 from an early age, you're learning already that your existence is wrong. And that's a very simplistic way to put it, right? Because of course, like wrong can mean many things, but you're essentially learning that the way that you think is not right. The way you have a lot of experiences, like the podcast that I had with Joe Williams, who's another sort of disabled advocate, public speaker kind of person, met them at the audition show. But we were talking about gaslighting, particularly, and lots of different types of it. And there was something that Jolie brought up, which was about like unintentional gaslighting. And this is something that a lot of autistic experience, like quite a lot. And the whole idea behind unintentional gaslighting is you're essentially denying someone's reality in order to make them feel better. You're struggling at a social event to fit in, to talk to people. People say to you, you can do it, you know what to do. You just need to talk to them. You know how to talk to people. You know, they might say stuff like that to kind of encourage you, but at the same time, you have no idea what you're doing, you know, or you're at a shopping mall, you're at a park, the noises are way too much. You're finding yourself like slowly slipping down into over stimulation to having a meltdown. And someone says, oh, it's okay, you can handle this. You've handled, you can handle all of this. It's not too bad. You know, your experience of this is not too bad. They're kind of telling you what your reality is like. And that happens in so many different points in your life. You know, if you talk to a psychologist, if you talk to a doctor, anyone like that, it really does happen a lot to us because usually those people's assumptions, they work with people who want autistic, but because we're atypical because we're different, those assumptions actually don't fit in with our experience of things quite often. Have you ever experienced an ego death? Well, some people think that being autistic might be inherently linked to this idea of ego death. You may have heard it, particularly in the psychedelic communities, but today we're going to dive into the world of philosophy from the autistic perspective with the fault spots. The video is called Let's Explore the Abstract Idea of How Being Autistic Is Inherently Linked to Ego Death. Probably one of the longest titles I've ever seen. It's very apt for the fault spot. So let's have a look at this video. Let's talk about the autistic experience and how that correlates with ego death. All right, you guys, I'm fully prepared to dive in deep in today's video. I don't know how long this is going to be, but I would not be surprised if I'm just jabbering for an hour straight. I wrote down all of my main points that I'm going to be going through. I'm ready. I feel like I've come to class and I'm ready to give my lecture. Just to go through the points that I'll be talking about in today's video. I will be talking about the ways that autistic people go through ego deaths specifically. And then I want to end the video in how it positively impacts some of us. Just because I don't like to be completely existential and depressing in all my videos because I know some of my topics can be very overwhelming. I always like to round things out with a little bit of positivity, not in a toxic positive way like woo woo. Let's meditate and act like everything's okay. But just in a way of like life is really hard, life is difficult, but also there's beautiful things as well that we can experience. I would definitely describe myself as a positive nihilist if you've ever heard of such a term. I don't believe that there's anything particularly meaningful about the world, but we create our own meaning basically. I'm also a determinist. So I believe that everything is set in stone from the start of the universe till now and the future. If you might have heard of the term ego death before because it's very heavily kind of talked about within I think when I was doing my sort of research into like different different compounds that people take. It seems that people who take psychedelics or kind of express this feeling of their being being somewhat melded with the universe and not particularly stepping out of their own persona who they are and sort of seeing how connected everything is and such. I've heard a lot of people explain it in a lot of different angles. But yeah, I mean, I've experienced some somewhat similar things especially like during long stints of like depression particularly tends to be very very heavily associated with like dissociation for me sometimes. But I have also seen some stuff about related to like autism. It seems that a lot of autistic people tend to think deeply about the meaning behind things which makes sense because we don't always have the same blueprints as what other people so what other people give us. Is that the same as fate? Yeah, somewhat, yeah. Determinism is based on the idea that your past basically makes up what's going to happen in the future. And you can't control your past. And you are, I mean, in my idea, everybody is a combination of the genetics that they were born with combined with things that happen to them, you know, and it's a very predictable thing all the way back into the history of the universe. It's kind of tied to this idea of like free will and stuff which is something that I don't believe in either. You know, gotta have that duality there. I wanted to talk about how ableism and being a scapegoat leads to ego deaths. I also want to talk about how our hyper self awareness comes from the fact that we are constantly forced to perceive ourselves from so many other people's perceptions. I wanted to talk about how ego death is essential for masking. I wanted to talk about the constant recalibration that we have to go through when we process other people's perceptions of us. I also wanted to talk about how having so many ego deaths throughout your life kind of obliterates your ego altogether and you end up having no sense of self because of that or no sense of identity because of that. I wanted to talk about how for a lot of high masking autistic individuals, it's a common experience as you grow older and older to hit these points where you have to almost intentionally integrate your ego back into your life and how ego is not necessarily a negative thing all the time. It's actually very necessary to have a sense of ego. So we have to oftentimes in our adult lives begin to learn how to set boundaries for ourselves, learn how to be empathetic towards ourselves, learn how to ask for accommodations and integrate accommodations. Well, the ego is a very sort of, it's a very integral part of being a person because it allows you to self advocate, it allows you to pursue your needs, it allows you to kind of get the other things that you need, avoid the things that you don't want, etc. So having an ego is very functional in that sense. It can also be, as often is talked about in the psychology spaces and the internet, having too much of an ego, people say. It's usually when people are a little bit more kind of, I would say, openly self-centered than most. There's an argument to be made about whether doing things for other people is a strange way of helping yourself, which it can be. But those people who particularly like that, you know, they're the center of the universe kind of people. And I haven't really heard about people talking about EODF outside of those communities that I was talking about. But I'm assuming that in this sense, it's kind of like a, I guess sort of a lack of understanding yourself and just not necessarily knowing who you are, what your identity is, having that somewhat reflected in what people's expectations are for you, what people say about you. You can see in a lot of circumstances why that might happen a lot for autistic people. And learn how to express ourselves again, because sometimes we even lose sight of who we are and what we enjoy, because we just don't pay attention to that ever. And I also want to talk about how when you recover from having so many ego deaths and you learn how to integrate a little bit of healthy ego back into your life, you can begin to healthily hold space for everyone's truth simultaneous to each other. And how that in turn allows you to have a clear idea of the collective wellness due to that dissolved ego. But before we get into today's deep dive, let's take a productivity shot together. For those of you who do not know, I struggle pretty intensely with chronic pain. I've had endometriosis and other conditions that I'm still figuring out with my rheumatologist. A big aspect of managing chronic pain is actually integrating lifestyle changes, like managing your diet, cutting certain things out. And one of those things is switching from coffee to matcha for me. Coffee is not necessarily good for you, especially if you're drinking it every day. And especially if you have those chronic pain conditions, something that's been really helpful for me in making that switch is being able to drink magic mind productivity shots. These shots taste so good, you guys. They honestly taste like fruit rollups or gushers. For those of you who know what that is. What's amazing about these shots is that they use ceremonial grade matcha. Matcha actually gives you a more sustainable energy flow throughout the day without the crash. If you actually reading, there is actually some good, good sort of research behind that. I know this is just kind of like a product placement, but if any of you out there really like your caffeine, like myself, but do find that you do have anxiety disorders and you feel quite like, have you stimulated quite a bit? An L-pheonine supplement is a good thing to turn research. It's quite cheap to actually to get. You can get it from bulk powders. But if you make a couple of tiny little spins of L-pheonine into your coffee or whatever, it can actually somewhat smooth the sort of excitatory effects of caffeine, sort of leave you with the focus, not necessarily all the jitters. So ego death is oftentimes described as feeling like a form of dying in which one lets go of their sense of self and identity. So some people describe it as eye-opening, cathartic, blissful, and sometimes even scary and terrifying. Sometimes people can describe that as also feeling like you are one with the universe. I want to continue to highlight that ego is a neutral term here. It's not necessarily just all negative. There's a lot of psychologists that will say that there is a healthy sense of ego because it's good for a person to be able to know who they are to know what they stand for to be able to set boundaries and to be able to take care of themselves, right? The downside to having no sense of ego is that you just lose yourself, all the bad, but also all the good. There's a lot of autistic individuals who end up unaliving themselves because they're struggling so intensely with their mental health. It has to do with a lot, but I feel like going through so many ego deaths throughout your life, it makes it so that you just don't care about yourself anymore and you're just suffering, right? So it makes sense. I relate to that. Yeah, I mean, I haven't had a lot of situations like that. I've had a few times where I've like meditated for a prolonged period of time or have been isolated on my own for a prolonged period of time, where I've experienced something like that. And it's not like I don't act in the world depending on what I want. There is definitely an aspect of ego in doing what I want and moving towards what I want. Definitely that kind of sense of not really feeling like I have much of a like at my own identity was something that I struggled with quite a bit when I was younger, trying to find out a reason. And I think a lot of that was probably due to number one, not really understanding myself. I think in the realm of understanding autism, but also getting lost in other people's perceptions of me. Taking on board that stuff too much, saying that this is the accurate representation of who I am, based on other people. It's such a good description in this video. Yeah, there was something that they said, yeah, it's like feeling lost. It's a very strange experience, that is for sure. I just want to go have a look at one of the, meet it for a second, try and find the quote that they were talking about. Ego death is the often instantaneous realization that you are not truly the things you identified with. The ego or the sense of self created in your mind is a fabrication. And in some instances can offer a profound feeling of peace and connectedness with all that is as the walls of separation. The ego creates crumbling down. Yeah, and my research into philosophy definitely created a lot of these instantaneous realizations. Sometimes it would just hit me in random places, usually related to nostalgia. I remember a particular time where I was in a theater. And I used, generally around Christmas time when I was used to go to the pantomime, which is kind of like a sort of theater performance if you don't know about it. And we had it around Christmas. It tends to be like around particular fairy tales and such. It's quite funny. But because I've been to that pretty much most years of my life to the same place, it's kind of like a glass breaking moment where you just kind of look at what's happening around you and yourself and you realize that you've been zoned in and somewhat embedded within the narrative of a story and you forget about everything else. It kind of has this very worrying feeling. But then again, I've also had experiences where it's been somewhat good for me, perhaps in situations where I've been taking too much accountability for things that are going on in my life. Being able to kind of have that sort of step back and see and just to cog in a big machine has been, sometimes gives me that separation in order to somewhat approach it with a bit of a reasonable angle for a reasonable sort of lens, I suppose. A lot of autistic individuals who end up unaliving themselves because they're struggling so intensely with their mental health. It has to do with a lot, but I feel like going through so many ego deaths throughout your life, it makes it so that you just don't care about yourself anymore and you're just suffering, right? So it makes sense that you just don't want to be here anymore. I've heard so many autistic people express how they don't necessarily want to unalive themselves, but they don't necessarily want to keep going either. Like there's no place for them here. And I feel like if we were to really abstract all of these very real objective consequences of being autistic, it comes down to the fact that there is a lot of ego death that we are constantly experiencing because of how poorly integrated autism is to our society, both objectively and also subjectively in our ideas of autism. I feel like the first place we experience ego deaths is oftentimes in our family dynamics, because as children, that's the first thing we're exposed to. The next significant area of our life where we experience that ego death is schools and around our peers. I feel like adolescence and childhood is so difficult for autistic people because one, like everyone else, you don't know much about the world around you or life or yourself and you're supposed to be learning that information from the people around you, your mentors, your teachers, your parents. And I feel like our society doesn't give enough advice or set near-divergent kids up well enough. We're constantly learning to use inappropriate tools for ourselves. Well, a lot of the time, particularly at school, a lot of the ways that we develop as people is through others, how people react to us, what people say about us, whether we like to say it or not. It does have a large impact on how we perceive ourselves to quite a large degree, I would say. The experience of somewhat being a wallflower, somewhat part of a group but not necessarily within the social things that are going on. You're just observing responding when people talk to you, not particularly actively engaging or bringing up new things. It can feel somewhat dissociating. You just feel like an item that's there and you're living life through observing other people to some degree and not really having much of a comprehension of what's going on as well, especially in those secondary school. Ages, I would say. Go through this process of needing to switch ourselves over from our original programming and our original tool belt over to a different programming with different tools. And I feel like that's kind of where we experience that first ego death of like, I don't know why I feel so different. I don't know why I feel wrong, but I am. And I'm going to learn how to exist correctly and appropriately so that I could be more accepted and integrated into society, or I don't want to be punished all the time, right? I feel like that has a very significant effect on children because from an early age, you're learning already that your existence is wrong. And that's a very simplistic way to put it, right? Because of course, wrong can mean many things, but you're essentially learning that the way that you think is not right. You have a lot of experiences like the podcast that I had with Joe Williams, who's another sort of disabled advocate, public speaker kind of person, met them in the order and show, but we were talking about gaslighting particularly and lots of different types of it. And there was something that Jolie brought up, which is about unintentional gaslighting. And this is something that a lot of autistic experience quite a lot. And the whole idea behind unintentional gaslighting is you're essentially denying someone's reality in order to make them feel better. You're struggling at a social event to fit in, to talk to people. People say to you, you can do it. You know what to do. You just need to talk to them. You know how to talk to people. They might say stuff like that to encourage you, but at the same time, you have no idea what you're doing. Or you're at a shopping mall. You're at a park. The noises are way too much. You're finding yourself slowly slipping down into over stimulation to having a meltdown. And someone says, oh, it's okay. You can handle this. You can handle all of this. It's not too bad. Your experience of this is not too bad. They're kind of telling you what your reality is like. And that happens in so many different points in your life. If you talk to a psychologist, if you talk to a doctor, anyone like that, it really does happen a lot to us because usually those people's assumptions, they work with people who want autistic. But because we're atypical because we're different, those assumptions actually don't fit in with our experience of things quite often. And so it can sometimes feel like we just don't really understand ourselves, don't really know what we want, don't really know what we would want to do in a specific circumstance. Combine that with kind of the the daily routine, trying to deal with all the stress, that kind of the daily school routine if you go to school, then you socialize at this time and then you do this. It all kind of combines into one and it feels very much like you don't really have much agency and ability to sort of self advocate for the way that you want to do things, the way that you think, the way that you're perceiving things, and the things that you think would be good for you. You just kind of idly learn to go by what other people think. Which I guess, you know, it definitely sounds a little bit like ego death to a certain degree. Bree says, I kind of looked back into my childhood and went through my life again, understanding now why I was discerning what was me and what was other, then throwing away the other. It's a good way of putting it. Paul says, I've tried to unmask a little and let people closest to me know what I need and what really causes me problems. In a few cases that has gone well, but mostly reactions have been negative. Yeah, well, up until that point, I suppose, people don't really expect you to come out with that stuff like they might say, what are you talking about? You've always been okay with this, even though it's just being over people telling you that you're okay with it. And you just going, okay, I guess that's true, at least in my experience. It's a mixed bag. And especially if you start to self-advocate, you start to tell people what your reality is. And it definitely goes against what they previously thought. There can be a lot of pushback against that, I would say. Aaron says, I always felt like an alien in human disguise. It was such a revelation that there were others hiding in human skins too. And tea advice doesn't always work with us 100%. There's a variety hiding in the human skins. Yeah, it's definitely looking back in secondary school. I can definitely pick out individuals that were definitely autistic, but I just didn't didn't really know what to look for. Strange existence, I would say. Stepping into the mind. The way that you operate and like to get things done is not right. The way that you socialize with people is not right. The way that you express yourself is not right. The way that you would want to learn is not right. You're constantly being told, don't do this. That's not okay. Do this instead. Why can't you just follow the rules? Why can't you just do this? And so that feeling of being wrong is deeply ingrained in us and in our bodies and in our nervous systems from an early age before we could understand why. And so as we grow up into adolescence and young adulthood, we begin to deal more with the cognitive aspect of ego death. Now we develop that sense of wrongness in our minds and in our thoughts of ourselves to be able to match up with the feeling of being wrong. And this is where the layers of ego death begin to pile on top of each other. So when you move into high school, college, and when you start to work in your adult jobs, you're constantly being reinforced of the nuances of how society operates and how that doesn't come naturally to you. You're constantly learning through messing up basically in social. But it's not only just that that people tell you that you're aware of it. I think that's that's the most disillusioning, like difficult part of it. It's like people are saying that your experience is wrong, that kind of unintentional gaslighting, like this doesn't make any sense. What you don't think of it that way. This is how people think about things. It's those that kind of inner things. It's kind of somewhat disregarding internally what's going on for you and trying to match that up with the regular way that that people might think about things. It just doesn't work. Yeah, and when you are a person who cares against the norm, a lot of the things that people tell you that you should do, which you can't always do because of capacity and having a different brain, you feel bad about it and you kind of feel like you're wrong and you somewhat feel adrift. It's kind of like you're in a stormy sea and you're just on kind of like a boat and you've got all sorts of people sort of pulling you one way or another, rowing you one way or another and you don't really have, you're the captain of the ship, but you don't really have sort of the power to sort of change things, to set a direction. I realize that might be a very weird sort of overly general example, but that's kind of what it feels like. For me, the point at which things started to change was when I established myself and I was like, okay, this is what I do like and what I don't and this is how I work and went through and I explained it to people and obviously there was some difficult situations where I had to self-advocate and say like, actually no, this is not what I want to do. This is not high work and not what I want to shoot for in life. Having that kind of self-agency, that ability to self-advocate is really important. People get the wrong end of the stick when I talk about self-advocacy. Self-advocacy is not always a battle. It's not always someone coming up to you and saying, you need to do this and you're saying, actually, I can't do that or this would be very uncomfortable for me. I'd prefer to do it this way. It's not always this kind of this battle of this is what I want and I'm not doing it that way and kind of the militant kind of self-advocacy. Sometimes it's just explaining your perspective and saying, okay, I understand that's the way that things are done but perhaps we can do it this way because of this and this and I experience that differently and sort of having a bit more of a gentle kind of more educating approach to it. It's not always like a battle, a battleground. Militant self-advocacy is one of my favorite terms. It's very, very reflected, I think, in some of the comments online where people are sort of shouting at people and saying, you're a horrible person and now this is not the way that you should be doing things. It's kind of like very aggressive sometimes. It's not always self-advocacy doesn't always look like that. In fact, it should most of the time not look like that unless someone is pushing you. Brie says, my family always just puts me in my own category. Lookie, they didn't completely gas like me then and say, no, you're wrong. They said, no, you're different. I guess I was lucky. Yeah, my mom was the same. It mostly came from other people in my life, romantic relationships, friendships. Definitely had a bit of big impact and doctors, of course. Special situations and in many different situations, like, oh, I didn't know this before, but now that I messed up, I can show up better next time. But you still take that hit to your sense of ego because you're constantly having to learn the hard way. And that does not feel good, right? It really just obliterates your sense of self-worth to always need to learn after messing up and to have to suffer the consequences and accept those negative labels, even though you weren't making those mistakes on purpose. Well, I don't necessarily think that it's always about like the making mistakes element either. I think a lot of the time, a lot of the difficulties that we can have is just because of a mismatching communication styles, misunderstandings, miscommunications. And there's no real person to blame in that situation. It's a mutual thing. It's just that we just tend to take the hit because we are not the norm, you know? And you are genuinely just existing only to find out after the fact that you were perceived as selfish or you were perceived as incompetent or ignorant in all of that stuff. You begin to add layers of shame and guilt to that ego death. So not only are you constantly suppressing yourself, but now you're feeling ashamed of yourself when you are not doing it good enough. I have been having meltdown after meltdown for the past like two weeks over the fact that I have a lot more support needs than I realized. I don't want to have to struggle. I don't want to have to rely on people so heavily. And it feels so awful to have these realizations. And on top of that, I continue to gaslight myself and on myself that I must be faking these struggles because how the hell did I go the first 20 years of my life not knowing I was autistic and not getting any help and support? And then I remind myself that being in this state right now is the consequence of masking and not getting help and support for the first 20 years of my life. I feel this way right now because I pushed myself so hard to fit in and pretend like I didn't have struggles. And this is the consequence. This is where it got me. I worked so hard to show people that I didn't struggle and convince myself that I didn't struggle. And I thought if I continued to do that, that at some point I wouldn't have those struggles anymore. But all Jesus Christ. Oh my God. I feel for that. I feel for us so much. Oh my God. I was not expecting that to be in the middle. I hate. I mean, it's great. There's the flag that is out there, but I hate to think that people are going through that. It just makes me so sad. Just like, yeah, sorry, it's an intense video, but in a good therapy way. Don't worry about it. It's just, it kind of hit me a little bit. Yeah, very smart. All it got me was here right now. I feel like a failure. I feel like a burden. And I feel like this is never going to go away. Like I'm always going to feel like this. And I know not. I'm just sharing how I feel and you begin to truly despise your sense of self. And even if we're not aware enough to realize that that's how we feel, because I don't think everyone is sitting there thinking I hate myself and I despise myself. But at least you feel it in your core, like in your body. For me, throughout my young adult life, it just felt like I was constantly cringing all the time when I was trying to see myself through other people's perceptions of me. It's difficult, because one of the main reasons why I tended to isolate myself and not really open up as much and sort of talk to people I used to do a lot of kind of solitary things, it was because I just didn't, I didn't like being around people because I didn't like to feel like that. You know, I wanted to somewhat feel in control and whenever I was around people, I'd just constantly get these little responses, these little subtleties that kind of told me that the way that I was interacting was wrong, the way that I was thinking was wrong. You know, people would try to motivate me, particularly about stuff that I struggled with. But they would do it in a very insensitive way. They saw it as like an easy task, something that most people couldn't do so you can do it, because you look like you can, because you are, you present as someone who is particularly functional in a lot of cases. And it just, it really just kind of eats at you. You know, so some of my best friends that I have were always people who listened and they said, oh yeah, I can see that. And, you know, didn't immediately just say, well, other people do that. Well, other people can do that. There's, you know, it's just something you have to do as an adult. You know, it's not like a, it's like a pushing you to the side, pushing how you feel and your perceptions and the things that you find difficult pushing that to the side. It was, yeah, I can see how that can be difficult and you know, why it is. And it only, it only tends to happen when I stepped out into the social world on my own. I was good. I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted to do. But obviously I really wanted that human connection at the same time, struggled with a lot of what was you know, said in that kind of vertical video when I was around people. It's horrible to see others suffering. You can't do anything. Yeah. What kind of help can an autistic adult expect? Well, I mean, it's, it's something that needs to be understood and developed over time because everybody is very different. I'm assuming you're talking, you're talking sort of generally not like specifically about like supports and things out there. But yeah, having, I have, one of the things about the autism journey is finding what you find difficult and saying, okay, I'm going to find ways to not do that because it's too much and I've tried and it's just not something that I can do naturally. It takes up a lot of my energy makes it so that I can't do the things that I enjoy as much in life and it makes it so that a lot of my energy is, is taxed by the end of the day and I can't get the things done that I need to do. It's about weighing up like in your head, which, which things do I need help with and saying to other people asking for help and saying, can you help me with that? And that, that's hard in itself, advocating and asking for help, but finding those things that you just struggle with too much that you need support in is, is hard because it requires you to look at yourself and say, I can't do this consistently. I can do this in the instant, but I can't do it consistently over time. I can't manage it. It always causes me large amounts of distress and difficulty and it eats into other parts of my life. That's the hard thing that I think that's the hardest bit about it, that alone asking for people, asking help for people. It's saying, you know, this is just too, I just can't do this bit, you know, and it's not, it's not shifting responsibility and refusing to grow. Like a lot of people might say, it's not about that because quite often these are things that people have tried to help themselves with for a large portion of their life and they, they do manage it, but it just takes such a toll on them constantly. I have times where I hate myself and the things I cannot do. And then at times I don't know how to feel then hours later it would hit me. I hate my emotions at times. Very, very hard to deal with. Yeah, it can be a very intense thing. No prob. I know someone who, some others have described similar services and areas, but it's hard to find maybe through Google asking for local support systems. You could perhaps get in touch with some, some charities. They may not be able to help you with getting the support, but a lot of like autism charities and places might be able to sign post due to other options. That seems to be the hardest thing when it comes to getting support is like knowing what's there. So if you go to someone, go to a charity, send an email in, try and get some, some, some more like paths to walk down some more, you know, ideas and sort of following that up. That is probably one of the best ways of going about it in my experience. I would in these moments play out what happened, but through other people's eyes, and I would watch myself through their eyes, knowing that they were thinking certain negative thoughts of me, and I would just genuinely cringe and think to myself, I hate myself. I am so gross. I'm so disgusting. I'm so cringe. How can I just keep existing like this? I just want to disappear. And I feel like this kind of goes into why a lot of autistic people hate being perceived. Like it's not just this cute thing of like, I don't want to be perceived. It's like it genuinely causes your nervous system to activate so intensely because you don't feel safe in other people's perceptions of you because rarely are you perceived accurately or positively, you know? And I feel like there's so many autistic people who talk about how when they go to talk therapy or when they're talking to someone in general, they get feedback from other people like, oh, you're so self aware. That's so amazing. You know so much about yourself and other people's perceptions of you and they talk about it like it's this positive thing. When in reality, it's absolutely debilitating for a lot of us to be that self aware. When I've been to therapy multiple times throughout my life, there's so many times where I'll share something in hopes of my therapist being able to give me some sort of feedback or share some sort of advice with me that I never thought of only to be disappointed by the fact that anything they say is something that I've already asked myself or said to myself. Any advice they give is something that I've already realized myself. And I've always been disappointed time and time again with how little feedback I can get that actually gets me to realize something new. And I feel like this very experience comes. That is so relatable. That's pretty much been my entire history with like mental health support systems. It's pretty much like they asked me a question and I'm like, yeah, I thought about that a few years ago. And then I explained to them all the things and then they asked me questions and I explained more. And then like another concert comes up and they try to understand that more. It just ends up like me lecturing about how I work and why, you know, why find things hard to a therapist. And I'm like, well, I can't really add anything because, you know, my job is to make you more self aware of things that are going on. But I can't offer necessarily anything else. I'm not autistic. I don't understand the nuances of it. And we only have a limited time for these sessions and limited amount of sessions. And usually by the end of it, once they really understand who I am and what I struggle with, it's over. It's like, see you later. Let us know if you need some more. God. They're like, oh, you've got a really, you've got some really good points. You're really self aware about that. I did not think about that. And it's like, you know, you're just telling them about life and stuff. And they're like, wow, that's a really nuanced thing. You have so much self awareness about that. Wow. And it's weird because you have that. But also this like, so what I've disconnected to be like, you know, why do you feel like this about this? And like, I don't know. It just doesn't make any sense. I'm aware of why I'm aware of what and it just doesn't seem to have much an impact on my overall mental health to be aware of myself and what's going on. Probably what would be helpful is less of psychotherapy and more like a helper, you know, someone who could implement the things that would make my life easier. But that's not something that is, you know, it's not something that people give you unless you have a significant like amount of support needs in their eyes. Yes, my therapist is always praising me for my self awareness. It just makes me feel hollow. Yeah, it's like you go there just to be validated that you are actually viewing things correctly and know there is nothing that they cannot do it. I think there's been one thing that has somewhat changed my perspective on life and feelings and myself. And that was the therapist saying, telling me that it is okay to express feelings of anger or upset or being upset with people. You know, I knew that kind of logically, but you know, I've always been very cautious around displaying negative emotion towards people because I know what it can feel like for me. But instead of like trying to dig and find out why I was angry, I would just dismiss it. And so being able to be like, okay, I'm angry about this, why am I angry about this? And being able to be like, okay, I understand why I don't necessarily have to like being a shouty mood to express anger, I could just say that I'm not happy with something, you know. And so that that was that was one thing that was the one thing out of years and years of therapy that has had some of an impact. And it has been a good impact, to be honest, because it's made me a lot more consistent in advocating for myself, particularly in like romantic relationships, I would say. Aaron says, I've been trying to find a therapist for my daughter who is a specialist in adult autism to give her support. That was a good idea. There are some really good therapists out there and autistic therapists, neurodivergence. The thing is, a lot of that stuff tends to be private. So you got to you got to have the cash, the dollar. Which makes things considerably more difficult. You know, I've very often refused private therapy, you know, when I was younger, because I didn't want to like be like a financial burden on my family. In that sense, it's a very strange way of thinking I brought, I shouldn't think of it in that way, but it was how I thought about it back then. It's impossible to not be self aware of the things you've struggled with for so long and to fix something that can't be fixed. As autistic people, we are, we have a lot of what Dr. Megan F would describe as cortical processing going on, which is basically like thinking and analyzing and understanding and dissecting things that happen to us, particularly in the social context. So this this idea of cortical cue processing, it kind of sets us up to be this kind of analytical person, which allows us to have a lot of logical factual kind of theoretical insight into what's happening to us. But we don't always necessarily tie that to feelings to events, and tie those those feelings to events rather, which quite often is the most impactful for us emotionally, you know, you kind of have this situation that I'm sure that many of you might my experience too. Whereas you're talking about something which is significantly distressing to you, that it's like a big problem in your life, but you're explaining it, you're talking about it like it's a case study, like it's not you. And it feels like you're talking about someone else. And that that is a problem, because the important thing of processing things, especially when it's impacting you emotionally, is to engage your emotions in that as well. So that that that was that's that's one thing that I've found has been particularly difficult. And it makes it significantly more difficult because therapists don't really understand the differences that autistic people can have emotionally comes from the fact that we are forced to perceive ourselves from other people's perspectives all the time, in order to mask better, in order to assimilate better, we're just always memorizing how we have to exist so that we could hopefully do it correctly the next time around. Yeah. And that responsibility is so tiring. Oh, I'm getting emotional just talking about it. You're getting me so exhausting to constantly feel like you are always messing up and to never feel like you could get a break and to never feel like you are doing good enough. And that's another aspect of how ego deaths are essential for masking. And this is why I will always say that masking is not a blessing. I think I read this in a comment in one of my last videos where someone was saying how higher support needs autistic deals with direct harm from society for not being able to mask. But high masking autistics have to deal with harm in their personal lives and with their personal mental and physical health. And I feel like I totally resonate with that. A lot of the times autism can be mistaken for borderline or bipolar disorder, especially if you are a woman, a minority of any sort. We are constantly needing to recalibrate our sense of self and identity because we're constantly needing to process other people's perceptions of us. What this can look like is you become a perfect person for all these different situations and people to a point where your sense of self is never able to come out. And I think sometimes that looks very much so like borderline. And I think this kind of ties into the concept of how autistic people sometimes can seem like the uncanny valley. You know, like you just kind of feel off around us because you could tell there's just so many masks there and scripts there that it's like who is underneath that surface. And that's the sad and ironic thing about this is that we experience these ego deaths, we mask in order to be perceived accurately, but in order to be perceived accurately, we have to become as inaccurate to ourselves as possible. So if you are a welcoming, warm, generous, caring, empathetic person, if you were to just show up as yourself, people are not going to see that or get it or perceive you as that. You have to figure out how to view yourself from their lens and how to then adjust your settings to show that you are all of those positive attributes in a way that they can understand. 100%. 100%. Yeah, especially if you're masking, you are very much like living life according to other people in a sense that you are expressing according to the people that you're trying to express to and not necessarily just being authentic and genuine in yourself. And the thing is, I don't mask. I'm not saying by any means that me not masking allows people to get a great understanding of who I am as a person. In fact, quite often, like some people might say that I'm a little bit too blunt and to, what would you say? Like, I don't know, just perhaps I'm trying to think of some, how is it that people seeing it? I don't know. They don't necessarily see me for who I am just because of the way that I express myself. And I'm okay with that. The thing is is that I enjoy people who don't necessarily make surface level judgments. So in some ways, it's okay because the people who do make surface level judgments, they think that I'm not. They think that I'm all sorts of possibly negative things. Like I had some people call me a loof because I wasn't engaged enough in a social conversation with someone that I didn't know that I was supposed to meet. I was like a part of the group or something. And I just didn't talk to them. So they thought I was a loof and they thought they didn't care and I wasn't warm and all those kind of things. Whereas if I wanted to mask, I could somewhat somewhat put that forward in the light that people would be able to understand who I was. But again, it's very fake. It feels very fake and it doesn't make me happy. Does it frequently cause mischaracterizations of me? Yeah, true. It does. But the people who don't make surface level judgments and are intrigued by my difference tend to be the people that I like more in general anyway. So it's, you know, it kind of works for me. No, don't get on with most people just initially from initial introductions. But some people do like me. I tend to have okay situations, okay social situations if someone has known me through some of the work that I've done. So that they have a baseline understanding of who I am as a person, what I'm like, before actually talking to me. So there's less of those kind of misjudgements of who I am as a person from that, which does happen quite a few times I would say. Yeah. Me not masking is accidentally speaking out loud random words. Me squeeing when I see something cute. Me asking, me to ask how others are feeling, me to look around all noises and patterns. Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely one too. Frankly ask, you know, genuinely ask a stranger, how are they, how are they doing with life? And genuinely mean it and not just mean it in a very humorous kind of callous way. You know, I just genuinely want to know how they're doing, which is weird to some people. It's like, why would you care? So I don't know, just how people are doing. I find it difficult to modulate my enthusiasm in conversations. It's either one way or the other. It's either I don't look interested at all, or I'm like way too interested and for an exciting like, oh, wow, that's awesome. You know, there's no middle ground with me. But get that in times 20 or times 100. That is what it's like to be a high masking autistic who is constantly going through ego death. And the thing is, a lot of autistic people don't have the luxury to not mask and to not have to go through these ego deaths because you kind of have to choose between one poison and the other. You could either continue being yourself and not masking, being authentic and suffering the consequences of ableism. So missing out on job opportunities, being phased out of jobs because everyone is alienating you, or you're judged more critically, or you're suffering the consequences of being alienated and less included in your friend groups, relationships, family life, or you could learn to assimilate mask and figure out how to be liked and included by becoming everything and everyone else other than yourself. And I feel like all of this is rooted in the fact that our society is just so ableist. Like if you think about all of the attributes of being autistic, those attributes are not accepted, understood, or liked in social settings. We've been trying for a while now, and we're pregnant. Why? Well, my granny's not here anymore. Oh, she's dead. Oh, well, yeah, I guess we ended up taking the stairs because I didn't know there was a lift. And bless her, she was she was struggling a little bit, but she disabled. Oh, no, no, no, no. She was teeny tiny. She had these tiny little shoes. Why was she so small? Oh, she was four. He was a doctor killed. What kind of doctor machine? Well, I've been beside myself since my cat died. Yeah, it's crazy. Things die, you know. My dad used to call me Jim Jim's dyslexic. Being someone that doesn't know how to reciprocate other people's energy, the way that they expect or want you to, not knowing how to show up for someone in a way that could be understood. So not being able to express yourself in a way that other people can understand or express how you care for someone in a way that they can understand. Saying certain things that might. I think that there is a good middle ground here, you know, whenever people, you know, speak about masking, there's usually two camps of people who comment or free. I mean, there's obviously people who agree with me, but there's one side of social media. You say that all masking is bad and that you should never do that and you should never, it's never a good thing to do. And there's other people who say masking is essential for living in this world and you need to do it all the time. Relationships, jobs, social occasions, anything like that. You must mask. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think, you know, particularly in times of confrontation, particularly in times where it's related to your job success, I think a somewhat level of masking can be helpful. In my experience, like meeting someone important that I need to make a good impression on, I usually do mask a little bit. But eventually that conversation somewhat develops into a point where I can talk about autism. I can say, oh, I'm autistic in this way. And then the person already has somewhat of an idea of what I'm like. And then I can sort of sit in in who I am a bit more. The change from that masking and the introduction into being myself is quite short, you know. And if you leave it too long, people start to think they know you and then they don't actually know you. And they're kind of a bit disturbed by the differences that you have just like knowing you for like a couple of months. And then you suddenly decide to unmask. It can be quite hard to understand. So I tried to make that transition short if I need to. And also you could argue in if you are like in a sales job of all things. You might be a person who decides in the comfort of my own home with my family, with my partner, with my friends. You sneeze. I'm unmasked and I'm myself. But when I go to work, I know that I'm being fake. But I can sort of conceptualize that a bit more and it's not my entire being. And I can sort of I can deal with that. It doesn't cause me much stress. Some people are like that and they can do that and they want to. And who am I to say not do that. But definitely if you're in the camp where you're masking in every single circumstance and you're never trying to like be yourself truly. That's definitely going to have some real long term negative impacts on you. I might offend someone when you genuinely weren't trying to like asking a question when you'd want to understand something. But everyone takes that as passive aggressiveness or having flat affect and everyone perceiving you as being intimidating and mean. You know these are attributes where people absolutely despise. We are in so many instances the scapegoat because of ableism. Everyone can sense that there's something different about you or off about you because you can't mask perfectly every time, right? And sometimes it comes off a natural or sometimes the mask slips. I feel like so many times people don't know how to coexist as different individuals or they don't know how to resolve issues peacefully. So if there's a lot of tension between people and they don't know how to resolve it within themselves and they don't know how else to get along and coexist, it's easier to let's say alienate that one autistic person and for everyone to kind of target all of that tension or that negativity onto them and then whatever energy is left over that's positive is able to be utilized for each other. What makes this even worse is if you do have genuine connections with one or two people within these groups, you now deal with the fact that they only talk to you or interact with you when everyone else is gone. So how many times have you guys been in spaces where you have one friend that is in the main group but they only really pay attention to you or hang out with you when it's just you two and no one else is around to see it? How many times have you brought something up to them about the group and they actually agree with you and say, you know what? I see that too. That's wrong. I don't think it's okay. But they turn a blind eye to it once the group is together and they turn their back against you and you look like the crazy person, you know? Experiences like this make you go through. I've had stuff like that in secondary school but not in adulthood. Not really. Not not in adulthood but definitely back in school. Go through another layer of ego death where you feel like you're just crazy. Like you take your perceptions of the world and your observations, you try to reflect it back to other people that you trust in order to get some sort of validation of like, does anyone see this too? And especially when you're simultaneously being scapegoated and everyone's turning their back on you, it genuinely makes you question your reality. It not only hurts you on an interpersonal, emotional level but it oftentimes threatens your sense of safety because when everyone else in the situation, in your relationships or at work, when they're all turning their backs on you, you feel like your sense of stability, your foundation is just gone. Like you have nothing to depend on. You don't feel safe. You feel like all of it could just be ripped out from under you and that is a scary feeling. It's also just really hurtful to go through that sense of betrayal. There were so many times where I would have observations of unhealthy things of like a group of people or a work life situation. I would be very genuine and open about communicating it to someone I thought I could trust. They would relay back similar sentiments only for them to turn around and continue assimilating to that same toxic cycle and act like I'm the outlier crazy one. The one friend that I did have, I don't- I think the reason why I don't experience this is because I do tend to be very, very picky with who I'm with. You know, if I'm around people like that, I just tend to like I'm fine with the- and also I'm fine with like being the other. You know, I'm fine with the group not agreeing with me. I'm pretty comfortable with that. So it never really caused me an issue. So I'm just, you know, but I can imagine, I can imagine that in that sense, I suppose, you know, everyone's in the flow of conversation. It just seems that when the group agrees with something, everyone's just like, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that just because that's what's somewhat expected of people in the group and can keep the conversation flowing and all that, but they don't actually agree with it. And then I try them up. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't make any much sense to me. What do you mean? I don't feel safe with them anymore. And so I now have to choose to either continue being friends with them, knowing that they're going to continually turn their backs on me and enable others to scapegoat me, or I could choose to genuinely just do everything by myself and have no allies. And that's another aspect of the ego death is just traversing life on your own. Even if on the surface, you may be able to maintain some sort of interaction with some people, that's not the same as genuinely being by yourself in every aspect of your life, like coming home to an empty house, not having anyone to spend your downtime with, not having anyone to talk to, to share your ideas or observations with to talk about anything with, and especially when you're someone that has such an active mind, that is like a personal hell to have such an active mind, but no one to reflect that off of and bounce back and forth off of and feel that much more lonely and crazy and gaslit. Like there's so many layers to this, and all of those layers don't feel good. You could either genuinely hate yourself and be like, I'm always wrong. I never make accurate observations. I am crazy. Or to be like, I do see things that no one else sees or everyone refuses to see. And I'm just alone in that. But with that being said, I do want to now get into the more positive aspects of all of this. There's another aspect that not everyone gets to reach in their lifetime where if you foster enough peace in your life, enough regulation, enough genuine, strong connections with people and yourself, you begin to return that healthy sense of ego back into your life. I feel like you could create a potential for you to be the person that can hold multiple truths at once, and to be able to validate everyone's experiences, including your own. So making space for the fact that you might make observations that is accurate, that is a hard truth to swallow, being able to accept that most likely, everyone else is not going to see what you're going to see. And that is okay with you. Not because you want it to be okay, but because that is just a truth that is just a fact of life. And you have taken time and effort to make peace with it. And that is, that is like the ultimate ego death, you know, to be able to know and accept that everyone is valid without needing to question yourself and without needing to question everyone else. I feel like I've only started to round out into that aspect. I mean, I get what she's saying. I do. I do think that's some, I don't really agree with like the sentiment of like, ever people's truths, I think. I'm, you know, I'm quite an atheistic non spiritual kind of person. I do think that to some degree, like, you know, I like having like debates with people or having disagree, like, not necessarily like a fight, but I'm okay with having like disagreements with people. You know, I tend to surround myself with people who also, you know, speak their minds and like to talk about things and don't assume that I'm being outwardly disagreeable just for the sake of it, just to be difficult. You know, I think people can have their own perceptions of it, but it's not, it's not a truth, you know, necessarily. It's just subjective experiences, I would say. But maybe that's what what the Thoughtspot is saying, subjective experiences, but being aware of how other people interpret things and being okay with that. Yeah, I agree with that. Aspect of my life in my late 20s, I'm 27 now, where I could see a truth and instead of needing to confront it or talk about it or get other people to realize it, I could just accept that truth on my own, feel valid in that and not question myself. And if anyone in the situation ever were to bring it up to me, that's when I'm like, yeah, I agree with that. And I've been seeing it for a while and to not feel offended if no one sees it or if people turn their backs on that same observation after the fact. I kind of understand at this point that everyone is on their own journey of realization, of understanding the world and themselves, and I could kind of make space for all of that. I feel like being able to arrive at that point is extremely free because you're not feeling as if you're holding the weight of the world anymore. You're not feeling like you're constantly fighting against the current or sinking in the quick sand. You could kind of just create this peaceful space for yourself and exist on that island. And I feel like that's not something that is commonly achievable for people to be able to hold multiple truths. Most of the time, people are so binary. People are so defensive. They're just constantly trying to defend why they're doing something, why they're valid and in turn invalidate other people in order to prove a point or to prove something to themselves. And that is just such an ugly cycle. And I feel like people don't see that until they've gone through multiple ego deaths of like, do you not understand that you could see the sky as blue, but I could also see the sky as cyan blue, you know, like both could be accurate. No one's wrong here. I feel like a really good example of this is the other day my partner was sharing an experience with me. And then my response to him was to say, yeah. And then he got offended because he was like, do you agree with that? And I was just like, no, I don't agree with that. But I could see why you feel that way. And then he got really annoyed and confused and was just like, why would you say yeah if you don't agree? Because when you say yeah, that means you agree with it. I kept trying to explain to him like, I think it's a sentiment of acknowledgement. I was just saying that the ego death, like complete ego death is the like the goal here. I don't know if that's necessarily what you should try you should attempt to achieve. I think developing like a stable kind of realistic view of yourself as a person, as an ego is like the most helpful thing to get to, you know, I think I think being ego less kind of leads you to being pulled and pushed in all sorts of different directions by people around you. Having an ego is healthy. Ego deaths do happen. I think it's more of a reaction to things that happen, particular thoughts or philosophical dives and such. But I think definitely like developing a healthy ego is good because you want to be able to self advocate for your opinions, your stances, what you want, what you don't want. And I think it's okay like to disagree with people and have conversations about it. I'd say in this particular instance, there's likely like going to be a lot of background emotions which are going into this, which you know, there might be if they're explaining like complaining about something, they're probably going to be in a quite elevated state. And so probably the best way to approach it is to validate and calm them down and then disagree with them and sort of give your own perceptions of it, not necessarily disagreeing with but just saying, this is what I think. I'm not saying that it's right, but this is what I think, you know, rather than saying, that's wrong. This is what I think. And this is the right thing. You know, it's more of that kind of, you sort of tempering it. So you've been genuine, like I don't agree with that, but it doesn't mean that I'm right. Just because I say, yeah, doesn't mean I agree with him. And that's my opinion. It just means that I heard what he had to say. I heard how it impacts him and I could see how that impacts him. And I feel like it was just really hard for him to understand that. And I feel like I've been through this so many times with people where upon sharing something with me, I just say like, okay, I can see that some people may feel really uncomfortable with that because they are so used to people either completely agreeing with them and relaying the same experiences or- No, I don't think that's what it is. I think it's more related to not reflecting that sort of same emotional state. You know, usually when someone confides in you about something that's difficult, they're wanting some somewhat of validation to how they're feeling. I think it probably in circumstances like that, it's more about hearing them out and trying to feel what they're feeling rather than sort of immediately jumping to, okay, here's the facts. That doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. What about that? Usually when someone's confiding in you about something that they're upset about, they're not necessarily looking for an immediate fix. They're just looking for you to be like, oh yeah, you don't seem to be doing good about this. It seems like you're really struggling with this and how can I help kind of thing. That's one thing that I had to learn. When people tell you stuff, they're not looking for you to fix it a lot of the time. They're looking for you to understand their perspective and how it might feel for them. Being extremely defensive because they have different opinions and experiences and I feel like this is also why a lot of autistic people are able to have such good pattern recognition and why we're able to have a clear idea of the collective wellness because when you have that dissolved ego, you develop this capability to put yourself in everyone else's shoes, to hold everyone's truth, to understand it. I think this is where I'm getting a bit lost with this. I don't particularly agree with that being the prescription. I think that's a good way of becoming an emotional sponge to some degree. You are sort of going back into simulating yourself back into things and masking. I don't know, that's what it kind of sounds like to me. Does it make sense? Do you guys know what they're trying to say? Because I imagine that they're making a good point but perhaps maybe the use of terminology might be a bit different. I don't see that as a good thing necessarily. Being aware and accepting and seeing things from other people's perspectives is good, but not necessarily being eageless and not sort of approaching it as yourself. You agree with me? I don't like to sort of point stuff like this out of it. I don't particularly understand what is being prescribed, I guess. I agree with a lot of what's being said so far though. And to learn how we could do better or what needs to be changed or integrated because you deal with having to integrate that within yourself. I think that's also why a lot of the times it's easy to make autistic people the scapegoat because much of the time we are that mirror to other people. Not mirrors in a way where you reflect the same energy back to them, but mirrors in a way where what they put onto you isn't being reciprocated and so they are left to almost see their own flaws and what's not working out and be f- But I think that's the goal. I think that's good. Like you don't want to be a mirror. You want to be yourself. Sadly, one of the side effects of mirroring things back to people, which is usually what people want in this circumstance, actually has an impact on you emotionally as well. I'm pretty happy in not being a mirror. You know, I kind of want to keep my own sort of emotional sanity and not sort of be sucked into it too much. I want to be empathetic, but definitely not mirror. I wouldn't say that. I think that's a pretty good component of social camouflage, which is not what we want. You can take on people's emotional baggage too much if you don't separate yourself from other's problems 100%. You get me too. Faced with those choices that they may not necessarily feel good about or attributes that they may not feel good about. All of this to say not every autistic person is going to be completely egoless. I'm not saying every autistic person has ego deaths. I'm just saying that the autistic experience for a lot of people out there does naturally elicit multiple ego deaths for many of us. And I just wanted to make a video that kind of talks about these very abstracted ideas and just like catalyze it into some sort of physical format. If you are an autistic person that resonates with having multiple ego deaths throughout your life and you, if anything might struggle with having no sense of ego, no sense of self, I want to encourage you to pay attention to the advice and the content that you're ingesting. Because a lot of the times the advice that is being put out there for everyone to follow doesn't necessarily apply to people like us. And so I might make a video separate from this that kind of goes into that in more depth, you know, going through advice that we commonly hear online and from other people. That's a lot about neurotypical expectations and stuff. Well, here's the thing. If you're egoless, if you don't have the ability to be like, oh, okay, I don't agree with that, you are just making yourself a sponge for information from other people and you're not thinking critically about whether. So if I was egoless, perhaps I would just agree with everything that false thought was saying. But because I do have some of the stable ideas and perspectives on things and, you know, the ability to not just do that and become a sponge and absorb all of it, I think that's a good thing because you can watch some really terrible takes on the internet. You know, and I would encourage everybody to not devolve into a state of egoless where all of my opinions are, you know, somewhat seen as like the gold standard, because they're definitely not like I'm under no illusion that I won't always, yeah, I don't always like say the right thing or prescribe the right thing or understand things in the right way. But everybody's like that. And, you know, it's good to good to challenge things, you know, ask questions. Yeah, I mean, 100% like throughout my life, 100, like a lot of ego deaths, I would say. It's not a fun thing. It's definitely something I've had to learn how to integrate my ego back in back to myself, you know, I had a very stable ego when I was younger, but I to a point where I didn't really take on board what other people were perceiving other perceptions of subjectivity of life in adulthood became a little bit more ego less from all of these experiences, kind of a bit kind of floating in the wind. Nowadays, it's hard because, you know, it requires you to be somewhat disagreeable. But it's definitely good. It's definitely good to have your own thoughts and perceptions and say that you don't agree with something. But you can be like that. And you can also be open to different perspectives and ideas at the same time. And if you say something, you disagree with something, you should be open to being agreed. I think that's that's that's an okay way to approach things. This video was a good description of how it felt to lose my sense of self due to extreme masking. Basically, 100% I, you know, 100% relate to that. What do you think of meditation to calm anxiety? Kingdale Clark definitely scientifically proven way to reduce an overactive amygdala over time through through meditative practice. So 100% does work is they've done brain scans on like monks and things like that and people who have people who before meditative sort of experience or schedule and then after and they showed some some changes, positive changes when it comes to emotions, emotional control and such. When I was a TGM, my mom would keep saying, remember who you are when I was going out socially. That's cool. I like that he says I finds with me I have to have a framework on what I believe but agree to disagree at times is hard. But it's something I'm learning. Yeah, I mean, I was very like my natural state of being unmasked is that I mixed like I'm pretty disagreeable. I don't agree with a lot. Just in general, but it's hard to disagree with subjective experience. Like I can't say that I disagree with the way that someone's feeling and how things have made them feel, you know, and I suppose that's something that I've learned over time. And also just being aware of the flaws in my own thinking styles and my own bias that I sort of accumulate during life and being open to be to being convinced otherwise. What do you think of the Carl Jung idea of the shadow said that inside everybody is a capacity for evil. I've done some some reading around that. I think it's yeah, definitely important. Quite quite important for me. Because despite my sort of outward presentation, my strong sort of feelings of empathy towards negative experiences that people have, you know, I'm quite a combative person, I guess, like, I've never been like aggressive physically with anybody. But, you know, I used to be a combat athlete, I do like fighting. So I know also, you know, there's things in life which are not good that I think about. And being aware of that is important, because everybody has faults like that. And it's just part of being human. And really who you are is what you do, to some degree, or what you allow to be part of yourself. The shadow is in everybody. No one's perfect. Yes, I've been doing that, that more standing up for myself and my beliefs, etc. is refreshing to have self confidence and to know oneself 100%. Yeah, and to do that, you do need to have a pretty stable ego. I think we're just about the end of this video. Follow because it's going to benefit us. And it's good for us when in reality, it might be counterintuitive for people like us. I hope this video was interesting for you guys. It's such an abstract idea. And to be honest, it took many months for me to kind of put together these thoughts in order to talk about it. Because I thought about this so long ago, but I just didn't know how to make clear all the points and figure out how they interconnect with each other. So I feel like I finally kind of reached a point where I could talk about it. Let me know in the comments section down below what your experiences with ego debts have been like from one person to the other. That's also been through many ego debts. I not only empathize with your experience, but I encourage you guys to begin to figure out how to center yourself back into your own life. And I want to reassure you that it is not selfish to do so. It is not selfish to set boundaries. It's not selfish to express yourself. It's not selfish to empathize for yourself. But yes, thank you guys for tuning in on today's video and having this very nuanced discussion with me. Again, go check out Magic Mind in the description box down below. Take some time to regulate today, and I will see you on the next video. So that was the full spot on the Autistic Experience in Ego Death. Definitely haven't heard of it. Sort of the experience of sort of ego deterioration in the ideas of... I haven't heard of using the concepts of ego when it comes to things like masking and social situations and such. So it's really interesting to hear that sort of explain from, suppose like a different angle. Definitely food for thought, of course. And yeah, it's really great. If you've enjoyed this, make sure to like, subscribe, and also go check out the full spots channel. Go have a look at their video, comment down below if you've got any experiences with this kind of idea of ego death that can be tied to the Autistic Experience. And let the full spot know. Let them know that I sent you. The shadow knows.