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.
I think we're talking about 2 seperate things. Or at least 2 seperate understandings of 'age regresion.' I'm not really talking about a midlife crisis or some sort of theraputic technequ to find your 'inner child.' The example that most springs to mind is an artical I read about a woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury that caused partial amnisia. She lost all of her adult memories, after the age of 16 I think. And finding herself not recognising her face or her familly, husband and children, she left them, dyed her hair purpul and started going to rock conserts and clubing. In a sense her self image reverted to an earlyer age. It's natural that you might not want to stay with children to don't remember raising or giving birth to, or a husband you don't remember meeting or marrying. But what's interesting is he life seems to have carried on where she left off at 16.
Now that's an extream example but I have heard people say, 'sometimes I have to remind myself I'm not 7 any more.' When dealling with traumatic memories. The strength of those memories is such that can pull their behavior and outlook on life back to what it was when they were 7. Much in the same way that elderly patients with dimentia may start behaving age inapropreatly when they start to loose the memories of the later parts of their lives.
As an autistic person people often comment on my oddly keen memory and sentamental atachment to the past. I have to wonder myself if it's so much the past I'm attached to or the futures that never happened. I've always had a strong sence of dreaming, of asperation. And sometimes in life, especially when you are young, it feels like everything falls into place. Like the note in a melody each one feels right and harmonious and leading to a resolution. And if your life is like mine that resolution never comes. Circumstances thwart those asperations, those melodies, often as they are nearing their crecendo. And then that unfinished symphony stays with you haunting you. They are still there in your mind years later waiting for their resolution. Years later after all the charicters in the story have moved on you still find yourself humming the tune in your mind from time to time never able to hear the last note.
I think autistic people have a stronger sence of memory and conection to the past. Which is maybe why suden unplaned changes in our enviroment can create such cognative disonance. And it seems to follow that if your memories of 10 or 20 years ago are as emotionally present in your mind as last year that your behaviour will have a lot in common with 10 or 20 years ago.
There is a word for what you're talking about & I heard it in a seminar 20+ years ago, something to do with how Trauma can impact a part of us which will stop growing. The doctor discussing this made an analogy to walking around with a limb that stopped growing at a young age. This impacts a part of our personality and now neurology discusses how we can rewire the brain in some situations, but it takes mental and emotional work.
A brain trauma as you described will have these consequences. We see this with Alzheimer's patients who might be old but due to deterioration of they brain end up with the 'emotional' age of someone much younger.
The discussion I was listening to was about healing, transitioning through forgiving others (regardless of whether or not you reconcile or if they think they need it) and allowing that time in history to be immersed in a type of healing, often it's a spiritual journey of sorts.
As for autistic being impacted with a greater intensity than our non-autistic peers, it's not always worse. Sometimes having a good ability to calculate what really happened is a better starting point than that reality being locked into a consciousness deeply beyond reach, because one will become worse for wear if they don't really know what they have to navigate and with NTs it's good to remember, they're often programmed to turn unacceptable thoughts, feelings, desires into 'civilised' behaviour, often this can be self or other sabotaging with trauma yet to be sorted.
It's all to do with trauma, though. This is a good thing to discuss methinks :)