Published on 12, July, 2020
I’m currently sat reflecting on my autism and how it all looks different now that I accept it. All the things I used to hate and fight against, I now love and embrace and I can see the benefits of them.
I was thinking of time perception and my lack of it and how it’s truly a gift and how I once thought it a curse. I decided to look it up, read some information about it as I’ve never read anything about it before.
I googled it and this article came up. It was written (I think) in 2014, (https://autism.lovetoknow.com/Time_Perception_in_Autism_Spectrum_Disorder) so hopefully things have improved since then but I was horrified to read what I read.
The article starts off well (in my opinion of course) but goes on to make some huge underlying assumptions, in my humble opinion.
It says, many people with autism experience fragmented or delayed time perception which can present challenges to social interaction and learning.
Apart from others, this assumes that their perception of time is the correct one and the only one and that autistic people must therefore be compared against them because they are the epitome of the perfect human being. And when they compare autistic people to them, because we don’t share the same perception of time, they are assuming that we are somehow defective and that we cause problems. What they really mean is that we cause ‘them’ problems. We don’t fit with their way of teaching and communicating so they must find ways to make us communicate like them and learn like them and that’s a bit of a problem to them, they would rather we were like everybody else and behaved and learned like everybody else. In their pursuit to ‘help’ us, they are also assuming that we want the same things as them. That what makes them happy will make us happy. Even though they clearly admit that we’re different, they still assume that we want the same kind of life that they have. Tied, like a ball and change, to their beloved perception of time, how to communicate and how to learn.
It goes on to explain what time perception is. It says ~ ‘Time perception is an essential part of the way people make sense of the world around them’ ~ this is simply not true. It is not an essential part of the way that ‘I’ make sense of the world around me and I’m a person, so why am I not included in this statement? Even if it were to say, this is true for ‘some’ people .....
It goes immediately on to say, ‘in autism, effected people have trouble processing the passage of time and may experience a delayed reaction to certain stimuli’. They are clearly assuming here that their perception of time, is the ‘correct’ and only valid perception and they are assuming that they are the ‘correct’ people, and furthermore, they’re comparing autistic people to non autistic people for the purpose of trying to make us like them or at least find ways to be able to communicate with us, based on ‘their’ version of what is correct. They’re assuming there’s a fixed and correct passage of time that one should stick to when responding to certain stimuli. I could write a similar article stating that nt’s are defective, that they have difficulty understanding the concept of now. That they’re so tied in with the idea of time that they live their lives according to the time on a clock. I could say their perception is faulty. But how would I know. I’m not an nt.
They go on to say that time perception is the way the human brain interprets the passage of time and that a ‘healthy’ brain can check incoming information and measure the passage of time. In autism, however, they say the concept of time is somehow ‘distorted’, although they say they don’t know why this is. But clearly they’re certain that our way of thinking is distorted and not healthy and that their way is the right way.
It goes on to give ‘four’ ways in which teachers and parents can ‘deal with’ autism time perception. Not one of the four ways mentions anything about the child other than to give it clear, short and concise instructions so they can follow along with everybody else.
What baffles me about this, is the assumptions that it makes. That autistic people are somehow defective and they’re (nt’s) are the perfect model of a human being. Their lives are ruled by time. Time is a constant threat to me but I don’t see it (my perception of it) as a ‘problem’ but rather a gift. They assume that it’s a problem. It’s only a problem when I try to fit into their world. But I no longer do that. I’m creating my own world, in my own ‘time’ and in my own way. So it’s not a problem.
I don’t have any answers. I’m not judging the advice given in this article, just the assumptions it makes. Is a lot of the information out there written from the assumption that autistic people are defective and that we don’t have a healthy brain?
Time perception is a very changeable thing, for NT and autistic people alike. Time spent doing something you love, or being completely focussed on an activity, seems to pass very quickly. Time spent doing something you hate or find boring seems to pass very slowly. But it's like that for everybody. Methinks they doth protest too much.
I suppose they may be referring to a difference in attitude towards the importance of being punctual, but again, it isn't a specifically autistic issue. I know NT people who have a casual attitude to being on time.
Hi OrinocoFlo, that made me giggle - methinks they doth protest too much ~ I can be an absolute stickler with some things sometimes and can even p**s myself off with my level of intensity! Lol!
With me, I barely know the difference between a minute and 6 months. I can’t really visualise a situation when somebody says it’s in 3 weeks time or something, so I can agree to something which is happening in the future and be totally shocked when it is suddently upon me as I don’t really have a concept of time passing. I kind of only have one mode for time, and that’s now.
That sounds very much like how my perception of time works, BlueRay. Whether I'm projecting into the future or recalling the past, I can't conceive of measuring the time intervals. Unless there are very obvious clues or records, I struggle to put my auto-biographical memories into chronological order. Have I been waiting for the bus for a minute or half an hour? Without a timepiece to note time's passing, I usually have no idea. Dinner time is when I am hungry, bed-time is when I feel tired, and when I follow my body's innate sense of daily rhythms, I'm always out of sync with the world around me (severe late onset insomnia has plagued me for my whole life, but I can sleep well when left to my own innate rhythms.)
The fact that the world around us seems to neither care about nor understand these differences is, I think, yet another example of a more generic problem. The study and treatment of autism are based almost exclusively around performing expected social behaviours, and matching those behaviours is deemed the only measure of success. There is very little attempt to understand that the social behaviours are not what defines autism; they are merely a consequence of the perceptual and cognitive differences which we experience but which cannot be observed externally. Most interventions take this approach too; they are deemed a success if we behave more "normally", but it is never questioned whether such interventions have negative consequences for the load on our brains, levels of fatigue and anxiety, or our self-esteem. As you suggest, they are all about making sure we don't scare the horses, totally disregarding our own internal sense of well-being.
Your tale of thinking it was Christmas made me smile; that's just the kind of thing that I'd do. If I look outside and there are no leaves on the trees, but it doesn't feel cold, I have to ponder for a while whether it is early Spring or late Autumn; or I'll go outside and it just "feels" like a certain time of year or time of day, and I won't question that unless something or someone presents me with a reason to.
It's really heartening to hear about your support worker. My experience is that very few professionals have such an enlightened view of autism. I have been trying to get my local social services to understand that it isn't being autistic that caused my crippling burn-outs - it was the strain of trying to pretend that I'm not that always became too much to bear.
That’s exactly like me Trogluddite. My first visit to the job centre was traumatic. To begin with, they told me to go to the yellow area, which I couldn’t find. I had a big overweight (not a judgement, just an observation) security guard running after me, all out of breathe and being totally scary - I was terrified and it turned out the yellow area, wasn’t yellow at all, it was just an area of a massive open plan room with a sticker on the wall saying yellow area. Then I was sat there when a worker came up to me because it turned out, I had been sat there for one and a half hours, way past my appointment time, because apparently nobody knew I was there but I didn’t have a clue I’d been sat there for so long.
Another clue came to me several years ago. I was sat drinking (alcohol) with a friend when he asked me why I was drinking. I didn’t normally drink but I thought the question was odd because I thought he knew I had a drink at Christmas. But I answered him anyway and said it was because it was Christmas and he looked at me in what I thought was astonishment, and said, but it’s April! He thought I was making up an excuse to drink, I was mortified that I didn’t realise it wasn’t still Christmas!
Now, armed with the realisation that I have no concept or perception of this man made time, with knowledge and acceptance of myself and with support, I am slowly creating my life around my own natural rhythm. My support worker (my first one, who could only take me so far) has been supporting me with this. She told me that even social care staff are now required to work a seven day week. She said times are changing which means I absolutely can pick and choose the hours I want to work based on my needs. And she says, so what if I need to take a week to recover from a social engagement, she says who’s to say that that’s not the best way to live our lives. My support workers support me in creating my life according to my needs while helping me build strategies to create harmonious interactions (when I have to have them) while at the same time, not compromising who I am. This is where I need nt support. I can see things they can’t see but they can see things that I can’t see and they’re helping me to see the things I need to see while at the same time, supporting my right to live my life according to my needs.
I told them, it’s not that I ‘can’t’ fit in although maybe I can’t anymore, since this burnout, but whether I can or can’t, I now simply refuse to. There is no benefit at all to me ‘fitting in’. It brings me no joy at all and in fact it almost destroyed me, so despite the current trend to see us as a success if we appear to act and behave like the majority of people in society, I no longer subscribe to that train of thought and I’m super excited and grateful to find people who support me in my endeavours.
As you pointed out, I think there is very little consideration given to our own internal sense of wellbeing when people are talking about us, which suggests they are basing their understanding on the belief that they are right, they’ve got it right and that they set the standard. Yet I look around and if they’ve got it ‘right’, then their right doesn’t match with mine because I see no need for conflict and wars and I see their world full of it. But I don’t see it as our world and there’s, it’s all one but I no longer chop myself up and shape myself to fit the current ‘norm’ and instead I follow my own norm and I’ll see where that leads me.