peoples' responses affect us more than we know

As I'm reading ballastexistenz' blog and the comments, plus some other blogs she's linked to, I keep thinking that there's a reason she and some of the other autistic people lose their abilities. I know nobody wants to 'blame' anybody else, and probably people also don't want to feel vulnerable to other peoples' behaviors over which they have no control (guessing, here, on all counts. This is all speculation).

I think that when people don't give you the response you 'expect', such as eye contact, a friendly glance, a nod, or whatever seems appropriate to the current social context, it affects you on a physiological level.

And since fundamental attribution error seems to underpin almost all human interaction, people tend to blame themselves. Or maybe they think, when other peoples' behavior affects them negatively, in a measurable, physiological way, that it's just 'something that happens', that it's a normal part of the progression of the 'disease' or whatever categorical word I should be using.

Or maybe they really don't think about it all, and yet it still affects them physiologically. I think that's what I'm trying to get at, here: That even when so-called 'negative' interactions are not consciously perceived, some part of us still perceives it and responds with an 'impairment' of some kind. In other words, the 'negative' (or unexpected) response from the other person gets in the way of us functioning properly, or perhaps to our personal 'optimal', because it literally affects our body systems.

As I'm reading these stories, I'm seeing, over and over again (or think I'm seeing), that when peoples' situations change, so do their behaviors. Over and over I see descriptions of how a person freezes up when they're subject to unwanted scrutiny, for example. I know this is true of me, and I don't think I'm particularly autistic. In fact, as a performer, I find that the kind of scrutiny I perceive myself being subjected to makes all the difference in the world to my performance.

For example, if someone seems like a friendly and supportive listener, someone who will still 'like' me as a person even if I screw up or don't play everything perfectly, it's suddenly as if I have wings. I can fly! But when the scrutiny seems hostile or unfriendly, or judgmental, suddenly it's as if I have three left feet and my shoelaces tied together - I'm falling all over the place, mostly on my face. Very unpleasant, and a vicious cycle, very hard to break out of once it's started. (Occurs to me here: Are some of us more sensitized, and therefore sensitive to, the negative facial expressions of others? This has occurred to me many times, and I've looked up many studies, but seen no conclusive evidence. The ways it seems to me is that a child who is repeatedly exposed to hostile or unfriendly glances begins to be hypersensitive to this kind of expression in their environment, almost seeking it out, in the sense of becoming hypervigilant to avoid such unpleasantness. It's like an early warning system, to keep you away from people who would do you 'harm' in this way. People who are not exposed to such unfriendliness on a regular basis tend to be less wary, and the cycle spins the other direction for them. The question, then, is: If you become consciously aware of these feedback loops, can you influence them? I would say yes, based on experience. Such a theory is the basis of every self-help book ever written, right? Starting with that old one, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is the first one I ever remember consciously noticing. Oh, except maybe I'm OK, You're OK.)

I would have to comb through everything I've read over and over again to find examples to explain what I think I'm seeing; but the story about the kid with the dog becoming 'normal' after initially being diagnosed as autistic; the stories about autistics being in supportive environments and suddenly gaining a lot more functionality.

I mean, we're affected by all this stuff. It's not just in our minds; it's in our bodies. The two are not separate, they are one, a whole, integrated system that doesn't work in the arbitrarily split-off ways we use for ease of talking about them. In fact, our way of talking about them interferes with our understanding of them, I believe. It would almost be better if we threw out all our ideas and preconceived notions altogether and just started paying attention. Easier said than done for creatures whose entire 'intelligence' is based on pattern-matching...

The reason all this matters to me is that I know from my own experience that the environment I'm in has a huge impact on my ability to function. My current house-bound, near-agoraphobic state has to do with my utter lack of trust that any of my most basic human needs for connection, recognition and fitting in, that is, not being shunned (in that primal, lizard-brain way that was so essential to human survival in tribal/clan days, and still remains hard-wired into our body systems even though we no longer live like that) - that any of those needs will be met.

It's like a car that looks like a modern, computer-driven juggernaut on the outside, but has the innards of a Model T.