Podcast Show Notes

Episode Title: Beyond Fight or Flight: Understanding Autistic Trauma Responses

Episode Number: 25

Release Date: Sept 14, 2024

Duration: 01:17:02

Episode Summary: In this episode of Now You Know One Autistic, Leah and Moshe navigate the complexities of masking, triggers, glimmers, and fawning in the context of neurodivergent experiences. They challenge conventional views on masking, emphasizing the importance of understanding the 'why' behind social behaviors. The hosts also explore the delicate balance between self-care and societal expectations, offering insights into the challenges and strategies for navigating a neurotypical world.

Key Takeaways

  • Masking & Authenticity: Masking is a common strategy for neurodivergent individuals to navigate social situations, but it can be exhausting and lead to a loss of self. The hosts emphasize the importance of finding safe spaces to unmask and be oneself.
  • Triggers & Glimmers: Understanding triggers (negative stimuli) and glimmers (positive stimuli) is crucial for self-regulation and well-being. The hosts discuss the importance of identifying and managing these to navigate daily life effectively.
  • Fawning & Boundaries: Fawning, or people-pleasing, can be a detrimental trauma response. The hosts discuss the importance of setting boundaries and prioritizing one's own needs in relationships.

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

  • The complexities of masking and its impact on neurodivergent individuals
  • The importance of understanding and managing triggers and glimmers
  • Strategies for setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care

Quotes

  • "You have to develop your own personality. And you have to know who you are." - Leah
  • "Everybody masks, including neurotypical people, just we understand why." - Leah

Resources & Links

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SEO keywords: autism, neurodiversity, masking, triggers, glimmers, fawning, self-care, boundaries, ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, trauma responses, fight, flight, freeze, fawn

Sponsors: The Now You Know One Autistic! Podcast is sponsored by:

  1. ARK Therapeutic (https://www.arktherapeutic.com/) - a leading manufacturer of innovative therapy tools and special needs products! Check them out!
  2. Munchables Sensory Solutions (https://www.munchables.ca/) - Munchables Sensory Solutions Ltd specializes in stylish chewelry for kids and adults. They offer chewy necklaces, bracelets, zipper pulls and pencil toppers. Every piece of chewable jewelry comes with a 90 Day Chew Guarantee. Free shipping within the United States and Canada! Go see what they have to offer!

Transcript

[00:08] Moshe: Hi, I'm Moshe, and I'm autistic.

[00:10] Leah: I'm Leah, and I'm boring. Welcome to the now, you know, one autistic podcast.

[00:16] Moshe: The opinions expressed in this podcast reflect one autistic and one layout and don't necessarily reflect the entire autistic community.

[00:25] Leah: Let's get to it.

[00:31] Moshe: Hi, Leah.

[00:32] Leah: Hi, Masha. Hi.

[00:34] Moshe: How are you?

[00:35] Leah: I'm all right. How are you today?

[00:36] Moshe: I am. I'm doing all right. If you are keeping up with the podcast on a current basis, then you'll see that this podcast episode is being recorded fairly late for a couple of reasons. More than a couple, actually. And if you're just a multitude of reasons, and if you're going back and just re listening to it, then it's right on time. And welcome, and we're happy to have you. So, this episode is being recorded a little bit late, as this week has been a bit challenging for me. I got sick for the first part of the week, and then when I was feeling better, we had this amazing recording. I would even venture to say the best episode we've ever recorded in the history of ever. And of course, I forgot to hit the save button, so it was all gone.

[01:24] Leah: I mean, you have ADHD.

[01:26] Moshe: Did people know it's one of those things that you try to plan for.

[01:30] Leah: It's like the worst kept secret in the entire world.

[01:33] Moshe: Yes. It's like the podcast is called now, you know, one autistic, maybe we should call it now, you know, one autistic who also has ADHD and often forgets things.

[01:43] Leah: Well, a lot of people use the term audhd or authd for what you've got. And I think it's apropos.

[01:50] Moshe: It really is. We have some friends of ours that you may have heard on a previous podcast episode named Adam and Becca at study show on TikTok. And they really started using the OdDhd or odDHD label.

[02:06] Leah: I like to think they got it from us, but maybe not.

[02:09] Moshe: We love Adam and Becca, and the ODDHD is actually very much almost a replacement, because you'll find it's a thing.

[02:18] Leah: That we already came up with, actually, when we first got together, I told you that I think most people who have ADHD have autism, and most people who have autism have ADHD. And you said no. And then over time, eventually, you got diagnosed with ADHD, and you went, well, maybe.

[02:33] Moshe: Exactly. And we find that that happens so often in concert with each other that it's almost.

[02:38] Leah: Doesn't mean everybody. But.

[02:40] Moshe: No, no, no, of course. Cause you know, you know, one autistic, you know, one odd thd person. Anyway, so we'll get into the show. But before we get into the show, maybe it was sort of fortuitous that we forgot to. Who am I kidding? That I forgot to save the last episode?

[02:54] Leah: Because there's no we here, Moshe.

[02:56] Moshe: No, I'm doing this by myself. You're just my imaginary friend. That's not a symptom of ADHD or autism, by the way.

[03:04] Leah: It's a symptom of other things we don't. We're not qualified to talk about.

[03:07] Moshe: No. And if you listen to the greeting, which, you know, we're not medical professionals.

[03:11] Leah: So we're not any kind of professionals. And that brings me around to. I really appreciate that people are reaching out to us especially for help right now, and we're totally happy to make friends with you, talk to you, give you advice, but I just want to put out there again that even though we were, like, super smart and we sound absolutely like we know what we're doing, neither of us is a professional of any kind.

[03:32] Moshe: Yeah. So with our growing fan base, and we're very, very grateful for all of your support, which we, as usual, we'll get into a little bit later in the episode. We've started getting a bit of an influx. It's kind of a trickle now, but hopefully it'll amount to a little bit more people who are writing us in. And there's still some of the usual, hey, great show, or I really like that point you made, but we've also started getting some messages from people who are looking for advice or sharing their situation and asking us for tips. And that's wonderful. It really is. We're really grateful to share our own experiences and some of the things that Leah and I went through at the beginning and the middle and currently and probably for the rest of our lives. But as the intro, you want to.

[04:15] Leah: Be with me for the rest of your life?

[04:17] Moshe: Yes, exactly.

[04:18] Leah: That was autistic romance right there.

[04:20] Moshe: Yes. You know, just kind of offhandedly mention it. But as the intro says, we're not medical professionals. We're not any kind of professional, really.

[04:29] Leah: I mean, we're professional at what we do for a day job, but it's nothing to do with, like, medical or neurological.

[04:34] Moshe: Right. And so I guess what. What we're trying to say is we really appreciate that people are sharing their experiences and we encourage people to keep doing that because it's wonderful to hear other people's experiences. But I just want to reiterate once again that neither of us are licensed professionals. We're not counselors, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, social workers or experts through any learning institution. We're just kind of using our live, our lived experiences and we can offer whatever help we can. But for some of the people that are talking to us, the answer is always going to be, at least in part, you really should speak with a professional about some of the issues that you're describing because we can offer you our advice, but we can't give you anything with any qualified expertise anyway. So that's all to say that I forgot to save last week's episode, but we had a really awesome thing happen shortly after. We forgot to. I keep saying we don't. I forgot.

[05:33] Leah: It's okay, honey. You can say we. Where are we? You probably should have said, did you save the recording?

[05:40] Moshe: You should have. But half the time you have to remind me to put my pants on. Listen to last week's episode for some experiences and.

[05:48] Leah: Okay, so side things, tell them about what happened. Okay, so there's this thing that happens to Moshe and I suspect a lot of other autistic people that when they get sick, their brain just kind of like erases.

[05:58] Moshe: Yes.

[05:59] Leah: So all, you know, all boundaries are gone. They don't remember a lot of anything. Some people will go what we call nonverbal, even though we don't like that term so much. And he ended up going to very sick. He was very, very sick. And he ended up going to the clinic, I guess would be the closest analog.

[06:16] Moshe: Right. The urgent care clinic. A lot of people, regardless of where you're listening to, whether you're in Canada, the states, we have listeners everywhere in the world at this point. But it would be like one step above the, just the walk in clinic.

[06:30] Leah: Like an urgent care clinic where they can actually do like iv's and stuff.

[06:33] Moshe: It's like we're kind of a hospital, but one or two steps below a hospital, we might still send you to the hospital.

[06:40] Leah: Yeah. They don't have like very high tech imaging, but they have everything else. So he went to the clinic on his own because I wasn't doing great either. Still dealing with a back thing from when we moved. And he had a female nurse and she put him in a room. And you thought it would be a good idea to do what, honey?

[06:57] Moshe: So I was sort of fading in and out of consciousness, very, very high fever, very out of it and somewhat immobile because I was in a lot of discomfort. So the nurse came into the room and I was lying on the bed, and she. She said, I'm just going to close the curtain for your own privacy. And I thought, okay, well, you know, that makes sense. And then I either heard and assumed it was referring to me, or I thought I heard. Cause it does happen sometimes where my brain fills in information that may or may not have actually happened exactly the way that I thought it did. I thought I heard, can I get some help in here? I can't do it on my own. And based on the aforementioned curtain closing and my current condition being that the abdominal region, I'd like to point out.

[07:47] Leah: That they could have been speaking in any combination of English, Arabic, or Hebrew at that point. So they might have been saying that they want, you know, a sandwich for lunch.

[07:57] Moshe: They may very well have been. I'm actually quite good in languages, but when I sort of. When I become sick, I sort of descend to the. To the bare minimum of my own functionality, which is basic English, even. And I. My brain thought, well, you know, you're here for your stomach. They close the curtain. They must be trying to do an MRI, or not an MRI, but an ultrasound, like an ultrasound or some sort of examination. And they're going to want me to get the lower part of my body undressed for them. So I. So I used what little strength I had, being, again, quite ill, to lift myself up and pull my pants down, not off, thank goodness, and in preparation. So when they inevitably came into the room and perhaps brought a doctor or an ultrasound machine, they'd be like, oh, wow, thank you so much for helping us out. What ended up happening was one of the nurses came by and pulled the curtain back, and there I was without any pants on. And she looked at me and said, why don't you have pants on? Why are your pants down? And I looked at her and quite innocently said, because I assumed that you were going to give me an ultrasound. And she goes, no, put your pants on.

[09:13] Leah: So now that you hear Moshe's explanation, it actually does make logical sense. Correct. But can you just imagine this partner walking into a room where she's expecting to, I don't know, give you a glass of water or an iv or something, and you're just there with your pants off for no reason, nobody told you to.

[09:30] Moshe: I will mention for the record that in a lot of different countries, it's somewhat uncommon, I guess, in Canada and the US and parts of Europe. But in countries in the Middle east or countries where there are strong, I guess you could say, religious values sort of baked into the society, there is a stratified job market. So subsequently, in almost every clinic or hospital, you will find that nurses here are exclusively female. The vast majority of nurses are women. And that's not to say that it's something that we support or that we think that women can't be doctors. In fact, the doctor that I did eventually see, I saw two of them, and both of them were actually women. But you will almost never see a male.

[10:15] Leah: Yeah, I'm not really sure why, but I guess that kind of makes sense. But you see, male janitors. I'd personally rather be the nurse in the clinic than the janitor, but whatever, that's not for my judgment.

[10:25] Moshe: So I ended up in this clinic where I was very limited in terms of my strength, and I had to be escorted everywhere. I was, like, very lightheaded and I could fall. And while I was pretty out of it, it did occur to me that if I should fall, there would be no way that any of these tiny girls could pick me up and bring me to where I was going. So despite the fact that they were trying their very best by putting their hand on my shoulder or kind of gently holding my arm to guide me, there was no way that they could bear my weight. Hence my decision to do what I thought was, you know, the only rational thing to do and take my pants off so that these two nurses won't have to find a way to, you know, to move this, you know, 250 plus pound guy on their own. So, of course, they. They were quite shocked to pull back the curtain and find that I had my pants off.

[11:16] Leah: So, I mean, this is a funny story just for, you know, giggles for the audience, but also it has a point. So when I say the brain is erased, that would include the ability to mask. Right. So the ability for you to be like, maybe I shouldn't take my pants off in front of these women without them asking. Or your ability to speak Hebrew. You said left. You were demanding to be spoken to.

[11:37] Moshe: I was unable to sort of form the words in Hebrew. I can actually speak Hebrew quite well in another language.

[11:43] Leah: Again, imagine their surprise when he walked in yelling that they had to speak to him in English. And then at the end, he left when he felt better, and he said goodbye to them in perfect Hebrew.

[11:51] Moshe: Yes, it was just kind of one of those by nature things. What else? Yeah, it was quite an interesting. It was quite an interesting week.

[12:00] Leah: So, yeah, that does bring us to the actual topic of the show. So it was a funny story, but it brings us to masking masking, but not just masking. Right. Because everybody talks about masking, but we're going to be talking about, as always, the more controversial aspects of masking and the popular opinions that we don't necessarily agree with.

[12:19] Moshe: Right. So the. The fact that we're a podcast about autism and autistic adults, although lately most more children and just neurodiversity in general, I can honestly tell you that if you look through our, you know, it's getting quite, not vast binding steroids, but it's starting to get a little bit numerous. I think this is episode 26 or 27. I'd have to look back, and we have done at least three episodes now where we talked about masking to a certain extent, ish. Ish. So we're going to do an episode on masking predominantly, and I. We're going to kind of give our own spin to it, and there's certain peripheral aspects of masking that we're going to discuss. But before we do that, I want to take a page out of some other podcasters that I've been listening to lately and do a marketing pitch. Please don't skip ahead because this is actually really cool. On the day that I forgot to save the last episode, we were approached by a friend of ours who we had purchased from a company in western Canada in British Columbia, who sells chewable jewelry. Now, we already have arc therapeutic, which we're very grateful for, but when we were still living in BC, we did reach out to.

[13:32] Leah: We tried to order from them, actually, for our.

[13:34] Moshe: Yeah, so her name is Laura May, and if you go to www. Dot munchables. M U N c h a b l e s ca, you can order from them. They're a canadian based small business. It's actually started by Laura to make things for her child who is teething. And of course, when you have a child that's teething and you start making it in a bit more of a larger scale, then you're going to inevitably end up with people who are like, you know, I have an older child that also likes to chew. And then adults are going to come along and say, yeah, can you make some designs that I can kind of discreetly have on me if I need to? Because sensory's seeking behavior up to and including chewing on things, is not unique to children. It's certainly not unique to teething babies. Our son Avram is very heavy chewer, as you know.

[14:23] Leah: You can listen to the arc therapeutic episode to get more information about that. But yeah, he is.

[14:28] Moshe: And we were we were really excited to partner with munchables. They're a great company, small business out of western Canada. We have many, many, many canadian listeners, and we got some amazing products. We got some pendants that one of which is around Avram's neck, and the other one is actually around our daughter Raya's neck. And not in the order that you would think.

[14:51] Leah: Oh, no. They each got their own preferential design. But Raya's is the cool black and red dragon pendant, and Avram's is the pink and purple kitty pendant.

[15:03] Moshe: Yes. So, Laura and all of our listeners out in, in western Canada, particularly on Vancouver island, will know that we very much support the fact that if a child wants to engage in behavior that's not necessarily gender locked, that that's a okay with us. And Alverm asked us if. If he wanted to take his, you know, pink and purple kitty pendant to school, what would, you know, people say? And I would say, well, just tell them that you like it, and that's all that they need to hear about. It's. It's a wonderful little kitty. It's got some. It's got some texture on it that he really likes.

[15:37] Leah: Yeah. He said it helps him stim with.

[15:38] Moshe: His fingers because of the texture it gives him. It gives him aaa double thing. And Raya loves dragons. Now, the thing that we noticed right away about the. About the products that we got from Munchables, because in addition to those two pendants, we got a really cool bracelet here, and we got some pencil toppers.

[15:55] Leah: We got, as you know, we're a big fan of pencil toppers because he's always using pencil.

[15:59] Moshe: Yeah. Avram is always drawing, always coloring. So these. These things, they go on the backs of. You'll see some pictures on our Facebook. They go on the backs of pencils. You can also put them on your fingers. So these. These actually make some really good, discreet, chewable things where if maybe you're. You're working in an office or you're a guy like me with. With a big beard who doesn't necessarily look like he would, you know, be chewing on a blue robot, you can kind of discreetly stick it on your finger and go wrong, and it's fine.

[16:29] Leah: I.

[16:29] Moshe: The texture is amazing. We absolutely love it. Like, I'm holding the bracelet right now, and it's very solid, but it's also very chewable. Avram has said that he really likes it because it's soft, so it feels good to chew on, but it's tough. Like, it's not something that he's easily chew through. And yes, he has chewed through.

[16:51] Leah: Chew, chew, chewed. No, chewed, chewed.

[16:55] Moshe: True. This is not a podcast on English, thank goodness. But he has chewed through several things, several pendants in the past, and we're very grateful that the Munchables product is very tough while still having a lot of give. So if you do buy them by going on Munchables Ca and sort of give them a good chew. Let's see. Testing live on the air.

[17:21] Leah: Yeah. For those of you who don't realize what he's doing right now, he's chewing on the bracelet.

[17:25] Moshe: No, it's really good. Like, it's, it's very, it's tough. Like there's, there's, there's, there's some give but not too much that you feel like if you gave it your all, you would chew right through it. And there are these little balls here, so, but they're really well attached. And you can put the bracelet on. It does stretch to a certain extent. I have pretty big wrists, but it's really good. And of course, the pencil toppers are amazing, not just if you have a child or, or, you know, someone who's neurodivergent, but if you, you know, if you, if you work in an office and you find that you're chewing on the back of your pen or your pencil or.

[17:59] Leah: Yeah. It's not even healthy to chew on your pen or pencil because it's plastic or wood and paint and it's not good for you. So if you tend to do that, just, you know, order a pencil topper and chew on that instead.

[18:10] Moshe: Go to munchables Ca and order a pencil topper. And, I mean, it says on it, kids, munchables. And there's a really cute drawing of a baby of some sort. But if you buy this, it doesn't matter if you're four or 40, you put this on the back of your pen, back of your pencil, or even your finger, like while you're in school and you're kind of listening to the person talk, you can kind of chew on this popsicle thing or this blue robot or these little Lego piece looking things. And if people ask you what you're doing, you can say that you're chewing on a munchable. Chewable jewelry.

[18:44] Leah: Yeah. And that they should, too.

[18:45] Moshe: And they should, too. So go on. Chewables CA or munchables, not Ca. Chewables is a different company. But Munchables CA is a, is a great company, Canadian owned started by a family, small biz, got to support those out of western Canada, and we're very lucky to be partnering with them. So 20 minutes in, we're getting into the actual podcast, but that's okay.

[19:07] Leah: The actual topic.

[19:09] Moshe: The actual topic. So today's topic was, is, and will continue to be masking triggers, glimmers, and fawning.

[19:16] Leah: So fight and flight.

[19:17] Moshe: Yeah, so we're going to do, we're going to do sort of an overview and kind of go into some of those topics. The, the importance, understanding what a trigger is and what a glimmer is, we'll kind of get into at the very end because the topics are very simplistic in explaining them. And most people know what a trigger is because it's obviously not unique to neurodiversity. People who unfortunately have a phobia or PTSD or some other form of. Not mental illness, well, I mean mental illness but also neurological processing issues will often know what a trigger is, but we'll get into masking. So masking is definitely by far going to be our most complex topic. And you're thinking to yourself, masking, like, I've heard the, like, if you've heard one masking podcast episode, you've heard them all.

[20:04] Leah: No, you haven't.

[20:05] Moshe: Absolutely not. So we'll briefly get into what masking is, and again, if you google what is masking or what is autistic masking and you sort of skip through all the entries about masking tape, you'll get to a bunch of descriptions. So I just kind of picked one at random. We're not endorsing any particular definition. This is just kind of one to get an idea. For those of you that don't necessarily know what masking is, and I'll read it out right now. Autistic masking is when a person on the autism spectrum mimics and uses social scripts learnt from others in order to fit in and to go unnoticed in the neurotypical world, both males and females on the autism spectrum mask, especially when the individual is more aware of their social differences to the neurotypical world. I'll discuss that a little bit more.

[20:56] Leah: Oh, I have so much to say.

[20:57] Moshe: About in a second. Studies show that people on the autism spectrum begin observing and masking from as young as six months old. We'll also talk about that in a few minutes. And masking often becomes automatic and a natural way of functioning with the person on the spectrum not knowing that they are doing it. So masking.

[21:15] Leah: Right. So here's the thing that I have to say about that. The first thing that jumped right out at me is that all the professionals, a lot of neurotypical people, a lot of people don't understand what an autistic is. Even a lot of autistics think that autism is characterized by an almost complete deficit in social interaction and social understanding. What's kind of messing me up about masking in general is that in order for you to observe, follow, and even mimic a person, you have to have a really great understanding of social aspects. Actually, what you're missing for the autistic person is something else. But what is that thing that you're missing in terms of being able to consistently do or easily do or automatically do the social things that a neurotypical person or somebody who was brought up neurotypical like me would do?

[22:06] Moshe: So what I like to refer to it as is the why factor, because masking as we're describing it is, I won't say unique, but it's specific as far as this topic goes to neurodivergence.

[22:19] Leah: But that's not true. I explained to you, everybody masks.

[22:21] Moshe: But masking in general, as we talked about a few seconds ago, is something that babies do.

[22:28] Leah: Everybody mask. It's just that I understand why I'm doing it and you don't. So it's not automatic for you.

[22:34] Moshe: Right. So studies show that people on the autism spectrum begin observing and masking from as young as six months old. I disagree with that. Not so much that the children begin observing and masking as young as six months old, but that it's unique to people on the autism spectrum. Because if you know anything about developmental psychology, which again, I'm not an expert on anything for that matter, but babies mask.

[22:58] Leah: They mimic.

[22:58] Moshe: They mimic. Masking is the wrong word. They mimic. They don't necessarily know why they're doing what they're doing. They just know that when they do it, it obtains a reaction.

[23:10] Leah: Yes. And for a lot of autistics, you never leave that stage. Right. So, for example, Moshe can think to himself, Leah really liked when I brought her home, I don't know chocolate. So I'm going to bring her home chocolate again. He knows the what? I bring home chocolate. Leah gets happy. Leah smiles at me, makes me happy.

[23:27] Moshe: Right?

[23:28] Leah: Whereas I would be like, oh, you know, leah once mentioned to me that she really liked chocolate. And I remember that she likes this kind. And it's really nice to bring someone chocolate because it shows you that they care about them. And it's not that you don't care about that stuff. It's just that it's not really part of your thought process. Your thought process is actually really simple, kind of like a baby's. Like when I smile at mommy, mommy smiles back at me.

[23:48] Moshe: Right. We talked in the last episode about the different interpretations of when a very small baby smiles. They used to say it was just gas. Some people say, the really optimistic people say, well, they're clearly showing joy at the sight of their parents. I would say that the majority opinion remains still that it is a reaction to positive feedback. When I make that expression with my face, the other person expresses themselves in a positive way. Ergo, if I keep making that expression, they will express themselves positively to me.

[24:23] Leah: Right. And I agree with that. And therefore kind of makes my point that you and Avram, as opposed to not having an understanding of social graces, let's say you have a hyper understanding of it. Because I'm thinking about him even when he was a baby and at a month old, he was doing things like smiling and winking and laughing and giggling because he was mirroring us. And that was clearly a skill that he was going to need later in life. Does that make sense?

[24:51] Moshe: It absolutely does. And in general, it is completely inaccurate, not just in general, but in practice. It is completely inaccurate to state that autistics and autism in general as a disorder is characterized by a lack of understanding.

[25:08] Leah: And you as an adult, I've never seen somebody so good at masking. To be honest with you, you can almost literally put on a different person. It's not just a face mask. Your whole everything changes, but you can't maintain it for very long. It's exhausting for you. So you want a businessman. Moshe can be a businessman. You want a cool, hip, you know, uncle type. Moshe can be that. You want whatever. He can put that on because he's studied all of it, but it's exhausting for him. Eventually, he has to unmask and relax, which is another part of the topic that we have to discuss.

[25:39] Moshe: So we'll kind of, before we get into the characteristics and talk a little bit more about it, we'll address. One of the people that many feel is the father, as it were, of masking is ole Ivar Levas, probably butchering his name. He was a norwegian american psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, most popularly known as UCLA. And he is seen as one of the fathers of basically conditioning, what we now know as teaching how to mask autistic children. He is seen as one of the fathers of Aba, and he did a lot of research, such as it was, on what he called applied behavioral analysis, which is Aba, to teach autistic children how to behave through prompts, modeling and reinforcement. And what he had to say was, you see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense. They have hair, a nose and a mouth, but they're not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person. And obviously that quote is incredibly offensive because it completely dehumanizes autistics in general. And, you know, we're not going to go too much into Aba because that's kind of its own controversial topic.

[27:05] Leah: To me. That is horrifying. It's not just, you know, insulting or inappropriate. It's horrifying that somebody actually thinks this way because you had no such thing as Aba, because you had no diagnosis. And as I recall when I met you at about seven years old, you were a fully formed human being with your own personality and everything. Avram the same. And I'm going to discuss Aba real quick. So the first thing is it does stand for applied behavioral analysis, which is considered still or up until recently, the gold standard treatment for autism. What does AbA look like? It literally teaches masking behavior, which is something that's kind of not necessary because if the autistic cares to fit in, they're going to do it anyway. It's like a survival tactic, but it demands sometimes that lower functioning autistics who can't mask, do masking behavior, and they achieve this by training them like a dog. So if you don't do the thing, it could be anything. Go to the potty, look at me in the eye, take turns, eat the thing. If you don't do the thing, you get punished by having something you like taken away or getting, you know, put in isolation. And if you do the thing, then you get a reward, literally like a dog treat. So they'll give you a smarty or, you know, some sort of a candy. And they tried to get us to have Avirman Aba. And I did some research, and as soon as I saw what it was, I said absolutely nothing. And that's how I learned it's the gold standard treatment because I had his not behavioral psychologist, but his developmental social worker, I think, tell me. Well, you have to have it. It's the gold standard. And I said, no, thank you.

[28:36] Moshe: Right. So the idea that masking is not only something that is desirable, but something that should be trained from a very young age is. It's one of those things that has the big picture. Right. But the details completely wrong, because what we now believe or what most people now feel depending on who you talk to. And again, that's something else that I want to get into really quick, is that for autistic children, the goal is not to teach them how to behave. The goal is to teach them what is expected of them and then have the world try to understand that they are autistic.

[29:18] Leah: Also, I don't mean to be controversial, and this is one of those controversial things I'm going to say. Your job is to teach them how to care.

[29:24] Moshe: Right.

[29:25] Leah: An autistic's natural state is actually not to care about other people. Sometimes they don't even care that much about themselves. You know, it's such a pain in the butt for me to eat. I'll just starve myself. You know, I have to distract myself to go to the bathroom. I won't go. It's hard to shower. I won't shower. So if they're in that state where they don't even necessarily care about themselves, you definitely have to teach them to care about and prioritizing other people. It's a whole thing, right?

[29:49] Moshe: And it's important to teach children how to behave. Like that's. And this is not unique to autistic children. This is unique to all children. You should teach all children how to behave. And one of the things that I talked to le about early on is you can't necessarily see autistics like a unique segment of society. They just happen to be people with different needs or different expectations or different ways of experiencing things. And just like we told one of Avram's teachers a couple of years ago, you know, he's autistic, so he's not always going to be aware of where he is and what he's doing and how he's behaving, the volume that he's using when he's talking. And the teacher said to us, well, what do we do if Avram gets up and starts walking around the middle of class? And we said, tell him to sit down? Like it seems so obvious, like, don't go. Well, he's autistic, clearly, you know, this is what he needs to do. No. What would you do if any child in the class got up and decided to start wandering around in the middle of your lesson? You would say, excuse me, could you please sit down. Now with Avram, you might have to say it five or six or seven or eight times, but it's the same expected result. If you treat him like, if you accept that he's autistic, but still treat him like you would treat other children, then you can kind of have almost the best of both worlds. And I do want to mention, for the sake of not necessarily throwing doctor Lovas under the bus, but his research on conditioning, unfortunately, also did extend to a very unfortunate project in 1974 called the UCLA Feminine Boy Project. And he attempted to use his ABA related techniques to train what was seen as feminine male children on how to be more boy like.

[31:38] Leah: I don't want to go there.

[31:39] Moshe: And that is essentially what we now refer to as conversion therapy. And, you know, that doesn't work.

[31:46] Leah: Neither does ABA. And honestly, the majority of the treatments for autism, if they're not for the autistic person, fail after time. So anything that you do that you're forcing them to do, once you stop applying the pressure or applying the therapy, they'll just go back to their baseline anyway, because they're people with their own baseline. What a shock, right?

[32:04] Moshe: And you can train your child how to behave, but going back to the original point that I was making, you have to also teach them the why.

[32:13] Leah: Right? So it's less about teaching them how to behave and more about teaching them to care. Because when someone cares about themselves and other people and how they come across, they'll automatically begin to do the behaviors.

[32:24] Moshe: Exactly.

[32:24] Leah: You may have to explain to them the correct behaviors. If they're autistic, it may not be preloaded, but they'll remember to. So I come back to my first example. Why does it matter that I understand why I'd be getting somebody chocolate? And Moshe just understands that he's getting the chocolate, because if it leaves his mind to get the chocolate, he'll stop doing it. And then that causes, you know, whatever kind of conflict that is. Whereas if I understand why I'm doing it, I'm going to just automatically continue to do it.

[32:50] Moshe: Right. Like, how does it affect me? What am I getting out of it? And that's very important in understanding why, because it is. When, when I was studying ancient Rome in school, we learned that in ancient Rome, way back in the before times, roman children were sent to school. Like, we would send our children to school, but they typically learned by rote where it was not important that the children knew what they were learning, but that what it. What it was like. Like, they didn't learn, necessarily that c a t spells cat. They learned that cat looks like this, dog looks like that. I mean, it was in Latin, so it might have been something else, but. And, you know, they learned how to.

[33:36] Leah: Recite facts, they learned how to memorize.

[33:39] Moshe: Rather than they learned how to memorize the word without understanding what they meant. I know what that word is. I don't know what it is.

[33:46] Leah: Sounds like us reading Hebrew sometimes because you can sound it out, but you don't necessarily know the definition of the word exactly.

[33:52] Moshe: You don't know what it is, but you know what it says. So they thought it was important because, you know, they would go home to their parents and go, you know, Plubius Maximus, guess what I learned? I learned how to spell these words.

[34:06] Leah: And I know I always used to call my father Plubius Maximus, too, or.

[34:10] Moshe: Whatever, and the result was that they knew how to spell the words, but they didn't know what they meant. And that kind of has to do with the idea of masking. You're teaching a child to copy how someone behaves, how someone acts, what to do in certain circumstances. When you're here, you should do this. When you're here there, you should do that. When you're in school, you should sit quietly. But they don't know why they're doing it. They just know that they have to do it, or there's going to be negative consequences, or they have to behave this way in order to get friends, but they don't know why they're doing it. They just know that the actions that they're doing in that particular order result in a positive result.

[34:49] Leah: Right? And that comes back to my original point, that everybody masks, including neurotypical people, just. We understand why.

[34:55] Moshe: Right?

[34:56] Leah: So a lot of times I'll hear autistic people, especially if the younger, sort of less savory rah rah TikTok. You have to accept everything about me because I'm an autistic and I'm a cat. Now, people will say that neurotypical people are always lying to each other. Theoretically, yes, it is a lie. But what it is is it's actually a mask, but it's a mask that we understand the meaning behind or that we understand the reasoning for. So I'll give you an example. When I had coffee with one of my friends the other day, I went into the cafe, and they sell bagels there. And, you know, sort of on a different topic, I'm kind of a bagel snob. Right, honey?

[35:32] Moshe: Yes. You definitely like your bagels.

[35:34] Leah: Not just that I like them, but I know a lot about them. I can talk to you about bagel culture, from where different bagels come from. And I make, in my humble opinion, the best bagels. And also Montreal makes the best bagels, or they used to, anyway. So I walk into this place and they say, wow, it's great that you're from Montreal. We make Montreal bagels here. And my first instinct was to say, no, you don't. But I understood that if I said that, then that would cause a confrontation. And I wasn't there to talk about their bagels, and I wasn't there to, like, I wasn't going to improve their bagel situation. Was I going to work for them? Was I going to give them some advice? No, I was there to have coffee with my friends. So what did I do instead? I went, oh, yeah, I'm sure they're great. And I smiled, nodded, I ordered one and I ate it. Is that technically a lie? Yeah. Would an autistic who doesn't understand at all why that kind of interaction is important say that I was lying to her? Absolutely. But I was masking or lying to her for the express purpose of avoiding a confrontation. That wasn't necessary, because I wasn't there for that. I was there to hang out with my friend. Are you following so far, moshe?

[36:35] Moshe: Yes, absolutely. So again, what happens there is, you know, the why of what you're doing.

[36:41] Leah: Exactly. So I just automatically did what you would call masking because I didn't want to have a confrontation. The end. It's totally lying. But then when a clueless autistic person comes around and goes, I'm going to call all of you out and I'm going to say how you're all lying to each other. We know. We don't need you to point it out.

[37:00] Moshe: Exactly.

[37:01] Leah: And that's why people are always upset at you. Like, it's just. It's so unnecessary. There was this video with this girl who said, I'm the one who calls everybody out all the time because I'm autistic, and everybody neurotypical around me lies to each other all the time, and I'm the one who's going to text everyone and tell them the truth. We don't need you to. We know the truth. It's just a nicety. And then we move on.

[37:21] Moshe: Yes, there is a such thing as being technically right, but functionally wrong. Right, because you're correct in how you feel, but you're wrong in how you are presenting that.

[37:35] Leah: Yes, but we already know the call is coming from inside the house, Moshe.

[37:39] Moshe: Right? I mean, we know people in our life that we don't necessarily always like.

[37:43] Leah: Does my *** look fat in this dress? No, you look great. I, like.

[37:47] Moshe: You're not gonna. You're not gonna tell? Well, my friend appreciates that. I always tell them, you know, the truth. Do they, though? I mean, do you really have to always be the one to have that discussion, too? You know, and we talked about in past episodes, about how you had to basically teach me a checklist, you know?

[38:05] Leah: No, we didn't, because that was in the episode you deleted, so you have to talk about it again.

[38:09] Moshe: Okay. So in order for me to. We're going way back. I had the very common habit as an autistic, of just always saying what I felt, and we had to discuss. We had to go through a flowchart. And your brain, the neurotypical brain, I'm told, has a version of this already.

[38:29] Leah: Yes, I have mine preloaded, and it automatically filters before things come out of my mouth.

[38:33] Moshe: But the neurodivergent brain doesn't necessarily always have it. So it goes like this. I want to say this thing. The first question I ask myself is, is it valid? Is it even correct? Is what I'm feeling or thinking true? If not, then it's no longer like. I don't even. I certainly don't even want to say it. If it's true, is it going to hurt someone's feeling? If it's not, then maybe it's okay to say it. But if it is, the next question is, am I prepared to deal with the fallout from that? Am I prepared to hurt someone's feelings? Is it worth hurting someone's feelings? It is a situation.

[39:07] Leah: Is it important?

[39:08] Moshe: Yeah. Is it important to the function of our life as we know it or our relationship that they know this information? If it's not, maybe you don't have to say it, or at least not right now. Or maybe workshop it a bit and see if you can come up with a more nice way to say it.

[39:24] Leah: A really cuter version of that. Do you remember the first Shabbat? We were here, and I hadn't quite figured out the oven yet, and I overcooked the chicken. And I was like, I overcooked the chicken. You're like, yeah, the chicken is dry and disgusting. And everyone else was like, moshe, it's fine, mom. It's great. You did your best. And I was like, no, it's disgusting. Exactly right. It wasn't necessary, but it didn't cause consequences, because I knew you were right.

[39:48] Moshe: No, it was one of those situations where it wasn't necessarily necessary that I say it, but it was true and it wasn't important enough. And I know you well enough to know that if I say it, you'll go, yeah, you're right. Because, you know cooking and you already know that it's gross and you're not trying to fool yourself. And then once you get to the very end, if you still feel like it's worth saying, the important question is, do you have to be the one to say it?

[40:11] Leah: Yes. Does it always have to be you? Maybe let someone else call them out.

[40:14] Moshe: If it's relevant and it's true and needs to be said, and it's, you know, pertinent to the situation and it may hurt their feelings, but it's necessary for it to be said. Does it have to be you? Does it have to be you? Now, can you wait until maybe after the party that you're going to?

[40:33] Leah: Right. So does it pass all of those filters? And if it does, sometimes there are some things that are really important. Like if someone you cares about has a drug problem, they're not going to like hearing about it, but you should tell them and you should offer to help them. But if somebody that you know, like, they have a hairstyle you don't like, maybe you can, like, not talk about that necessarily.

[40:51] Moshe: Unfortunately, certain people are far more sensitive to certain aspects of their life, and I suffered from that a great deal. And a lot of the time they're either not ready to hear certain things or I know I wasn't, but it was important enough to the functionality of our relationship that we sort of do this now so that we don't have to deal with it later type of thing. So that is essentially the very basics of masking. And we talked about what it is and sort of what are the hallmarks of it, like copying certain things, essentially to break it down. It's doing things that you've observed or that you did by accident that got a positive result and not understanding why the result was gotten, but knowing that if you continue to behave that way, you may continue to get that result.

[41:44] Leah: Which is good in and of itself, but it definitely leads to the you're one of us, but not quite us feeling. So when you're navigating in the neurotypical world, it will eventually come out, because if you don't understand the why or if you don't actually care, then you're going to slip up. You're going to forget. It'll leave your mind. You won't repeat it once or twice or something will happen and then everybody will sort of look at you and go, oh, you're kind of like us, but you're not exactly like us right now. Does that matter? I think that's personally up to the autistic individuals themselves. Do they want to fit in? If they don't want to fit in and they want to, you know, just our example is play video games all day and collect welfare and stay home or live with their parents, that's fine. But do they want, you know, the house, the job, the wife, the kids? Do they want to be able to function in your typical society? Then they have a lot more work to do, unfortunately.

[42:34] Moshe: And that's essentially where it is. And we talked about it again in the famous lost episode.

[42:39] Leah: Now, you wouldn't go to China and say, I refuse to learn Chinese, accommodate me, right? And these neurodivergent people who say, I refuse to learn how to communicate with you, you just have to accommodate me. Remind me so much of that. It's unreasonable.

[42:54] Moshe: And we are going to quickly get into it before we move on because I did say I would. This is what makes you and I very unique in our podcast, because I'm autistic, you're not divergent. And we speak for both sides. Now, there's the side which is purely rah rah rah autistic. And, you know, I'm more rah rah.

[43:14] Leah: Autistic than you are, actually.

[43:15] Moshe: Good on you, and that's great. But there's a lot of content creators out there who are very much of the mindset that says that this is how we are. Y'all have to deal with it. And then you have the other side of the equation, which is very much autistics are so weird and they are so non functional that they have to, you know, figure it out or they'll never get anywhere in life.

[43:40] Leah: Like most things for us, we fall somewhere in the middle, right? You do, you boo. Live and let live it is fine. But then be prepared to deal with the consequences. If you are rude all the time and you're calling people out all the time and you don't know social graces and you don't clean yourself, so you smell and you don't eat properly, and you can't maintain a reciprocal relationship because you only care about yourself, there's going to be consequences to that if that's what you want. How about it?

[44:08] Moshe: Right? And I think to summarize that it's everyone is entitled to be who they want to be and act how they want to act, but what they're not entitled to is to have everyone accommodate them 100% of the time. And that's just a fact. And that's something that me as an autistic can, can honestly say. If I wanted to just lock myself in my room and play video games 16 hours a day, then, hey, that's the life that I've chosen to live. I'm a grown man. I can do what I want, but then I can't turn around and expect my wife to be like, okay, I'm going to raise all the children. I'm going to look after all of the affairs. I'm going to make all the money. And you do you, because that's not reasonable, that's not fair, and that's not going to lead to a very good relationship. And maybe there are spouses out there who are great with that, and that's also good. But at the same time, you have to be able to be with someone who is willing to accommodate the things that you want to have accommodated. And they also have the right to say, I don't. I don't want to accommodate that, but.

[45:15] Leah: It goes the other way. Because we, we joke a lot of times where you say, you've trained me very well, but it also works the other way. You've trained me very well.

[45:24] Moshe: Right.

[45:24] Leah: I've dropped a lot of the pretense of he should know he has to do this. What kind of a grown man doesn't know that? And I'm much more, I can't really think of the word, but I'm much more, I guess, compassionate and patient and calm. I will do things like when you're dumb, ask you what you mean by that, instead of getting angry and triggered. I will. I've learned you well enough to learn sort of what your nonverbal looks are about and just, you know, not always being like, are you okay? What's wrong? What's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because that would annoy you.

[45:55] Moshe: But that comes from experience.

[45:56] Leah: Yes, but I learned I could be like, I'm neurotypical. You have to accommodate me. I'm not going to do that. Right, but I didn't. It goes both ways.

[46:03] Moshe: And I'm disabled. And I'm okay saying that I'm disabled. The d word is a lot like the r word to certain autistics. And that's okay. I choose to use it, because it identifies the fact that I do have challenges and because I'm disabled. There are going to be columns. There's going to be a list of things that I absolutely can do. There's going to be a list of things that I often or generally, or usually can do, but oftentimes with assistance, there are things that I struggle a great deal with, but I can do if they're absolutely necessary, and then there are things that I absolutely can't do, and that is okay.

[46:43] Leah: I had to first accommodate those never going to happen or that never going to happen column, and that caused a lot of conflict because some of those things were initially important to me, I guess. But I had to ask myself, why is it important, and how important is it? Is it more important than you?

[46:56] Moshe: Right. And that's something that you, you absolutely have to consider if you're going to be in a relationship with a neurodivergent, and conversely, if you're going to be in a relationship with neurotypical, because, I mean, it does go both ways. And I, you know, if you're a neurodivergent, if you're autistic and you happen to want to have a relationship with a neurotypical, and you're saying to yourself, she's always meeting with friends and having people over and socializing, it's so exhausting for me. Is that something that you, as a neurodivergent, will be able to deal with because you care about the person?

[47:28] Leah: Work that out. So, for example, in our situation, if I wanted to have friends over all the time, it would be a situation where you could be like, you could have friends over. But is it okay if I pop out for an hour and just be in the bedroom on my phone, and then I can come back and say, hey, like, you can always accommodate one another, right?

[47:46] Moshe: Exactly. Anyway, we're rapidly approaching the hour mark as far as the, the initial bit of the podcast. If you're listening to the podcast now, you're probably listening to the edited version. And if I'm talking about the hour mark and we're at 20 minutes, then you best believe I had to do some pretty heavy editing.

[48:05] Leah: I think so. I think we did pretty good this time.

[48:07] Moshe: But we'll go into the next topic, which is the different kinds of masks, and I'll read a blurb again. You could find these anywhere. We don't endorse any particular definitions. It's just kind of a few things that I found. And they wrote, every autistic is unique. Every autistic has strengths and struggles. The well known quote by Stephen Shore is, if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. And I don't know, that sounds kind of familiar.

[48:33] Leah: A fantastic quote.

[48:35] Moshe: And the only correction I would make is that a lot of people really don't like the person first language. And I think at some point we are going to have to do an episode on that and why person first language is not necessarily ideal or why it's okay. I mean, we'd love to hear your feedback. Continuing along. Just because an artist appears sociable on the surface, it doesn't show the underlying masking. Think a swan. I don't know what this line means. Graceful on the surface, but legs paddling fast under the surface. So anyway, a lot of that is gibberish to me, but I kind of get the nugget. But what the point of it is is we most recently have started to understand four different kinds of math and most jump between all of them. It's not like one person's always this or one person's always that. And it depends on environmental factors. Some people call these masking types. A lot of people, in fact, most people that I've researched in doing the research for this episode call them trauma responses. Take it for what you will. And they are fight, flight, freeze, and fawnitevere. Some people refer to freeze as flop. I think it's a cute word. I don't know if it's necessary. So fight, fight, freeze, or fawn. The four f's at their. At their basis, they are trauma responses because the brain ends up going into survival mode. So the first question then would be, why does the brain have to go into survival mode?

[49:56] Leah: Because it's a perceived threat.

[49:57] Moshe: Right? Because we're not talking about the autistic person happily engaging in their special interests, doing something that they're fully comfortable doing. We're talking about like a new situation, a new response, and something has come up that that's made the autistics person's back get up a little bit. Or at the very least, he's kind of trying to find an appropriate response. So he has to come up with a mask to wear. And the. The five f's were there five?

[50:26] Leah: There were four.

[50:27] Moshe: There were five. But it says here the five f's, I'm not really sure what the fifth f was.

[50:32] Leah: Claimed that flight and flop or freeze and flop were different things, but I don't.

[50:36] Moshe: So we'll get into it. Fight, flight, freeze and fawn or flop and fawn, it doesn't really matter. So the, the two most, I don't know that we'll call them. The two most instinctual responses are fight and flight. You're faced with a perceived trauma. Your first response is to fight. So you are going to respond assertively, or usually aggressively. Avram has a song that he doesn't like, and his initial response to it is to rage against it. That is his go to, yes and no.

[51:08] Leah: So as we've explained to his teacher, he is very self aware. So unlike a lot of other children, never mind neurodivergent children his age, he's very self aware. So he will at first attempt to remove himself for the situation where that song is being played. If he cannot, he is aware that he's going to go into fight mode and somebody's going to get hit or somebody's going to get pushed or somebody's going to get hurt. So we've explained to people that if he needs to leave, if he knows he needs to leave a situation, let him leave.

[51:35] Moshe: Exactly. So he does have a bit of self control.

[51:39] Leah: He's a small boy still, too. I do worry for when he gets bigger.

[51:43] Moshe: Right. And I mean, you probably know an autistic or a neurodivergent or someone who has trauma responses for other reasons. And their go to is fight. Unfortunately, you see fight quite a lot the less control you have over your reactions. So if you are one of our level two or three autistic friends, then perhaps you require a lot more support. And one of the supports you need is regulation. And so when you are faced with a trauma or a difficult response, your go to is to attack or to rage or to yellen or to hit things. Or do you hit yourself or to cause like, an aggressive response? So the definition is all the things that I mentioned. The fight can be physical, it can be, I'm going to hit something or someone or myself. It can be verbal. I have this stimuli, or I have this situation, or I have this perceived trauma, to use the word. And my response is to just start yelling and screaming. And it is very common, as Leah mentioned, if flight is prevented, because if you have enough self control, or even if you don't, it's actually more instinctual to run from something that hurts you than it is to fight it. And the expression is snakes and spiders, with a few exceptions, are far more likely to run away from a perceived threat than to attack it. And they will generally only attack it if they're cornered. Some won't, some spiders and snakes are just, you know, they're not nice. But fight is the response. Flight is the exact opposite. So your perceived trauma is present and you run, you leave the situation, you get up and you walk out and you leave. I'm triggered by large amounts of people, like crowds and stuff. If I'm in a room with a lot of people and they're all sort of coming at me, my instinct is to leave. I have an anxiety response and I just peace out of the situation. Doesn't matter what's happening, but I'm like, I'm done, and then I'm out. And that is the situation that is dealt with by flight. Freeze or flop, I guess, is to do nothing. Essentially, you shut down.

[54:05] Leah: Yeah. So if you're unautistic, it can actually look like they're just sort of staring into space or making no facial expression or going nonverbal, putting quotes around it.

[54:15] Moshe: They go, to use one of the old perceptions of autistics, they go inside themselves. So you are being criticized by your teacher or your spouse or your partner, or you're disciplining your child in verbose way. And instead of reacting, they just sit there and they look like they're either not listening or they are just looking at something else. Flight is or a freeze, rather, I should say. Freeze is interesting because it can look like, as you said, a lack of attention. It can also look like something innocent. Some people employ the freeze response by, like, looking at their phone or playing with their fingers or kind of like looking around. A lot of people, when they are faced with forced social interaction, like a job interview or a lecture or someone directly talking to you, the lack of eye contact oftentimes is a form of the. Of the freeze response. They're just kind of looking down. And it can be because eye contact is difficult, and we've discussed a bit about why that is, but it can also be because I'm feeling traumatized, for lack of a better word. So I'm just going to sit here and I'm going to disappear, and I'm going to wait until I feel better. Now, freeze can be the whole response, but freeze can also be a preamble to fight or flight where I'm just going to shut down. But if I keep. If the thing doesn't go away, I'm either going to lash out at it or I'm going to walk away from it.

[55:42] Leah: Yes. For me, I, again, by all, you know, standards, I guess I'm neurotypical, sort of, maybe, kind of, mostly. But that is my response if I freeze, if I'm sitting there silently, I'm talking to you, I'm staring into space, you're about 3 seconds away from me freaking out and screaming at you.

[55:58] Moshe: Right. And freeze is also a. I guess you could say it is a because.

[56:04] Leah: I have non divergent related trauma.

[56:07] Moshe: Exactly. And this is why these are called trauma responses and not unique to autistics because they're very relatable to other people with like PTSD and other things, phobias.

[56:16] Leah: So the freeze, sitting there silently with tears coming out of my eyes, run, right.

[56:21] Moshe: You don't know what's gonna happen. I've been the recipient of that more than a few times. And the freeze response, it often is a form of self control, but it can also be like the default.

[56:33] Leah: It's an attempted self control in my case, but yeah, I'm sure it is the default.

[56:37] Moshe: For some people, it's like fainting goat response. I'm just going to play dead and hope that they go away eventually. Now, the fourth response is the one that I find personally the most interesting but also the most damaging because it is often seen as a positive response and not a trauma response. And that is fawning. So fawning is defined as people pleasing. So you hear people pleasing, you think, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with making people like you? What's wrong with doing what people ask and getting along with people?

[57:15] Leah: What's wrong with. There's nothing wrong with it. It's when it infringes upon your comfort preferences or well being.

[57:21] Moshe: So I'll read a little graphic here. Autistics are by nature very rules based. And as a form of masking, some of us quickly learn and live by unspoken rules, such as, always please everyone, always be good, never make anyone upset, don't disagree with anyone, or there might be a conflict. Everyone else's feelings don't matter. Your feelings are the only ones that. Your feelings don't matter. Everyone else's feelings, rather, are more important than mine. My feelings don't matter and I am cursed. And this one's the worst one. I am personally responsible for how everyone around me feels. And that comes. That is, when you hear those things, it doesn't necessarily sound very positive, it comes across as very negative. Because especially with the last one, if you have decided through your own trauma that you are personally responsible for everyone else's feelings, then you are going to be the peacemaker in every situation.

[58:21] Leah: You're going to do some bizarre things to make people feel better, believed because.

[58:25] Moshe: It doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. What matters is everyone's happy. And then you end up with this child. This, unfortunately, does happen a lot in cases where children are, you know, living with abusive parents. They just want mom and dad to get along. They don't care what's going on. As long as everyone's happy, it's perfectly okay. And sometimes if dad has to hit mom and mom ends up going to a room, at least everyone's happy now. At least there's no more conflict. I was very much of the, of the fawning response. You would come to me and you'd be like, hey, I have, I'm having a hard time paying my credit card bill. Sure. I don't need food. Here's some money. You can, you can pay for your credit card bill. You know, you're, you're wrong and I'm right. Yeah, no, you're probably right about that. I'm obviously wrong about everything, so why would I ever be right? Like, clearly, what I think is never right. So you're always right and I'm always wrong. And that is clearly the way it's going to be. It allows you to be gaslit, it allows you to be manipulated. You end up in a codependent relationship. And the follow up for all of those things is a lifetime of trying to fawn often results in an adult who has no idea what boundaries are, who doesn't know how to speak up for themselves, who ignores constantly their own needs, who melts down at the first sign of conflict or confrontation, who tolerates unsafe situations and mistreatment, and who doesn't know how to express disagreement.

[59:56] Leah: Right? So the fawning response for me, because I did have the perfect child syndrome, I really, really did, for much the reasons that you expressed to me. The fawning response, even now, as an adult, is so cringeworthy to me that I actually don't even like to admit that it exists. So even if Avram is trying, for example, too hard to please you, I ***** at you about it. I'm like, he's trying too hard to please you. Be nice to him. It is, it is just so painful for me that even when you brought it up as a topic, at first, I said I didn't want to talk about it because it is so cringe.

[01:00:31] Moshe: It's something that, unfortunately, we both have a lot of experience with.

[01:00:35] Leah: And fortunately, I needed a lot of therapy, and it still is a daily struggle for me to stay out of it and to continue to put at least some of my needs first and to not try to please everybody and do everything for everybody. And, you know, whatever, for everybody. Because of the first five to ten years of my life that instilled that. It's a lifetime battle to stop it.

[01:00:56] Moshe: And it really comes down to the ability to believe, and it's like an honest thing, that you have the right to set boundaries. You have the right to disagree with things that you don't necessarily support. You have the right to not tolerate unsafe situations.

[01:01:14] Leah: It's extremely sad, but it took me two sessions, not one, two sessions with an extremely expensive therapist to learn how to start to say no to people, not to learn how to say no to people, not to learn how to helpfully do it, to learn how to start to try to kind of say no to people.

[01:01:32] Moshe: And it is still a daily struggle for me. I mean, I've gone through a lot in my life, and even to this day, I still have this instinctual response that if someone asks me for something, I'm going to say yes to them, because if I don't, they'll be mad at me. And, of course, the thing that you actually taught me a lot about was if they ask for something unreasonable and you say no, and then they react badly to you, that is not a fault of yours, that is a fault of theirs. Because you have the right to say no. I mean, within reason. And if you're ever lost, you've said to me, you can always tell me the situation, and I'll tell you what you know, whether or not it's appropriate for you, in that case, to say, no. And I still need help. And I'm not afraid to say that I need help sometimes understanding that it's okay for me to say, no, I don't want to do that, or no, it's not okay that that happened, or no, you can't talk to people like that. And we. Avram and I have had situations because, I mean, we're both autistic and we're both struggling to deal with overcoming the whole fawning response. But when I act badly, when I act badly, and I present enough to know that I'm acting badly, and his response is still to say, it's okay, I forgive you. Don't worry about it. You didn't mean it. Well, to actually advocate for him and say, no, actually, it's not okay. What I did was not appropriate. We're talking about something minor now. We're not, like, talking about anything, like, serious, but, like, if I like, dinner table stuff, like, if I got mad at him for something. And then I thought, whoa, you know what? Maybe that reaction was a little bit too much. And then I'll say, hey, Avram, you know what? I snapped at you before. I'm really sorry about that. And I'll go, it's okay. You didn't mean it. And I'll go, actually, what I did was wrong, and it's okay for you to be upset about that, but I'm trying to explain to you that what I did was wrong, and I'm really sorry about it. And it doesn't have to be okay.

[01:03:33] Leah: But it's very good that it also opens up a conversation, because then we can have the conversation with him that, like, you know, it's not okay for Abba to do it to you. And also, if anybody else does it to you, it's also not okay. It's sort of instilling a little bit of armor in him a bit at a time early on, right?

[01:03:49] Moshe: Because you can't live a life where you're constantly giving in to everyone else. The problem with fawning, and this is the last point I'll make on it, because I could talk about fawning all day, is it like all the other forms of masking, sort of circling back, is a form of dishonesty? Because you have a friend group, and your friend group loves to have pineapple on their pizza, and you hate pineapple on your pizza. So you'll say, hey, I love pineapple on my pizza. And your friend group really likes rock and roll music, and you like classical jazz. You go, I love rock and roll music. And then your friend group says, I want to go watch the new Star wars movie, and you hate Star wars. And you'll go, I love Star wars. And at some point, as you mentioned earlier, you'll end up in a conversation where, you know, they'll. They'll be having a conversation. Go, remember in the. The last Star wars movie, the ba ba ba character, da da da? Remember that? And you'll go, I didn't actually see that movie. You'll go, I thought you said you love Star wars. Like, oh, but I mean, see, in the end, not only are you lying to people, but you're creating a Persona that doesn't exist, right?

[01:04:57] Leah: And then people do feel lied to, and they're actually right to be upset.

[01:05:01] Moshe: Then you can come back and say, well, I only said all those things because I wanted you to like me.

[01:05:06] Leah: And that's insulting to me because my response to you or anybody else would rightly be. Do you think that I'm such a shallow person that I wouldn't have tried to like you anyway?

[01:05:15] Moshe: Right? You have to develop your own personality, and you have to know who you are, and you have to know that what you want is a lot of the time, completely valid. And that's where we get into the balance between your own needs and other people's needs. You can't go fully to your needs because then you become incredibly selfish and no one wants to be around you. But you can't give up so much of who you are as a person and your own personality to try to please everyone else that you don't know who Moshe is or who Leah is or who anyone else is.

[01:05:46] Leah: And also ultimately leads to nobody wanting to be around you.

[01:05:50] Moshe: Exactly.

[01:05:50] Leah: Because the second you're like, I don't like pineapple on my pizza, your friends will rightly look at you and go see, been lying to us for a year. What's wrong with you exactly?

[01:05:58] Moshe: Honesty.

[01:05:59] Leah: We would have been willing to try mushroom pizza.

[01:06:01] Moshe: Yeah, who knows? Mushrooms on pizza is delicious. So that is the basis of the four trauma types. And I think we'll close by going into triggers and glimmers. There's far, far, far more to talk about on this subject, but I think we'll call it here. And before we get into the last segment, we'll just very quickly talk about once again, we really, really appreciate all the love and support that has been shown to our podcast from the very beginning until the present. Thank you so much for subscribing. Thank you so much for sharing our podcast with all of your friends, with your family, if you do, with your coworkers, with people you don't particularly like, because you never know. Thank you for listening to our podcast while you're doing the laundry, while you're cooking dinner, while you're driving to work, while you're falling asleep, or just when you have nothing else to do and you want to listen to Leah and I talk. Thank you to everyone who has written us about anything from the very beginning. Please continue to do all of those things. You will continue to hear ads periodically throughout the episodes. We do have a PayPal link and we do have a Patreon link. I still don't know what we're going to do with the Patreon link. We'll think of it eventually.

[01:07:14] Leah: I'm sure we'll do that every week.

[01:07:15] Moshe: I know. Hey, suggestions? Maybe throw some things out that you'd be willing to pay for but if you want to tip us, that's the way to do it it to the 91 autistic PayPal. My name is Moshe. You can subscribe to Patreon and eventually get stuff, but if you maybe don't want to, or you're not in a position to, if you listen to the ads that pop up throughout the episode, the advertisers throw money at us and eventually, logically speaking, we would see that money come back to us. But the best way to support us is actually still going to be to download. We recently passed 5000 downloads, which is just incredible. We're probably about halfway or close to it. Up to 6000.

[01:07:59] Leah: Exciting.

[01:07:59] Moshe: It doesn't seem like a lot, given some of those longstanding podcasts out there, but for us it's just incredible considering our first thousand was just blowing us away. When we first started, the majority of our listeners were from Canada, the states, and Israel. Now the vast majority of our listeners are still in the states. So thank you very much to all of our american listeners, but we have listeners across Europe, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain. We're starting to pick up some really interesting listeners. In Asia, we have people from China, from Japan, from Thailand, from India, Pakistan. We have listeners, of course, from Australia who are probably listening to the podcast when they get up in the morning, which is I don't even know how long after we've recorded it. We have listeners pretty much from every single country in the world, more or less, and in Canada, basically every province and almost every state. And we are so blessed, and we thank you for all of your support. Please continue to keep supporting us. So, triggers and glimmers real quick. What's a trigger? Well, a trigger is something that elicits a trauma response. We talked about trauma responses a few seconds ago, and a trigger is not unique, once again, to autism or neurodiversity. If something triggers you, it makes you upset, it makes you frustrated, it makes you overstimulated, it makes you angry. It could be a loud noise, it could be a strong smell. It could be bright lights. It could be certain people. It could be certain textures. Like think of how you feel when you think of nails on a chalkboard or some rubbing your hand over sandpaper, something that just. One of my triggers, for example, is having sticky stuff on my fingers. I have to eat potato chips or crisps. To our british listeners that are plain, that don't have a coating, because if they're like barbecue flavored or all dress flavored or ketchup flavored, for our canadian listeners, or something with, like, a flavor coating, and it gets on my fingers. It just makes me feel icky, and I don't like it. And I have to wash my hands, so I like. The salt and vinegar chips are fine. The plain chips are fine.

[01:10:05] Leah: We probably have to bet you like chip tweezers. You know, you can pick up tweezers.

[01:10:09] Moshe: I don't like. I struggle very much with cheesies and doritos. I just. I'm constantly trying to flick off the feeling on my fingers. So that's an example of a trigger.

[01:10:19] Leah: One that's really easy for people to understand would be if somebody yells at you, especially if you're from an abusive home, as a child, somebody yells at you, it could instantly trigger you. Yes, fight for me. Fight. But fight, flight, you know, Fawn, one.

[01:10:32] Moshe: Of those flop freeze figures. So all the fetichi. I love the fettuccine response we didn't get to. Maybe we'll get it to a future response.

[01:10:44] Leah: I think part of my overachieving from being an abused child is my fettuccine response.

[01:10:49] Moshe: Very good. So because a trigger is characterized as something that instantly causes a negative reaction, they thought about what would be the opposite of that, and what would be something that would instantly cause a sense of calm and joy and wellness and grounding, so they called it. One of the words that they chose was glimmer. I'm not really sure why they use the term glimmer. I didn't pick it, but it's the word that seems to be getting some acceptance in the community.

[01:11:17] Leah: It's a really new term, and honestly, I hate it. The first time you said it to me, I said, a what? Now I'll explain to you exactly why. Because I come from a background where I'm sort of a fan of, like, horror and low fantasy, and a glimmer reminds me of something like, that a vampire does to you before they bite you, or like a witch does to make you think she's pretty when she's really not. You know, like a glimmer is to fool you. So I just pictured, like, you know, when you're triggered, in order to calm you down, I just grab your cell phone and go, here's your cell phone, moshe. Oh, it's a good moja like. Yes, it just. It elicits really weird images in my head in terms of, you have to.

[01:11:56] Moshe: Glimmer yourself, so you have to glimmer yourself. So glimmers are characterized as things that induce an instant, like euphoria. Euphoria or a feeling of calm. Usually it's instant, but sometimes it's just something that, you know, will automatically, like, be your go to. And it can be something small. Some people listed their glimmers as the sound of a cat purring. The smell of lavender is a common one for its calming effect. Listening to cows moo, the sound of rain on a rooftop. Certain people have a favorite chair that they like to sit in. Certain people have certain songs that they can put on whenever they're in a bad mood that always make them feel really good. Sometimes it can be something super obvious. Like, one of my glimmers is just Leia. Like, when I'm in a bad mood, I'll go to her and I'll be like, can you just hug me? And it just instantly induces a sense of calm for me because I feel that sense of closeness with her, and I am happy. So glimmers are those little moments in your day that you take the time to sort of de escalate your. Your own trauma response. You can sort of drop the mask. You can stop flopping or freezing or fighting or. What's the other one?

[01:13:12] Leah: Fawning.

[01:13:13] Moshe: Fawning? Yeah, stop the. That's the big one. You can stop masking and you can just be yourself. And again, talking about being yourself, some people list that their glimmer is stimming. And that's actually completely okay. I think I mentioned somewhat embarrassingly in a previous episode. That one of my favorite moments of the day was when my sister was out of the house. I used to go into a room and turn on the hi fi system. And just run around her room in a circle and flap my hand. And it would make me feel so happy and so joyful and just so full of peace and calm. That it was sort of an escape from some of the stress of my own childhood at times.

[01:13:59] Leah: Yeah. So in terms of being yourself, that actually brings me to, like, a final point that I wanted to make sure, which is we talk a lot about this masking and all this masking that you do in order to be successful in the neurotypical world. But eventually, I did touch on it. You become exhausted. So let's discuss the importance of. I mean, anybody neurotypical as well, but especially a neurodivergent person, an autistic person. To be able to have a safe environment where they can unmask and relax and rejuvenate for a while.

[01:14:27] Moshe: Exactly. And if you have a place to call your own, if you have a room that you can go to or even if you are an adult, like I am, and you have a place to live, which we do, unlike very.

[01:14:42] Leah: Many orthodox jewish couples who are lucky enough to have separate bedrooms, we do not. So we share one.

[01:14:46] Moshe: Right. And that is an important part of my own sense of calm, and yours too, because if one of your glimmers is physical contact, then it would stand to reason that one of your priorities would be to be with someone who likes to give hugs or likes to cuddle or is okay with, like, touching you and stuff and balancing, you know, the lack of overtly physical affection in public with just sometimes I need you to, like, hold my hand or whatever is important. And your personal needs and your ability to feel grounded, you know, have to be able to be respected.

[01:15:29] Leah: Yeah. So part of why a relationship works so well is we. We do share quite a few glimmers. Sorry, I hate the term, but we do. One of them is just getting into bed together and cuddling and watching a tv show or watching silly videos.

[01:15:41] Moshe: We like to laugh together.

[01:15:42] Leah: They instantly sort of calm us both down.

[01:15:45] Moshe: We put on, like, really mindless, stupid content. Maybe some of you put it out and we just laugh and laugh and laugh. Anyway, so we'll wrap it up now. I do want to thank you very much for tuning in, and I apologize if you were waiting for this episode for a while. I hope it lives up to your expectations. And once again, a huge, huge thanks to Laura May and munchables for their wonderful partnership. We love the products. We will definitely order more. And we are so grateful to have the new sponsor.

[01:16:18] Leah: Now, Moshe, don't forget to press the save button.

[01:16:21] Moshe: Right. So if you're listening to this episode, then I was successful. And if you're not listening to this episode, I took the blue pill. And then the next episode, I just sound completely fed up then you know where it went. But thanks very much for. For tuning in. And as we say in our culture, bizarre. Which means, if God wills it, we'll be back next week with a new episode.

[01:16:44] Leah: See you next week.

[01:16:46] Moshe: Well, that's our show for today. Now, you know when autistic just a little bit better. So something you may not know about some autistics is that we often struggle with ending social interactions. So. Leah.

[01:17:02] Leah: All right, Moshe. I'll take care of it. Thank you for listening to now, you know, one autistic. See you next week.

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