 Do you find yourself burdened by an aching sense that something around you, something with someone else is very very wrong? Well it could be that you are experiencing paranoia. Something that I'm sure many of you understand, have knowledge on of experience to some degree in specific social situations, especially when you're up in front of the class delivering a PowerPoint that you put together about five minutes before the lesson. Autistic paranoia, the experience of going through life, having those really early childhood experiences, particularly in secondary school or high school as you Americans like to call it. And you develop a lot of paranoia due to that atmosphere. You have a lot of social dynamics that you don't really understand and you don't really trust people because you don't know what's happening. You don't know all these social rules that are happening. And going through that for such as a prolonged like period of time, undoubtedly it's going to instill a lot of emotional or even physical changes to your brain. A lot of emotional changes that sort of carry on into adulthood. When I was in secondary school, my earliest experiences of paranoia occurred when I became acutely aware of the fact I didn't live on the same wavelength as everybody around me. I didn't get why people were laughing. I didn't get why people were saying stuff in a certain way. I didn't even pick up on it. I didn't understand how people knew stuff about other people that they've never talked about gossiping for you in order to kind of combat this because I was getting myself in situations which I received some public humiliation, online humiliation. In pretty much all circumstances, people really just took advantage of me due to my lower level of social competence. And so I suspected danger everywhere to keep myself safe. The moment that I got on that bus to school, to the moment I came back, I was on high alert all the time and it caused me a lot of stress, anxiety, meltdown, shutdowns, everything like that. But I needed to be aware because I didn't feel safe. I didn't feel safe in my secondary school. I don't think it's something specific about mine because those are a lot of great things about it. But it does seem to be quite a common occurrence that we receive a lot of trauma in secondary school and then doubtedly that's going to come a lot with feelings of paranoia. So I guess before we jump into the meat of it, let's clear out the air. What is paranoia and why does it happen? Paranoia is the feeling that you're being threatened in some way, such as people watching you, acting against you, even though there's no proof that it's true. And this is a difficult one because the social landscape, it's not always certain. And nobody has the power of oversight, but if someone was to walk through life being constantly paranoid about something that could happen, such as being bullied or hit, at some point it's going to happen. It's going to validate those feelings of paranoia. Even though perhaps for the entirety of the school days, it's not really something that happens on a very frequent basis, but you're always in that state ready to combat it, ready to protect yourself as it be. So when we become paranoid, it's a really toxic exercise in trying to read the future or see past the superficial. And when you're autistic, especially at that age, it's going to be very hard for us to identify feelings and identify social dynamics, things of that nature, unless we've been taught it. And even then, it's going to be extremely difficult. If you're paranoid, you're going to focus on those thoughts, those feelings, and it's going to go in a loop and it's going to be a lot more of a constant thing even each day. You may not even have a diagnosis of paranoia because you don't fit the criteria, but you do feel paranoid all the time, but you don't really know why. And the thing is, yes, nobody has that power, so it leads to a constant state of anxiety and mistrust. And that anxiety and mistrust can carry on into adulthood. Going into, I guess, one of the more specifics about autistic paranoia. I've already said it, but your natural instincts for people will be off. We base how we think people will act based on how we think about things and how we perceive things. And if you don't and you're different, you're not really going to have a good sense for it because people aren't like you, the majority of people like 99, 98% of people. Do you have autistic paranoia? Do you hate or suspect pretty much all of the NTs, all of the neurotypicals that you come across? Do you suspect that your close friends secretly hate you and they're actually planning something against you when they're just keeping you around for a laugh? Do you think that words or affirmations that people give you are like an illusion, like they're just saying it for the sake of it? Do you doubt your own interpretations of things that are happening around you? Even now as an adult and doing all this research in psychology or understanding a lot more about neurotypicals and autism and things like that, do you still doubt that your decisions, that your perceptions of things are always wrong? Do you think that they're always wrong? I'm pretty sure you got the message there. Paranoia is a very difficult thing to overcome, but it is possible. It is possible to shift your mindset. Obviously I'm not a licensed psychotherapist or anything of that nature, so it's best to take advice about mental health conditions like that from someone who knows a bit more about it. But I'm just speaking from personal experience and the experiential knowledge that I've gathered from talking to numerous autistic advocates and people. So to get over it, you really need to develop some sort of trust in people, and that requires a lot of patience and it requires you to trust in yourself as well. We can never be completely certain of things, but we can have a good idea about it and we can think of things that are more likely to happen than other things. The issue when we grow up and we have all these traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence is that we have a very negative experience of people, and so we're a lot more closed off, we're a lot more, I guess, dismissive of people, particularly neurotypicals. It's a really tough thing. You may even find that when this thing occurs that you're worried about, you feel like the veil is lifted. If you find yourself in the same situation as time and time again with people, then learn from it, but you don't need to be paranoid about things. You shouldn't be overthinking lots of things in your head over and over again. If you have a query, talk to a counselor about it, talk to a friend about it, talk to an autism organization, talk to someone about it, or at least just get it written down on paper and sort of try and dissect it from there. The issue is with anxiety and paranoia, things go around in your head over and over again, and if you don't have any output or input, it just kind of stays like that. It's very common for us to be quite mistrustful of neurotypicals, because for the most of it, during adolescence, we receive a lot of negativity from them. I love sometimes a lot of trauma and sometimes abusive situations. The real step for this is to go out there and try and find positive experiences. It may be hard and you may be quite cynical, not very positive about the possibility of connecting with another person, but you can find those good experiences and you can find those good people. It's just about trying to learn about how to spot the red flags in people, how to do all of that, and how to retreat from a situation if you need to. Obviously, this is quite an exploratory topic. I'm sure that there will be something out there and perhaps a research study that I haven't read yet. I do think that it's worthwhile considering whether you have a negative bias towards a particular group of people and why. Some of the most amazing people that I know are not autistic, they're neurotypicals, and some of the other amazing people that I know are autistic. It doesn't mean that just because someone has a particular neurotype or you've had that negative bias of those bad interactions when you were younger, that it's going to be the same when you're an adult, where you can control your environment and you don't have to do things that you don't want to, all the adults telling you to. There's a lot of elements to this and I think it's just worthwhile highlighting situations where things that you've learned in adolescence are being transferred to adult life and causing you to miss out on a lot of opportunities for friendship and connection and just generally feeling at one and happy in today's society. So yes, very exploratory, not very concise and I feel like my brain's going all over the place for this video, so I'm going to end it here and please go follow my social medias. This is based on a post that is probably a lot more coherent and makes a lot more sense than the video that I'm doing now. It's basically kind of a loose, these Instagram posts are basically a loose script for my videos. So go over there, it's mostly Instagram that I post on, but you can follow me on other places. It's all at Thomas Hanley UK and if you want to get in contact to be on the podcast or to get me for modelling or public speaking or to attend certain online events, go through my website, thomashanley.co.uk. There is a contact form on there and yes, I mentioned about a podcast, 40 Autie Podcast Season 2. It's out, I've had some very notable guests on there, some big names around autism and also love great conversations with a lot of different autism advocates from across the globe. So go check that out, all of these links will be down in the description and I hope you have enjoyed this topic and please comment down below letting me know what are your experiences with paranoia. Do you think that these feelings towards narratives are warranted or do you think maybe it's time to sort of try and get rid of that negative bias? That's a very loaded question, apologies for that. Anyway, I'll see you later guys, peace out.