This piece is a follow-up to my half of the presentation on the History of Autistics webinar on the 28th of August 2024, hosted by AUsome Training. If you want to listen to me talk about the ways that autistic people have interfaced with religion, culture, and technology throughout our history, you can purchase a recording of the webinar here.
In the webinar I spoke about the history of autistic people during the medieval and Renaissance periods of European history. It was a really interesting piece to both devise and deliver, but some of the comments I got made me think that I could do a follow-up article addressing a certain question, namely: How can knowing about history in general help us autistics in the present day?
I’ve talked in other places about how many autistic people in the present day suffer from extremely low self-esteem. It’s common for autistics to feel like they are ‘useless’ or disappointing or a ‘failure’ for not being able to meet the neurotypical social ideas of what a ‘successful’ person is. In the same vein, many autistics also feel like they are bad or unlovable people because of these perceived shortcomings, and it can lead many of them to develop extremely negative perceptions of themselves.
As part of my work here at 2diverse providing input to our programmes for parents of autistic people, I have met a lot of parents who experience these problems with their children, and they often don’t know how to help them. One of the difficulties is that if you say something like, ‘You’re not lazy, you’re a really hard worker!’ to an autistic person who firmly believes they are lazy by their own (internalised neurotypical) standards, very often you just meet a flat ‘I don’t believe you.’
In these cases, the way to reach your young autistic person is not by attempting to refute their firmly held belief, but rather by challenging the system that’s underpinning it.
By explaining to them that the actual ideas they hold – about what makes a person ‘lazy’, or ‘successful’ or ‘a failure’ – are based on a faulty premise, you can pave the way for considering an alternative set of criteria for things like success and failure, effort/hard work and laziness.
This way, instead of what feels to them like an unfounded, purely emotionally based assertion – one that they probably think you’re telling them just to make them feel better – you offer them a strong, facts-based argument. And since lots of autistic people like to rationally justify their dislike for themselves, this can lead them to reassess their positions. If they can’t find a sensible reason to be angry or disappointed with themselves, they’ll be much more willing to let go of that element of negative self-perception!
However, being able to do that in conversation with your child requires you to understand the ways in which these assumptions are wrong. And a lot of the time, those reasons are rooted in history. It helps a lot if, as well as being able to explain why a belief is incorrect, you can also explain how that belief came into existence, what conditions led to it becoming widespread, and what – if any – purpose it originally served.
One example of this might be the 9-5 workday. In the present day, being able to work from 9 to 5 is considered ‘normal’ for most people, and if you can’t manage those hours, you are an outlier. Many autistic people feel a sense of guilt or shame for not being able to hold a 9-5 job and feel like this makes them a failure compared to their peers.
The truth is that the expectation that one ought to be able to work 9-5 is very flawed.
In the first place, more and more research is starting to show that the 40 hour work week is actually detrimental to even neurotypical people’s productivity, with several studies showing that people actually get more done in a week when they have a three day weekend and fewer total working hours.
The 9-5 workday was also an invention of the industrial revolution. It came into existence as part of a wider process of standardisation in the workplace, which in turn was about the philosophical idea of creating a ‘typical worker,’ a human ‘unit of production,’ as it were, that could be considered exchangeable with any other of its type. The point of this was originally to make factory lines more efficient but as time passed, the idea began to be applied to every other type of workplace as well. The idea was that, by coordinating all of society around this idea that people should work from 9 in the morning to 5 in the evening, everyday life could be ‘optimised’ and made more efficient.
But what, then, becomes of those who can’t work a 9 to 5 day? What are they to do? This is where many writers would go on to explain how a 9-5 centric system excludes autistics and leaves us with no way to fit in but, in this case, we can do even better than that.
What of the people who can work 9-5? Life certainly isn’t peachy for them either, in a lot of cases. Workers all over the world complain about the fact that, by the time they’ve finished their 9-5, all the shops nearby have closed, and they can’t go out to buy anything. Working a 9-5 also means that, in the case of any indoor job, you often get no opportunity for 5/7 days of the week to go outside or enjoy the sun – two things closely linked to poor mental health and conditions such as depression. In many cases, so-called ‘9-5’ jobs also involve an hour or more of commute on either end, turning them into functionally 8-6 jobs instead, or even worse if the travel time is longer.
Take a moment to just think about all of this: We’re talking about a system that is so riddled with holes that it isn’t even working properly for the neurotypical majority who constructed it. Even the people who can fit into this system are being made to suffer because of it. When you take the time to realise just how poorly this system is working, it starts to lose any moral weight that it might have. It’s one thing to feel like you’re a failure for being the only one who’s not fitting into a system, but what if that system isn’t working for anyone? Then it starts to feel like you’re not really the problem here, it’s the environment that is.
And of course, this isn’t to say ‘Oh, neurotypicals have it bad too.’ They absolutely do, but it’s nowhere near as bad as autistics have it. There’s just no comparing the extent to which 9-5 culture harms us compared to them.
The point of mentioning all of this isn’t to lessen the severity of our problems, it’s to take away any authority this system might have in telling us how we should aspire to live our lives, or about what makes us a ‘success’ or a ‘failure.’
This method can be applied to many of the other moral and social frameworks that cause autistic people to feel bad about themselves, and it can be a fantastic method of improving low self-esteem and combatting guilt and shame.
By far the hardest part of an approach like this, though, is knowing the arguments that can undermine deeply entrenched societal ideas like the 9-5 system. It can require a lot of reading to learn all the theory that I just spoke about, and that’s not something every parent has time to get into for every false idea weighing their children down.
That’s where we can help!
My mother (Sarah) and I have spent years talking about the many false dichotomies that autistic young people often find themselves trapped in. We have lots of experience teaching parents how to help their loved ones dismantle and free themselves from the unhealthy expectations that they’ve become bound by. We’ve also learned how to do the same for ourselves.
If you think that your young person is being affected by one of these beliefs, and you want to help them stop being hooked up in it, but don’t know how to get them out send us a message – we’d love to help!