by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 14, 2009
Sometimes it helps to look at something from a different perspective.
For the last 30 odd years I’ve been trying to get rid of my (at times) very annoying habit of talking to myself.
Not only by will power but also by trying to figure out why I did it and what the purpose might be.
At times I succeeded to not talk to my self for a few hours. But it always came back.
A few weeks ago my manager called me stubborn behind my back. Very loudly behind my back.
I didn’t mined that much because being called stubborn is only one mans judgment.
Being strong willed and being stubborn is actually the same thing. Both means that you have the power to overcome obstacles you find on your way. In the case of stubborn the person setting those obstacles will call you stubborn. (Usually because he doesn’t agree with the way you live your life.)
But thinking about it a little longer I realized that there is a difference in being strong willed and being stubborn. But the difference isn’t in your actions but in the way you present yourself.
A strong willed person will be very calm and composed. Where as a stubborn person is loud and argumentative.
I act stubborn. And I do that because I always are afraid because of all those people criticizing me.
That is.
When I thought about it I realized that there is actually nobody criticizing me. Except in my mind.
A few days ago I realized that I am constantly imagining people who are criticizing me. And I’m constantly defending myself from those imaginable people.
All those imaginable people who are criticizing me frighten me a lot. So why would I do that?
This morning I finally figured it out.
Because of my visual thinking process I can imagine myself somewhere else then I’m right now. That other place feels very real. Actually far more real then the place where I am right now.
So for instance, at the moment bicycling is fairly frightening because of the fact that I fell and broke my hip last year. At the moment I’m again learning how to keep balance.
When I cycling to work I feel very scared. So I imagine that I’m in the office of my manager being chewed out for something I did wrong.
That feels so real that I don’t feel the fear from cycling anymore.
But of course I have to imagine something my manager could be angry about and get frightened of that imaginary problem.
In the end that gets me more frightened that just concentrating on cycling.
So you might ask why did I ever learn a trick that made me more frightened then I would have been just going about my way.
And the answer is that I didn’t.
Originally I would imagine someplace nice I could visit if I wanted to flee reality. That worked perfectly for years. It only had one big drawback namely that it was very distracting.
I remember days passing without me. At 10 AM I would flee reality and next it would be 11 PM and apparently I just sat there for hours on end.
So about 20 years ago I tried to loose that habit but because I didn’t understand why I did it I only replaced it by an other habit that wasn’t as distracting but far more annoying.
So now I know.
This morning I realized that I should concentrate on reality. On living in the here and the now.
Today, for the first time in my life, I had a day without talking to myself and without fleeing reality.
It felt both very nice and as though I was doing some very heavy lifting.
Clearly this isn’t something that will just go on it’s own. I’ll have to fight for it.
But since it’s also clear that fleeing reality causes more fear then it curbs. And not fleeing reality actually helps against the anxiety attics I’m optimistic.
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 17, 2009
Thinking about my thinking process.
- Processing abstract information
- Finding the limit of my thoughts
In my last post I wrote that I expected that post would be a little further apart in future. This one is taking even more time then I had expected.
On the up side I have figured out that my very annoying habit of talking to myself is actually a symptom of my autism.
Having a visual thinking process means that I can’t think about subjects I can’t visualize. Things like “feelings”, the word “goals”, “business deals” are to abstract to visualize.
I’m not able to think about them except by talking about them.
Accepting that this is a symptom of my autism means a few things.
- It means that I have to accept that I will never get rid of this habit.
- It means that I’ll have to accept that I can’t draw as much as I would want to. Because I can’t think visual at the same time that I’m processing abstract information.
- But it also means that I need a better understanding of this process. There must be a natural boundary. A point where I’ve solved the problem I’m working on and should go back to thinking visually. That’s what I’m working on right now.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 15, 2009
For the last 20-30 years I’ve been talking to myself. A lot of the time even out loud. Even when I’m outside and people can hear and see me.
It’s a very annoying and distracting habbit that makes me look like some kind of madman.
Over the years I’ve tried many times to break the habbit. I’ve even been in therapy to get off of it but nothing ever seemed to help.
This morning I finally figured out what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what I should do to stop doing it.
I was laying in bed thinking about the epiphany I had a few days ago. The discovery that I have two modes of looking at drawings. The mode you usually use when looking at a drawing made by some one else. In which you see shades and ridges. And the mode I tend to use when I look at my own work. Where I see a flat drawing with darker and lighter areas.
I was wondering whether the ability to switch from one mode to the other while doing a drawing is something that’s specific for autistics with a visual thinking process or whether anybody could do it.
Then it hit me.
I have two modes of thinking. Two thought process.
I have the natural (autistic) visual thought process and I have the self taught talking thought process.
I started life thinking only in pictures.
For years I didn’t feel the need to talk very much, so I didn’t. Around my 8th or 9th I could get through a week without uttering much more then 3 or 4 sentences.
But by my late teens early twenties I found ever more that I became the bud of less then nice jokes people made. And my inability to response made it all the more frightening.
So at first I spend hours thinking about what I could have answered. Later on I spend hours practicing the answers I could have given. Then I progressed to thinking about the jokes I could have made myself in response to some ones joke. Then thinking about jokes I could make without being provoked. Then….
I’m still practicing.
I’m not completely sure what it is I’m practicing right now but I’m clearly practicing something.
Now I’ve finally figured out what I’m doing I find that I’m not sure whether practicing is a bad thing.
As my life progresses and I find myself facing new challenges, it could be that it is a good thing to practice the different roles I should play in different circumstances.
But it can’t be good that I spend all my time practicing speech. I need a little balance in my live.
My visual thought process used to be very important to me. It still is.
Not thinking in pictures as much as I ones did is something I feel as a big loss.
To get it back I’ll have to work on myself. And now I understand what is going on it’s quite obvious what I have to do.
In essence I’ve been training myself for years to talk to myself. So now I have to train myself to go back to thinking in pictures.
I used to be able to imagine a kind of full color 3 dimensional video. The difference was that I was in the video instead of looking at it through a rectangular window of limited size.
I still can.
Only nowadays it takes an immeasurable amount of concentration to ban the words from my mind. So usually I tend to give up and just think in words.
But of course there’s one rule that applies to every form of training:
The more you try it, the easier it become. The more you not try it, the harder it becomes.
“Not trying” as in starting with something but not finishing it.
In essence you tell yourself that it is too hard. And after a while you start to believe that it’s too hard and stop trying.
Which means that the way to train myself to think visual is to imagine 3 dimensional full color videos. And at first it will be very hard but over time it will become easier.
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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday January 27, 2009
If there is one thing that stands out at my two hospitalizations over the past three months it’s how boring the nights were. Not the pain, not the food but the boring nights.
In the night of the 24th of November last year there was a particular treatures cold spell that froze over bridges end bicycle routs. But I didn’t know that when I set out for work on Tuesday the 25th.
Only Ten meters from my front door I slipped and fell and broke my left hip. Luckily I was discovered within minutes by a lady who called for an ambulance and I was rushed to hospital. An other lucky circumstance was that I hadn’t eaten that morning, so I could be operated on the same day.
That was where the luck ended.
From the moment I met the first nurse I started telling telling that I’m autistic. I’ve had enough experience in the last two years to know that autism has the tendency to complicate things. But sadly nobody at the hospital took any notice of it.
Two days after the operation I was given my first walker and was told that I should start learning to walk again. But I soon found that I couldn’t.
The first time I tried it I could manage to put a little bit of wait on my left leg but I kept tripping over the walker. The second time I couldn’t get my left leg to bear any weight. Which seemed strange because that didn’t seem that difficult the first time. The next day they came with crutches, which was even worse. I couldn’t get my left leg to bear weight and I couldn’t keep my balance.
After that the physiotherapist told me to practice with the walker on Saturday and Sunday. But I couldn’t. i just couldn’t walk with that thing.
Sunday night after a little panic attack I finally realized what was going wrong. This was a simple problem having to do with one of the symptoms of autism. Autistics can only learn one skill at the time.
Learning to walk and learning to use crutches are two different skills. There just too much information. My brain can’t process it all at one. Walking with crutches actually feels like walking with four legs and I have think about the place where I put every one of my four “feet”.
To learn to walk I need a rollator.
I got one on Monday. From then learning to walk became much easier and I could leave the hospital on Wednesday. Only four day after the hospital wanted to send me home.
One and a halve month later I was back in hospital. After a checkup the surgeon decided that something had gone wrong with my hip and had to be corrected. So last Friday morning 11 o’clock I was emited and by 1 o’clock operated upon.
Tomorow, Tuesday around 11 o’clock I will back home. Again 4 nights in hospital.
The problem is I don’t feel really sick. Yes my leg is operated upon and it hurts a bit. But for the most part that’s kept in check by the the pain medication.
For the way i feel I could actually leaf my bed and walk around except for the fact that I can’t walk.
So I spent the entire day in bed. Reading a little, watching television and talking to people. And then at 10 PM the staff comes by, turns the lights off and I’ supposed to fall a sleep. But of course I’m not at all sleepy.
So I spent the night waiting. Watching a little television but there is nothing on and reading. But reading isn’t much fun if you only do it to pass the time.
For this, my last night in hospital, I decided to write this article. It’s now 3.49 AM. I only have to wait four more hours before breakfast is served.
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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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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 12, 2007
Joel over at “NTs are weird” writes a lot about why auties don’t represent them selves. That was one of the first questions I asked the first time I visited the Autie club in Rotterdam (in the Netherlands). This club is established and run by Neuro Typicals and although there are some auties on the board the NT’s have a big say in the running of the club.
The second question I asked is “why don’t we?” Although, as I understand it Joel has a lot of difficulty in dealing with NT’s, I don’t. I’ve have nearly twenty years experience in organizing clubs with the mentally impaired and with children. It’s a lot of work to start but after a while you share the load and it becomes easier.
Nose mountain
But after going to the club for a while I’ve decided that I won’t even try. For several reasons. Some of which have to do with autism, some with my personal live.
For one thing to establish a club you have to talk a lot with a lot of people and I don’t like talking. It might be that it will become easier after my big examination but for now it’s not something I would want to do.
But most of the reasons have to do with my feelings for my fellow auties. Or rather the lack of feelings. Auties should be “my kind of people” but they’re not. I feel more alike with my mentally and physically impairmered colleagues at the sheltered workplace then with other auties. I do have the feeling that I don’t have to prove myself. I presume that when I sit quietly in a corner people will know that’s not because I don’t like them but because I don’t like talking.
Not talking to each other also is a point. I’ve been watching the conversation over at Wrong planet for a while and it seems to me that auties don’t really talk to each other. Someone thinks of a subject and hundreds of auties react with a story of there own but nobody reacts to stories of the others.
I see the same at the Autie club. People going round telling there stories. They come to me and I react with something like “oh”, “ah” and “that’s great!”. But I don’t feel the need to pursuit the matter so they go on to the next person to tell the same story. Auties tend to flock round the NT’s because the NT’s do have the need discuss the story. Conversation between auties on the Internet at large also seem to go along these lines. As far as I’ve seen auties are great at announcing something but the NT’s are discussing.
Isn’t that the biggest difference between auties and NT’s? NT’s need to do things together with other people and will go to great lengths to get a lot of people in one room. Where as we auties like to pursuit our own projects, sometimes together with other people but we don’t have the need to be together.
Does this mean that we will never be able to represent our selves?
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 22, 2007
It seems that a lot of what I’m doing the last couple of months is relearning things I knew as a child and trying to loose things I’ve learned in the last twenty years. But I’m also learning some new skills.
Like most autistics my thinking process is very visual. Thinking about something is like watching a little movie that is screened in my head. When I think about what I need (shopping list) a stream of pictures pops into my mind.
Until a few month ago I didn’t know that this was a strange way of thinking. It suits me and I never gave it a second thought.
The only thing is that thinking in pictures gives you a disadvantage when you want to say something. “A Picture Is Worth One Thousand Words” is very treu. The problem is that it’s very difficult to think of those thousand words the moment you want to say something. So as a child I didn’t talk very much. Usely not much more then five or six sentences in a week.
But as an adult you are bound to run into a lot of problems if you don’t talk. Many people think it’s very funny to abuse someone who doesn’t talk.
About twenty years ago I learned to talk in my mind. In the beginning I practised for situation I was expecting in which I had to talk to people. But it never was enough. I allways had the feeling that I had to practise more. The last few years I was allways practising. 98% of the conversation I practised never happened.
But all that practising was exhausting.
The last few months I’m learning to stop the talking in my head.
One of the thinks I never managed as a child was how to deal with anger.
Most neuro typical curse and yell when they are angry. I have tried it but it doesn’t work for me. Talking when I’m angry just gives me the feeling that I don’t understand myself.
But I’ve found a solution. I have found a large block of something in my mind. Tied it with a rope ( I think) and bash it in to things. Probebly it does a lot of damage. But mostly it’s a relief to feel all that anger be released.
Beating them
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