 Right, let's go for this one from neurodivergent magic, autistic identity issues. All right, so today we're going to talk about the concepts of enmeshment and individuation, but we're going to specifically look at these concepts through the lens of autism. Hi, my name is Megan, and welcome to neurodivergent magic, the YouTube channel for accessible and relatable neurodivergent content. Let's start by defining some terms. Enmeshment is when two or more people have their identities intertwined. One person cannot fully be themselves without the presence or impact of this other person or people. And individuation is essentially the opposite of enmeshment. It is when we come into our own, when we become our own full individual people. Now I do want to point out that Western cultures tend to put a lot of emphasis on individuation and individualism in general. So for people trying to move away from that hyperindividualism, enmeshment, this idea of relying on one another and not fully being yourself without someone else might sound kind of appealing, but the truth Yeah, I mean, there is, we do definitely have an issue with, like, we are becoming very hyperindividual individualization thing. I cannot, hyperindividualization, I feel like a lot, like a lot of the content that I see, particularly on YouTube is like, you've got to be completely self-reliant, you've got to not want validation from other people. And pretty much one of the main functions of social interaction is to be validated in your experiences, your thoughts, or at least contrast them with another person. And I think that's something that's lost a little bit, because you want to get to a point where you are like, if you're in a relationship, you don't want to be hyperindividualized because it's not going to really work, you're not going to work as a team. So you want to, there is a word for it. You've got to work together. I can't remember what the word was, it's a good word. I'll probably think about it in a sec, but let's go over. Enmeshment is not a healthy relationship dynamic. It is not interdependence, it is codependence. Some of the key problematic features of enmeshments include triangulation, gray rocking, and gaslighting, all of which I will explain here in a second. If you're sick of hyperindividualism, if you're sick of having to do it all, be your own person, and never rely on anyone, I get that. I'm just saying enmeshment's not the answer. Now, what were those problematic things I was talking about earlier? So triangulation is when there's communication between at least three parties. There is person A who is upset with person B, and there is person C. You might wonder, what's person C doing there? You see, person A isn't going to talk to person B about being upset with them. Instead, they're going to yell at person C about person B and expect person C to go talk to person B for them. If this sounds childish, you are correct. A lot of children communicate this way, and unfortunately, a lot of emotionally immature adults do as well. I am not exempt from this. P.M. Furious, as I'm always somehow managing to irritate someone, I get nervous, so skeptical about approaching Thomas. Me too. I'm not the best at starting conversations with people that, unless I get very positive feedback instantly, I'm pretty much put off from talking to people. It's a lot to do with RSD. I think a lot of natural human needs are being lost. It's true. He used to have, I suppose, with the advent of the internet, we do have opportunities to connect with more people, but there are not always people around us. We might have had, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, we might have had a bit more of a community atmosphere around things, people helping each other. You see it a lot in specific villages. There's some really cool community groups within those villages that they support each other. They're actually really good for autistic people as well, because if they have some needs that they can't fulfill, then someone in the community can help them. If that person also has something that they need to fill, then someone else can help them. So it's a really good thing. It sounds, I did get the impression, it does sound very much like the whole codependency thing, but in terms of enmeshment, I'm just trying to think of things in my life that might be considered like that. I definitely do specifically at the workplace have a person, I always have a person that I talk to that helps me with things. And if I'm struggling to communicate, a lot of the time having this person to help me communicate definitely does help. I suppose you could consider that to be like triangulation, but it's never like in a mean kind of like I'm shouting at that person. It's always like, would you be able to help me with this? Maybe that's what they're talking about. I don't know if it's completely applicable to that idea of triangulation though. I grew up with a lot of enmeshment at home and I have definitely fallen into the triangulation pattern of communication in the past. It's tempting because it protects your ego. You don't have to confront the person you're upset with and see that you might be exaggerating or you might be actually in the wrong or maybe you shouldn't be quite as upset as you are. Instead, you talk to a third party, a third party who can neither confirm nor deny whether your anger is appropriate and so they just have to take it and listen. I'm not proud of using triangulation and I'm definitely trying to get away from it. But I admit that I have done it because I want you to know if you're listening and you're like, crap, I've definitely done this before. I don't want you to think you're this horrible, irredeemable person. It means that you have room to grow and that's okay. Now, one of the other things I meant. Yeah, I guess so. I think there are also some circumstances where that might be quite important. Like, I can think of a lot of mediation services that that's basically triangulation. You're talking to a mediator and they're helping. You sort of mediate between each other because when you get together it's not a good situation. So sometimes it can be good. I don't think I really experience this a lot because I don't outwardly express a lot of negative emotion. It tends to be a very internal to me. If I'm upset, it tends not to be that I will act upset with somebody or if I'm angry with somebody, I tend not to, well, I pretty much never shout at people or call people names and things like that. It's just not something that I do. And it's something called gray rocking. So gray rocking is basically a way to protect yourself from judgment. Whenever someone is talking or asking you questions, you simply respond with the blandest, most neutral answers you can possibly think of, basically taking the form of a boring gray rock. This way the person has nothing to criticize about you, nothing to judge, and you can sort of slip under the radar. This is hugely problematic because gray rocking means that you can't be yourself. No one gets to know the real you. You are sacrificing your identity for the common piece. And I'm not saying that I I do get this, but like, I mean, there isn't aspects that is very, very clear with autistic people. I've talked about it in this stream and talk about a lot. I like to find you like sometimes you just actually just don't know what you're feeling. So like how do you how do you respond emotively? You know, if you're not you're not feeling like you don't know what you're feeling in that moment, you know, so I'd say that there's a lot of situations where I might come across as doing that. But I think as well, like the way that I listen and I take on board what someone's saying is by like really being quiet, listening to how they're feeling, what they're saying. You know, sometimes if people are being very aggressive and overwhelming, then I will just like not not speak to them for a bit. But that's I think that's a lot to do with me because I'm especially I care about someone then like the work the impact of people's words and emotions can be really heightened to the point where like it could have like a meltdown or like stuff like that. So it doesn't happen with strangers. Definitely not. But like if you are close to some if I'm close to someone and something like that happens, then it's really difficult for me. When I get angry, I tend to go very pent up and let it out onto someone later on. Yeah, I guess I guess so. I mean, you know, it's definitely good to get get it out of your system. As long as you're not like directing it towards somebody, you know, like they're receiving your anger and hate, like some some some people have done that. Like I know some people who are who are like that. And it's not a nice thing. But definitely like explaining and expressing how you're feeling about a certain situation. I guess it's normal. Like that's the whole validation aspect to socializing can get very strong emotions depending on how sensitive I am that day. That's another aspect, you know, definitely, definitely. Peace isn't something we should strive for. And there aren't sacrifices to be made. But everyone should be making those sacrifices. It shouldn't fall on one or two specific people to hide who they are in order to prevent other people from outrageous, disproportionate, angry or judgmental responses. And finally, I mentioned gaslighting. Gaslighting has become a pretty common buzzword these days. So you've probably heard it before, but you may not actually know what it means. Gaslighting is when someone makes you doubt your reality. In some way, they assert that their reality is more true, more reflective of the one objective reality than yours is. They may do this by calling you too sensitive, telling you they were joking or even just straight up telling you that you imagined things. Hopefully, I don't have to tell you why that's problematic. There is also different aspects of it. You have indirect and directs. The ones that they're mentioning is direct gaslighting. You're doing it for a reason. But not like it is very tied to this idea of narcissism. You say a lot of it with online content about narcissists. Gaslighting is very tied to that. But you don't have to be like that to gaslight someone. Everyone can do it. It doesn't matter how nice or pleasant you can be. Sometimes you just do. A lot of the time, it's unintentional. There's a lot of situations where parents of kids or teachers of kids or your boss or someone in your life or your partner may definitely undermine the experiences that you have as an autistic person unintentionally because they don't get it. They don't see and experience the world as you do and so it doesn't make sense to them. It can definitely happen. Your reality is just as valid as anybody else's and conflict resolution should rely on accepting and merging two realities instead of one triumphing over the other. This tiny device has... Sorry for the ads. This is one of these blood sugar control things. I've seen a lot of them at the moment. What are they trying to tell me? Am I diabetic? Okay, so we've talked about enmeshment. We understand why it's deeply unhealthy. But what does enmeshment and individuation have to do with autism? As an autistic person who grew up in an enmeshed family, I can tell you that my autism definitely had an impact on how the enmeshment affected me. It's very common for autistic folks to have a hard time lying and to have a hard time expecting others to lie and it can lead to a sort of naivete. Now, to be fair, this is not the case for every autistic person, but it definitely was the case for me. I genuinely believed every word out of everyone's mouth because why would they lie? This made me very gullible and easy to play pranks on on the lighter spectrum of things. But this is one of the hardest things, being a direct communicator in a world where indirect communication is commonplace. Man, it's so hard. I pretty much like with anybody that I go across who is like direct and they always like apologize for being too direct. I'm like, please continue to be direct with me. It's so much easier mixing so like a lot of people who are used to that indirect way of communicating like that emotional expression over emotional explanation, they can find people who are direct to very intense and even though you're basically saying the same things but just in a different way, you're just being a lot more truthful and stuff. Definitely like problem friendships, you have that thing of make crime, people take advantage of you because you think that they are your friend. Romantic relationships, the whole codependency aspect of things, if someone's telling you something and it goes in directly against how they're acting and what they did, even if they tell you it's very hard for me to say actually no. This is not what happens. It's probably one of the main ways that I was bullied when I was younger. People saying something to me doing the complete opposite, lying. I did go through a long stage of not being able to tell even white lies to people. I just didn't want to tell people white lies because I felt that it was going behind their back. I wanted to be a truthful person. I have learned in adulthood. I did go through a stage where I started to try and do that but it just didn't feel right to me. I wanted to incorporate my more artistic style of communication into my life and try and expect it a lot more from the people around me to meet halfway. Most people, they only want to meet you 5% of the way because they don't understand how you work but if you find the right people, they'll meet you halfway with things. That's with communication too. Yes, they're still getting in trouble for telling the truth. It doesn't make sense. A lot of the time people don't like it because the truth is not always good. Sometimes it is really good. That's one of the beauties. It's not something that everybody enjoys because if you're truthful, sometimes they'll definitely believe what you say but if you say something negative, it's bad. They don't like it. If you say something positive and they actually get that you are truthful and that you are honest about things, then they can really enjoy that but it's not for everybody from experience, especially in romantic relationships. Part of my emotional heartburst can be brought on by feeling rejected and made to look irresponsible. Yeah, mischaracterization is a big issue for me. It's probably one of the only things that I find difficult about online stuff. I don't mind people disagreeing with me but misrepresenting is a big thing for me. I don't like being misrepresented but rejection is a common place for a lot of autistic people. It makes sense that we struggle with it in adult life just from past experiences. The heavier end of things, it made it so I couldn't always tell the difference between someone expressing an opinion and someone telling me a fact. This made it almost impossible for me to individuate as a person. I assumed the identity of the people around me because I assumed that they were telling me facts when really they were just expressing opinions and being their own unique individual selves but I thought they were telling me. That is a really good point. I've not thought about that before. It makes total sense to me. I remember I went to a Catholic place and they told me that anyone who didn't believe in God would go to hell. I told my dad that he's a very firm atheist. He was very upset. That was my experience of hearing an opinion and believe. If someone says it in a very convincing way and they're obviously being truthful, it comes across as a fact to me sometimes. I always tell the truth and some people who are used to lying and being lied to believe I'm lying no matter how much I say I'm not. You don't want to be around people like that as much as you can. You can never win. Me universal truths. And when I found myself disagreeing with those universal truths, I felt like something must be wrong with me and I learned to gray rock. I learned to hide in whatever manner I could. Now I understand that this is autistic masking and I hid my autism but I also hid every facet of myself. Truth was something that others spoke. It was something other people had control of and I simply had to scramble to find out what the truth was. I couldn't create my own. If this is sounding really familiar to you, then I get it and welcome to the club and I want to help. Here's what I've done to learn to individuate as an autistic adult. First and foremost I've learned to pay attention when I gray rock or when I mask because it used to just happen so automatically I didn't even really notice I was doing it. Now I might still mask or do the whole gray rock thing if I feel like it keeps me safest but I pay attention to it and afterwards I sort of assert to myself what I truly believe and I come up with that truth on my own as my own individual. Yeah and you would do that after because, you know, Alexivania, it makes sense, you know. I don't think it's something that we can always say no gray rocking. It's sometimes you just don't know how you're feeling and it's better to not scramble to find words that don't accurately describe what you're feeling. It can be frustrating for some people for them to like express something to you and you just not like know how you feel about what they said or like have an opinion about it because you haven't thought about it properly but it's pretty much the only way that I can do it to be honest especially if it's a very like emotionally volatile situation. You know, time is important because, you know, I want to be able to understand exactly how I feel about something. So maybe remember something I'm not aware of when people are winding me up and making fun of me. I definitely am. I'm aware now, like I have a keen sense for it but when I was younger I definitely did not. Stacy says once I was told that I won't be mad at, if I'm open and honest with the individual then it's like okay but they still sound like they were mad or upset anyways. Yeah, that's a tough thing as well. And I think that's not necessarily just a neurotypical thing. You know, we like to promise that we won't be, act or feel a certain way to what someone's telling us but it's not always the case but you know, whenever I've been in situations where I'm like, you know, just be open and vulnerable with me and stuff and you know, I won't be overly like negatively responsive. I might be upset by something but you know, just being honest about like that I think is important because I tend to lose a lot of trust in people when they say stuff like that and they're like just be open, just be truthful, just be honest with me and then they get upset with you even even though they said that they wouldn't. It's okay not to agree with me, just don't discriminate me. Yeah, I guess so. I don't really know what you mean by that. Yeah and there's a lot of things as well that people, you know, they might say that oh I don't mind, I don't care if you're autistic like I like you as a person and then you do something autistic and they're like oh damn, don't worry about it Stacy. I've had to learn that my situation has changed. I am not in the same situation where I had to gray rock all the time, where I had to mask all the time. I am in a situation where I have some agency over what happens to me and that takes some massive brain rewiring to really emotionally grasp that concept but that's what I'm working on now because if I can have agency over my own life then I can tell my own story and be my own person and embrace who I am and everybody else be damned. Finally I am embracing neurodivergent communities. Being around other people who are like me who are autistic or neurodivergent in some other way it helps me feel a healthy sense of interdependence rather than co-dependence and enmeshment. What do you think about all this? Has your neurodivergence impacted your ability to be your own person? Let me know in the comments and as always thank you so much for watching. I think it's a bit confusing for me in this video in certain points because like there are a lot of different words for things and like specifically in this video I feel like some of the words I do I do actually understand the concepts but I just didn't understand like the actual like the variation in the words because masking makes sense you know. I suppose it is kind of an issue of identity in a lot of cases. I have never really had an enmeshment before. I have come across some people who are like a really highly enmeshed with like the support helper or like the parents or