multiplicity_archives | (no subject)

i believe it is possible to have an autistic person in-house, even if the fronting person(s) are not autistic.

Ulla & Co.

Well, it kind of depends on how exactly you're defining "autistic".

Real autism's no more like the media stereotype of "autism" than real multiplicity's like the media stereotype of that. I'm autistic, but a person would have to be pretty close to me and know some things about autism in order to guess it. One irritating thing is when people who find out say "You don't look autistic" - meaning I don't look like the fiction-based stereotype in their minds. Well no, I don't look like Dustin Hoffman. As far as I know, though, Dustin Hoffman isn't really autistic, so that's neither here nor there.

My 'brother' Crist-Erui, who shares this body, often acts more stereotypically autistic than I do. He can talk, but we didn't find that out till our 40's because he never did till then, and he still doesn't talk much - a word or two every few days, no more than that. He's very shy, has extremely keen senses but apparently a higher-than-usual pain threshold, is deathly afraid of certain kinds of noise, only will eat certain kinds of food, and spends much of his corporeal time playing his own inexplicable games with stones, seeds, etcetera.

However, his twin Kír adamantly insists that Crist-Erui is not autistic, that he himself is not, and that if I want to identify myself under that label, it's my choice, but not to presume to make that choice for them. So I don't. Actually, my reason for hanging on to that label - rather than rejecting it along with a lot of other unwelcome labels from the past - is a political one: if everyone who could "pass" as neurotypical does so, what happens to the ones who can't "pass", who get left behind?

As a result of this, I'm the only autistic person in our House (note: I'm not a "personality"; none of us are "personalities". We are people.) Whatever our shy, silent, notably-odd 'brother' may be, we don't call him autistic - and certainly no one's calling Kír so, even though of the three of us, he's had the most difficulty getting his senses and coordination straightened out.

Now, if autism is defined as a physical difference - a genetic predisposition to certain kinds of neurological variances - then presumably all three of us are autistic. It may be one of those variances that causes the tendency to multiplicity, in fact, because the proportion of multiples seems to be unusually high in the autistic community (and vice versa.) However, there's no way to be sure, because the research isn't anywhere near that advanced yet.

If this topic interests you, you can view the research findings here (http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/58/3/428).

We have a system member, Chloe, who certainly presents as autistic-like. She tends to get serious sensory overload, be either nonverbal or extremely literal and speaking in odd broken sentences, trying to "talk around" concepts almost like a stroke victim. She usually is forced out by situations that induce sensory overload; she spends much of her time inside. She has come out deliberately, though, on occasion, to communicate with frightened animals. I don't know if she is really autistic.

yeah it is. I mean if you can have a blind personality when the core isn't blind, why not autistic?

In our case, the brain we share in the earth world has the autism; anyone who comes front is affected by it, some more than others. The states that are called "autistic" or "asperger syndrome" in the earth world are normal on our homeworld (they're called chen or chenshi) and we have several frontrunners who are chen, and others who are not and whose autism is limited to the processes of the earth brain they use when they are fronting.

(points to

elenbarathi's post) I second this; check out the info she's linked to.

The reason I ask is this:

I was told that when I was young, my parents thought I was autistic. Then one day, I just stopped being autistic. 2 of my personalities are autistic, one severely, the other moderatly. I was just wondering what was up.

One of our personalities is autistic. She pretty much only communicates through music. (Nicholeen named her "La" because of this.) We have others who have autistic tendancies, but she's the one who is the most obvious. Like, we know something's different about Sarah, who is three, because all she does is breathe, pretty much (when she surfaces, we look catatonic, but we're not. She seems to notice things, and loud noises scare her). She has the development of an infant, and we've wondered if she's autistic. Katie has tendancies (mostly the head-banging, and her obsessive need to do certain things and think certain things), too, but that could just be the programming...about how she's bad, she has to be punished... It's like she got the single idea in her head, and no matter what, nothing else gets through to her.

But anyway, those are a few of the examples.

-Meghan, of The People