It's hard to get along with people with my particular version of Autism. Non-verbalism is not easy to move out of. The amount of patience I've had to engage just to endure other people's temperaments is, well. Hard to describe here; not because I can't but because I don't want you to empathize with my negative experiences. Instead I'd like to help you understand the constructive value of being a stone-faced autistic person that cultivates ethical awareness in an organization.

Typically people in power need to orient their communication into demanding higher standards and the unfortunate truth about my particular flavor of autism, accurately portrayed by Thaddea Graham in her role in Sex Education. There isn't much room for conversation on my end because the feelings I have around something going wrong are well, intense. The slightest mistake I make could be ballooned into a false reality if I vocally discharge. A majority of people I've been around have zero issue reinforcing what I trigger on rather than what I work towards and that further limits my behavior to a very narrow interaction to get things done. The professional environments I've found myself within have cultivated and attempted to reinforce masking behaviors and I have to actively put a stop to it in delicate and diplomatic ways.

Someone was reckless enough to sit in the same room with me and talk to me about my Autism. He was encouraged to do it and this particular individual is someone who is normally kind. My attempts to stabalize the relationship were well, ignored because he was put in a position relative to me and felt as if he had some kind of authority over me. I side stepped his advances to project onto me and tried to help him understand the fallacy of his behavioism. In the end he chose to cross a series of boundaries and verbally assault me serval times. Not because he felt justified to do it, but because an authority figure gave him permission to do it. These people exist and as much as I live up to a golden standard beyond-reproach when it comes to being autistic, there is always someone ready to justify they know more than I do about autism without actually having a conversation with me.

Normally called scapegoating.

He had recently put his child into ABA therapy and me knowing the landscape of Autism. I knew having a conversation with him about the negative effects of ABA therapy are, well, probably unwelcome because he's already in a desperate situation with his child and I don't want to get tangled into that emotional mess with him. As much as I feel for his child and the path he is forcing his child to undertake, I couldn't help but empathize with his plight, as a parent concern for their child. In reality, he showed all the same signs as someone who is trying to function in a world where he too, has a variation of PTSD. Indoctrinated into the belief system of power and the illusion of comfort it provides.

This is where my version of Autism makes it hard to progress in life. I'm forced into a behavior pattern which limits my communication to precise and pine-pointed comments. Most people look at me as a white-privileged male first and the conversation of equal rights or gender identity doesn't come up. In actuality, I consider myself an advocate for intersectionality. Childcare however, is a very subjective subject and the only people making headway in the indurstry are the vultures willing to take advantaged of desperate parents.

Executives are hard to converse with because they have to remain engaged and focused in a field of variables that cultivate nuero-colonialism relevant behaviorism. I take great care to maintain their integrity because their reputations are earned over a series of events that have brought them the grace of good fortune as they've navigated the ethical landscape yet to be influenced by my more relevant narrative on autism. This is where my version of autism makes it hard to navigate relationships on that level too. I have to learn and respond to their intonation because they speak relative to a team that is inundated with nuero-colonialism. If I introduce an ethical dilemma they can't navigate, then the most likely course is for me to be terminated and the sad truth is. The ABA narrative is at the forefront of their current understanding.

I perceive "The War on Autism" as based on a similar narrative from The War on Drugs and has been framed into the minds of multiple generations, including my peers. Hordes of people thrive on competition in games, sports, virtual; it is a very normal these days. We get better at beating the computer and then we get better at beating each other in the games we play. When it comes to life, we are psycologically positioned to work together as long as we say and do the right things. If however the wrong series of words or the wrong series of behaviors occurs. Social Contracts can break down and everything has to be renegotiated. This happens in companies as a "restructuring" or "lay off". Numerical quantities are fantastic for knowledge pursuit when tring to understand mathmatical reasoning; but can also serve as a trial to improve when running laps around the track. In a competitive enivornment, qualifiers sometimes become disqualifiers when people become desperate enough to retain what little influance they have if they find themselves disagreeing with you and it can lead to workplace bullying.

Enlightenment is not enough; fortitude in a society of people educated with the wrong narratives about autism makes things just a little bit harder. It is easy for people to pin behavior on those they disagree with. This is nuero-coloniasm at it's worst, as it demonizes the behavior of another and reinforces the negative affects of behaviorism as a standard to live up to within a social group. Authority figure after authority figure using a person as example on how individuals should behave or should not behave is disheartening. Further by not taking into account the merits and integrity we autistic people breath every day by simply walking into the door and not upsetting the inherited balance to their ideologies and maintaining order within ourselves without suffering from mental illness.

There is hope, the reality is, every single person on this planet is good. Even the worst of the worst of us, are good; science is starting to discover all the reasons as to why someone might go bad. The sad truth is, people who can't function need to be cut from the group in order to prevent the group from imploding. What is relievant in a social group may not be relievant to you, but there is also structure in that social group that needs to be respected and if that doesn't align with your ethics, than you should revisit your association to that social group.

What happens when the core-elements of an institution don't align with our unique perspectives?

How do we disconnect when the institution is meant to empower us?

My non-verbalism took root in me before I became a teenager. Visiting and asking my kindergarten teacher why I wasn't allowed to be a safety patrol officer. At the time, her response was complete and utter shock and I was confused as to why she looked at me that way. Searching deep within myself today, the most relevant answer is that I don't think she was aware that I had an intelligence underneath my Autistic Mask. Furthermore the concept of an Autistic Mask wasn't to be published for at least twenty years after I had asked her that question. In my early twenties, a series of behavior manipulation techniques was used to force me into a group of people that would come to hate me and it was my first social experience outside of school. It was absolutely traumatizing and produced trauma in me that I was able to measure and review using an OpenBCI Ultracortex Mark IV decades later. I managed to recover from the trauma by inventing a therapy, but at significate cost with over 20 years flopping around between activities and the constant feeling of having to be more than what I was. Truthfully I was ecstatic at what I discovered. Physical, verifiable evidence, that what I experienced is producing physical changes. ..why did it take me that long to learn how to undo the damage that was done to me?

The attempt to fix me in my early twenties is what broke me. Score one for ABA as it silenced me and pushed me into a pipeline that was suppose to improve my quality of life. In the end, I came full circle with the feelings and challenged the status quo after learning enough about myself. Before I learned what the Autistic Mask is, I was already well aware of it. I knew something was off with my ability to interact with people, because I found myself in conversations meaning to say one thing and then completely saying other things. It didn't take me long to trace the origin of the misalignment from my early twenties and me not having access to those memories.. I had to develop an elaborate emotional map of every relationship I had with the newly minted emotional chassis I had been developing in secret for nearly a decade.

Gifted with the concept of agency in a form of innocence I hadn't seen before. I started to build-out my emotional chassis back in the early 2000s for the first time. The amount of effort it took to assert my inner-self over your Autistic Mask is intangible and I see other autistic people suffering with the same tug of war. I believe our inability to harmonize our Autistic Mask with our innerselves is the primary reason why we have burnouts.

The amount of false starts and burnouts I went through to find some kind of way to function; is/was maddening. In time, it became clear to that the only way I could maintain is if I typed and wrote code and practiced decision making around my computer as it became my agent of creation and the mountain of software I've built both open-source and closed-sourced no longer held value to me outside of the people it helped. I eventually gravitated towards an altruistic belief system that allowed me to walk away from a project without attachment and gifted me a sense of disentanglement. One of the first qualifiers I used to identify good executives from bad executives; executives more interested in the building a relationship with you vs executives more interested in the code you're writing for them.

With enough of the core of my emotional chassis built and a rudimentary ethical matrix installed in my reasoning. I was now making emotional decisions without showing a hint of emotion. Scientists are looking for visual/facial indications of emotional response in Autistic children passing as allistic. Which is great that we're talking about it, but the writing of the science is already biased as it passively emphasizes the importance of showing an emotional response.. which is another example of nuero-colonialism.

How would you start the conversation with an authority figure with the intention to dispel the negative effects of behaviorism?

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