Human nature is not maths
“Let’s observe our thoughts. As a thought comes into your mind, say it out loud and I’ll write it down, here. Then we can think about those thoughts. Are they helpful or unhelpful? True or untrue? Ok. What are you thinking?”
“Knifing a man on a train.
...
I want an Antboy costume.
...
Darren Pencille.
...
I want Mummy to go to jail because she said the wrong thing yesterday.”
Each time Spike talks about a stabbing or murder it is like a punch in the gut. I try not to react on the outside. I have trained myself not to. There is some complex psychology at play that I do not fully understand. I don’t want to add a cartoonishly shocked expression or my fear or anger to the mix. For the last six months or so Spike has been perseverating on an unpleasant collection of topics: prisons, arrests, murders and murderers, bullies and bullying. While I mostly manage to remain outwardly composed in the face of these verbal shocks, I feel it on the inside, my organs twisting in a soup of worry and fear. What is the cause of this perseveration? What are the consequences?
I can see Spike is processing big, difficult ideas around the deprivation of basic rights. We have been through this kind of thing before, he and us, when the fact of death landed heavily on him. Some aspects of our existence are so enormous and incomprehensible that they saturate him. As he came to terms with the knowledge that he and everyone he knows will die, he saw death everywhere. All endings were deaths. We were limited in what we could do to help him, beyond validating his feelings and emphasising that we are all healthy and plan on living long, happy lives. Like all of us, he just had to learn to live with this new knowledge. In some ways, although navigating Spike’s dawning awareness of death was upsetting, it was easier than this latest challenge. Death is big, but it is uncomplicated. We are biological beings. We live. We die. It is the bald fact of it that is hard. The realisation that people can do bad things to one another is more difficult to unravel and pin down.
The preoccupation has peaked but at its worst it felt like heinous topics were all he could talk about. We were assailed by emotive words repeated over and over again: stab, knife, arson, suicide. Each word carried a charge which jumped from him to me like little electric shocks. In moments of extreme anger or pain he seemed to draw a line from the violence of the emotion he was experiencing to the violence he had heard and read about in the real world. He would make wildly barbarous, unmeant threats against himself and, occasionally, us. And they were unmeant. If, in the heat of the moment, we turned his words around, “Do you really want me to die?” he would appear shocked at my question and howl, “Noooo! Don’t die! Don’t die!”
We know that a good swear offers visceral relief and I think uttering these taboo threats offered him an emotional release. His appalled reaction to his own words made it clear there was no substance to them, and when the dust settled he was remorseful and took them back.
Spike didn’t ask questions about the incidents he had learned about (primarily from the big bad internet, but also from school books and TV) although he must have had them. I felt like they were there inside of him, but he was unable to coagulate the thoughts into words. Instead, I imagined these confusing events floating around his brain, unsettling him: the bad things people do to each other. Questions would have been easier to handle. In offering Spike even inadequate answers, it would have felt like I was inching him towards an understanding, however uneasy. Instead, he overflowed with what he knew. His preoccupation spilled over into his verbal self-stimulatory behaviours (known as “stims”): he sang little ditties about appalling crimes, recited verbatim snippets of upsetting news reports and bandied about names of perpetrators and victims.
Like many autistic people, Spike has various physical and verbal stims which mainly aid his self-regulation: he will bounce firmly and repetitively on his gym ball to ground himself, or recite scripts from favourite movies or books to relax. Some of the stims seem to be just for pleasure - certain words appear to feel good in his mouth or sound good to his ear. We do not stop his stimming. Like water, the energy that stims mitigate or release will find a way. Better to open the valve than risk blowing up the dam entirely. Most days it is easy and we hardly notice his stims, but at the peak of this particular preoccupation we felt under siege by them.
If I had been smarter, I would have seen it coming. He was primed for this by the narratives of books and movies. Even the most elementary of children’s stories seems populated by orphans, kidnaps, dangerous adults and catastrophic events. In stories, the exceptional happens every day. As these narratives accumulated I saw an uncertainty developing as Spike wondered whether this is what life has in store for him. A reading comprehension text about a schoolyard bully convinced him that he needed to be on high alert for bullies. All these dramatic stories made him a little bit anxious, a little bit fascinated.
For neurotypical children, these challenging ideas are held at a remove by the fictional, fantastical settings in which they are presented. This seems to give them a helpful distance from the topics, allowing them to become accustomed to the ideas, to turn them over in their minds without undue fear. The made-up nature of books and movies did not seem to offer Spike the same analytical distance.
He also has trouble seeing the bigger picture. Take Paddington 2. A light-hearted, charming film about a bear who gets into a spot of bother over a pop-up book. Ask Spike and he will tell you that it is about an orphaned bear wrenched from his new family, imprisoned and forgotten about. The original Paddington is perhaps even worse. Spike is entirely focussed on Nicole Kidman’s villainous character who is intent on having Paddington for her taxidermy collection - her sharp knives make it clear how she intends to achieve that. For him, the movie is wholly about Paddington’s attempts to avoid an evil woman set on flaying and stuffing him. This laser-focus means he misses the loveliness and the overall message of the movie. I think his takeaway is “people will go to extraordinary lengths to do bad things to you.”
Spike has difficulty seeing the wider context because he is so detail-oriented (which obviously also has its advantages). A narrative does not always come together as a whole. It is seen piecemeal, like a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pieces jammed together, distorting the final image. In the first Lord of the Rings movie, Gandalf throws an envelope containing the One Ring into the fire to avoid touching it, or perhaps to provoke it into revealing its secrets. For Spike, this is the main event of that almost four hour long movie. He is scared of fire and the destruction of the envelope is so shocking to him that it derails him from the narrative.
While I would never want to erode Spike’s unique perspective, there are downsides to not being able to access the overall idea of something and so we have worked hard on this with him, in a structured way. I would have liked him to be further along in this process before he was introduced to the full messy scope of human existence. Unfortunately our efforts were undermined by bad luck and real life. When Googling about trains our entry-level parental controls failed to block upsetting news stories and they took root in his mind. We have now paid for super-duper filtering software, but it’s too late. His memory is exceptional and he can recall the events in technicolour detail any time he likes - although I suspect they intrude, unbidden. It is not always obvious that Spike is struggling with this new awareness of human nature, but his perseveration seems to me to be a clear indication that he has not processed this knowledge. His brain does not know what to do with the information , so he turns it over and over. His monotropism will not give him a holiday from it until it is processed.
Dealing with this phase offers practical challenges. In general, when we teach Spike about complex things, particularly those with a socio-emotional context, we try to build a strong, simple foundation and then, as his capacity to understand increases, refine his understanding towards something closer to the truth. These recent revelations have upended this process. For example, we have taught Spike that community helpers like policemen are “good” and we can trust them. But then he saw a news report about a six year old girl being arrested for having a tantrum at school. The idea that this can happen obviously troubles Spike. He knows that he loses control sometimes. The story impacted him deeply and it seems likely that he identifies with the story on some level. This new information about policemen does not so much refine his existing knowledge as turn it on its head. I tell him the policeman made a mistake, and these are the words that Spike repeats when his thoughts alight, once again, on the story: “The policeman made a mistake?” Similarly, with violence, we find ourselves afloat way out in the grey, murky waters of human complexity. It’s difficult to know where to start given that Spike has only recently got a handle on primary emotions (anger, love, fear, joy, sadness) and is on unsteady terrain with secondary emotions.
As lovers of true crime will attest, the dark side of human nature is compelling and I am sure this also goes some way to explaining Spike’s fascination with these crimes and tragedies. Spike, by most objective measures, has lived a charmed existence. The “tragic autism” narrative really has no place in his life. Yes, his life has its challenges and his neurotype means that he has to work hard at certain things which come easily to most of us. But, he has a family who love, respect, care for and support him, and a warm and pleasant home filled with all the things he could reasonably need. I suspect this is partly why these unpleasant topics loom so large in his mind. They are aberrative. At odds with his experience. Almost unimaginable.
It is apparent that Spike is personally moved by those stories which he can more readily imagine. Fatal violence must seem so preposterously savage and final that it is unreal to him. He can’t quite get a handle on the gravity of such incidents (and I am in no hurry for him to reach that point). However, the young girl being removed from her safe adults must be more easily comprehensible and the idea troubles Spike enormously. This also skews his perspective - he can be more unsettled by the idea of someone being imprisoned than of the crime that put them there.
Thankfully, we no longer hear about murder, arrests and prison all day long. It feels like we are on the descending arm of the bell curve. We still worry that his words could have unwanted consequences, like when his teachers thought his constant doodles of gravestones were an indication of suicidal thoughts. We also worry about what people will think. Well, I do - my husband seems a bit more bulletproof in this regard. Actually, that’s not quite right. I worry about what people will do. Will they keep their kids away from mine? Will they report us to social services? Will they hear my son yell something shocking (but unmeant) during a meltdown and call the police? It is tiring and stressful.
It is a relief that the verbal stimming on unpleasant topics has decreased significantly, suggesting that perhaps some aspects of this enormous topic have attained some cognitive order. We are also hearing more questions, more attempts to understand. Really, his whole way of dealing with this has been very much like how he learns about any new topic. He immerses himself in it, feeling his way through rafts of information, searching for patterns. And then he gets a foothold, a way in and starts constructing a body of knowledge.
Lacking the powerful driving force of innate curiosity about human nature and interactions, Spike is having to cognitively learn the rules of engagement for the human race. What an exhausting task that must be. Human nature is not maths. Spike is not learning in the way that I would choose, which makes this phase an uncomfortable experience for me. But I recognise that he is learning and I understand that the lesson is a necessary one. We’re along for the ride: windswept but committed.
Read something else >> Spike and the egg
