 Welcome back to another episode of Autism Language, Demystified. Not the Demystified bit, but Autism Language explained part 2. By popular appeal it has come back and I cannot get myself comfortable. Right, this is going to be a running joke isn't it that you can't just keep the audible screen off your computer. So we are back with another video. This video series, these parts, I'm going to be explaining some of the common autism language that people use. For the purpose of educating, sounds very narcissistic of me, but for the purpose of educating you folk who want to get into the world of autism advocacy, that you want to raise autism awareness and acceptance and understanding online, but you're not too clued up on the recent socially progressive language and a few terms. So I'm coming at you today, coming at you with another video on this series and I've said that already. So without further ado, make sure to click that like button and subscribe button, it really helps me with the YouTube algorithms and I know everybody says it and I know it's annoying but it really does help. So if you're watching this, you like it, give it a like if you don't, give it a dislike. So without further ado, in this very very abnormally short intro for the Asperger's Grove YouTube channel, let's get into it. Number one, the first thing that we are talking about is meltdowns and shutdowns. Now most people I think who have some awareness of autism will understand what a meltdown is. I believe that many of you NTs, you neurotypicals, like to use it in reference to feeling overwhelmed by things and I completely understand that, hopefully you get it, but it's not meltdown. It is very different and very specific to autistic people, the neurodivergently inclined. What's the difference between a meltdown and a shutdown now? Well, meltdowns usually occur when someone gets way too overwhelmed and they cannot soothe themselves, they cannot regulate their anxiety or regulate their emotions. Their emotions peak, brain function goes down and your ability to speak and to act and to think about things and to plan things immediately just gets wiped out and you're pretty much left in a state of vulnerability in many cases. It's not a great thing, it's very uncomfortable and I think I've seen quite a few bits in the scientific literature around inflammation of the brain, it's not particularly good for you to have a meltdown and it usually comes on from a number of things. On the other side, we have shutdowns, people don't really understand them, I think a lot of people with autism probably have never heard the term for it. A shutdown is basically your first line of defence, I guess the first line would be prevention, your second line of defence to combat against having a meltdown. A shutdown is characterised by basically stopping talking, stopping thinking, stopping doing the thing that's overloading you and secluding yourself off internally into your own mind. Many people who have shutdowns may not talk, they may struggle when people want them to talk or in situations where they cannot go inside themselves, they can't go inside themselves enough to stop themselves from having a meltdown. It's partially involuntary and partially voluntary, it really does hamper your ability to communicate although you can do it. It's usually quite dependent on the circumstance as well, when you go into a shutdown you try to stop yourself from having a meltdown. Meltdowns aren't great, especially if you have some stims when you're having a meltdown that are quite self-injurious, you could hurt yourself. Shutdowns just generally occur but people don't really have a name for it. If you see another autistic person or you're talking to someone and you're talking about something quite stressful and something very social, they don't have the opportunity to express themselves and they feel very pressured to respond or they're finding the environment too hard then they would likely go into a shutdown and depending on the context if they're quite comfortable they may stop talking more than if they're around other people because there's none of that social pressure that builds up. So if I'm having a shutdown it's likely that I probably won't talk a lot and I'd probably be very short with my words and my processing will be very long. Take a long time for me to understand and respond but I will in a social setting to not escalate it and people to ask what's wrong, it's saying you're being rude or something like that whereas if I'm with someone I'm comfortable with I can safely do that and safely keep myself in a shutdown and not have a meltdown. I guess in terms of autism language it's important to understand the difference between these two because for one if you're autistic yourself it's good to know what it is, good to know why you do that and it's a good way to explain to people what they should do when you're having one of these and when they happen. Most people just think that autistic people have meltdowns and we do have meltdowns, I have meltdowns now and again but I also have shutdowns and most cases I do have shutdowns and I can cope with it and I recover. I do feel a bit spacey afterwards as you do with a meltdown but not so much and I generally feel a lot better about myself especially if I shut down rather than meltdown in public. Okay so that's number one. Number two I was going to go for the second hand there but that would have been four. One, two, three, four. Who's that knocking at the door? Infantsilization, very heavy on the old vocabulary this word, it's very wordy, that's what I'm trying to say. Infantsilization is, it basically occurs when an adult is treated like an infant. In a lot of cases, a lot of cases in my life, you know, I've been an adult or I've been a teenager and because they know that I'm autistic they'll treat me like a kid. This is, I think, one of the more underrated manifestations of discriminating. The problem is that in many cases the person who's doing it thinks that they're doing a good thing, you know, they think that you're disabled or that you're incapable of representing yourself or incapable of understanding social situations and acting appropriately. And so people think that they're doing a good thing by doing this, infantilizing somebody. And it happens a lot, specifically in the media, you know, you see an autistic person come on to a chat show or a program and they're just there to make everyone go, oh, you know, they've got that awe factor. That's what they're looking for by having this person on and it's not good. You're basically just making them kind of like a spectacle, you know, you're not treating them as an adult, you're not treating them as you would any other person. And I understand that depending on, you know, whether they may be more classically inclined in terms of autism, that you may have to change your way of behaving around them. You may have to have to help them with a few things, but you never have to infantilize them. It happens a lot. And people take autistic people's interests as being childish, you know, maybe the majority of people who watch SpongeBob SquarePants are children or teenagers, but it doesn't mean that it's unwatchable for adults. I mean, I recently watched a sort of like a docu-series on YouTube about different theories about SpongeBob SquarePants, like some of that stuff is pretty adult and I didn't, I don't think that many kids watching that would understand or be able to comprehend that. So there's a lot of depth to it. And I feel like I'm just trying to justify watching SpongeBob SquarePants. I don't watch it anymore. I would say if I did, because I don't care, but I love Pokemon. I love RuneScape. I love lots of different things that most people would think is a bit childish. But does that mean that I am a child? Nope. Does it mean that I have a different brain and I communicate differently and I understand things differently? Does that make me a child? Nope. It's all based on what is socially normative, in a socially normative way of behaving. If you don't match up with that, you're immediately labeled as a child. You don't agree with that and you don't act in a certain way in this situation. You're a child. That's kind of like at the core of infantilization. I've only recently found a word for it and I saw someone make a post on it on Instagram and I'm hoping to have them on the podcast at some point. We're going to touch a little bit on this infantilization, but it's a very interesting thing and a very interesting term. I never really had a word for it. I can find many instances in my life where I could apply this word to. It's a very good thing to keep in the back of your head in terms of language and it will serve you well to research into it more. Autistic burnout. Asperger's growth. Have you just took burnout, you know that thing that everybody gets and put artistic on it? What are you talking about? Why do you have to put labels and everything? Well, me. Well me. Autistic burnout. It's actually a lot of different in a lot of life. I can't even call it an argument with myself. Terrible. Confrontation, even with myself. It's a struggle. Autistic burnout is less about the actual product, less about the actual thing. It's more about the things that lead to a burnout. So for example, most people stress, difficulties in relationships and workplace and friendships and money and you know all those little stressors that those tend to lead to things like burnouts where you're working too hard to try and organise things and your brain's just getting tired and you can't focus. Autistic burnout is a little bit different because a lot of the things that may lead to a burnout won't be the typical things. So it could be socialising. It could be being exposed to sensory stimuli like a big ring light that you used to make videos with. Little things like that, little different aspects, things that the autistic people struggle with may lead to a burnout. But I guess going against what I just said earlier, the manifestation of it may be a bit different. So people may become a lot more socially isolated willingly just to preserve energy. They've shown in ECG studies, I think Temple Grandin was one of the subjects that autistic people during social interaction use a much larger part of their brain than just the speech and language centres. So obviously there's a lot of energy that's required for those social interactions and so limiting those and sort of cutting yourself off and having a bit of a long time is usually the thing to kind of overcome that burnout. There are other ways that it may manifest, but that's the main ways that I can think of off the top of my head. Burnout is something that I've experienced quite a bit. I try to do a lot of things and quite often I don't control a lot of areas in my life, you know, just in general as a human being, things just come up on you. Bad things, good things, neutral things. Sometimes I don't have the sort of the time and the space to kind of recharge and be alone and do all of those things that are going to combat that rising stress that's going to cause a burnout. And burnout's not great and they can last for a long time, or they can be intermittent and they can just happen when you just get really stressed and you take a day off from work and you recover or a couple of days. It's very much dependent on the amount of stress and how long it's been occurring for. It's just with autistic burnout you have different contributors to that stress and possibly a few more different manifestations to your regular old burnout. Why are you buzzing? Shut up. Empathy. You may be wondering why? Why have you put empathy as a part of autistic language? Well, the thing is that not many people understand the ins and outs of empathy. Lorna Wing, I believe, was one of the first people to characterize autistic people as having a low amount of empathy. There are generally two types of main empathy. I know in some of my other empathy videos, people have listed different types of subcategories of different types of empathy. But in terms of sort of the scientific literature, there are two types. Cognitive empathy and adaptive empathy. Cognitive being your ability to tell what someone's feeling, to feel what someone's feeling, to know their emotional state based on non-verbal cues, verbal cues, context, tone of voice, all of that kind of stuff contributes to cognitive empathy, which is something that autistic people lack in. One thing that we don't lack in is adaptive empathy, which is something that psychopaths don't have a lot of. Adaptive empathy is basically the ability to act appropriately based on someone's emotional state. The best example that I could give you of real life of these two types of empathy in autistic people would be my experience as a teacher. One of my students that I worked one-to-one with, they really struggled, I think around the age of seven or eight, and they really struggled to understand when they've hurt people. So I was thinking of ways to try and help them understand when they've hurt somebody. So what I did was, the next time that the kid actually hurt me, perhaps ran into me a bit too hard as little kids do, and I sort of amplified my facial expressions and my tone of voice, and I said, oh, you've hurt me, oh, it really hurts. In usual cases, if I didn't do that, he would not know because of that deficit in cognitive empathy, but once I did that and I once made him aware of the fact that you've hurt me, he showed a lot of adaptive empathy. He asked me if I was okay. He made sure that I was all right and that it didn't hurt too much and he apologized. And as I said, that showed a lot of adaptive empathy. It's important to know these two types of empathy because it's very often a blanket term that people use. You have empathy or you don't have empathy, which is wrong, especially in the case of autistic people and psychopaths. It's different. Psychopaths, bad, adaptive, good at cognitive. So they know what you're feeling, they don't care. They're not gonna do anything about it. They're gonna use you for the purposes. Autistic people aren't really aware that you're hurting or feeling a certain thing, but once they do know, they're gonna act appropriately and they're gonna make sure that you're all right. So there's those two kind of concepts to jug with and to understand. It's not just that whole thing of we struggle with empathy. It's not at all. And in fact, studies have shown and I guess in my own personal experiences, you can improve cognitive empathy. I did a test on cognitive empathy when I was younger. I think I got about 15 out of 40, not very good, but I did it recently and I got 38 out of 40. And that was the eyes test, if you want to try that out. You basically, you're looking at different people's eyes and trying to discern what emotion they're feeling. But yeah, I'll stop rambling about this. Empathy, not as clear cut as you think. Important to understand. So let's talk about everyone's favorite topic, possibly one of the more out there things. Probably something that I should have included in the first video, but forgot. Masking, no I'm not talking about going to a masquerade ball and dressing up in fancy clothes and wearing those little masks with the little feathers sticking out. Not talking about those, those are for poshies. Masking is a concept that has recently surfaced and it's taken off quite a bit and for a good reason. Masking is a thing that occurs when an autistic person acts like they're not autistic. They hide their autistic traits, they hide their autistic behaviors. If you watched one of my previous videos, you will know that I talked about the fact that maybe your personality and behaviors and ways of conducting in life will change when you're openly autistic. And that's because a lot of people who have gone for extended periods of their life, either not knowing they're autistic or not understanding the aspects of their autism, they will mask heavily and they won't feel good about it. They will know that I'm asking and they will do it anyway in order to fit in and feel good and have friendships, but they won't feel that that interconnection to other people. They won't feel like anyone gets them. So it's quite a lonely, a lonely thing to do. I've done some videos and some podcasts around, I guess I would coin it, adaptive masking. In certain situations, it may be quite advantageous to mask, such as interviews, such as first instances, dating somebody who perhaps doesn't know about autism. Sometimes it's good to put on a little bit of a mask like everybody does in different situations and adapt it based on how close you are to a person. And that's something that I've been doing for a while and it works and I'm very good at it. I'm very good at masking. So people who just meet me, they will think I'm incredibly extroverted and socially driven and understanding the ins and outs of social situations and feeling them and understanding and helping with the social dynamics and I do that, but I did learn how to do that. It wasn't something that I was innately born with. It's not my confidence. It's not my repeated exposure to social situations. It was my research and my analyzing conversations that I've had and understanding or non-autistic people even. I guess the most important things to know is that girls tend to do it more often. Girls tend to have a more natural ability to copy in social mimicry and so social interactions go easier, but they also mask a lot more. I feel like in a lot of cases girls tend to struggle. If they don't fit into certain groups, they don't think and like the same thing. Just from the female friends that I have, it seems to be a lot more harsh on that front, whereas with dudes that they tend to be a bit more forgiving, they may tease you, but they're not gonna exclude you from groups for certain interests or something like that. That's a bad thing for both of those groups because masking can very negatively affect someone's life. If done wrongly, of course, if done rightly and cognitively and balanced with who you are inside and who you are outside, then it's great. You can turn it on and off, you know who you are, you can be yourself around people that you know, you can put on a mask to people that you see on the streets or anything like that or people who don't understand autism. It's a very, very interesting topic masking and I believe there's quite a lot of literature around it. So I would recommend listening to people's experiences with masking and learning a bit more about it because it is something that comes up like a lot. Comes up a lot in like social media and videos and all sorts of jibber jabber. So it's definitely a good term to learn. Lastly, we've got a short one for you to round up the video. Special interests. And what's so special about those special interests? Special interests, it's a very strange term because it assumes that anybody who has an intense passion for something that they like that is not the norm, you have a passion for biology. You know, you're a little kid and you love reading biology books and by the time you're in GCSEs you're reading into like degree level stuff. That's called a special interest because it's not something that often happens for most people. Autistic people tend to get more easily fixated on certain subjects, which is why it's sort of coined in it. Not coined, but it's described in a certain way that kind of makes it sound like a bad thing, makes it sound like an abnormality. You know, it's a special interest. It's not just an interest that they really like. And I think a lot in teaching and a lot in parenting, there's a lot of use in using a child's special interests to further their education in different areas to provide social stories so that they understand different social scenarios that they'll get into using some of like those characters and using those interests. There's a lot of utility in them and it's something that has been noted quite far back in history around the sort of Hans Asperger end of things. They did notice that certain students had a propensity for certain areas like geometry. You know, someone who's interested in geometry as a child, they probably have a good future in maths and they knew that and they promoted that and they went in to do really well in maths. And it's the same as special interests. It's just got this turn around it that doesn't sound very great. I guess I could give you my special interests. I have a few. One is autism. One is biology. One is psychology. One is taekwondo and martial arts, the gym. And, oh God, what's the other one that I really like? I've got a lot of stuff. I like podcasts and media and YouTubeing, of course, but... Yeah, I've got quite a few special interests now that I think about it. I wouldn't say that they're in any way special. They're just very varied, very, you know, they don't really connect with each other. I think another thing to mention about special interests is that usually when neurotypical children have an interest, their interests are very tightly knit to their main interest. So you can better characterize somebody and what they like. Whereas with autistic people, you never know what they're interested in. They could be interested in... They could be like a bioscientist or something. And I guess in neurotypical, you may think, oh, they're scientists. They probably do some cardio, like a running or biking or something like that. But they could be like Olympic weightlifters, you know, they could run like a DJ show or like go to raves and play their music and rap or anything along those lines. And I guess that would be a special interest, but not in that sense, more as something outstanding and something cool and something unexpected, which I guess is a good way to think about them. And I do think we need to put a bit more work into reframing that whole... This is a trait and a difficulty and a negative of autism. It's not. It's great. So... That just about does it for another episode of the Autism Language series. You can look forward to another one very, very soon. And to go with the theme of today's video sort of, we have our own type of language, my own catchphrase, the thing that I've coined, the thing that I love on my t-shirt. Difability, not disability. I think disability is a great word because everyone can be disabled in certain ways if they don't fit into the norms. Difability, it's a lot more inclusive and progressive and understanding that autistic people better at some things, worse than some things. It's a different ability, of course. If you want to get a t-shirt like this, you can get, I mean, tanks, hoodies. You can get some joggers. Joggers are really cool, I'll have to show you at some point. You can find those all on the Born Anxious website. I've been working very closely with the company director, Kelly, and she's awesome. And all the clothing is sensory-friendly. They cut out the tags for you. They're soft as a, I'm gonna say a baby's bottom. Soft as a baby's cheek. They're just all, I'm a brilliant company. For a limited time only, I believe, you can get them in different colors. According to the Olympic rings as sort of a sporting sort of apparel that you can wear. I've been wearing these to the gym quite a bit recently. I've recently taken up bodybuilding just for a short while before I do some photo shoots and stuff. It's really been a very crazy experience going out there and wearing things like strong, powerful, autistic, or neurodiverse squad, or something like that in public. It was a bit weird the first few times and it did feel like people were looking at me or it was getting a bit paranoid, but honestly, it's such an empowering thing to do. Just to say it, because there's nothing wrong with it. Who cares if people know? I don't care. And it just feels great to rep the cause, you know? Get that autism awareness out there. So that rounds up another video. Make sure to follow my social media accounts. If you want, of course, you don't have to. Asperger's Growth, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Instagram being the key one there because that's the place that I upload the most. And do stories and inform people on what's happening in my life. You can also check out the 420 podcast, which has just ended the season one. There's a lovely, I think about 34, 35 episodes that you'll be able to listen through. If you've never got into it, this is the time to do it. Just getting caught up on the episodes before I release my second season. And if you want to be on that second season or you just wanna give me some comments, you can always contact me on my email, asperger'sgrowth at gmail.com. I will always try to reply to you within a week. As I said, I'm quite busy with all my special interests, but I will try. And if you have any other concepts or language that you want me to explain or go into, please button down in the comments and I will try to get on them as quick as possible. Take care, stay fresh, drink some water. I'm gonna have to drink some water because I've been sat in this chair for, God knows how long, my bum, I'm so, I know you don't need to know and I know it's a bit too much information, but my bum is very sweaty. You know, it happens. It's what happens when he takes a talopram and makes you sweat. And I'm already quite sweaty anyway, so like a fountain, take care. And I'll see you in another episode of the Autism Language series. Now how do I round this video up? Like that.