Published on 12, July, 2020
So recently someone I know told me that their doctor had told them one of their symptoms was age regression.
I actually had to look this up to be sure. Apparently it’s a psychological response, it’s quite rare, that’s associated with some mental health conditions, where a person will take on childlike qualities and behaviour and sometimes start acting or believing they are a child. Now every time a mental health professional accuses this person of behaving childishly they remind them that age regression is one of their diagnosis symptoms. This person is autistic but has a ton of mental health conditions on top of that.
However it got me thinking. I am often accused of being childish or immature. Of not acting my age. A lot of autistic people are painted rightly or wrongly as being Peter Pan types. It is perhaps ironic; like many other autistic people as a child adults said that I made a better adult than a child. Too serious, too linguistically precociously, too formal. And now as adults we’re too immature, not self-aware enough, not serious enough. The expectations have shifted from one side to the other and I’ve stayed the same or more the same than people expected.
So todays topic for debate. If not age regression; more generally is age inappropriate behaviour a symptom of autism? And if it is a natural aspect of autism to what extent should society be expected to accept and include it?
Here are some things to consider:
Finding your inner child at 22 will look very different than doing so at 52.
We can teach a child increments of responsibility in healthy constructive ways, but sometimes adults have a load of deprogramming to undergo to un-learn a thing and work out why or how they picked it up, whether it's a perspective or behaviour and it may be out of context or a misinterpretation of thing, much like Freud's explanations on how children might get the wrong ideas about consensual intimate relations between their parents if it appears to them to be otherwise.
It does seem to me the theory suggested in the early-mid last century that Autistics don't create Defence Mechanisms because we aren't wired to pick up social-linguistics is water tight. This accounts for language differences. a lack of desensitisation (thought the physical senses are coupled with other mechanisms) and how one matures.
The difference here being more driven by our own personalities with out the construction of Reason / Intellectualism when young and much more unknowingly driven by instinct. As we grow, it's crucial then, to get ahold of reason, wisdom, grow and nurture the intellect and imagination to temper instinct.
Regression can also be an act of back tracking. And in the wild, this is valuable. If we're not growing with our peers but picking up some of the worst of society, the unspoken conflict and a lack of synchronicity in general, these perspectives will need to be mended and behaviours flocked off. And during these moments, one needs to find ground, which may be a sense of safety in something familiar from youth.
I don't think our NT peers don't do this, thus the mid-life crisis. But they do it in ways which are socially approved, even if that 2 seater BMW means a second mortgage on the house. That's a whole different kind of childish/selfishness.
A point I meant to include is that many people flirting with their Diverse-Empowered-neurotype (sigh) are being encouraged to be recklessly 'authentic' at too young of an age as is.