Dissociation: A Stranger to My Life

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
I\’ve just gotten home from my week and a half trip out to Connecticut to help my parents move.  Now both in their 60s, they\’re politely and thoughtfully moving themselves into an independent living facility/retirement home.  The place is such that if they should become unable to maintain independent living, the management will provide helping staff for them.  If that becomes too little help, they may be moved into an assisted living unit, and eventually, if necessary, into an intensive care area.  Basically, they\’ve made it so that I, their closest child, will not need to worry about their living accommodations and care, right up until they die.

To facilitate this, though, they had to embark on a major stuff-downsizing campaign.  So my mother spent almost the entire summer pruning the various things she\’d collecting in her years of life.  Old art projects from my childhood, scads of paperwork, sheet music, odds and ends, etc.  This was difficult for her, because her natural impulse is to keep everything for the memories and nostalgia and the \”in case we need this\” impulse.  However, she\’s been working on reversing this tendency for at least a decade now, and she\’s gotten much better at letting things go.  By the time I showed up, there were less than 30 boxes left to go through, at least ten of which were partially or entirely mine.

So I spent a lot of time in the basement this trip, with my head full of half-remembered memories as I sifted through years of my life stored in battered cardboard boxes.  I threw out or donated most of what I found, but as I did, I must have absorbed some of my high school mindset.  The various notebooks I went through contained some of my high school dilemmas, rants, and miseries.  And of course I was staying in my old room, with its peculiar odor, in the old house, with all the same noises and quirks.  I soon even reached a familiar state of sleep deprivation, which plagued me through late high school.

In short, it\’s sort of like I was transported partially back to my high school years, sans that I knew I was autistic and that sudden sharp noises and anxious people hurt and wore on me.

So maybe it\’s not surprising that when I finally got home to my apartment, I only half-recognized the wood flooring.  And my computer\’s mouse and keyboard felt unfamiliar, despite that I do most of my work on it.  And most upsettingly to me, that I only half-recognized my spouse\’s face, even as I did recognize his voice and demeanor.

It\’s not that I hadn\’t seen him during the trip.  We\’d used a video phone system to chat for a half hour or longer every evening I was gone.  I was pretty worn out every night, though, especially towards the end.  Maybe I wasn\’t looking as much as I could have been?  Either way, when I arrived back and was summarily confused by my lack of complete recognition, I don\’t think he noticed or cared.  He was happy to see me and helped me carry my luggage back, which was why I was able to contemplate the flooring in the foyer, and my keyboard and mouse later.

I guess what floors me about this whole experience is that it was only a week and a half.  I really wasn\’t gone long.  But now my normal life feels strange.  A book I read recently suggested that autistic brains are much more plastic (changeable) than neurotypical brains, so perhaps my brain was already shifting to accommodate the stressful circumstances I put it in?

I\’ve had this kind of dissociation in small portions before, where I\’d left off playing a computer game for almost a year.  When I came back to it, the game interface and mechanics were simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.  But I don\’t think I\’ve ever had the dissociation on such a grand scale.  My fingers are unerringly typing out this post on my computer\’s keyboard, and it no longer feels so unfamiliar now.  So the confusion will pass, I\’m sure.

Hopefully soon.  I have adulting to do: bills to pay, car registration to finalize, passport to renew, blog to keep up with…  And soon, I\’ll need to incorporate my various personal items from my parents\’ house into this apartment, too.  I think the process may take longer than it would otherwise.  Normally I have more structure to my life than I do right now…  because of the extreme amounts of stress, I stopped playing my usual computer game (and won\’t be returning to it; it eats too much time) and quit one of my volunteer jobs.  I\’m going to have to find some other things to do.  In the meantime, I guess things will feel strange for awhile.

Legwork and Life, week of 10/4/17

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Gee, I\’d thought this whole trip down to help my parents was going to be a break from the stresses of my life.  I was right and completely wrong, simultaneously.

Technically, the stresses I\’m experiencing are not normal stresses for my life.  So in the most literal sense, I\’m getting a break.  That said, the spirit of that phrase \”break from the stresses of life\” tends to mean \”a break from stress\” and that I most definitely am not getting.

I think I\’ve actually been miserable pretty much since I arrived.  I\’ve mostly not paid attention to it, since there\’s been lots of work to be done.  But in the moments when there isn\’t work, and more and more recently as I\’ve run out of patience and energy faster, I am definitely miserable.

Maybe this shouldn\’t be surprising.  I\’m away from my spouse and my apartment and my bed.  I haven\’t been sleeping well due to the change in beds.  The house my parents lived in has almost no insulation from noise, meaning I could hear people going up and down the stairs, doing dishes in the kitchen, going out to the garage, talking… and my dad gets up at 5am relatively often.

This meant I didn\’t sleep well… but it also meant that I was constantly subjected to noise abuse.  Anytime someone touched dishes or cupboards, I suffered.  And because they were moving and they eat three meals a day, that was often.  So I spent a lot of energy dealing with that, with the poor sleep giving me an ever-decreasing supply of energy.

This trip also lacked a decent place for me to be alone and isolated from other people.  Normally, at home, my apartment is reasonably sound-proofed.  Not perfect, but okay.  And when Chris is at work, I have the place to myself, which gives me plenty of time to recharge, focus, and get work done. Not so here.  There was work to do from sunup to sundown, and the only reasonably quiet, alone time I was able to get was around 1-2am, after both parents were asleep.  And I quickly stopped taking advantage of that, because my mother would be up by 8am or earlier.  So I was basically trading sleep for sanity.  I figured out pretty quick that it was a bad tradeoff.

I\’ve sort of deteriorated over the last week.  I arrived a reasonably cheerful, smiling daughter with ambitions to help.  As the days passed, I sort of slowly lost the ability to smile and make eye contact.  Which was kind of distressing, but given how tired and emotionally worn I was, is also maybe not surprising.  I\’m kind of down to \”put one foot in front of the other and someday this will end\” mode.  I\’ve mostly stopped making eye contact, and retreated into being selectively mute (I don\’t talk unless I\’m asked a question or need to say something important).  It\’s felt bad, though, because even without making eye contact and checking the facial expressions, I know I\’m not doing the neurotypical act properly, and there are consequences to that.  Mostly slightly hurt feelings in people I\’ll never see again, thus far, though.

I\’ve complained about this trip a lot, dear reader, but you should keep in mind that it\’s not really anyone\’s fault, except maybe mine for signing up for it.  Moving is a stressful process no matter who you are, and this particular move was fast-paced and stressful even for my parents.  Also, they had never been told how much their cupboards and dishes and such hurt me, and it had never been a problem for me to simply stay in my old room before.  Presumably I wasn\’t self-aware enough in high school to explain it to them.

Today finds me holed up in a hotel room for another half hour or so, after which the driving begins.  Every day prior to Monday was packing/sorting/etc.  Monday was when the movers came to pack up the furniture, boxes, etc.  I was basically useless that day.  The sound of tape ripping, all the time, every time, was so painful that I wore earplugs most of the day, and eventually left the house entirely.  Yesterday was spent cleaning the house now that all the stuff was gone.  I made myself somewhat useful there, as I had some experience with cleaning residences from a summer job.  We then drove about 4 hours to this hotel, where I spent the night.

Which leaves today, the last day of the trip, where we\’ll drive 10-12 hours to get my parents and their remaining stuff to Michigan.  My spouse will be waiting with a hug, some cuddles, and my own bed.  I\’m looking forward to that.  Not the drive, so much, but definitely the stuff after the drive.  

Reading the Research: Treating Untreatable Depression

Posted on by Realistic Autistic
Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today\’s study examines neurofeedback as a treatment option for depression.  Many people with autism develop depression (and anxiety), either from the strain of being a square peg stuffed into a round hole, or from various other factors. The traditional therapy for such depression is drugs, which aren\’t ideal for various reasons, not the least of which being that autistic people can have very sensitive systems.  The dosage of antidepressants can be very finicky, and we don\’t always respond in any kind of predictable fashion to them.  In addition, up to a third of all people with depression (numbering over 300 million worldwide) aren\’t helped by the many and varied forms of antidepressants on the market.  This necessitates other forms of treatment, which are limited to say the least.

In the US, this line of research has been all but ignored.  Pharmaceutical companies need steady revenue to research new drugs and improve old ones, and they are the ones with most of the money to throw at studies like this one.  Neurofeedback is a non-drug intervention, and one that can eventually render itself unnecessary, so effective are the results.  That\’s bad for business, for pharmaceutical companies, and as such not much research has come out for this therapy.  So, unsurprisingly at least to me, this study comes from elsewhere in the world: South Korea.

This was a very very small study, with less than 25 participants, so the results should of course be taken with a grain of salt and preferably replicated as soon as possible on a large scale.  But the results were very promising.  Fully 2/3rds of the experimental subjects (8 of 12), the ones that received the neurofeedback therapy, showed results, and five of them showed results so strongly that their depression was categorized as \”in remission.\”  Basically, they were recovering so well that they stopped qualifying as \”depressed.\”  The control group, the ones not given neurofeedback therapy, showed no changes at all.

Regular readers of this blog will probably be able to guess why I\’m highlighting this study to you.  I myself have improved markedly because of neurofeedback over the course of two and a half years.  The type of neurofeedback involved in this study was an active form, where the participant focuses on changing the levels of particular brainwaves as displayed on a computer screen in front of them.  The type I benefit from is passive, and is called LENS.

I highly recommend it.  While it did take awhile to have noticeable results for me, the results are definitely in at this point.  I am much less anxious, much less depressed, and much more able to smile and interact with people on a day-to-day basis, in a socially acceptable manner, than I was two years ago.  My ability to be a social chameleon has skyrocketed.  My mood climate (my mood overall, rather than day-to-day) has risen to \”neutral, maybe slightly positive\” instead of \”grumpy all day every day.\”  I am much less somber than I used to be, and much more able to toss out jokes.

In short, my quality of living has risen markedly because of this therapy.  It does me good to see it getting some publicity.  As far as I\’m concerned, it needs a lot more.  The scientists involved in this study were apparently surprised at how good their results were, which makes me wonder what their expectations looked like… but regardless, hopefully South Korea and other countries can help lead the way to safer, more long-lasting therapies for depression, anxiety, executive function disorders, and dysregulation in general.