The Emotional Alchemy Podcast
Welcome to the Emotional Alchemy Podcast where safety is medicine, connection is never automated and everything is relational.
The Emotional Alchemy Podcast
139. Unmasking the Constellation of Autism with Creativity Coach Sarah Cook
Creativity Coach Sarah Cook joined me in a conversation peeling back the layers of her life post-autism diagnosis, exploring the transformative power of understanding and embracing neurodiversity. Because this is brand new information to her, I cherished the opportunity to capture the raw joy of this moment in her life. Through the lens of her experience, we navigate the often invisible terrain of unseen disabilities, unmasking the complexities of autism—particularly among women and people of color. This journey isn't just about self-acceptance; it's a broader challenge to societal norms and the way we perceive and support those around us.
Sarah and I unravel the tight weave of where trauma and misinterpreted neurodivergence converge. The conversation becomes a sanctuary for those feeling misunderstood within the rigid structures of mental health diagnosis, as we examine the spectrum of human traits with curiosity and compassion. Our dialogue offers a perspective shift, proposing that the essence of therapy and coaching is not to reshape but to recognize and validate the diverse tapestry of the human experience.
As we close this profound exchange, the focus turns to the delicate dance of unmasking in pursuit of authenticity. Sarah's insights guide us through the process, revealing the patience required to shed layers of conditioning and societal expectations. This episode isn't simply a story shared; it's an invitation to witness the journey towards true self-discovery and a celebration of the neurological diversity that enriches our lives. Join us for an episode that champions the beauty of being different and the courage it takes to live authentically.
Sarah Cook is an Autistic writer, poet, and creative mentor. She lives in Oregon and publishes For the Birds, a Substack newsletter about writing, building resilience, & being in conversation with the natural world. Learn more about one-on-one Creative Mentorship at sarahteresacook.com.
Kat HoSoo Lee is an Emotional Alchemy Coach, Spiritual Business Mentor and host of The Emotional Alchemy Podcast.
She loves playing in the space where science and spirituality converge because this is where we get to experience emotional alchemy. In her work, she educates space-holders about somatic physiology and environmental biology so they can deepen their practices of listening and presence which ultimately helps them expand their capacity to hold space for others.
As a Spiritual Business Mentor, she guides soulful entrepreneurs to approach their business as a spiritual practice. The work bridges the emotional landscape with practical tools which allow them to cultivate businesses that are rooted in conscious values, relational marketing and purposeful service.
This podcast is made possible with sound production by Andre Lagace.
Hello, my friends, Welcome to the Rooted Business Podcast. I have a repeat guest with me today, Sarah Cook. She's a creativity coach. She has been on this podcast a bajillion times already and I want to have her back on for a bajillion more times, so thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2:Sarah, yeah, thanks for having me. I love that we can't keep track of how many times we've sat down to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but today's conversation is something that is incredibly alive and near and dear to your heart at this very moment and, if I can just be completely honest, I really just wanted to like capture the juiciness of this moment, because there's something about like the same way that you can't fully like go back to like new love energy, and you can't go back to like the new beginning energy.
Speaker 1:um, I feel like that's where you're at right now and I really just wanted to sort of like capture it for, for lack of a better way of just saying that, um, because yeah, I'll just, I'll let you uh, lead into the um, the background story, and then I'll set up just a couple of things that I want to hold as intentions for this conversation. So go ahead, take it away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that sounds great. Goodness, Well, the the short version is um. This past winter, uh, as a 36 year old adult woman, I received my autism diagnosis. Um, and I think that that, like juiciness that you so perfectly described, is also part of what I just want to be really frank from the start makes me really nervous about having this conversation there.
Speaker 2:There's so much there's so much immediate liberation. I mean the levels of self clarityclarity that I've experienced just in the three short months of holding this are mind-blowing. Just wild amounts of self-clarity, a greater sense of my authenticity as a person, so many things suddenly making sense about me. There's a lot of good things and I have 36 years of experience of identifying not as an autistic person and now like one short season of identifying in this more truthful way. So it also feels like a strange thing to be talking about, because I'm still learning about it and I'm still running into my own internalized weird blocks around what counts, what disability does and doesn't look like, especially for me, just the ways that my autism has been so masked, which is so common in women and people of color.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of talk right now about that because historically we think of autism as this thing that we associate with young white boys who are obsessed with dinosaurs or whatever. Right, there's like these very, very specific ways that we expect it to look, and it looks different in different bodies and especially for women who are already being conditioned in certain ways to mask and to accommodate and to camouflage and to compensate, and so it's, yeah, it's, it's sort of a bigger deal in terms of the landscape, of thinking about disability and what gets seen and what doesn't get seen. A big quick summary. A big quick summary, yeah.
Speaker 1:And in terms of the intentions of this conversation.
Speaker 1:I really want to hold the intention of how can we advocate for and how can we support people who have these sort of like unseen disabilities as you speak of. And then I've, before you shared with me. I've been thinking about, hey, like if I am noticing something in a client as a coach or as a mentor, and I am seeing this pattern that may potentially be, you know, cptsd or ADHD or autism or whatever you know, pick, pick your flavor of the DSM-5, you know what is my responsibility as a coach and a mentor to support that person.
Speaker 1:How can I support that person? And you know, I think that you know your introduction into this already feels really celebratory and I also just want to name that that's not always the case for people.
Speaker 1:And so how do we navigate those waters with as much understanding and nuance? And, um, the word sovereignty keeps coming to mind as, like, you and I have a conversation about this, um, and so you know, these are big, big questions. I don't expect us to like come up with any sort of like definitive, like handbook on what to do, but I think that even just having the conversation and framing it in this way and really sort of talking about something that I think that people are you know, I've most of my clients are coaches and like, there's always this feeling of like I don't want to do any more harm into my space because they're already coming in with, you know, overactive nervous systems and all this trauma and all the story and so like, like that, that rule of like first do no harm, and how do we delicately play within those like moral and societal and cultural and individual structures? Um, I think is like, I feel like that's all.
Speaker 1:That's a lot to try to cover in a conversation but, I trust us and I trust, uh, you know, um, just the way that we flow is, yeah, that I'm really excited to just learn more about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm equally energized and intimidated by everything you just said, Because, yeah, that feeling of like how do we avoid re-traumatization, how do we also be good stewards and good observers and be attentive of our clients which I think is like really what this business of coaching is and holding that space, and I mean I just I come back again and again to like we're never going to go wrong with a trauma-informed perspective, right, Because that is a perspective that sets us up to be, I think, both deeply and compassionately curious about our clients, but also always from this perspective of knowing what we're seeing is just a part of what's there.
Speaker 2:So, I think, always remembering, which is not to discount that we might be seeing things that are indicating that there's something there, discount that we might be seeing things that are indicating that there's something there, but always remembering that we're even with people, we're really close with right, that we know on intimate levels we're never seeing the full picture, and so remembering that I think there's something about that that I think is so important as coaches, especially when there's this other I see this other messaging often in the coaching space that if you're a good coach, you tell it like it is and you sort of like you don't beat around the bush and I always I mean, I guess to just say what I mean bluntly like I'm not convinced that you can be a trauma-informed practitioner if you subscribe to that belief, because that belief depends on you assuming that you're seeing everything and that you can be really confident about another person's experience.
Speaker 2:You know it's just like so we need all of this, like more spaciousness and that's not of this. Like more spaciousness and that's not. It's not in competition with our authority. You know it's.
Speaker 1:It's yeah, it's about the kind of space we hold for people yeah which leads me to ask you if you feel comfortable sharing, because I was so moved by how your therapist approached this conversation um and I think in your newsletter the way that you phrased it was just so beautiful and I'm going to butcher it, but it was something along the lines of like she asked with curiosity instead of authority. So I really just want to like flesh that out because I think that.
Speaker 1:Want to like flesh that out because I I think that I guess I can only speak to my own experience of of um, my brother, having gone through, like the mental health and institution world back in the that would have been early 2000s and seeing a very, very, very different culture and dynamic, um, I think that you you hit the the nail on the head with those two words of authority versus curiosity and yeah, I'd love to hear that story, just so people can have context for even just like stepping into the, the diagnosis, and and how that can be a stewardship process as well for any therapists who are listening out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I'm really happy to speak to this transparently and I just you know, maybe I want to start by saying I've been in and out of therapy my whole life. My youngest experiences with it were because of some trauma that had happened. When I was young, I was actually mandated to be in therapy, so from the start I had an impression of it that was not consensual, right, that was frustrating, that was limiting, that was like against my will. I can still kind of remember the first therapist I ever worked with I was 13. And it was not not positive. And then I ended up transitioning to a new one and I ended up working with someone who I really liked and who did help me at that time. And then, to be honest, I don't really remember how it ended. But as I became an adult, I've been, as I became an adult, I've been in and out of therapy and have kind of seen a pattern repeat which is for a long time, starting when I was very young.
Speaker 2:I have always thought I had OCD. I have reasons for thinking that it's also in my family, but this thing would happen and it happened again and again. Multiple times I would go to a therapist because my concerns and my symptoms and the things that I was struggling with had built up and I would go to a therapist and we'd talk and very, very quickly the person would tell me I don't think you have OCD. And there was always this flavor of them thinking I was, seeming to think I was doing better than I was telling them I was Right. I think this is where we start to get into some of that really yucky, sticky territory of like, well, I seem high functioning, quote unquote which really just means like I can participate in heteronormative culture and capitalism. Well enough to seem like I'm okay, right, like I mean, really that's what that means. Right, like my needs are more internal and less immediately visible perhaps than other people with OCD that they've talked to. So you know, they would sort of tell me I think you're fine. So they would sort of tell me oh, I think you're fine, in a matter of words, and it would just be really clear that whether I saw them for a few sessions or maybe a few months, it just wasn't going anywhere. So then I'd stop seeing them for a while, I'd continue on with my life and then the pattern would repeat.
Speaker 2:So I attempted to find a therapist. Multiple times throughout my adult life, including last year. I had a different therapist I was working with before my current one and I just kept coming back because the only framework that I had was ah, something's going on with me. I think it's OCD, right? I kept bringing that same thing to my therapist and that's just how they responded to me with just looking at that one thing, my current therapist, when I brought that to her, she did also say pretty early on I'm not seeing things that are looking like OCD.
Speaker 2:I'm not hearing you describe things that sound like OCD to me, but why don't we be curious about what is going on?
Speaker 2:That was the first thing before autism was even on the table was just someone who was willing to see. Oh, this person thinks they are experiencing something that is really hard and that is ongoing, and I don't think it's what they think they're experiencing. But that still means there's something happening. Right, there was still something happening, and the fact that it took so many therapists for someone to just be willing to see that even if my framework for it or my assumed diagnosis for it was wrong, it's like she was able to see over that and just wanted to be more curious. I had never had a therapist be so curious about me before. I cannot tell you how much of a gift that was, how good it felt to have someone be genuinely curious and to care more about what I think I'm experiencing, whether I'm right or wrong about what it is. That's just like the first thing and I want like that. That piece is so huge right and I want like that.
Speaker 1:that piece is so huge, right, I think the first thing I would just want to like highlight in this um is by having curiosity instead of dismissing your potential story, like to me, like the mindset of that therapist is already in a different place than the other therapist that you had experienced.
Speaker 1:Because you know, I think this is the old, outdated way of looking at patterns like autism and ADHD and, you know, ocd even, and things like that, where, because it is off of the norm, that means that it is something that is wrong and something that is diseased and something that needs to be fixed, versus the way that your therapist approached it is. This isn't something that is wrong. Let's get curious about it, you know, and already that feels like such a big exhale and I and I think that if we can sort of just like you know, frame that, I just I really wish that we can move towards a society that is more about accepting biodiversity in all the beautiful different forms, instead of that is different from the norm and, like you were saying, like I'm high functioning, whatever the fuck that means. It's like whatever the fuck that means. You know, it's like um, I can fit into capitalism, I can, you know, flow through these heteronormative states and it's like, yeah, and like there's a layer of, I think, learned helplessness.
Speaker 1:I see so much in my neurodivergent clients and this like freedom that comes as soon as you like, can take a breath together and say like, hey, this actually isn't something that's wrong with you. It's like beautiful and unique and wonderful about you and I wish that there were, you know, more expressions of biodiversity. Or like, rather, like people felt more comfortable expressing their biodiversity, because I think the biodiversity it's just not fully. We don't feel safe enough to express it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And you know, one thing that's coming up for me right now that I want to try to put into language, although it feels really tricky for me and I know this is not how everybody experiences receiving a diagnosis, and I don't I don't yet completely know why I've experienced it so positively, or you know, other than it's just it's given me clarity, it's given me structure. There's also maybe something that speaks to my autistic brain about like I, I really benefit from certain kinds of structures and frameworks and clarity, and so it's almost like it feels like it's part of my autism to also like want to know I am autistic and to like have that and to know right. It's like there's something like oh yeah, that kind of makes sense about what I need.
Speaker 2:But one really interesting thing that has happened is there are things about me, about my character, about my experiences, about my feelings, that I think I have been reading as trauma and undoubtedly like let me be clear, I do also have CPTSD. I do also have trauma, some of which is processed, much of which I have realized is still not. So that is also happening, right, there are multiple things going on here, but I have for years been looking at needs, right, these neutral things about me and reading them as trauma responses that I need to work through. That's a really damaging way to be engaging with myself. Right To be seeing things that are just a part of who I am and are, at minimum, neutral and ideally maybe kind of nice things about me or just ways that I am, ways that I am in this world, or just part, you know, ways that I am, ways that I am in this world, and to be only reading them through the lens of trauma has really done a number to my sense of self, right, and to also how I interact with others. So there's also something.
Speaker 2:I mean, all of this is so tangled and messy and I feel like there are places where, you know, it's a bigger conversation to talk about neurodivergence and trauma in general, and they often go hand in hand because we live in a neurotypical world, right.
Speaker 2:So people who are neurodivergent are also already going to be more likely to experience trauma, right? These things go hand in hand and a lot of it is messy and root bound and I think is really hard to distinguish. And then there are some cases where it's it is and is going to continue being really important to me to distinguish between the two, because it's about reclaiming if anybody has like 40 plus hours, beautiful, beautiful writer and researcher and he many years ago, I think almost a decade ago, he put up his entire like lecture series on the Yale YouTube website and one of the things he he really talks about is we really I'm gonna just like, I'm gonna try to simplify this as much as I can but, like, this whole concept of like free will that we think about may not be exactly what we think free will is like.
Speaker 1:There's a deterministic way of looking at the world, which is not entirely true, and there's a completely like free will way of looking at the world, which is also not entirely true, and there's a completely like free will way of looking at the world, which is also not completely true, and there's like a combination somewhere in the middle that is more or less true for humans, and what I'm hearing in your story is like the things that you thought were, you know, um more flexible are actually the pieces of you that are, like, more structured.
Speaker 1:And so then, in that framework, we can accept the parts of you that are more structured and really examine the, our trauma responses at like almost a level of discernment instead of everything is a trauma response you know, we can now start being like, oh like, with discernment.
Speaker 1:Can I look at this particular character trait of mine, or this particular way I do things, or this particular need of mine and really, if that's just who I am versus, that is coming from a traumatized response, and I think that there's, um, you know, robert Sapolsky frames it within the context of, like you know, genetics versus epigenetics and, you know, really understanding the difference between someone's DNA versus, like, the environment that they grew up in. But I feel like it's all the same stuff that we're talking about here is like stuff that is rigid.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that rigidity doesn't mean that it's bad. It just means that that is like a part of the makeup of who you are, and so, in the context of that, can we accept and then carry on with our lives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and you know, one of the things this won't surprise you like one of the things that I've been sort of re-evaluating in light of this diagnosis is my experiences in academia, which I already knew had been bad and had been hard. But now the clarity of like, oh yeah, the ways you're supposed to be in that space, the ways that you demonstrate and perform intellect and broad sweeping thinking and being able to conjure thoughts right away and about lots of different subjects, and if I think about some of the ways that my mind, part of that rigidity I'm coming to realize, is also part of why I need a lot of time.
Speaker 2:And I don't always have immediate thoughts or I don't always have immediate. Some of my best questions and ideas are going to show up like two days later or two months later, whatever right. Like not in the same timeframe, in a divergent timeframe, and so I don't know, somehow what you just said got me thinking about this too, like how we demonstrate our intelligence and how we, how we are expected to, and how there's not. You know, it's like so many of the ways that I thought I was supposed to show that I'm a really smart intellectual person kept me at odds with some of the needs I had in order to get to the spaces where my best thinking happens, you know, and so anytime I would run into that rigidity or find myself, you know, wanting to stay in maybe a repetitive space with something. It's like I would, I would, I was always prepared to read that as a flaw you know whether even before knowing that it it's or not.
Speaker 2:You know I was. I was ready to compare my impulses against these like neurotypical practices and expectations.
Speaker 1:You know about this, and it's not just you and your diagnosis.
Speaker 1:What I'm loving about just this, like I want to call it a bit of a movement around people accepting, um is that, instead of making ourselves wrong, which you know we've all done for however many years, you know, um, we are now looking at society and being like, hey, like there's some stuff in here that we need to, we need to shift, you know, in in the face of character traits being the more rigid pieces. That means that culture has to change, instead of it being the other way around. You know, and I really love this, I don't know, it feels like another iteration of a yin yang cycle where we're sort of like switching the yin and the yang roles here, where you know where the culture was young. Now we get to allow people to be young from that space. Like, what sort of creative ways can culture change from that space? Is is a bit of what I'm hearing yeah, and it's, and there is.
Speaker 2:There is this sort of movement happening right and a lot and books and writing and thinkers and all this talk about neurodivergence and it is so exciting and it's so much. It is so much more than just these things aren't wrong, but it's also oh, by the way, some of these practices like if we can think about them as practices like neurodivergent practices actually can make a lot more space for more depthful thinking or for more intimate relationships with people, or you know, it's, it's, there's actually. It's not just about um, tolerating the thing, but recognizing that, like neurodivergency often points us toward like different kinds of wisdom and possibility, there's actually like something for everybody to benefit from, from paying attention to these other ways of being and thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. If we can circle back to your diagnosis story for a moment, I think one of the things that I was so moved about your interaction with your therapist is her ability to like call, name the pattern, and I think that I'm just trying to think of, like, how do I say this in English? What is the thing I'm trying to say? It's so hard to talk about this stuff, right?
Speaker 2:It's really hard to talk about it.
Speaker 1:So I'm, I'm remembering a analogy that Dr Romani I don't remember her last name, but she is a psychotherapist who does a lot of work with narcissism and you know, I think that one of the things that she was pointing out is that, like, this concept of narcissism has become such a like a catchy phrase, like you know just phrase, like you know just, it's a part of this social vocabulary and, um, and it seems like it's just like more in you know culture's eye right now, um, and she names the importance of calling a thing exactly what it is, and what I mean by that, that is, she shares an analogy where she's like, you know, if I said, hey, I'm going to bake you a cake, and showed up at your house with an egg, that's not actually a cake, right? Like, baking a cake is like there's a bunch of different ingredients in it there's eggs, there's sugar, there's flour, there's, you know, baking soda, and then you do this thing and you know, and then, voila, there's a cake and she's like like we need to be really careful when it comes to diagnoses, where we're not just like cherry picking a character trait or like one side of that list
Speaker 1:of things that shows up in the dsm and then labeling that as narcissism. It's like, yeah, ex-boyfriend might be selfish, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're narcissistic. And you know, I think that that is the beautiful nuance that your therapist brought in is, instead of being like like throwing the baby out the bath water, it was more of like okay. So you're telling me that you are a cake. Let's figure out what flavor of cake you are. So yeah that's such an important skill to have. Um yeah, we, we asked to hold us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, and I I'm realizing too, like I I hate, I hate that the what my therapist has offered me and the way that we're that she is helping me look at mental health, mental illness, which autism is not mental illness, but looking at, like mental health in general, the full scope of it. Right, I hate that. It's radical, right, I hate that, like, the things that she's offering me and the perspectives we're using are so radical. We have talked about in one of our sessions that mental health is this spectrum and we could sit and look through the DSM and find qualities of most diagnoses that we relate to. Right, we all have these different facets of ourselves, these different parts. It's not like some of us are all good and then some of us are not. It's like we're all all the things you can think of it as, like with astrology. It's like my sun and moon are in Taurus, I'm very Taurus, but I have all the signs in me, right, I have all the aspects. It's like all of these things are spectrums, which is such an important word, right, autism, we know, is a spectrum.
Speaker 2:One word I've been thinking a lot lately is social psychologist Devin Price, who is the amazing author of the book unmasking autism, which has been just like a Bible for me through this process. It's been such an important book to read. But he describes it. He actually talks about how a spectrum is maybe the wrong word because it makes this sound like it's still a linear thing, when it's actually a constellation. It's like this intersecting of all of these things, and so I think also that's what I hear you talking about, that's what I think is I think we're talking about it when we're talking about trauma-informed care, when we're talking about context. Right, it's like recognizing that we're all these little constellations and we are the way we are for so many complex reasons, and to really want to show compassion to each other, which is also to understand each other, it involves needing to be willing to understand a lot of context. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, just putting myself into the shoes of of some of our listeners here, and and also, just, you know, a space that I'm really trying to like understand and be mindful of and be as ethical as possible in this realm, is the overlap between the roles of a coach and a therapist are becoming a lot more overlaid these days, and I see very, very clear boundaries here, and I think it's important to name those boundaries Because as coaches, we are not trained to diagnose. That is not, you know, part of our scope, and I think it's really important to know that that is not part of our scope Because there's so many conversations about mental and emotional health.
Speaker 1:These days, people are looking for ways in which they can find support, and that's not always with a therapist, and so to me, as a coach, it's so important to name that, hey, the place where I do not touch the like definite line in the sand is where a diagnosis is actually needed and would be helpful for that person and for that client, and that's something that I'm currently learning, currently trying to figure out.
Speaker 1:Certainly, you know, like, like you and I have worked together. You were my client for a long time and and then now you've moved on to therapy and so I I really want to sort of explore that space where, as your coach, I certainly was thinking CPTSD as a possibility. That doesn't surprise me. Your stories, autism is not something that I was thinking of, but as soon as you said it, it made sense and because I want to be the best possible coach slash mentor that I can be, you know, I'm curious if there's anything that, like, I could have done differently before you met your therapist.
Speaker 1:That would have felt really supportive. So yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think exactly how you supported me, did help me get to therapy. I mean, just to talk about something like really personal, like you and I talked about, uh, my Babadook, right, this like this relationship I have with a certain part of me and my nervousness, and I won't get into too much detail, but that Babadook has now shown up in therapy. Right, you did sort of, I think, by being again trauma informed and holding the right space for me, you allowed things to surface, both that surfaced in real time between you and I, and also just things that got shaken up, that are now surfacing in therapy and that had nothing to do with you being able to know or not know or spot or diagnose. It had to do with you being curious and open. Right, and I'm actually realizing it does come back to those two words that I wrote about with my diagnosis and that you're picking up on.
Speaker 2:It's the distinction between authority and curiosity, I think so often, especially for coaches and maybe for any person who is in a role where there is this inherent power, dynamic and part of what you're offering, we have this sense that it depends on our skills and our expertise, and so we can assume that means.
Speaker 2:I think that's what's driving a coach when they're saying I'm a good coach and I tell it like it is. There's this sense of wanting to be like my authority is concrete and it's valuable and that's why you're paying me and you're going to get a thing that you don't have. But often what I need, more than a thing that I don't have, is a certain kind of space and a certain kind of enthusiasm from someone right, someone who's enthusiastic about me and curious about me and can hold a space that I can really enter a little bit more fully. And that's where I think we can maybe release ourselves from feeling like we need to be able to spot the thing. It's more about listening and being curious. I think that's what will bring. Invite the things. It doesn't matter if we know what they are or not, you know what they are or not, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's something that like I I mean maybe I should get this tattooed on my body somewhere, but like I really think of, like safety is the medicine, you know it doesn't, matter what kind of tool or technique that you're using. Um, you know, you could be a reiki practitioner, you can be an acupuncturist, you could be a massage therapist, a somatic healer, like. There's so many fucking different flavors of tools out there.
Speaker 1:I don't really know at all what I do, because it's like a mishmash toolbox of things that I've picked up along the way. But I think that when we as coaches and as mentors and as therapists can point our compass towards safety Like people, come up with all sorts of fucking creative solutions you know, and like the reason why they're not able to think their way or feel their way through a particular challenge or block is because they feel on some level there's some sort of threat happening you know, it happened with me this morning.
Speaker 1:I'm working with a dear friend of mine who is a horse trainer and um, coco, I love him to pieces and he's got some behavioral things that, as he gets older, are gonna actually be dangerous for me. Um, it's into my space and he doesn't really respect my boundaries and, like you know, the list of how he, how close he wants to be to me, is uncomfortable to me. And so she noticed like hey, how's your body right now? And that gave me a sense of being able to be like oh, actually he's coming to look for me in my space because my body, like my spirit, has left my body already, because I feel so threatened by his presence um then it was like okay.
Speaker 1:so her question was like how do you want to get back in your body? And so it's like okay, like give me a moment and I'm going to breathe into it and anchor and root out, because I know how to do that and you know, it gave me an opportunity to find my own sense of safety and I think that that's really what a good coach or, you know, service provider does is like hey, like can you create a safe enough space that people can find their own sovereignty and agency and make their choices, enough space that people can find their own sovereignty and agency and make their choices? And that's really what I'm hearing in your story with your therapist and I'm really glad that I got to be people on that journey for you.
Speaker 2:But, like, I think we like I'm glad you're bringing this word safety into the conversation and I'm just thinking about how, like, oh, there's nothing for me. You know and I say this as a person who's very neurodivergent, possibly also has a mental illness, I don't know yet right, there's my, my therapist and I are getting clearer on the other details. Now that we have this base framework right, there's like, and there's trauma we're processing and all these things right. So I'm, I'm a, I'm a complex and unique person, but from my experience, there's like nothing that feels safer and nicer to me than somebody who is not just willing to look over at my reality but is willing to like enter my reality with me.
Speaker 2:And years ago this was earlier on in my social work trajectory and he was someone who had some delusions about himself, some pretty severe delusions that were objectively not true. Among other things, he was convinced that he had had a child who had passed away and this had not happened. But it was a thing he carried. That was true. And I remember seeing a lot of service providers really sometimes getting quite frustrated and really struggling with him about that because it's like, dude, this didn't happen. It didn't matter that it didn't happen.
Speaker 2:He was walking around with this reality that he had experienced, that. He felt grief, he felt frustration, he felt all the things that might accompany such an experience and if I wanted to, even for a moment, try to meet him where he was at like, you can't get there through through this thing of but I'm right, this didn't happen. Like being right or wrong stops mattering. It's about like what is that person's experience of themselves that has to matter more than like what is right or wrong? Right, as a space holder. It's like when we're talking about meeting the person where they're at, that has to be, yeah, being willing to sort of like greet that person where their reality is, even if you feel an edge between your experience of reality and theirs.
Speaker 1:There's something about being willing to go to that space, yeah my heart is breaking a little bit right now because, um you know, I had sort of like alluded to the fact that my brother went through like the mental health system at a young age he was probably, I want to say 13 ish, um, when he first, like he went through multiple rounds of suicide attempts.
Speaker 1:He went through bouts of depression and one of the things that came up for him, one of the stories that he was holding onto, is he said that my mom pulled him out of the car once and broke his arm, pulled him out of the car once and broke his arm, and I remember at that time, you know my the therapist who was working with him, you know relate this as a potential for, like, having to call, you know, child protective services, and you know was going off of what my brother had said to her and of course it puts, you know, I put myself into my parents shoes and they're on the defensive because they're like that never happened. You know, if it was true, then there would be x-ray, we would have taken him to the hospital and it became this whole thing between the therapist and my parents, um, kind of arguing about what the truth was, because that was what the therapist thought was advocating for my brother um and you know.
Speaker 1:And then the therapist was saying things like well, you wouldn't, you know, if there was abuse happening, there might not have been a hospital visit. And my parents would be like, well then, wouldn't there have been some sort of like physical abnormality if we didn't get him medical care? And it was just this whole thing, and I just remember at that time like being like maybe my mom pulled him out of the car in a way that was really frightening to him.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe that got weird into his memory in a way that, like, was really scary for a four-year-old or a five-year-old you know, and maybe the only way that he could actually express how scary that was was by creatively coming up with this story that his arm was broken because it wouldn't have been like a big enough thing to just say like you hurt me or that was really scary, or you know, I felt really sort of like scared about your frustration, like like there were so many possibilities that that could have been you know that didn't necessarily have to be based in truth.
Speaker 1:It could have been based in be an emotional landscape that we are not able to fully explore with people because we're so focused on the facts of like. Did this happen you? Know, I I hear this a lot talking to people about rape as well is when they start questioning whether or not they were raped or not.
Speaker 1:It's like okay.
Speaker 1:So you know, do we need to abide by these strict sort of definitions of these things, or can we really explore what that emotional signature that left on you is, regardless of what we live for?
Speaker 1:You is, regardless of what we live? You know, and I think that people feel like they aren't allowed to talk about these big hurts and these big emotional things that happen in their lives without calling it a thing and labeling it as a thing, and I don't think that that's necessarily true. Like, as a coach, I feel like it's my responsibility I won't put this on anybody else, but, you know, I think it's my responsibility to like get down on the like level where you're like examining all the bugs and the like rocks and the you know tiny plants that are coming up on the ground, like if that's where you're at. Like I want to get down there with you and like look at the world with you instead of, like you know, looking at the world from the top view and being like we have to start labeling these rocks and these you know, and categorizing these things that are happening.
Speaker 2:It's like, no, like, let's just let's just get down on the ground and like look at this stuff together, need to reach for authority and knowingness and certainty, and that that's the sort of neurotypical source of our confidence, right, and it feels threatening to not know or to be a little more open and be a little less focused on, like, mastering something and instead cultivating curiosity, right, or just all these things we're talking about. I think if you have a certain definition of confidence, they can feel sort of threatening to you.
Speaker 2:But I think it's a really thin and ungenerous way to think about confidence, and then I think it also limits the kind of space you can hold for other people and the places you can go and the things that might surface, the things you can be curious about and even also reaching some of those layers that are a little bit more internal or a little bit less obvious or a little less apparent.
Speaker 1:Right, I think the one thing that I do hold as an authority when I'm with a client, though, is this feeling of like I trust you, and in that moment where you don't trust yourself, I'm going to hold that trust for you. I think to me there's like I feel like I do have to take on like a little bit of an authoritative role when I hold that message, because, oftentimes, when people are just like down in the middle of their story, like they just lose that self-agency and trust, and to me, if I step in on one side of authority and say, hey, I see that you feel, um, like a bit shaky about your self-trust, let me come in here and like.
Speaker 1:I'll be the thing that you trust and let me tell you what to do. Like that's one aspect of authority and that's not at all how I think this community works um but I think that I do find it important to hold the authority of like hey, in this moment you don't trust yourself, can we name that? And in this moment, while you can't trust yourself, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold that trust for you, and I feel like that's, that's an important way to hold authority.
Speaker 2:If, if there's a way that we can sort of like spin authority in a in a positive light yeah, it's, I almost I, I'm, I'm just sort of like processing what you're saying and I'm almost like we need a better word because you're right, I hear what you're saying, that it is this kind of thing that like you're not going to set down and you're holding onto it even when you see the other person not holding onto it. Right, I mean, it's not about it's also again, it's less about setting down my reality and picking up the other person's reality. It's not about it's also, again, it's less about setting down my reality and picking up the other person's reality. It's more about finding the edge where they meet and holding space from there. There's always going to be an edge. There's always going to be an through this world in a way that is fundamentally in opposition to how I'm moving through this world. There's always going to be a place where we could meet if we both wanted to, and so it's more about finding that edge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that, like the reason why I use the word authority is like it's one of the only times when I coach where I feel like I do have to implement a bit of like hierarchy and by hierarchy. I mean, it's just like I have to step outside and get up off of the floor while you're looking at the flowers, all the shit down there, you know, and I have to like actually physically, sort of like stand up and like look at it with a different perspective and.
Speaker 2:I think that that's where it feels like authority, like somatically in my body, but like again not like exact language here yeah, it gave me this feeling when you said it just now of like, of like, oh, you're willing to hold a loving and firm boundary. In a way, like it, it feels like a holding, like a knight, like a, like a security, almost. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm curious because I think that different people have different responses to receiving a diagnosis and you and I have talked like on a personal level about this but, like you know, I probably, if somebody were to you know do a full, thorough examination on me, I probably would be diagnosed with ADHD and I don't find that label particularly helpful and useful, which is why I work more with coaches rather than with therapists. I'm curious about this celebration that you are feeling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm curious about it too.
Speaker 1:It's in one person. I'll say that, like, my brother's wife also received an autism diagnosis later in life, also received an autism diagnosis later in life Um, and she had a very similar experience of like I feel like this is it explains a lot and gives me permission to be who I am. And you know, like I remember my parents being so confused as to like why is she so excited about this thing?
Speaker 1:um, because they're of like old school mindset and, um, still see autism as like a thing that is is wrong with people and like I love this celebratory energy that you're bringing in and I'm I'm hoping that we get to sort of like explore know if I have or don't have it.
Speaker 2:Never, you know, thinking that I had it never gave me clarity or made me feel like you know, celebratory or more more deeply inside myself than when I didn't think I had it. I mean, part, part of me wants to just say like I don't know. Autistic joy is just real. I mean, if you start reading and learning about autism and listening to people talk about autism, there's certain phrases, certain ideas, certain like common manifestations of it that you'll hear about. People talk about having special interests, right, this idea that autistic brains tend to be very monotropic, tend to get hyper-focused on things, tend to care a lot about the things that we care about and not care as much about things we don't care about. There's a kind of like a burstingness and an enthusiasm and there's a lot of talk about autistic joy. There's a kind of there's an experience of enthusiasm that you can have for the things that bring you joy. That just there's a part of me that's just like I don't know, it's real, it's just great, it's cool to be autistic. I don't know, I just there's something about that that feels meaningful to name. There's also, you know, part of.
Speaker 2:Why I'm also curious about this is because I've known so many people for whom diagnoses are not celebratory and they can be even limiting. Truthfully, they can create a very limiting experience and that also depends on your own history with mental illness. It depends on the therapist you're working with, right I mean. All the factors make a huge difference, but I don't know Truly. For 36 years I've been having this experience. It's something I've shared with you. I've named it to every single coach I've worked with and I've named it to multiple therapists. I've just often had this feeling of being a ghost in my own life. Multiple therapists like I've just often had this feeling of being a ghost in my own life and I've often had this feeling that it's like I'm trying to look at myself and I can't see her.
Speaker 2:There's this real ghostliness, real absence that I've always felt and my CPTSD diagnosis explains it a little to a degree. Kind of loss of self Explains it a little to a degree, you know, kind of loss of self, intensity of self-doubt. All I know is the minute my therapist said the word autism, right, we were having. We had already talked about bringing some diagnostics to the table we had talked about. You know, she wanted to know what diagnoses I wanted us to explore. Obviously, ocd was one of them. She wanted to know if she could suggest some as well, and autism was what she suggested and the minute.
Speaker 1:She said it, can I just like pause there? Yeah, yeah, like so much in that conversation.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. I also I mean because she asked me first right, this was a question we addressed together. We went our separate ways. I thought about it. Then, at the next session, I said, okay, I want to talk about OCD and I want to talk about bipolar disorder, Not because I ever thought I had it, but because I thought there were some things about the symptoms and diagnostics that could at least lead us in the right direction. And so then autism was the thing that she mentioned.
Speaker 2:All I know is I had heard about autism before many times. Something in me had never given myself permission to consider that that could be a truth about my brain and my body, a truth about my brain and my body. The minute she offered it as something she had observed in me, I just felt something happen in my body that I can still feel in this moment, and it's like a thing got flipped and it just has not unflipped since then. It makes me a little emotional to talk about, because that 36 years of feeling like I couldn't see myself since talking about autism and receiving the diagnosis. But even before she formalized it, just when we first started exploring it, I started having some of the first moments I'd ever had in my life of feeling like I could just see myself, and they were happening in really small, safe ways too. Right, Like I do this indoor rowing class with my partner once a week I've been doing it for like two years I just I like had a day I remember it was the first day that I noticed in real time that I was autistic because, like the instructor was telling us what we were going to do that day and I noticed that I was getting really frustrated and I was not understanding what she was saying and I started to like, kind of all these things started happening inside of me and I started to get really frustrated and I felt myself wanting to do the thing that I normally do, which is either to decide I guess I hate this class now, or to beat myself up and be like, oh, I'm just. Why can't I understand? This is not working. Like I'm being so stupid, what is this?
Speaker 2:And then, for the first time, it's like in DBT therapy, where you talk about like wise mind. It's like for the first time in truly 36 years, I had this experience of going into my wise mind. I wasn't leaving my body, but I was looking at myself and I was just like, oh, you're autistic. This you're not. This information right now is too much and you're getting overwhelmed. And I just and it didn't make. It didn't make me understand what was going on, but it meant I stopped being scared because I understood why it was happening and I just thought, okay, I don't understand what we're supposed to be doing right now. I'm either going to have to ask her for clarity or I'm just going to watch what other people are doing. And I just watched what other people were doing and it wasn't perfect because I still didn't understand. But I just saw the way that like, oh, in certain situations, with certain information, I glitch and I don't know how to read it, and so I read it either aggressively toward myself or toward other people, and I don't even know if I'm doing a good job explaining it, but it just made so much sense. And then the next day I had therapy and I told her about this and I just cried and cried and I just, I just like knew, I just knew.
Speaker 2:From that moment on, like there's no if there's any part of me that doubted that I'm autistic, like the clarity it has given me, I know a lot about a lot of diagnoses and mental illness and I've been around it personally and professionally. I've never had a thing just help me see myself so clearly Like. That to me is like proof that it's real right. If there's any part of my brain that's still like is this really? I'm autistic, you know it's like. No, it's, I can.
Speaker 2:I can feel it from the inside out that it's real and I think that's where there's just it's just so fucking nice, it's just so, it's just so nice to like see myself more clearly in real time and that's that's where the celebration is coming from. Like that it's. It's so scary scary, I think, and so hard to just go so long not understanding. Forget about like fixing things, because there are some things I want to address and some skills and strategies that I would like to be learning to help me be in certain spaces, but like I don't even that'll come with time. The the thing that is so nice to have is just to like have a better understanding of why I experienced the things that I experienced, because I've never is me getting down on the ground level with you um, what I'm hearing in your story is you know with my clients I like to use this like analogy of you know who are all the parts on your school bus.
Speaker 1:You know? And who's driving, who's driving the school bus and um, and oftentimes we talk about that in terms of like okay, so there's a five-year-old who's tantruming and like do we really want the five-year-old to be driving the school bus in this moment?
Speaker 1:right and what I'm hearing is that, like you being such an observant person, like you know who all of your inner people are, who like ride this school bus with you, and there's been this like little tiny one who has like been hiding in the like back corner of the school bus because she never thought that like anyone would ever see her and like I can imagine how hollow that must have felt. Because you're like I'm taking roll call with all the little parts of you and being like like I feel like there's someone missing here. I don't know who. Like I feel like there's someone missing here.
Speaker 1:I don't know who it is, but I feel like there's someone missing, and receiving that diagnosis was almost like like inviting her to like sit in the school bus with everybody else and telling me she's like and now you get to like dialogue with her, like that's really what I'm hearing in the like wise self who's like ah, like, you're having a hard time really processing this because you're autistic right like that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you or that there's something like that we need to fix. It's just. This is hard to process and you get to. You know, a lot of the stuff that we do is about like parenting our inner children.
Speaker 1:It's like this little one never got to be parented and now you have an opportunity because you're now able to like name her as being a part of this constellation of beings on the school bus with you, like like now you get to have these conversations with her, now she gets to have some of these needs met, gets to like understand contextually why things have been harder, why things have been easy in her life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I really like about your, the image and this metaphor, is like, yeah, when my it. I almost picture if we can like slow down that moment when my therapist first said the word autism. It's almost like she said it and my brain went to go, oh no, but that little part of me was like I'm here, yeah, that's right, it's me. I'm here, like, because there really was this like inside out feeling of like it was like I knew, but the knowing was in a part of me that my brain had never accessed. It was so I truly have never had an experience like. It was so strange and so powerful the way it happened. And I want to like make it an even more complex metaphor because it's also like it's like it's there in that really, really young part of me right, three-year-old, four-year-old, five-year-old Sarah, who's like autistic and doing all these things and spending all this time alone. And you know, my mom has been also noticing things that she didn't notice in real time and we've been talking about this together and kind of reprocessing things about the past. And one thing she said is yeah, you know, anytime, anytime I she tried to like explain something to me, or there were instructions for a thing or there was something to like learn how to do. I didn't want to have anything explained to me. I wanted to take the information and go be alone in my room and figure it out myself.
Speaker 2:There's something about that the need for me to have time and space and be alone and figure out the thing that I, you know. I see it in that, I see it in some of these memories I have from childhood, but I also see it in my teens and I also see it in my twenties and I also see it right now Like it's. It's it's both this very young part of me and it's also like a part of all the parts of me. It's like it's more it's where we get back to that like constellation-y thing, right, because it's it's there in those younger parts that need a lot of protection. And it's also like here right now, in the parts of me that are where my like biggest iteration of agency exists, like it's. And so part of the work I feel also is like and this is really the work of unmasking, to say, something that feels impossible, but that is the only way forward.
Speaker 2:It's not just ah, I'm autistic. Now I take the mask off and reveal it. It's like no, there's a mask on each part of me. It's going to be slow, depthful work. I don't even know what it looks like to begin living a more unmasked life. I think the only thing I know is that it starts with just giving myself the time and space to notice how things affect me and to notice my needs in the most inclusive way possible. I think it's just going to start with a lot of noticing, which, fortunately, I'm really good at. Now that I have this framework, I can begin that. But it's sort of like every single kid on that bus also has a mask on in some way, and now I need to help them all take them off.
Speaker 1:I want to sit in the learner seat for a moment. I want to sit in the learner seat for a moment. A I've become obsessed with words lately. I think that's partially your doing, sarah. Yay, but can you describe to me and, like almost like, define for me what unmasking is? Hmm.
Speaker 2:What a question. Yeah, idea in general is that for some autistic people, in particularly for, as I said, women and people of color, people who are not, you know, do not readily belong to the dominant type of person who gets to move more easily through our modern culture, right Like cis, white man, for many of us who belong to, you know, a more marginalized community, we learn usually very early on to mask our autism. So, and you can see right away, you can even hear in the language language, the way this can sort of mimic and go hand in hand with a lot of gendered conditioning, right Like learning to be a submissive woman, learning to you know people, please. Fawning, right, when I think about, like my masking, I think about all the fawning I've done in my life. I think about all the fawning I've done in my life. So there's this idea that for some of us, our autism got masked very early on. So there's these three words that get talked about a lot masking, compensation and camouflaging. I don't know that I can do a really proper job explaining the nuanced differences between the two, but they are all I mean you can hear in the language right Camouflaging the self, compensating for things that you don't have, and masking to hide what's there.
Speaker 2:They're all tactics for safety, right? I mean it comes back to that. They're tactics for a safety that is dependent on hiding a part of what you are and who you are and how you are, and blending in and really enacting a kind of neurotypicality, even if it is against my will, my need, what feels best to me. So you know, if we can think about like cut to me, being in that, you know, grad school academic classroom and me, you know, trying to hide the fact that I didn't always know what was going on, or trying to not let people know when I'm not understanding something, or trying to pretend I'm not. Someone who needs the amount of time that I need, or even in social settings right to learn how to navigate social settings, to learn how to make eye contact, to learn how to sort of, you know, blend in as a non-autistic person, for a sense of safety and for not having your difference or your divergence noticed.
Speaker 2:Right, and masking I mean it's such a funny and strange word because again it sounds like, oh, you just take the mask off, right to figure out how to get to the edge of that thing and start peeling it away and get to like an authentic sense of who I am. For me, it's about really wanting to find the place in me and the practices and the ways of being that feel most authentic, and that is also different than a lot of the things that I'm used to enacting, and so there's a lot of strangeness there. I think one of the things I wrote in that essay, when I sort of like announced my diagnosis, was that it doesn't just feel like I need to take a mask off. It feels like I'm part of the thing that needs to be taken off. It's like very, very like loopy and strange, you know.
Speaker 1:I I'm just like noticing this like surgical precision that one would have to do to like enact in order to like be really clear about, like what part of me is the mask and what part of me is actually me, mm-hmm, what I love about your story is that there's not this like rush to do this like there's almost like this feeling of like, hey, when that snake skin is ready to shed, it's gonna be ready and you're not trying to like do surgery on snake skin that's not ready to shed yet yeah yeah go ahead.
Speaker 2:Oh, just yeah, I think I think you're right and I think I think part of why I have that resolve is because of the relationship I have with writing. I think that's one thing that I've realized. I mean, I've loved writing my whole life and I started writing when I was really really young, and what I have, what I've come to realize post-diagnosis, is that writing was the first thing I loved to do, but it was also my earliest coping mechanism, writing. I mean, all those years I talked about feeling like I was a ghost in my whole life. Well, the one place I didn't feel that was on the page. I've never felt that on the page. I've always had a clear sense of self. I've always been able to go to the page and sort of like find me, and that doesn't mean I mean it's a very different experience than feeling like I have a sense of self in the 3D world, right Like that. That feels important too, and I have a lot of curiosity, curiosity about how to cultivate more of that. But I think I think having this place, which for me happens to be creativity, and specifically the page where I can sort of feel predominantly unmasked, is also it's a real like orienting thing for me, and for a long time, I mean, I think I shared this in our like Slack community For a long time, even though I've always been, I've always had a positive relationship with my writing.
Speaker 2:I did see all of this that I'm describing right now for a long time as a kind of failure of my ability to be a person, almost like I'm someone who, well, yeah, I'm really good on the page, but I also hide behind the page. But now I'm seeing like, oh no, there's like typical verbal speech and social interactions. Those can look a lot of different ways. I attended a poetry reading two weeks ago with a poet who is a non-speaking autistic poet. She does not speak verbally, she speaks through her iPad. That's how she expresses herself, and it was one of the most amazing, brilliant, moving experiences I've ever had. So the page or whatever medium we use to express ourselves, that can look necessarily so different for so many people and so many bodies, and so I'm also. You know there's a lot of things shifting and deepening with that too that feel like a really important part of how I'm able to even cope with this Right.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm just hearing that, like on the page.
Speaker 1:It gives you like that time that you always crave you know, like the world moves too fast and people want the answer right now. And you know, in this iteration it's like no, like on the page, like the way that you write to is also like kind of meandery and like takes a lot of like circular roads and then returns to concepts and themes, and it's like on the page. You get to do that and you know I can imagine that all these masked parts of yourselves didn't always feel safe or had the permission to do that in real time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also sometimes it's just I don't want to do it any other way, I need to do it on the page or I need to communicate this thing on the page, right? I think it's about inviting more neutrality into these things and also realizing that the things we assume are normal with everything, but especially with language and with communication, are just neurotypical and are also like like solidified as the status quo. When I went to this poetry reading, I attended. The poet's name is Iman Bukele. She was amazing. Her book is published through the Multiverse series, which is an imprint of milkweed. I encourage everybody to Google all of that and find a bunch of really incredible poets.
Speaker 2:But when I at the start of the presentation, the first question cause, she answered a couple of questions first and then she had given her editor permission to read her poems out loud and then she answered more questions at the end. So the first question that she answered. You know she would type on her iPad to answer the question and that's a slow process. The sentence is not revealed in the way that I'm revealing a sentence to you right now at this, like very quick speed. It's a word at a time and when I first heard her answer a question. My thought was, oh, this is really slow.
Speaker 2:And by the end of the 90 minutes, or however long the experience was, my perspective had totally flipped and I felt like why does everybody talk so quickly all the time? Why do everybody talk so quickly all the time? Why do I talk so quickly all the time? So I think also, when I say like, oh, divergent practices, it's not just about being willing to tolerate them, but look at what they offer all of us. Look at what it can offer all of us to give ourselves space to value and to be curious about what might I express if, rather than rushing to say the thing and to know the thing as quickly as possible, what if I give myself time and space which I can practice doing, maybe with a little more ease on the page? What will that help me see about myself? That will make my experience of myself and my thoughts and my feelings and my inspirations maybe a little bit bigger than they have been up until now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that and it's like there's a presence that happens when you're able to slow down in that way.
Speaker 1:Slow down in that way. You know, I think that I experience time a little bit differently, being more on the like ADHD sort of end of the spectrum and like it's simultaneously like a weird thing because I can move quite quickly in the world, but it's also not my preferred mode of being, as I think that there's an unmasking that happens in the way that you're speaking of, like very specific to autism, but also like as my I'm exploring my own nervous system in real time, like moving with the seasons of my new land and moving with the bodies of my horses, and a lot of the training work that I do with my horses is question and answer. You know, can I pick up your foot? Will you move your nose that way? Will you follow me? Can I follow you? And the speed of animals when they're in a sympathetic state is very quick because they need to move very quickly, but when they're in a sympathetic state is very quick because they need to move very quickly but, when they're in a parasympathetic state.
Speaker 1:They sit and ponder that question for a real long time, sometimes to the point where like I used to feel kind of uncomfortable and I was just working with um forest this morning and you know, like I just made a note of like okay, how long does it take him to answer a question? And so I would ask him a question of like hey, can we move together in a circle together? And it would be five or six seconds sometimes before he would respond. It's like what would happen if we all moved in varying timelines and how would that sort of create capacity in a different way? I'm hearing in this experience with your attending the poetry reading is like just the sheer fact that, like she can only answer a question one word at a time dropped you into a timescape that is just foreign and new and like to me it sounds like it brought the whole audience into a sense of presence.
Speaker 1:You know, and that's really what I get when I slow down with my horses is it's like oh, like, let me go at your speed like let me not rush you you know, and I can see that they're thinking the whole time like like the same way that you're talking about, like word after word after word after word I'm like, oh, like, forest is processing, he's blinking, he's, you know, chewing. He's like, literally like chewing on whether he wants to do this thing that I've asked him to do or not. And you know, if I were to rush him, it would push him out of presence and it would push me out of presence too. And I think that's like.
Speaker 2:That's one of the beautiful takeaways that I'm having from this conversation is it's like hey, like can we visit other timelines and like what that visitation can offer us yeah, yeah, there's so much that can happen between the space of question and answer and and again it's about like pleasantly scrambling our expectations around, like when we think there's nothing happening just because we're not yet seeing the answer. But there's other things happening, right. It's again this need to like think a little bit more inclusively about you know what we expect the thing to look like, or what we think is or isn't happening in those spaces of silence and waiting.
Speaker 1:I want to start wrapping up the conversation here, but I have one last question, as, like somebody who's you know continuing to sit in the learner seat is you had alluded to this, this stereotype of, of autism, of like what it typically looks like, and even as somebody who has worked in the medical industry for a very long time, even though I, like, was in eastern medicine, I got like pretty formalized western medicine training and this is exactly what they tell us is autism is more common in boys. It is more common in white boys.
Speaker 1:It looks like this the few experiences that I've had with people I've known who were autistic were very sort of like stereotypical. You know, I had a client who was like obsessed, like I love that, like autistic joy that you were talking about. Like he was obsessed with civil war generals like I've never seen somebody who could?
Speaker 1:gain so much joy from knowing everything about generally. Um, and you know, I I want to just open up the space for you to describe a different picture, a different constellation of what autism can look like, because I think that a lot of people don't know how to perhaps identify themselves in a way that might be helpful. And so like putting you into the framework in the context of like before your diagnosis. What would have been helpful to know about what an autistic experience in life could look like. But like we have a different picture.
Speaker 2:But like we have a different picture, a more nuanced and more colorful picture of what looks like outside of a textbook definition, mm, hmm, yeah, this is a really good question and and I do want to just caveat it by saying, well, the the best way I can answer this is what I wrote in that essay that I published, where I announced that I'm autistic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, truly, that is like the most comprehensive. But in addition to that and again I can't overemphasize how much Devin Price's writing about autism, and particularly his book Unmasking Autism, has played such a huge, huge role, and so what I'm about to say, I really feel like I'm pulling from the wisdom and the research that I've learned from his work. I think some of the main things, some of the really big aha moments for me around autism, have been realizing that again there's this tendency for the brain to be kind of monotropic, to be able to get into these like hyper focused states where you sort of like forget to eat and you forget to drink water and you can sort of you can, you can be in like a flow state but you can sort of like lose track of your 3d body really easily. You can, you can get into that, that space also, this idea of being a bottom-up thinker, so like a more neurotypical brain might enter a room, take in the environment, environment, see what's going on and be able to very easily and quickly kind of synthesize what's happening and know which details to keep in mind and which details to set down and then figure out where to go from, there in the room or in the situation or at the event.
Speaker 2:For an autistic brain, there's a harder time to know what's important and what matters and what doesn't. You're like taking in all of the information and a lot of details and so you can get kind of stuck like not understanding what matters based on what's at hand and what doesn't matter. You can sort of you can maybe feel like you're getting stuck on a detail that you can't get past, even though maybe other people are like well, that doesn't, that's not important to what's going on here, and it's like no, but I, but this doesn't make sense to me. I need to like understand this first. So there's this sort of like getting into the weeds, yeah, bottom up processing. There's also and I'm really glad I'm going to mention this before we go there can be a really different relationship to intuition and to knowing. And it's so funny because for a long time I used to even tell people like I don't really have intuition, and a lot of times that was met with you know. Oh, of course you do. Of course you do Like reassurance, and I do think I have cultivated more of an intuition over the past couple of years than I used to have.
Speaker 2:But for autistic brains it is very common that you don't necessarily experience these like knee jerk, like aha things. You need a lot of information and I am someone who needs a lot of information and I really it takes me a long time to know. I can't tell you how many times in therapy I have asked my therapist like she'll ask me a question and I'll say, well, how would I know? Or I'll say what does knowing feel like? Like it's really hard for me to know what knowing feels like, and I think it feels different in my brain and body than it tends to feel, feels different in my brain and body than it tends to feel.
Speaker 2:And so it it. It makes my relationship to intuition and knowing and making decisions for myself look a little bit different and and maybe a little less glamorous than some of the ways that we can think about. You know, just those aha like moments of knowing. It's I do, I have had those. They are not the norm for me and I used to think you know, see it as a flaw that I needed all this information, and now it's like oh, no, no, no, my brain just needs the information it needs right.
Speaker 1:It's another shift and I think that there I just want to like insert and I think that there I just want to like insert, like it's totally okay that you need a lot of information, and I also see that this is like a vulnerability that can be exploited. Um, because in that like again, like I'm just going to use the horse analogy in that pod, where like forest is trying to decide. Do I want to, you know, do the thing that cat is asking me.
Speaker 1:I could then come in and put pressure on him to make that decision so much faster than he's ready to make that decision, absolutely giving him all the space and giving you all the information that he needs so that I can clearly communicate, like, hey, this is the direction that I want us to move in. And you know, I think that this is a place where I've seen, in some of my clients, where gaslighting can happen, even in the therapy field, where, um, because people are uncomfortable with the pace at which you intuit things and also how you intuit things and because it might be different from how they intuit things um or they might also be neurodivergent and be uncomfortable with how they intuit things, and so they're projecting their own sort of insecurities onto your situation.
Speaker 1:Um, like, I've seen this in.
Speaker 1:um, it just opens up a space where there's potential for, like, just pressure to come in yeah so I just um I wish, if you don't have a Sean in your life Sean is my husband if you don't have a Sean in your life, like, I wish that I could gift you a Sean because, like there's something so beautiful about somebody saying, like I love the way that your brain works it's so different from the way my brain works and like I know that you have a really wonderful partner and he is accepting and amazing, and I imagine all sorts of wonderful and I also just would be like another person in your corner saying like I love the way your brain works, sarah, and you know I've been in awe of your writing for a very long time.
Speaker 1:People, if you are listening to this, I please go and subscribe to her sub stack. Um, and, you know, flow in the the juicy timeline of somebody who's got a different than yours.
Speaker 1:um, quite honestly, like I see your emails come and they typically tend to be a bit longer- and so I will flag it and come back to it when I know that I have a moment, and to me that's such a gift to be able to like bring a bit of presence in my life, like the same way that you were just sharing about the reading it.
Speaker 1:it's like you bring that into my life as well, through the self-stack, because it's like, oh, like, I really actually do want to prioritize this and I want to hear what you know, what Sarah has to say, and I can't just consume this while I'm, you know, standing in line at the grocery store, the way that I could, you know, just flip through an Instagram post. It asks me to slow down. So yeah, thank you so much for you, and your work.
Speaker 2:No, I thank you. I really appreciate that, that reflection, and I appreciate too you naming the vulnerability. Yeah, I think folks who are neurodivergent in general and certainly for a lot of autistic know it's like bad things can happen. I I I've encountered in multiple things I've read really like really devastating statistics about like the overlap between people who are autistic and who find themselves easily, um like drawn into cults, like there there's a kind of like impressionability, that that makes you really, really vulnerable and and yes, it can be exploited.
Speaker 2:And to loop that back to this like wonderful reflection you just gave, I feel like it's been a journey for me to also like, just be mindful of like wanting to protect the way I think and write, mindful of like wanting to protect the way I think and write and not wanting to let my writing become something that is easier for people to digest, even if that would make it more successful. Or, you know, help me move in the direction of like neurotypical success, which is like trying to go viral or something right. Like I don't think any of my essays are going to go viral anytime soon and I'm very much learning to be okay with that, Because it's I value. I value the thing that is preventing me from having that kind of, that kind of success. So, thank you, Thank you for that reflection.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, please don't change the way that you write.
Speaker 1:I think it's exactly, you know, like it's something that I, that we talk about in BAM, is like hey, like you show up, as you and your people are going to find you, like that you know and I get really excited to think about like hey, like what happens when Sarah starts unmasking all these parts of her that you've lived your life as authentically as you could up until this point. So it's like, you know, we're all doing our best with the information that we have, totally, and a piece of information that I imagine is just going to help you deepen into relationship with self, relationship with your work, going to help you deepen into relationship with self, relationship with your work and yeah, I get excited to, to see what's on the horizon for you, me too, me too.
Speaker 1:Thanks, kat well, I'll put all those resources down in the show notes. Um, this is going to be a hefty show note load, so click through those pieces and please let us know how we can find you in the internet world. If people don't want to like, just click through all the show notes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, my website, Sarah Teresa cookcom, so Sarah does have an H at the end. Teresa does not have an H. All my stuff is linked on my website, but you can also go straight to my sub stack at Sarah cooksubstackcom. Those are the two main places I show up and and all the, all the good things are there.
Speaker 1:Yay, thanks for having this conversation with me and I'll see you soon, thanks.
Speaker 2:Kat.