Posts tagged as:

fear

Solving my travel phobia

by Henk ter Heide on Saturday December 1, 2007

My problems with toilet habits turned out to be a lot bigger then I thought.

Ever since I started this blog at the beginning of this year I’ve been surprised by the amount of knowledge you need if you want to write an article about something you don’t know and how much you must understand if you want to write an article about something you don’t understand. This means that I not only have to solve problems but I also have to figure out what the problem was so I can write about it.
That seems like a lot of extra work but actually it’s a good thing.
I’ve been taught to try to find the easiest solution for problems and go for it. I’m not sure whether that is one of those things you learn by accident or that it actually does work for people who aren’t autistic.
Although this doesn’t work for me I tend to forget. I work very hard at solving a problem the hard way and then at some point I realize what caused the problem and within 30 seconds it’s gone.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the problems I have had all through my life with toilet habits. I told that it had come to a crisis and that I had to take some sick leave. But I had gotten a handle on things and was planning to go back to work in a few days.
Sadly I didn’t. I couldn’t.
A few minutes before I should have been picked up by the mini van to be brought to the shop in Capelle I felt some bowel movements. Not knowing what these feelings meant I called in sick again. Which turned out to be a good decision. If I had gone I would have had an other crisis.
After that I stayed at home for a few weeks. Thinking I should first learn to distinguish between the different feelings I have in my bowels.

Two weeks ago my counselor came by again.
We talk al lot about the toilet problems I had been having and he pointed me to something that I hadn’t noticed for some reason.
I was getting afraid to leave my house.
To go down town I have to cycle down a 2 kilometer long narrow road with water on both sides. When going down town I was getting afraid that I might accidentally drive into the water. Strangely enough on the way back I didn’t have this fear although I cycle down the same road.

Thinking about it some more I realized that I never had a problem with toilet habits. It always was more of a phobia and although it has something to do with toilet habits it’s more of a fear of travel. Since fear cause diarrhoea it’s an easy mistake.
The best way to deal with fobia is to face them right on. The more you think about your fear the bigger it gets. If you just deal with it usually it passes.

I went back to work last Tuesday and had two anxience days in which a took I lot of anti diarrhoea medicine and had four very frightening travel experiences.
On Thursday some one asked me what exactly scared me. Not something I wanted to talk about because I thought that my fear would increase if I thought to much.
But the opposite happened. I realized that I wasn’t afraid that I would soil myself. I was afraid of the feeling it self.
The moment I realized that the fear was gone.

BTW I read that some autistics are afraid of public toilets.
Although I never feared them I do have a problem with a lot of public toilets.
There are two types of toilets. In homes you usually find the type with a plateau on which the stool comes to rest before you flush it down.
In public places you tend to find the type with a watery hole in which the stool disappears.
I’ve always had the problem that I couldn’t feel my stool coming. I still have the problem that I can’t feel how big the stool is.
To know if the rest of my day will be “save” I have to look down. It’s quite scary when that isn’t possible.

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Does loosing skills lead to background fear?

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday November 22, 2007

People talk about background radiation. Can you talk about background fear? If so I have it.

The WordPress editor I’m using to write this article has an “Save and Continue Editing” button. Just like in working with any editor you want to regularly save your work in case you have a power outauge. Or what happens more frequently is that an other site I’ve opened (for instance my thesaurus site) becomes unstable and closes my browser. In that case I don’t want to loose my work.
The problem is that every time I hit the “Save and Continue Editing” button I feel this strong fear that I’ll have a database error and I will loose everything I’ve enter so far. Which is ridiculous because it has never happened.

I have the same problem with drawing the last few days.
I’ve been drawing for the better part of last year and have produced a few really nice drawings. (If I may say so myself).
The last few weeks I’ve been working with the book “Drawing on the right side of the brain” and have produced a few drawings that are much better then I had ever expected. But the last few days I’m getting frightened that I won’t be able to do it again.
Even thinking about a drawing I want to do, I feel the fear creaping up my throught.

Then there is my computer game. Mahjong. A simple game where you have to find to matching tiles and make them disappear.
I’ve been playing this game for years.
Until I started working for the sheltered work place I used to be very good at it. The last few years I became worse and worse and at some point stopped playing it all together.
Last year after discovering my autism I started playing it again and have found that I’m better at it then I ever was. Just yesterday I broke my all time record of the shortest time to solve the playing field.
I’ve even figured out why knowing that I’m autistic is important for this game. I make use of my wider then normal field of vision. By staring at the playing field I can see all the stones all at ones. What makes it possible to see which stones I should disappear and in which order.

The strange thing is that as I become better at this game I also become more frightened of the game. Although I’ve always been afraid of this game. I never recognized the feeling but I did know that I couldn’t sit still while playing. I’ve learned in the last few months that the more frightened I am, the more I move.

So why am I always afraid?
My theory is that it has something to do with the loosing of skills problem autistics have.

Usually you expect that if you start with something new that you won’t be very good at it. But if you work at it you’ll find that your skills improve and you’ll get better and better.
Of course you can have days that everything seems to be working against you. But generally your progress will be linear. And then at some point your progress will drop off. You’ll have reach the maximum amount of skill you can get with the time your willing to spent learning this skill.
(Of course the more you spent at it the futher you’ll come. But not everybody needs the skill to drive a car round a corner at 200 miles/hour.)

For me learning skills works very different. For one thing my progress doesn’t seem to be linear.
I start out as you would expect with becoming better and better but instead of a drop off in my progress I seem to experience a drop off in my level of skills.

When I was about 13 I played tennis for a little while. I started out with hitting a ball against a specific point at a wall for a few weeks (or maybe even months) and then joined a tennis club. A few weeks joining the coach taught me the backhand and from that moment it seemed as though I lost all my skills.
All over sudden I lost the ability to aim. Instead of hitting a specific point my balls went all over the place. Mostly up. After loosing a lot of balls by hitting them over the fence I stopped playing tennis.

For years I thought that the problem was that for what ever reason there was something wrong with my learning curve.
25 years ago I played the guitar for a while and that too lead to strange problems.
I noticed that instead of practicing a lot it seemed as though I would learn more when I didn’t practice. After playing a nice tune in the morning and failing miserably in the afternoon I wouldn’t play for a few days only to find that my skills had improved.
Up till a point it seemed as though I improved my skills by not practicing. But of course if you hardly ever do something you’ll loose interest.
So although I still have my guitar I haven’t played for years.

Now I’ve learned about autism and experienced it for a while I think this problem is created by two symptoms.
I’m told that autistics have a harder time learning new skills because they have trouble with automating skills. (I’m not sure whether this is the right word).
When you repeat a new action often enough your brain will create a little program that takes care of that action. So you can do it without thinking about it.
Learning how to walk would be a good example. Anyone will know of the kind of struggles little children have with walking. Then at some point they do it without thinking.
Apparently it takes more time for autistics to create these programs. I haven’t had any experienced this in the last year so I don’t know whether this means that I should make more of an effort to learn a new skill or that I just should be more patient.

The other problem that autistics have with skills is that these little programs sometimes just cut out. For no reason what so ever you’ll loose a skill you’ve know for years.
For a few minutes, days, weeks or maybe even months the skill will be gone. And then as if nothing ever happened the skill will come back.
Minutes, days, weeks or months…? Well, actually I don’t know for what period the skill will be gone. I hope it’s only for a few minutes of maybe a day.

I’m assuming that my problem with learning to play tennis had something to do with skipping parts of learning the skill of forehand hitting. For weeks I practiced daily to aiming at a stationary point. After joining the tennis club I had to learn in a few hours a week to aim anywhere but towards my opponent.
In hindsight that’s probably exactly what I learned. The problem being that “anywhere” wasn’t right. It should have been “anywhere on the playing field”.

I think that my problem with learning to play the guitar might be related with impatience. I didn’t have a good idea of the amount of practice that would be needed. But succeeding to play a simple tune in the morning and failing in the afternoon didn’t help. So being disappointed I wouldn’t play for a few weeks. And a few weeks later I would find that I could still play the tune. Which is what I would have expected if it wasn’t for the fact that I couldn’t the last time I tried to play it.

I’ve been wandering why pushing the “Save and Continue Editing” button scares me.
The problem seems to be with the way I write my articles.
The general advice for bloggers is to brainstorm for good ideas and articles but I never do. I write my articles in the same way as I used to do my homework when I was in school.
With many school assignments I didn’t know what was expected of me. So I would read the assignment and then stop and do something else.
After a while it would come to me what was expected of me and then I would continue with the assignment. (Of course my mother never understood what was going on and punished me for procrastinating).
After having done an assignment I sometimes lost it. I would misplace it or forget to take it to school. (Or you had to tell the teacher what you had done without looking in your notebook.) I don’t remember how often this happened but I do remember how frightening it was to face the same problem all over again. To ones again have to figure out what was expected of me.
I always tried to solve the problem by trying to remember how I solved it the last time. Which almost never worked.

I still have this fear. This article contains 1500 words. If something would go wrong I would have to reproduce it. I can’t remember it and I don’t know whether I could write the article again.
The same holds true for drawing. How do I know that I can repeat the drawing I did yesterday.
The holds true for mahjong. How do I know whether I can improve my time if I don’t know how I did it the last time.

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Dealing with fear

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 20, 2007

It’s difficult to judge how long you’ve been suffering from phobias if you’ve never been able to recognize your feelings. But judging by the types of behavior I’m learning to recognize it must be for years.

When I started with drawing at the beginning of this year I figured that I would learn a lot. But I didn’t figure I would learn more about myself then about drawing. (Although I might still become quite good at drawing )
The last few weeks I’ve been reading and working out off the book “Drawing with the right side of the brain” and it works. Doing the exercises seem to have made it possible for me to use the right side of my brain much more then I have the last 30 years, or so. As a result I’ve almost entirely stopped thinking in words.
I’m getting feelings and thoughts back that remember me of myself 30 to 40 years ago.

When I started this I expected that it would enrich me. I didn’t expect that I would have to deal with a large amount of fear. I’m now noticing that I have so much fear that it’s becoming ever more clear that I have to deal with it.
I have to defeat it or it will defeat me.

The coming few days, or possibly even weeks, I won’t be doing much drawing. For one thing because that too begins to scare me. But mainly because I’m busy sorting through half forgotten memories to figure out when fears and phobias started and how I will deal with them.
For one thing is clear. I’ll have to do something.
When your really scared of something you’re tempted to curl up in a little corner but if you do that you only get more scared and at some point you’ll never come out of your corner.

I’ve seen that happen with a friend of mine who gets an anxiety attack every time he wants to leave his house. The last time I saw him was about a year ago. He was in the middle of an anxiety attack. He told me that he always got them when he had to go out to do his shopping or to visit his psychiatrist.
That was all he had left. Visits to his psychiatrist and doing his daily shopping. The rest of the world scared him to much.

I don’t want to become like him. So I’ll better deal with my fears.

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Need to repeat

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 28, 2007

I’ve finally found a solution to a problem that has been bugging me for the last 30 years.

For the last 30 years or so I’ve been talking to myself. Well, not really talking to myself. I had imaginary talks with other people.

As a child I was always afraid that I would get them confused with the real thing and would at some point start having those conversations out loud. Some 20 years ago that fear became a reality when I indeed started to have my imaginary conversations out loud. Although I never confused them with real conversations, people must have thought I was mad.

Over the years I have had innumerous theories about why I would talk to myself. Maybe it was a way to deal with tension. Maybe it was a method to suppress feelings. Maybe it was a method to think about problems. Maybe it was a way of talking to people when I had no one to talk to.

Over and over again I tried to get rid of this habit by using a brute force method. I thought that if I just were strong enough I should be able to succeed. But I wasn’t
Every time I started with not talking it felt good but within a few hours my motivation would be gone. For some reason talking to myself would feel nice again for a while and I forgot that I was trying not to do it.

Yesterday I finally realized that there is a lot of repeating going on in the imaginary conversations I have with myself. Often I just keep repeating one sentence and even when it gets very annoying I just can’t stop myself.
Thinking a little more about that I realized that actually all of my imaginary conversations have some repeating element to them. First I think of something and then I start talking about it.
In every conversation I repeat at least ones but usually dozens of times.

Loving to repeat is a major symptom of autism. Actually as much as I had thought about it I never did find this symptom in my own behavior. But here it seems to be.

I’ve made myself a little repeating toy. A chain with beads to fiddle with.
Although I made this toy less then 24 hours ago I already feel a lot more at ease with myself then I ‘ve ever done.
Every time I feel the need to talk to myself I start fiddling with my chain and the feeling fades away.

Even writing this article is a lot easier then usual. Usually it takes me days to write a story. I find a few words that could fit and keep repeating them over and over. That gets so distracting that it takes for ever to come up with some more words.
This time I jumped out of bed at 5.30 AM and the story came in one burst.

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Separate the man from the boys (Study: Cars)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 17, 2007

Struggle

In the Netherlands we have a writer who is “world famous in the Netherlands” called Maarten ‘t Hart. I’ve never read any of his books (except for the one I had to read for school) but I’ve seen him quite often on television. In the eighties and nineties he was a sought after guest on several Dutch shows were he talked about the struggles of being an artist.
(At the end of the nineties he started wearing drag and people lost interest )

I never quite got the struggle part. Why would artist need to struggle?
It’s not just Maarten ‘t Hart. I’ve often read about the struggle of artists. Writers seem to struggle a lot. Painters also do, but to a lesser extance.
Preforming artist don’t struggle as much. Or at least so it seems.

I’ve been drawing and writing for this blog for close to seven month now and although I hit a few bumps it wasn’t a struggle.
Actually for the most part it was a lot of fun.
I’ve made a lot of sketches and a few times I hit it lucky and produced drawings that were truly beautiful.
With some of the drawing I wanted to make I found that I couldn’t because I didn’t have the skills or didn’t know the techniques. But I’ve never had the feeling that the well was running dry.

Now I do.

Luckily I’m writing for a blog. I don’t jet have that many regular readers. (I guestimate that there are about 23 or 24 of you.) (Plus a few hundred one time visitors a day.) But there are people who seem to think that it is a nice distraction or maybe even something they can learn from.
So I can’t just stop blogging. And since my blog is about drawing I can’t just stop drawing.

Lately I’ve been reading a bit about the art of writing. One of the things that struck me is that every writers tells the same story:
There isn’t such a thing is good writing.
Good writing is a result of bad writing plus good editing.

It took me a while to realize that’s also true for drawing.
To make a beautiful drawing you need a good idea and alot of skill. Then you work.

But I’ve found that even more important than work is you confidence in your ability to draw the picture or write the story.

The struggle begins when you start to doubt your ability to draw your pictures. The moment where you realize that the skills you have aren’t enough to draw the pictures you want to draw.

The struggle begins the moment that you realize that it isn’t the well that is running dry but your self confidence.

The struggle begins the moment you decide that trying to draw your pictures is more important then knowing that you can.

Cars

There are a few autism savants who can draw complete cities from memory. Since I have a photographic memory I expected that I could do something like that. But I couldn’t.

Now I’ve been drawing for a while I’ve realized a few things.
Savants only draw buildings where I want to draw trees and animal and people.
When using ink, the drawing has a lot of straight line and right angles. Just like buildings have. But trees, animal and people dont have straight lines and right angles. Which means that the drawing won’t look like the real thing.

An other problem I’ve found is that the strength of my memory varies with my feelings. When I’m feeling happy and confident I remember a lot more then when I’m scared.

Drawing from memory is something that is very important to me. If I can’t find a way to do that, it will be that much more difficult to draw the pictures in my mind.
Since people, animal and trees are very complicated subjects I’m starting with trying to draw cars.
Here goes nothing…

Cars 1

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I’m trying to draw cars the way I see them. Which means from strange angles because I see them as a cyclist from the site of the road looking down over the cars. That leads to all sorts of problems with perspective.

I’m not sure whether I should study perspective or try to get a clearer picture in my mind.

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Lose structure (drawing: Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue))

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday July 5, 2007

Fearing colors

Who is afraid of yellow red and blue (picture) is a famous painting by Barnett Newman I never quit understood. How could anybody be afraid of colors?

After drawing Tentacles I wanted to draw some more pictures were I could play with colors. A drawing of a fire seemed the logical next step.

But instead of starting with a drawing I started pacing my room. For some reason I couldn’t sit down and make this drawing.

Had this been a few months ago I’d probably would have stopped drawing all together. I would have concluded that some unknown force didn’t want me to draw. So why try.
But in the last few months I’ve learned that people with autism have feelings to. They just have great difficulty in recognizing them. I tend to have very strong physical reactions to feelings but it can take a few hours to a week before I recognize the feeling.

So instead of stopping all together I decided that there probably was something very frightening about this picture, that I couldn’t draw it. But it should be possible to draw something that resembled a fire but wouldn’t be frightening to me.
I started out with this sketch:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 1st sketch

This picture looks nothing like a fire it just uses the colors.
But after drawing this much I found that it still was to frightening. So thinking that my fear might be caused by the colors I tried this drawing:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 2th sketch

But again it got very frightening and I tried something else:

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 3th sketch

Here I’m almost drawing plants. What wasn’t what I had in mind.

Who’s afraid of yellow, orange (and blue) 5th sketch

With the 4th and 5th sketch I tried to get away from the plant shapes and back to the yellow and orange colors but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with this drawing and why it coursed such violent emotions in me.
After using a whole day to draw five sketches I went to sleep.

Problems at work

The next day my employer, the sheltered workplace Promen (Dutch), tried to blindside me to force me to accept a move to one of their least structured departments.
For some reason I can’t phantom Promen seems to think that doing stupid mind numbing work makes a department structured when in actual fact it’s the manager that structures a department.
“Structured” means either that it’s very easy to predict how a day will run or that you have a great deal of control over the way your day plays out.
The problems with this manager is that he has a low self esteem which results in his ongoing attempts to prove who’s boss. He also has much trouble admitting mistakes.
I’ve known him to order people to preform tasks they weren’t qualified to do and then getting angry when they protested. (“WHEN I TELL YOU TO DO SOMETHING I EXPECT YOU TO DO IT!!!!”). I get very strong, unrecognized, feelings when I’m placed in that kind of a situation.
I’ve also known him to punish people for doing what he told them to do instead of what he meant.
If this wasn’t enough he also has a great mistrust of people. In his mind there’re always out to fool him. Once I witnessed how he refused a mentally impaired colleague sick leave stating that since he didn’t experience monthly pains she couldn’t either.
There’s no way I’m ever going to work at his department.
Luckily I recognized in time what was going on and I could get some help, but still I was very frightened for several days and couldn’t work on this drawing.

Where is the structure

About a week after I started I felt that I should give this drawing another try.
Almost at ones I realized that it wasn’t the colors that frightened me. It was the fact that I wanted to make a drawing that wouldn’t have any structure what so ever. Just putting some yellow and orange colors on the paper and see where it leads.
After I realized that it still took me several hours to finish this drawing.
I do like the result.

Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue)

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Link

I still don’t know why Barnett Newman was afraid of yellow, red and blue. If you want to know more about this abstract painter this Wikipadia article is a nice place to start. I couldn’t find a site where you can see his work but by using this Google page you’ll find pictures of a lot of his paintings.

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Being autistic (drawing: Looking out of my kitchen window)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 5, 2007

Bart Westgeest suggested that I should use three colors green for a tree instead of two, four or five as I’ve been trying up till now. He suggest that especially the middle color is important. I’ve used three greens for this pictures although probably not in the way he meant.

It’s now a little over six months ago that I discovered that I’m autistic and I must say that although it took some getting used to it has made my live a lot easier.

Last Wednesday I had a … attack. I don’t know what to call the feeling but it isn’t a nice feeling. Somewhere between feeling trapped and being restless.

Looking out of my kitchen window

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I have had it before. Lots of times. Up till now when I got this feeling I asked my manager for the rest of the day off and usually got it. But since it was a feeling I had lots of times it meant that I never took vacation because I needed my days for the … attack.

This time was different in that I knew that it had something to do with autism. I even had some idea as to what caused the attack: The work I’ve been doing was a little bit to chaotic for me. I liked it and I’ll probably do it again but I must make it clear to my manager that I decide when it is time to quit. This time he forced me to go on when I wanted to stop.

It has been like this for the last few months. Slowly all sorts of strange problems I’ve been having for most of my live are making more sense. For instance I never understood why people didn’t take me serious when I said that I didn’t like some kind of work. Now I know that was because I didn’t formulated it the right way.

For me “I don’t like” means every thing varying from I don’t like being tickled to I don’t like being killed. But Neuro Typical don’t see it like that. They use words that not only tell you what feeling they have but also to what degree they have that feeling. So they will tell you they don’t like some kind of work but do it if they must or they’ll tell you that they hate some kind of work and they won’t do it what ever the consequence.

Off course I always told people that I didn’t like something and that I wouldn’t do it what ever the consequence and people told me that I was being stubborn. I never understood why I was being stubborn while the next person was allow not to do the work.

Always being tench was also one of the strange things. Especially always talking to myself. I always had the feeling that talking to myself had something to do with tension but I never was sure. Nor did I understand what caused the tension.

Now I know. There are several causes but the most important has to do with the way I feel temperature. When I put on a sweater I feel cold shivers going down my back. Literally. My back doesn’t feel warmth. Or rather my back does feel warmth but everything is a little bit colder. Sweaters, showers even a sauna bath feels a little colder on my back.

When I first discovered this, it frightened me. It took a lot of getting used to.

When I go outside in the winter and I feel cold that doesn’t mean that my coat is to thin. It means that my coat is to thick.

But after a few months I’ve gotten used to it. I learning how to interpret the strange feelings I have. I’m learning how to understand them. I’m learning how to deal with them.

Hopefully in a few weeks I will get a large examination and find out what kind of autism I have and learn more about my feelings.

The only problem is the waiting list. I was registered in September 2006 and was told that the waiting period would be about six months. ByOctober I got a letter informing me that the waiting period had gone up to seven months. At the beginning of April I contacted them and was told that my examination would start within six weeks. In May they told me that it would be within three weeks.

I will be calling them again next monday.

But still. Although it’s sometime a frightening experience I am learning about myself.

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