 Hello, everybody. I know all of you, but for those watching on recording, I'm Mel Hauser. I use she, they pronouns and I am executive director of all brains belong for my let me share screen and I will get us oriented. All right. So we are going to be capping off our discussion of the double empathy problem, but not really capping off because we talk about double empathy problem every day. It's just officially the last week of September, which is going to spend our theme for the month. So talking about double empathy problem at work today. So this of course is brain club, our educational space created to educate the broader ABB community about neurodiversity and related topics. Just as a reminder, this is for education purposes only. This is not a support group and this is not for medical or mental health advice. All forms of participation are okay here. You could have your video on or off and even if we even if you have your video on, we don't expect anything of you. We certainly don't need you to like sit still or look at the camera or anything. So feel free to walk, move around, fidget, eat, stim, take breaks, whatever, whatever needs doing and everyone's welcome at brain club and all formats of communication are welcome. You can unmute and use mouth words, you can type in the chat, whatever, whatever works for you. And in addition to affirming all aspects of identity, it's really important that we respect and protect everybody's access needs. So if there's anything that you are, that you need, anything that you're uncomfortable for any reason, just send a direct message to Lizzie. Hey, Lizzie, would you mind, mind waving if people know who you are? Amazing. That's Lizzie, our education programs coordinator. All right. And just as a reminder, since we have a lot of different brains, that we want to create safety for a broad range of communicators to give lots of space and time for people to participate however they are most comfortable participating, including observation is a completely valid form of participation. There is never any pressure to like directly communicate. And if you want to, we want to make sure that you have like time and space to enter conversation either in the chat or out loud. Okay. All right. Last bit of access. Plus captioning is enabled. You just have to toggle it on if you'd like to use it. So depending on your version of zoom, you might see the live transcript plus captioning icon. And if not, look for the more and choose show subtitles. You can also do the same and choose hide something as if you want to turn them off. Okay. That's my visual support to open up my chat box window. All right. So as I said, we've been discussing the double empathy problem all month in various contexts. And as a reminder, what that is, so it's a term coined by Dr. Damian Milton, who's an autistic social scientist in the UK. And what's been identified in research and consistently replicated for more than a decade now is that miscommunication does not happen because there is one set of normal social skills and then autistic people over there. Mismatch comes a mismatch of communication style and worldview in both directions between neurodivergent people and non-neurodivergent people. This is really about a failure of perspective taking. And so we've been talking about perspective taking throughout the month. Oh, Lizzie made a QR code for October Ring Club. That's so awesome, Lizzie. Thanks for doing that. So next month is our new theme. It's going to be about understanding your access needs. This is, I want to call your attention. We do not have Ring Club next week. I'm going to be presenting at the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit. We'll put the link for that at some point during Ring Club tonight. It's a three-day conference. And my presentation is during Ring Club. So that's why there's no Ring Club next week. But we'd love if you joined us over there. But we'll be back on the 10th to kick off our Understanding Your Access Needs Ring Club. And we'll have a series of community panels all about understanding your access need. Okay. If you missed last week, our QR codes in every slide. Oh my goodness. Anyway, that's the QR code for last week's webinar so that you can. But I mean, if you registered for Ring Club, you'll also get the, you know, the recording link sent out that way also. Okay. Oh, that's awesome, Michelle. Yay. All right. Last announcement before we get into our content. For those of you who are local to Vermont, we have our annual community health education fair this weekend. It was flooded out originally. So we're very excited to collaborate with the Montpelier Rocksbury Public Schools Partners in Education and joined Montpelier Fall Festival. So we'll be a zone of Montpelier Fall Festival. We'll have inclusion-minded community partners, activities for people of all ages, and the Encore Renewable Energy Take-Up Break Station. So we, for anyone who's around, we'd love to meet you in person on the Steakhouse lawn. Okay. All right. I guess I had one more announcement. My goodness. We are very excited that it's time to announce our next cohort of the Neuro-Inclusive Employment Bright Spotting Program. This is a program that we've been, this is our third cohort. So this is a program through which Vermonters can nominate employers in the community who are creating workplace environments for people with all types of brains to thrive. And so we are very excited to announce the winners of the Fall 2023 Neuro-Inclusive Employer Bright Spotting Program. So darn tough Encore Renewable Energy, Eternity, and Oak Maple Finance. And you'll get to hear from these folks during a brain club in October, or I mean November. November. They're coming to brain club in November. There we go. Okay. All right. So we talked about the double empathy problem. How does this play out at work? Or what is, you know, what's the significance of this? Why do we even talk about, why do we talk about work? Well, autistic adults are anywhere from two and a half to eight times more likely to be unemployed or under employed. Hold on. I'm getting, Sarah, did I remember to make you co-host? Yeah. Sorry. I didn't, I missed that one. No worries. No, no, I, I thought I just, you know, executive functioning. I didn't actually do that. I've been letting people in. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. All right. So, and 75% of ADHD adults experience employment-related challenges as well. And what we know is that employment and health are, are, are related in, in both directions. And, you know, unemployment increases the probability of developing a chronic health condition by 83%. And we know that autistic and ADHD years, as we discussed last week, have higher rates of chronic illness. And so this goes back and forth in both directions. A couple of months ago, we, well, I mean, throughout the winter and spring, we, I wanted to hold a visual support up, but I can't find my visual support, we have covered various topics from the book Parenting for Social Justice. And we had one of the co-authors come to present this spring. Anyway, I wanted to share some quotes from one of the authors of Parenting for Social Justice, Jamie Lynn Kasab, about the relationship between economics and health. We were drowning in a river of stress, trying to swim through it and mostly failing. The shame and guilt that I carried with me over how society viewed me simply because of my circumstances was extremely heavy. And when I've been completely stressed out worrying financially, my brain just couldn't work efficiently. It took so much energy just to exist. And I think this is so common, important to shed light on this. When we think about all of the different ways in which humans are othered and the intersectionality of all of those multiple aspects of marginalization, when we think about the economic factors, the class factors, this is inextricably connected with all of the other aspects of identity. And it's that combination of access to resources, relationship to work, whether you're respected and belong, whether you have any decision-making power or any given situation, these are some of the ways in which the oppressive power systems thwart people. And when we think about neurodivergent people who are thwarted for so many different reasons, this is an important piece of the conversation. What we don't want, we talk a lot about access needs here and we're going to talk about it all month next month at Brain Club. But what we don't want is when people don't have their access needs met at their places of employment, they're hammered to fit the square peg to fit into the round hole. And what happens, you break the peg, and that's what happens. That's what happens and drives so many of our community members into neurodivergent burnout. And that, of course, is part of health. And so this is all connected. And when we think about disability, the social model of disability, which is how the World Health Organization has defined disability for the past 25 years, about the barriers to access being what determines how much disability someone experiences. And so the more thwarted someone is, the more barriers in the environment to their access needs being met, the more disability someone experiences. So just by recap, if this is a new term for you, so access needs being anything that anyone needs to fully and meaningfully participate in one's environment or community, everyone has access needs. It's just that for neurodivergent folks, we're less likely to have our access needs met by the defaults of society. And so when we think about work, and we're going to talk more about this next month at the, you know, we always have a, one of the weeks per month is about employment. So we're talking about employment, so the last time we were talking about employment by any means. But some of the specific ways where like subtle ways in which employment related access needs are not met, you know, related to task allocation, you know, is that task the best fit for the way someone's brain works, the manner in which it is allocated and assigned, and, you know, and overlap with employee supervisor interactions, and which overlaps with power dynamics, and lots of other variables that contribute to dysregulation. So with that, we are going to watch a video clip from a whole year ago. This is back in summer 2022 where we we we we dabbled in hybrid brain club on the statehouse lawn and on zoom. And we're going to hear from some of our community members talking about their experiences of perspective, taking mismatches and the workplace. All right, David, take it away. I think about 30 minutes. But really, that that's how a lot of people feel because a lot of culture, workplace cultures, it's not safe to what to ask for what you need. And so as a supervisor, we really have to be in that place to say this is normal. It is normal to have needs. And I want to know what those things are. So that's what I it's it's it's part of it's part of safety, like emotional, physical safety of knowing that it's normal to have needs. Clem. Oh, you have you want to use that microphone? Okay, cool. Yeah. As long as everyone can hear me sounds like you can. So my early career experience for the past like eight months has been really interesting, because I'm not only like new to my workspace, but I'm like new to like nine to five, like office space world, adulting, you know, all that. And the thing that I've noticed in my particular space is that there's a lot of freedom and flexibility and like privilege and like having like kind of a white collar like office job. But at the same time, there's like no structure for anyone because there's assumptions and like, these are explicit assumptions that my like supervisors have talked about where they everyone's so busy that they expect everyone to kind of self regulate themselves and like do things the way that is going to work for them. But that's an assumption that everyone's going to be able to work well on their own without that structure. And then when that's not the case and you try to communicate it, it's like even if you're trying to communicate your needs or something like it can be hard to translate to people. And just before this, I saw a Twitter that was basically about spoons and thinking about spoon theory from like a neurotypical neurodivergent mental health lens. And it's like the thing that highlights is that like, I try to do my best work when I have the energy to do it. And when I don't have the energy to do it, like I that's not up to me. And that type of like energy ebb and flow does not fit into the nine to five cycle like it's supposed to. So if I want to like stay at the office and work until like 9pm on a given day, sometimes that like is legitimately like the best thing that I need to do for myself. But no one like sees that like if I need to leave earlier, if I need to leave late, because there's not that supervision or that structure. So my point is with all this is that in my work, there can be a this situation where like, nobody sees how much you're struggling to like regulate yourself from how much you're struggling to cope with your given environment or whatever, because like as long as you do the work or whatever, then they might think that everything's okay. So you have to go beyond just like doing your work and getting things done. You have to like make your work work for you. You know, you have to make your own work existence like tolerable for yourself, which is a learning process. It doesn't happen overnight. I'm curious. So you're a new college graduate entering the workforce. Um, did you know that this would be so hard? It's it's really interesting. It's okay. I didn't know, but it's because I expected it to be different, but it actually ended up being exactly the same as that like college environment where again, like professors don't regulate you. You just kind of have to do your own homework and they want you to get results. But the way that you do your homework or whatever, the way that you go through your work, some people will find it very easy. Some people will find it very challenging. And like, so it actually ended up being like the exact same like work habits and patterns that I've been having for the past like four years, which is weird. So to answer your question, I didn't expect it, but only because I expected it to be different and it ended up being the same, which was weird because I thought, you know, you're supposed to get off at 5pm or whatever and then go home. But if I have my laptop at home and the things I didn't get to today are going to bother me tomorrow anyways, it really breaks down those barriers. So it's actually very similar to college. That's interesting. So many times people share with me that when they first enter the workforce or even they first graduate high school or like various stages of transition where there is a this feeling of failure, like I'm having a hard time adulting, like as though there's right way to be an adult or like, you know, I'm having a hard time like paying my bills or like I can't I can't cook for myself. I anyway, like all these things that there's a lot of self judgment and a lot of internalized ableism that goes on because sometimes there's like this mythical narrative that being an adult means that you have a certain amount of executive functioning skills as though like executive functioning equals adulting. I don't know if if that resonates with anyone else but that is a that is a struggle for a lot of people. So I just want to name that for anyone in the audience who is feeling that today. Connie. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having me. This is my first brain club and I'm so glad to be part of this. And I guess let's just think how what can I share with you without going on too long. So Mel, like give me the the hook if I go on and on because my brain is making lots of connections right now. And I'm kind of that like idea person where I'll just go off because I see all these connections. But I actually did that with Mel recently on a call. And everything that's being talked about today really comes together for me with the work that our team of resource coordinators do in working bridges through United Way's workplace based team. Both on a on a it was like a supervisor level like working with our team and the people that show up to do the work of being a resource coordinator in very diverse workplaces. We actually resource coordinators go to workplaces to work with employees that are within specific companies and and they go to companies that are essential jobs. So these are kinds of jobs where many functions many job functions that are in these companies don't have remote capabilities. Even through COVID and some of the initial challenges that we faced where we work with employees that have to show up to their job, you know, in manufacturing settings and in health care settings. And so I think a lot about neuro inclusion and diversity of how our brains work as far as how the resource coordinators do their work because we have lots of different tools available to us. But not everybody works with those tools in the same way or wants those tools in their job. I think about it just from an organizational perspective, you know, United Way Northwest Vermont had the chance to connect with Mel through our staff training and start to really think about how the how does this happen, how does neuro inclusion impact our workplace and our work styles and the way we show up fully at work. So that's one perspective. But then I also see in our workplaces where we provide resource coordination. So with the employers that we work with, this feels sort of cutting edge. You know, it's kind of interesting because I think many of you here, you've been talking about this for some time, you know this, you know the work, but employers aren't, you know, this hasn't really been discussed. I don't think employers have had the chance to even have some frame around this or have some understanding about what this means and how they can look at jobs and look at individual needs and really see where options can be, where flexibility can be. One of my teammates met with an employee at a manufacturing company who was feeling really frustrated and really undervalued in their work and disclosed to the resource coordinator who's a confidential support that their person on the autism spectrum and that what they really want to do is organize that darn warehouse. But they're in a completely different position that's not really like speaking to them, right? It's not grabbing the way they want to work, right? And so I think there's just, there's so much stigma still that employees come to their resource coordinator and will share these things and yet they don't feel safe sharing with their employer when they know they could, like what's so hard to sit there is like the employer could have really maximize that employee's well-being and their ability to produce and do the job. If only we could break that down and create opportunities for people that really talk about what they need and maybe just shift that stigma so that employers too can create ways for people to talk to their supervisor and know that that's encouraged and that we want that in our culture and our workplace. I'll stop there, but this just, to me, with the employers they work, I feel like there's just a lot of work to be done and I just think the timing and the relevance is just all coming together really nicely and I anyway I'll stop there. Thank you Connie and it looks like Zeph has a question for you or your comment. Hi Zeph go ahead. Hi actually I was hoping to tag on and go next after what you were saying. So I want to preface my comments by saying number one Mel I'm going to be using the prompts that you sent out. Thank you I'm going to try to blow through them really quickly and what I would like the community gathered here to understand is that I didn't get my autism diagnosis until I was like 54 years old. That meant that I spent most of my life I'm 55 56 now I forget but I spent way more of my life not knowing that I was autistic in a neurotypical environment than I have knowing that I am neurotypical and unfortunately because of where the lack of information comes regarding neurodiversity the complex PTSD that I have actually is as a result predominantly of my employment scenarios. So some of the stuff I'm going to share isn't going to be really happy stuff and I'm sorry about that but it's also real and I'm also not super sorry about that. So the first question was what kinds of access needs do you have at work? I wrote down a couple notes about executive functioning and organization. I want to give an example of how the company came in had a consultant come in was working with us all for things on like organization and things like that at that point I had been in the business for 25 30 years I was holding high-level professional roles and I couldn't manage things and all of the suggestions that were given were neurotypical suggestions. They're all the ones that you find in the books they're all the ones that I had tried before and none of them worked for me because they weren't built for my brain but unfortunately what winds up happening is I just came off like I was resistant to any kind of help because the help that I was getting wasn't actually conducive to the problems I was trying to solve. The problem was nobody knew that I was autistic at that time. Another thing that came into play regarding access needs is top-down processing. Clem you were talking about working different hours. I can't work when there's sound around me I can't block out that sound and so I would go into the office at six o'clock when it was quiet work until it was nine not not be able to get anything done between nine and four o'clock with interruptions and then I would work until seven, eight, nine o'clock every day and I wound up getting fired in spite of unprecedented results because they needed somebody who could do the job in 40 hours a week. I was on salary so it cost them nothing more and I was putting in the time and getting unprecedented industry results and fundamentally what wound up happening is I wound up getting kicked out of the company for political reasons. They used 360 degree reviews and fundamentally none of the people who were reviewing me were actually qualified to review me. So that's just a little bit about the access. I don't want to go on too long but the part about making it hard to communicate the access needs really comes down to the fact that 3% of the research that goes into autism goes into adult autism as opposed to pediatric autism. I've been declined for medical services because the physician or the therapist doesn't know what to do with me. If the therapist or the physician doesn't know what to do with me, how can I expect the employers to know what to do with me? If the scientists aren't doing the research to inform me what help I need, how can I be informed to help an employer be informed as to what. So it turns into like this vicious circle. The last thing I want to address and I'll make this really really quick about how the concepts of access needs and perspective taking play out in the workplace. The one thing I want to note is because most people make an assumption that everybody else is neurotypical. They do not have it in their thought constructs that oh this person might be autistic, this person might be neurodivergent and so what happens when some of our neurodivergent features like rigidity or pathological demand avoidance show up, those kinds of features are often conflated as personality traits when they're actually hurdles that we are trying to get over in order to do our job and get the results that the company expects us to get. So that's my kind of little brief and thank you. Thank you, Zeph. Thank you so much for sharing that and I hear on the state how so many people nodding their head along while you were speaking. Connie. Zeph, what you just said made me think of something I just wanted to share. I think oh there goes my hand. Sorry I was like my hand's still up. Where's my hand? Oh but what you just said, I saw this happen in a workplace with, there was an employee that came to meet with me as a resource coordinator, right? So the employee came in was crying and clearly really escalated and you know really upset by their supervisor on a production line having yelled at them to do the job and do something a certain way and so they came to me and they disclosed that they had experienced a lot of trauma and having been previously incarcerated and that they were experiencing that flight fight, you know kind of that just the flood you could tell that person in it. But that team lead, that supervisor essentially that was a trigger, right? That person figured that and so the supervisor team lead, this is days later I came to find out the company let that employee go and what I have come to learn since what I think happened there and I don't know for sure but what I think was happening is the team lead in the company perceived that employee had that perception, right? That idea that this person just being difficult not following rules and you know creating this problem. When I know because I got to talk to that person I recognize, no, what's happening right now is the way a person's communicating is triggering your brain to go somewhere else. Your brain's not here at work, right? With that team lead who you know wasn't supported to approach that situation with those types of tools or with that thinking, right? We didn't we hadn't set that team lead up to be able to communicate in a way that would really have de-escalated the situation. It could have made that work totally differently. That I will never forget because I knew what was happening but the company didn't have any steps or any practice or any support for the employees that are in it day to day, right? Right. Yeah and if I could also point out because Connie what you're really reminding me of is you're really like a cultural broker. You are an interpreter where you are taking what you've seen, the communication, the nonverbal communication that you have perceived and you're now translating it or interpreting it through a lens of understanding nervous system regulation. It's not a common practice that we can even identify when people are dysregulated. It's like when I do trainings on neuroinclusive employment that is the first thing I do. It's what I do for you guys because I think if we cease overtly flipping their lid and throwing things like we can maybe recognize that's not a calm person right now but that's not the only manifestation of dysregulation. So if somebody is the tone of voice, the flood of ideas, the pace of speech, the rapid pace, there's all different ways that a nervous system manifests dysregulation. I think one of the most most helpful steps for an employer to like be investing in neuroinclusive culture is to get some training around recognizing dysregulation in your employees and not attributing things to like a conscious cortical like, yeah I really thought this out and I thought this was the way I was going to handle this. Like this is limbic involuntary automatic responses dysregulation. Jeff? Yeah, I was going to take on to that and say that especially with the the flight fight, fawn and freeze responses particularly with the fawning responses and disassociation. We know that our brain goes offline when we disassociate and that is precisely the time when we need to be able to be paying attention to what is going on but because of the disassociation we have to spend more time, focus and energy on passing in that scenario rather than on the work content that the employer actually wants us to be to be working on. Right, if you are spending all of your cognitive energy focusing on regulating because the environment is so dysregulating you have less cognitive energy available to do your actual work. I'm curious for any of our panelists for anybody in the audience this idea of a go between or an interpreter to like help facilitate perspective taking or just like challenges of perspective taking in general in the workplace. What have other people's experiences been about like why it's hard to do or how how how failures to perspective take have on you know unhelpful consequences. Yeah, the bandwidth tax that's exactly right, Connie. Yeah, so and and and I can start with the folks in zoomland you know feel free to unmute or type in the chat box if you know any any any any ways that that these topics of perspective taking in the workplace are resonating with you. Go ahead. Oh well I think I think part of the you know a huge part of the problem is is simply that there's a giant percentage of the adult population that has no idea that that that there's some that neurodiversity is so common and so you know and I'm and I say that including myself right. Mel said to me a long time ago what do you think happens to all those kids who are diagnosed with this when they were little they turn into adults and we just don't learn anything about that and it's not just physicians it's like everybody right so so there is so little knowledge and therefore interest in in getting an interpreter or being an interpreter you know the other thought the other thing I'm thinking though is there are certain I mean you can tell me what you think about this but there are certain kinds of jobs where you being regulated is necessity you can't just accommodate everything for every job. I love that you're bringing that up so two things I would say so one is the idea is that many times when people are dysregulated it would be helpful to like wonder why why are you dysregulated and so like to prevent dysregulation so when I when I think back to my medical training I can think hi when I can think back to like being a resident like breaking down like crying in the in the resident call room it was always in the context of my computer doing something terrible to me that was like really interfering with my ability to do my job I had no idea that I had visual processing and visual motor differences I had no idea I just knew that I felt terrible and I was flipping my lid about it like this happens all the time these like subtle ways in which the environment and the bandwidth tax depletes one's nervous system and so like the idea would be that uh yeah we we we should we should all know about our brains so that we can design a life that's meant for our brain you know like I I didn't know about assistive technology until I was 37 years old made a huge difference now my five-year-old has already had an assistive technology console like this is this is what happens when you can learn about your brain you have incredible power up you know offered to you and and and the most important thing is to not internalize a narrative of being broken and defective like yeah this is a thing this like zoom it's so hard to work it it's not my fault it's the way the program was designed so like that that that subtle shift makes a huge difference you know over over someone's lifespan because what I would say to Zef's point about or actually I'll also just just just just to add on directly to Rachel's point about you know autistic or you know otherwise neurodivergent kids become neurodivergent adults we have um you know here at all brains belong uh we have you know almost 200 uh neurodivergent adults who were not identified as children um you know the the people that come to our practice may or may not um you know the be neurodivergent or identify as neurodivergent but by and large the people come here because their needs were not met by the traditional health care system and we're offering something different um and in so doing what many not all but many people have in common um is that um you know growing up with a brain that thinks learns or communicates differently than that so-called typical brain whatever that means um is that there's just a lot of internalized ableism and um and just like impact on agency and self-esteem and self concept from being told explicitly or implicitly that there's something wrong with you and that there's something broken about you um when that that's that's not true it was a brain rule it was a package it was a myth that was that's that's been fed to so many people you know from from you know infancy toddlerhood onwards like the myth that there's a right type of brain like we tell toddlers that like you know this is this is how you play you can't just play the same thing over and over again that's pathological like you play as the pursuit of joy like who are we to you know like that makes no sense but yeah that's what kind of goes on that's the narrative go ahead hold on I want to give you a microphone here you go oh cool yeah you got your own microphone here you go I I think there's a I think we're up against something that's also that's bigger than just sort of informing people about like and getting people to buy into the idea of that that there are access needs and that it would be really great if there were sort of a universal design or a universal design approach because when I think about the cultural context in which people come into employment um first of all I mean this is the means of for me to make a living and support my family so already anybody who's like needs to be in the job market is stressed about their employment so they're coming in that fight so they already have their fight flight stuff going up up in arms when it comes to retaining employment so someone else gets an advantage that that you know is if all of a sudden that pool of potential employees becomes larger that's a scary thing for the people who are already the even the neuro the neurotypical people who are like wait this is my pool now somebody else is getting an advantage and then and also you've got not only that but you've got the the the companies that are in competition with each other and and they're in fight flight with each other so so we have a whole culture where employment is a fight flight thing that's sort of bringing out the worst of us as far as how how we each secure our own private little advantages our own little advantage nooks rather than how we open access and um and and um and share resources and so I don't I don't know how to deal with that but I think we're coming into something that has to be that that that is better recognized um and and addressed intentionally as a part of like how do we how do we make this better for everybody in a way that that like and and how do we make clear the stress the impact that the stress is having on everybody that it's like that the way that we're doing employment right now is bad for everybody so it would be good for us to begin to change. You can pass the microphone to Matt and I would say that I mean this is an opportunity to zoom out and say the way that we're doing a lot of things in society is not working for a lot of people um the way we're doing healthcare the way that we're doing education the way that we're doing employment like it's like and and and and this this this is the work that we're trying to take on here at all brains belong in terms of like like can we zoom out and reimagine what's possible because like this not working. Well so uh one of the things that I just noticed on that video um that I remember from real life um uh was there was someone on the lawn who was texting who was texting to the zoom chat and we read it out loud like it was such a beautiful capturing of like what's on here of creating spaces for people to show up however however they're most comfortable and just show up authentically so um I wonder um what's what's standing out for for folks tonight. This is gonna sound negative this is from Michelle when I was listening to I think it was Bruno talking I'm like wow that's a lot of pettiness that he's having to react to from the people at work I think it was Bruno the chat no no the guy in the video oh somebody in the video talking about yeah I mean there's so many there's so much right there's so much pettiness out there but it's also like I think um some of that comes from conflicting access needs so some of um some of what people encounter in workplaces um are because the people they're interacting with they don't have their access needs met either and so they're dysregulated they can't perspective take they can't zoom out and see the big picture um and consequences and when we have like imbalance of power dynamics um often those conflicting access needs result in one person powering over another and you know sometimes people lose their job over that. Mel this is Christina I'm sorry I don't if you have more to say Michelle go ahead. No I'm fine um that was just my first take I'm like wow there's just a lot of little petty activities here that if you add them up over time yeah it's probably enough for you to be fired over but oh my god right and so um and and you add them up over time and it takes a considerable toll on a person's nervous system and we wonder why so many are in burnout. That's interesting you say that because like I so related to the burnout thing you said Mel it's like I've always had this interesting concept and I think it's it's relatable I think to other autistic people um when I have like a like a a workload to complete I feel like you know there's so much that I need to do and every time I you know sit down I'm gonna like I'm I'm gonna do like my best effort and and like even maybe above you know and and there's this kind of um internalized concept that like I have set that like I have to do this much you know every time and like perform like equally but there's this undercurrent sort of understanding I think with people that are unlike not autistic that it's like that's enough like like if you had a scale from one to six like they put in six you know level six effort and that's good enough and then they like you know they finish with the day where I'm always like shooting for like the 10 that like the level 10 effort and I feel like when I fall below that that I'm not doing my best you know and so my scale of my performance has just measured so off of like what would be expected in like but I don't have this concept internally of like what is realistic or what are other people doing like you know I don't know that and like it seems to be sort of like there's this understanding that people have about how much effort they put in on any given time and then I am putting too much too much too much and then it goes to the burnout part and then I then I'm like not performing at the same level and then it looks like I'm really terrible as an employee because I'm not like at the level that I used to be and it it is kind of this thing that I feel like is a consistent pattern that I've had and I feel like other people would relate to that that I relate to that so many people really hear about this all the time you know I think that a lot of this also I mean there's like like at the everything relates to the brain right so so you know what why do we do that why do we push so far that we burn out well I don't think we know that we're doing that right so it's like this higher order executive functioning skill of self-monitoring of and and if you also have the kind of brain that doesn't feel time you have an access need for objective feedback on on performance on where your body is in space where you are in time where you are in relationship to other people and I think like the first panelist was saying about like when you have even in the spirit of like you know flexibility that that actually is really hard for people because you when you lose the objective metrics you're like well I don't I don't I don't know if I'm done I'm just gonna keep going um and nothing ever feels done nothing ever feels saturated it's just and then there's also like foot on the gas you start doing the thing you can't stop doing the thing um is from dopamine deficiency inertia it's it's all of it and as Bruno's adding in the chat also layer in perfectionism which is um I I think a trauma response um and so common Michelle um this goes back to when I used to be a consultant um you know in a well-run company they would have metrics and there'd be clarity around how much is enough um now nobody has that I mean it's very rare for that to happen but well run companies tend to do that so you don't have people killing themselves as much overdoing it as much um so really interesting part of it part of the issue I think is poor communication um from management on down um just poor communication to the employee around what exactly is the job supposed to be and all of the implicit things that are never said um as so as a former business process management organizational change management person I'm like yeah there's a lot of stuff that's not said and hopefully we can start to make that more explicit yes and I would also layer in that it's not just you know I think a lot of times people talk about well you know in neuro normative culture things are not said or I don't know that it's only neuro normative culture um sometimes it's a conflicting access need piece like I would say that like I don't know I'm maybe I'm not the best boss but like I suck at telling people clearly what I'm thinking because I don't know what done looks like like all the time because I don't know what done looks like until I've done the thing and so it is really I think so like lack of clarity isn't always because there's like the hidden curriculum of like there's only one way to be in the world it's also like it might actually relate to the employer or manager's brain and style yeah but they at least uh to encourage someone to ask questions sure right that's culture that's a culture where you you uh you say you say what you need you ask for clarity um you seek you seek what you need yeah reading the chat um Bruno says for me perfectionism started as a result of neglect um a reason to try and be good enough to receive the needs for love and attention as a very young boy this transformed as an adult to try to be good enough in comparison to others that were succeeding where I was not just want to take that in we're so not alone there are so many people for whom that is true and it's like the earlier in life that you receive the message that there's something fundamental about you that is not good enough that needs to be changed I mean that stays um and but it's never too late so like you you find your community and you start to recognize that it it was never you um and that that discovery that transformation of of one's own narrative and one's own relationship with themselves that makes all the difference in the world so with that thank you all so much for being here and being part of this conversation and we look forward to seeing you not next week but the week after um october 10th uh we'll pick back up to be discussing understand from a community panel reflecting on their experiences of coming to understand their own access needs