 Let's face it, our inherent difficulties in social interaction can put us in very, very compromising positions, it's just the truth. Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel, my name is Thomas Henley and I make a lot of videos on autism, mental health and dating, neurodiverse relationships. Today our topic is autism, confrontation and bullying. Few heart-hitting things there, particularly around the bullying, so if you feel like this is going to be too much of a sensitive video for you, please feel free to click off, watch some of my other stuff. So I first want to go through a number of things that could make confrontation something that we really struggle with. These are going to be things particularly from personal experience but also from listening to other autistic individuals. Number one, meltdowns and shutdowns. Of course these are going to drastically reduce our ability to communicate, manage emotions and function and that this takes precedent in every single situation in life and it could be in a situation perhaps where you're at school or in the workplace or out doing your stuff in daily life and people are being confrontational with you. Sometimes that could just be enough, you know if your mental health is that bad, you're in a burnout, your anxiety is high, your paranoia is high, it could be enough to tip you over the edge into shutdown or a meltdown. Number two, dealing with nasty people. Mean spirited people in general can be hard to manage, that's why we have the laws, that's why we have policies and practices and rules. The thing is is that these people, these toxic people, they don't care about the rules, they just care about numero one which apparently is themselves. The difficulty here is that there is no explicit rules of conducting yourself in these situations. Just opinions, you may ask one person, you may ask a really old school dad, you know, you're asking what do I do with someone's bullying me, they might say you need to him, you need to show them that you're dominant, you need to crush them, you know. Then he might go over and you ask someone else and they say well just try to pacify them, just try to make sure that you don't escalate things, just try and get out of that situation. Another person might say go run, another person might say oh if someone looks at you bad you should pop first, you should pop, pop them, get rid of them. So there's a lot of conflicting information on this and because it's not a deafener, because it's not concrete and it's very situational to situational basis, it's hard to give or hold good guidelines to how to conduct yourself in those situations. Another aspect to it is lack of eye contact and closed body language. This can be a really big indicator that someone's anxious and not self confident. It may not be the case for you as an autistic individual, you may be very very confident but you just don't like giving eye contact and you may just feel like you just naturally more rest in quite a closed body language position. It could be an indicator of anxiety, it could be an indicator of low self-esteem and people are aware of that, people take advantage of that and this non-verbal communication can give people the impression that you're not confident and that you won't retaliate. Now that could be something that sounds quite good but it's important for other people to recognize that there is a danger to bullying you, to confronting you, you need to try and hold you ground, or at least in my opinion, and all of these two concepts in conjunction can make you a pretty prime target for a lot of nasty people, especially in a wide open group situation like a school. There's also another aspect of infantilization, so if someone knows that you're autistic or just you know knows you, they may think that you act quite childish, you act quite immature, you don't really understand social things and while this may be just a consequence of us having lower social emotional or slower social emotional development, but it's mostly down to people interpreting our different way of being as non-conformity or being different because your views and way of feeling and looking at things and thinking about things are so different to theirs, they may see it as a sign of immaturity because they are also immature at that age. It could also be with adults, some adults really do have some kind of superiority complex as we know with the dark-dried traits but it's all in all the you know these things that I've talked about the infantilization, the lack of eye contact and closed body language as well as not having explicit rules of how to engage with people who are being confrontational and the possibility of meltdowns and shutdowns, we can be quite vulnerable to bullies, to nasty people, to toxic people, to evil people. Okay I got a bit carried away of myself. So here's the thing, I'm not ashamed to say that I was subjected to quite extensive amounts of emotional and physical bullying at school or around school, it's just something that happened, I was young, I was vulnerable, I didn't know what what isn't meant for me, I didn't know what I was, I didn't understand other people so it kind of left me in a tough situation and I developed quite a lot of mental health conditions because of that, it's not the only thing but it was a really big player in that. The absolute best thing that I did for myself is to get into a combat sport. I started with Taekwondo, it was very chilled, very relaxed, very focused on like the movements and looking flashy and stuff for the first two years until I decided to take it to an actual competitive level just to compete in it as a sport and Taekwondo really allowed me to channel what of that anger and self-hate that I'd bottled up inside from years and years of bullying. It helped so much with that, it gave me a direction with the bullying I felt like I had to close myself off to try and appear invisible whereas going into combat sports I could almost visualize the difficulties that I was experiencing onto my opponents and beat them up. I always find it so funny talking about martial arts and in positive likes, it sounds so alien and cruel and awful but they're trying to do it to me as well, don't get that wrong, it's a consensual agreement. So with that new found confidence that I got from combat sports I was able to stand up for myself and my friends. Nowadays I don't feel scared when other people cross my boundaries without asking or you know intentionally trying to cross my boundaries to annoy me or upset me or diss me or anything like that and now I calmly assert them. I don't get fearful, I don't back down, I don't engage physically, I don't just punch them out of the blue because they annoy me but in my adult life I've been able to cultivate a strong sense of non-reactivity and self-confidence and it's helped me hold hold my own a lot in adult life even if it's not such a confrontational thing like a fight or someone you know that you don't really know just coming up to you and getting all angry and up in your face and stuff. It's in all areas of life and that sort of self-imbuilt confidence in yourself can be really really helpful. Now not everybody wants the combat sports and I don't think everybody's right for it, I don't think it can help everybody, I think it can help a lot of people and it can be a very stressful difficult thing to do. Worth it, definitely in my books even coming from someone who has had severe anxiety, paranoia, low self-esteem, everything like that had a massive impact on me positively but if you're looking for ways to build up an idea of what to do I definitely try to learn some non-verbal body language. I want you to try and firstly you need to try and take control of your emotional state and advocate for your needs if someone asks you to go to the bar or to the club and you are very very in a very very vulnerable state it's probably going to lead to some difficult situations where you have meltdowns or shutdowns and sometimes people can react very badly to that and see it as an opportunity. So you need to advocate for yourself and take the time when you need it go do social things when you feel able. Dealing with nasty people you know that as I said there's a lot of lots of opinions on that and I don't want to be liable for if you go along and punch someone in the face so I'm not going to make any recommendations on that front although I would really really consider looking around researching it trying to get a good picture of how to how to approach these types of situations in a way that feels normal and natural for you and it's impossible you know if someone's a big dude loads and loads of muscle gets up in you up in your face or you get your face up in their chest that sounds weird you know it's not always the case that you can intimidate them and you have to think about whether you might just want to try and just distinguish the situation or lower the tension or you know there's lots of different ways that you can do that it doesn't always have to be or someone stepped up to me how dare they step up to me right I'm gonna fight them and show them how big dog I am it doesn't have to be like that and a lot of fighters uh not all of them but a lot of fighters that I've known they don't have that mentality they they go with the non-reactivity and the calm confidence and I think that's a lot more conducive to be to the autistic mind because naturally tend to be a bit more introverted so cultivating that introverted confidence you can imagine is going to help a lot last thing is lack of eye contact and closed body language you what you have my permission to make more eye contact if someone's being confrontational you should not lower it if someone's not breaking eye contact with you either you need to break it now and again you don't have to be completely intensely staring at them all the time sometimes that can make some people a bit more riled up but in general making solid eye contact stronger than usual than usual for most neurotypicals um it's probably 80 percent of the time you probably a lot ties with them 20 percent of the time you're not kind of feel very painful kind of feel very um hard and difficult but if you're in that situation you need to try and protect yourself another example of that would be closed body language um that's something that you can work on in the long term overall if someone's um posturing up against you it's always important to have confident body language you don't have to puff your chest out and like like shoulder badge people and stuff like that you could just stand a little straighter you could pull your shoulders back you could straighten your gaze a bit more you could um perhaps be a bit more open with your body language in your hands and the way that you sit if you feel like you're in a in a difficult situation so there's those things that you can do and sadly the infantilization aspect of it is not really something that you can solve it's just something that happens in our society they see us as disabled people so naturally a disability around social communication and sensory things and thought they're going to think right they don't know anything that they're talking about so it's better not to take that as what it is um obviously if you're in a confrontation or thing you can't really do much about it in in general to me that's in general infantilization is a bloody awful thing but I hope that my advice is something that you'd be able to take on board and maybe if you don't feel like my suggestions really hold any weight at least you will feel a little bit less alone in feeling absolutely clueless when it comes to confrontation in the real world I found a lot of utility in confrontation in a controlled manner confrontation in a manner where both parties are willingly engaged which is combat sports but that's just something that's helped me so I hope you have enjoyed this episode and if you want to see more from me maybe you want to see the whole write-up over on my instagram tomashanleyuk at tomashanleyuk and go check out my website tomashanley.co.uk and if you want to stay up to date with more things make sure to like subscribe the podcast is out season two lots of juicy guests coming on juicy guests don't know if I should say that cool guests informative guests inspirational guests so go check that out that's available on all podcasting platforms as well as youtube right on here yes of course and uh yeah see you in another episode on the tomashanley youtube channel see you later folks