 Good day and welcome back to my channel. My name is Thomas Henley, I make a lot of autism and mental health videos and today I'm bringing to you my autistic experience with going non-verbal. Not speaking, not being able to speak. Something that you can imagine causes a lot of difficulties in daily life, especially when you're surrounded with people who really don't know the first thing about it. Let's talk first about the stigma. Yes, going non-verbal can be frustrating for both yourself and uneducated others, people who don't know about non-verbal. They don't know about the association between autism and it. Some people also believe that only ASD2 or ASD3 individuals experience this, or that it's something that you only experience in childhood or early adolescence. This is not the case, of course. So due to this, people can't really comprehend or accept that we can't speak sometimes. Especially if you're someone like me who presents, I guess, a little bit more neurotypical than most autistic people, who perhaps has a lot of social, worked on their social skills for quite a long period of time and communication skills, and then perhaps you go and meet somebody as a friend or as a relationship or some extended member of the family, and they don't really understand why you stop speaking, and they push you for it harder, and you might go into a shutdown or go into a meltdown, and they just have absolutely no idea why this happens. And they may also think that when they ask you a question that you actively want to not speak to them, that you're stonewalling them, that you are really not paying any attention to what they're trying to say or what they're asking you to do, something more akin to selective mutism. So why does it happen and when? Why do we go into non-verbal shutdowns? Why do we stop speaking? In my experience, it tends to happen if I'm in a very stressful situation or very low states of mental health when my energy is very, very low. We know that the brain doesn't just act automatically, it requires energy to function, send all those electric signals and things of that nature. So you can imagine when someone who struggles communicating and socializing is in a very, very low, depleted state, that they're going to find it very hard to communicate. It can also happen if I go into shutdown. It's perhaps one of the only telling signs that my peers know of when I go into shutdown, because I just don't talk. I become very dissociated. I don't really interact with the world. I retreat inside my brain. I don't really communicate. But it sometimes also happens before one of these, or after one of these, or in the mid stages between having a meltdown and having a shutdown. It tends to be very, very variable case by case. So it's not always easy to indicate that this is what's happening. It's usually what you'd say, or usually what you say. When you're non-verbal, usually what you'd say is a non-verbal. I can't speak at the moment, but due to the fact that you can't speak, you can't say that. Of course. Why the hell am I telling you that? Of course you know that. So it can be very difficult at times, especially if you haven't had a conversation with another person that this is something that sometimes happens, or perhaps you're in a group of neurotypicals and they forget that this is something that happens. It can happen for a large amount of different reasons, and it's all very individualistic. This is just my experience of it. You can imagine that someone who wants to communicate and is being pressured to communicate really wants to talk. So yes, it can be incredibly frustrating. But it's only really an issue when other people are involved. Like it's not something that causes you any issue at all in isolation. It's only when you're talking to somebody. But if you're around somebody, if you're around a group, if you're another person, it can feel very isolating because you can't speak. You can't interact with the world. You can feel very helpless because you get a lot of paranoid thoughts about it. You're like, can I really speak? And can I not really speak? And you're like trying to do all these mental gymnastics in your head. But really the fact is is that your brain is stopping you from speaking. So you can feel very helpless in that, especially if it's something that you really, really don't want to happen in this situation. There's also an aspect of vulnerability to it. Because if you're having an argument with someone and you go non-verbal, you can't defend yourself. You can't stand your ground. You know, if you're in an altercation, in confrontation, you're going non-verbal. Like it's not going to be good for that situation as you can imagine. So there's lots of areas where it can feel worse. And the way that it kind of feels for me sort of inside my head internally is whenever someone asks me a question and that I kind of have a stint of non-verbal activity, and that question travels all the way throughout my brain, all the way just completely erratically just bouncing off everything and causing me to think about different things and things that are completely unrelated. And then I come back to the moment and I've lost it. And even in the cases where I can comprehend what they're trying to ask me, formulating sentences is limited to about one to two words. And they tend to be simple yeses or noes or affirmatives or the opposite of affirmative. Diffirmative? Someone knows the answer to that. It's probably very simple. For autistic people to interact with the neurotypical world, use their language sort of, you know, in cases even when you're masking or trying to raise your social skill gain. Sometimes when you get become non-verbal or you're going to shut down or going to melt down, you lose a lot of the inflections, tonality, and you generally sound quite monotone and quite stereotypical to autism. And this isn't something that you should be ashamed of. It's not something that's bad. It's just because it's taking so much effort just to say a single word or two that when it comes out, you don't have all that time to sort of think about how you say it or the way that you say it. You just say it. You be direct with it. And that's one of the ways that we tend to like to communicate. You know, all of this coming into one, non-verbal can cause you a lot of difficulties in relationships, especially when you're with toxic people. I'm not just talking about romantic relationships. I'm talking about any relationships, familial friendships, anything of that nature in the workplace, at school. There's a lot of situations where it can put you in a very vulnerable, helpless, isolated kind of position. And there's not a lot of ways that you can really combat that other than making people aware. Or not getting yourself in situations where you're going to feel overwhelmed, overloaded, or not going to social events when you are particularly bad, mental health wise. So what I really want to know is what are your experiences with going non-verbal? Obviously, I can only talk from my personal experience. It does happen to me a fair bit. A lot more nowadays than it used to. But then again, I'm not having as many meltdowns. So sometimes it can be a bit protective because you're kind of cutting all social input. So it's kind of like having a mini shutdown sometimes. That's a really interesting concept. And it's something that I've battled with internally for a while, doing all of those mental gymnastics. Am I doing this on purpose and I'm just being difficult? Can I actually speak? Am I just putting it on? You have all of those thoughts that are kind of similar to autistic imposter syndrome. So yes, let me know down in the comments what are your experiences with going non-verbal. I'd really, really like to hear from you. Hear from your experiences, understand it from multiple different angles, multiple different people. It's very, very useful for me and it's probably going to be useful for a lot of the other people that are watching. They're going to scroll down to the comments or maybe you're already there having a look at some of the other things that people have said. But I hope you're doing well. Make sure to check out the socials at Thomas Henley UK for Instagram being the main one. Thomas Henley.co.uk being the website for coaching, things of that nature, modelling, all of that, public speaking. And of course, if you want to stay update with the 4080 podcast, it's available on all podcast streaming services and music platforms Spotify, Apple, Google, all in all. I hope you've got something from this video and I hope that you feel less alone and less paranoid about yourself when you next go into an autism nonverbal stint. Could have worded that better, but I think the information gets across well enough. Take care, stay hydrated, and I'll see you in another autism related video on the Thomas Henley channel. See you later. Take care. Go again. So patronising.