Published on 12, July, 2020
hi, do others tend on fixate on things? I do, especially when I've made a mistake. it would be helpful to hear if this was common for other people with autism. and has anyone any tips on managing it?
It's a pretty common one. There's various that I think are a result of the same mechanism.
Fixation on hobbies and interests (spins) and perseverate/recurring thoughts that are often obtrusive ( we find they pop up and won't go away!)
If they're negative I tend to try and bat them away as quick as I can before they stick, dismiss them where you can. Trying to find anything else to distract, like something you're interested in that's positive usually works.
Positive ones like getting stuck thinking about a hobby or interest I tend to have better control of more recently, telling myself I need to move on and think about it later.
If its re running an event over and over I feel that's the same as scripting, one's in the future the other is in the past but both are things we obsess about in terms of what we should have said or didn't do etc. Best to realise that the past isn't there any more, it literally no longer exists so we're not thinking about something we can change or go back to, it's happened, we did our best at the time, we are allowed to make mistakes, not easy, but true. Scripting the future is harder to escape as you are trying to prepare for something, but things rarely go the way we predict so our scripts are often useless and prove to do nothing but waste our time and generate anxiety while trying to second guess every possible outcome of something that might not even happen.
Sometimes writing things down helps to get them out and stop them wizzing round your head.
None of these are easy to escape and can be all consuming, I've lost days to them, but just realising in the moment that you are doing it, having a word with yourself about why and what you think it's going to achieve (or not achieve!)can sometimes help snap out of them.
Your post is extremely helpful for me and I relate 100% to what you’ve described. What helps me get it out is writing down or talking to an invisible person when I’m alone at home. Very rarely but sometimes it happens that the prepared answer fits some conversation (at least I think that at the moment) but the others reaction is hmm they stare at me with wide eyes. So I’m not sure if what I said was good or not. Then I get trapped in another loop of thoughts that I should have or shouldn’t have said this or that. I also often obsess about aliens. About meeting them, traveling with their craft etc