Question

[stealthdragon.livejournal.com]

It's been suggested that multiplicity might be more common in people with/whose body has Aspergers' syndrome or autism, and I'm rather curious how well that holds up.

Do you or anyone in your system have Aspergers' syndrome or autism? If so, is it a system-wide thing, or particular to a certain person or group?


We have Aspergers' syndrome, and it appears to affect everyone in our system to some extent. (None of us is all that good at understanding social situations or reading body language, for instance, and the lot of us have 'odd' interests.)

(Posted as a result of this entry.)

Comments

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

FWIW, though, thinking about it some more, I think we may be affected in different ways by the tendencies of our shared brain. Nobody is totally unaffected, but there seem to be varying levels of tolerance for things like overload, etc.; one person will wear a type of clothing or eat a certain kind of food which another person has sensory issues with.

Non-autistic persons fronting through this body aren't less affected than the rest of us, although their effects may possibly be different or more subtle. Some of them have to deal with their own sort of 'oddness' coming to the front (Ruka, for instance-- he's a good example of someone who's not autistic, but also not neurotypical). Someone might find that they get more obsessed with counting or alphabetizing things than they do 'back home,' or more inclined to read encyclopedias as opposed to novels.

[echoesnspectres.livejournal.com]

FWIW, though, thinking about it some more, I think we may be affected in different ways by the tendencies of our shared brain.

Yeah. That was actually one of the things (perhaps the thing) most suggestive of plurality of some kind, to us. Of course you sometimes see autistics write things like "oops, my receptive language comprehension seems to have left me" and things like that, and sometimes it is just the brain getting overloaded in that area/skill and burning out/giving up, and you just need to give it rest before it can come back online. (Sometimes of course it's a plural, but one who doesn't identify publicly and/or privately as such.) So we try not to confuse overload situations with switching.

We do seem to be autistic in different ways. Though it's hard to tell what is autism and what is just "wiring" in general; the fact that one of us has difficulty with dividing or switching attention, for instance, could be thought of in terms of autism but also in terms of a certain personality type.

Some functioning differences may have more to do with how the person "deals" with the autism than with how they are affected by it. One of us is intelligent-but-not-intellectual and pays much more attention to social stuff than the rest of us; she experiences a great deal of exhaustion. Is she differently affected by the autism or does she just rely a lot on things the brain isn't good at?

But looking at things like how much people need to withdraw, what sensory issues they have, things like that - I think that may be autism working differently for different people.

Someone might find that they get more obsessed with counting or alphabetizing things than they do 'back home,' or more inclined to read encyclopedias as opposed to novels.

With us, I'm not sure if it's people from "outside" that this especially applies to, but there are definately some who view things like that as somewhat external to themselves, as opposed to those who experience them as part of who they are.

(I'm almost not posting this because I'm not sure if it makes sense; brain tired, me tired, whatever.)