored by his child. Much, much better, don’t you think?
Overriding triggered emotional responses isn’t easy. It’s a skill that takes time and lots of uncomfortable but deliberate choices. We’re all still working on it in our house.
Frankly, friends, here’s the bottom line. While drama is great for Hollywood, setting yourself against the world in real life means setting the entire world against you. That’s exhausting and heartbreaking.
Where there is fear, there cannot be trust: one cannot live while the other survives. And without trust, there can be no love, no possibility, no hope. There are, in fact, questions that are not threats. There are critiques that are not insults. There can even be delight, rather than disgust, in difference, laughter in mistakes, and a whole lot of fun in weird. After all, “normal” has already been done. So, stop. Blink. Think. Breathe. At every person, at every situation—look again. Trust me. Let’s just be different and weird and revel in nerdy fabulousness together. Whaddya say, green shirt….
BIO
Jennifer Cook O’Toole graduated with honors from Brown University and has since studied at the Graduate School of Social Work at Columbia University and Graduate School of Education at Queens University. She won the coveted 2012 Temple Grandin Award, GRASP’s Distinguished Spectrumite Medal, and was chosen for Dr. Tony Attwood’s Global “Top Aspie Mentors Project.” She was nominated for Disney Teacher of the Year Award and named an “Autism Parent Superstar.” Jennifer has been featured by the NPR, BBC World Service, has keynoted internationally, and appears on major national US news shows as the “go-to gal” on autism/Asperger’s Syndrome. She is the author of three books: Asperkids: An Insider’s Guide to Loving, Understanding and Teaching Children with Asperger Syndrome (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2012), The Asperkid’s Secret Book of Social Rules: The Handbook of Not-So-Obvious Social Guidelines for Tweens and Teens with Asperger Syndrome (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013), and The Asperkid’s Launch Pad: Home Design that Empowers Everyday Superheroes (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013).
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