Disruption to embodiment in autism, and its repair
Summary (4 min read)
Autistic Experience as a Disruption of the Primary Affective Self, and its Coherent Integration with Secondary and Tertiary Processing
- In this paper the authors examine lived autistic experience to reveal its nature in light of the vertical organisation of mental processing.
- Therefore, the experiences and conclusions drawn from these are relevant for this one particular autistic individual, and the authors can guarantee their accuracy as reported.
- Autism is not a simple variation of normal motivation and intelligence.
- It is recognized as a very varied state of personality and in each case manifests its spectrum of conditions idiosyncratically (Hobson, 1993; Gillberg, 1992; Hobson & Hobson, 2011).
A Brainstem Sensorimotor Disruption in Autism
- The authors account of autism emphasises a disruption to efficient primary processing of sensorymotor information, and the self-related affective processing that mediates arousal regulation and coherence of motivation within Panksepp’s Core Self .
- The authors account recognises and appreciates the fundamental contribution to conscious thought, feelings, and awareness the brainstem complex provides, not only in terms of organising information, but in terms of organising one’s subjective awareness.
- As the autistic community points out, “if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism”.
- An intra-personal coherence between levels of processing appears disrupted, which prevents the development of the innate function of the core self in regulating affective states, and that disrupts efficient agency and inter-personal communication recognised in formal clinical autistic symptomology.
Autistic Challenges of a Disconnected and Incoherent Core Self
- In Pum’s experience, she felt a distressing disjunction between her rational, reflective self and her inability to manage her affective states of arousal.
- Further, this habitual disassociation into a performed script damaged her ability to manage her basic functioning, and manifested in, for example, eating and sleeping disorders and entrenched mental health problems in her early adult life.
- The language of the core self is non-verbal, affective and aneotic (Vandekerckhove & Panksepp, 2009).
- And she worked hard to learn speech, reading and writing through copying particular demonstrations of these, and with obsessive attention to detail of politeness and needs of others.
- It was only many years later in adult life, after ongoing therapy and some decades of self-reflection and analysis that she came to understand that she had developed a disjunction between what the authors now know as her Core Self – her core affective, perceptual, and embodied Self – and her more artificial, rational, and reflective Tertiary Self.
Meaning, Coherence, and the Challenge of Incoherence
- The authors are a social species that demands meaningful social interaction, even in autism (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2018).
- Similarly, disconnection within oneself can be painful.
- Left unattended to in childhood, this lack of depth of meaning created despair and anxiety that became the standard in her adolescence and early adulthood.
- Johnson and Lakoff teach us how ‘being in the body’ grows into language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999), a feature missed or reduced in Pum’s development.
- The expressive language of the emotions and body come first in development, on which the language of words bears depth of meaning, and purpose.
Implications for Self-Improvement and Therapeutic Support of Autistic Disturbance to the Core Self
- If their account of the disruption to the coherence of core experience of self and its communication with higher level processing is correct, then focussing therapeutic intervention on overt behaviours and conventional speech production may miss the mark, - 9 - over-shooting a coherent integration of feelings and impulses of the affective Core Self.
- Ontogenetically one must work to develop and substantiate the primary levels of processing first, before extending to more advanced forms such as social regulation, speech production and verbal communication.
- Without support for routines, feelings and self-agency may be inaccessible, blocked by executive function difficulties in planning, preparation, and organisation.
- The human organism must come to terms with the innate complexity of its own movements, expressions, and desires, and able to experience these as self-expression of ‘Me’, before one can differentiate him or herself from the actions of another.
Getting into a Routine
- There is an anxiety specific to autism provoked by the beginning of any new act (Robledo, Donnellan, and Strandt-Conroy, 2012), and it takes time for the individual to feel safe and allow arousal levels to settle.
- This can be debilitating, and prevent wilful transition into the activity.
How Emotional Arousal can be Understood, and Managed.
- States of happiness and surprise are especially triggering, and stressfully disorientating.
- Pum dissociate and become over-stimulated, which often results in an inevitable shift to meltdowns and anxiety, leading to disorientation, confusion and a grief-stricken state.
- The practitioner’s actions need to be predictable and consistent for the person with autism to feel accepted, safe and their needs appreciated.
- Then they can begin to become aware of what those needs are, safe in the knowledge that the other is able to foster trust and lower arousal.
- From this foundation in mutual regulation of self-awareness and trust, the more creative organic platform of communication for the self through structured, repetitive activity can be developed.
Co-opting Compulsions for Repetitive Behaviours, and Transforming Them into Productive, Creative, Self-sustaining Action for Personal Growth
- Self-expression is built and shared in efforts of sport and art, but their aesthetic and moral power in shared vitality can be devalued and often overlooked in Psychology, even as music has been by Stephen Pinker, follower of Noam Chomsky’s theory of the rational formality of language (Chomsky, 1957), on ‘the language instinct’ (Pinker, 1994).
- Pum has shown that the power of two routines she has developed over many years can coopt her autistic needs for repetition and regularity, but also her needs for body movement to feel alive in the body and in her mind.
- Regular, repetitive sensory-motor loops of arm, leg, head, and body posture in synchrony are paced and forced with direction in space and time to produce fluid movement of the whole body through the water.
- Swimming builds up individual and relational awareness and creates a safe exploration in rhythms of movement for the experience of Self, to appreciate it is intact and truly inhabited with an ambitious will to live.
- Exercise of repetitive body movement can liberate thought.
2 Interestingly, this stands in contrast to the lateral thinking released for enhancement of the creative imagination in people without autism, and suggests that while some common mechanism is at work, its effects
- Differ in their quality between autistic and non-autistic experience.
- It involves intention for regular cycles of repetitive sensorimotor activity – sorting of the paper, selection of images, cutting of fragments – all actions that demand integrated action across the body, stabilising posture and maintaining coherence of attention and coordinated action.
- As with her swimming, Pum has found collage-making to be a calming activity that allows an integration of the whole self from across the vertical levels of mental processing, allowing thought of the experience to flow from its perceptual elements to recollections of their embodied resonances on combination.
- This process of composing an integrated picture can be cathartic, easing her internal tension which arises out of an autistic confusion of fragmented parts and contexts.
- It is in such sustained activity that she begins to synthesise thoughts, feelings, and ideas working below the level of conscious reflection to solve problems, and that is when she begins to feel an intuitive, integrated and coherent sense of self.
Sensitive Care for the Primary Self of a Companion with Autism: Supportive Structures for Routines of Practice
- And while this may yield some benefit for the family and community by creating an apparently adapted individual with socially normalised behaviours, that individual may very likely remain internally stressed deeper in the body, because performative communication can remain disconnected from personal motives, and remain meaningless or empty.
- By understanding the individual’s autism’s needs for clear, transparent expectations with explicit prompts, a caring supporter can facilitate management of the individual’s growing anxieties about the change-to-come.
- Preparing the swimming costume and towel, packing the bag, wearing the right clothes for the outside, leaving the house, and travelling to the pool, also known as Each step is important.
- This will promote a growing sense of self-control, self-confidence, and selfempowerment.
Supporting an Integration of the Self, for Self-Awareness and Self-Empowerment
- The experience of feelings and motives for action and interaction of the Core Self can be very different from that of the higher-order, Conceptually-Oriented Self.
- This can lead to “difficult”, “disruptive”, or “challenging” behaviours.
- This is why the authors advise support for them to become more happily self-aware, ready and able to ask for help and therefore to manage their autism better, in friendship.
- The Core Self is non-verbal, expressive in the language of body movement, gesture, and intonation of the voice.
- It may be that to emphasise verbal language acquisition in some children – ‘to get them to talk’ – may miss the fact that they don’t speak because they are not ready for that level of abstract, verbal narrative and sense-making, and must rely on intuitive non-verbal elements of self-expression.
All Behaviour is Communication
- Parents as custodians of mental and emotional life can often be overly concerned with what their child ‘can’t do’, overlooking what their child ‘can do’.
- And at the same time it’s activity in action is creating life experiences at a cognitive and sensory level, creating new neural pathways.
- Thus, the best caregiver support is attentive and observant to the opening, to where the child is going to be able to channel communication with their self and body.
- This is fundamental learning for self-care and self-development.
- The authors identify means that caring persons can deploy to help the person with autism become more complete, embodied and coherent, and to help them express their individuality ready to share an integral meaning in life’s movements and what they discover.
10. Expiration the cloud of breath, or speech bubble of chromosomes, the complex strands
- Which hold and fold their genetic mysteries.
- Pum believes that the branch of science epigenetics is showing up just how important lifestyle choices (how the interactions with their environment shape their being, and the expressions of their genes) are.
- Autism aetiology is complex, involving both genetic and environmental factors (Hallmayer, Cleveland, Torres, & et al., 2011)(Sandin et al., 2014).
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Frequently Asked Questions (14)
Q2. What does it mean to be over-stimulated?
Pum dissociate and become over-stimulated, which often results in an inevitable shift to meltdowns and anxiety, leading to disorientation, confusion and a grief-stricken state.
Q3. What is the role of the motor life in the sensory-motor realm of psychological functioning?
In the sensory-motor realm of psychological functioning, the motor life embeds and supports the awareness of the senses, physically yolking them to the sensory, giving structure to and learning of selfconsciousness from sensory perceptions.
Q4. How does the body maintain its physiological homeostasis?
Done well, the body’s physiological homeostasis can be maintained for many tens of minutes with the benefit of a constant, regular repetition of action and its felt sensory effects.
Q5. What is the importance of a routine to reducing anxiety?
Familiarity with this routine is paramount to reducing anxiety, and maintaining consistency in the patterns is extremely helpful.
Q6. What is the purpose of her practice?
Her practice developed from a need to explore, express and, inter-relate ideas and concepts from her own personal research and scholarly work.
Q7. What is the role of the sensory and motor system in the development of the self?
In the activity of ‘doing’, the sensory and motor system embeds, supports and physically yolks experience to the active sensory-affective self.
Q8. What can be done to help the person with autism to become aware of their needs?
Then they can begin to become aware of what those needs are, safe in the knowledge that the other is able to foster trust and lower arousal.
Q9. How can the authors help a person with autism become more complete, embodied and coherent?
The authors identify means that caring persons can deploy to help the person with autism become more complete, embodied and coherent, and to help them express their individuality ready to share an integral meaning in life’s movements and what they discover.
Q10. What is the common form of loss of control?
When over-done, their beneficial effect is lost to a detrimental, sometimes damaging form of loss of control, such as in compulsive eating, biting, or extensive habits that cause damage to the body.
Q11. What is the hypothesis that increases the strength of the brainstem integrative signal excited for swimming?
From this knowledge the authors advance the hypothesis that increased strength of the brainstem integrative signal excited for swimming generates a coherence of conscious experience by its regular repetition with the improved vigour of simultaneous, all-body sensory and motor signals.
Q12. What is the main benefit of collage?
The other important feature of collage is that it captures one’s interest in the little fiddly movements some individuals with ASD are compelled to repeat, normally with little product or enjoyment to be shared.
Q13. What was her disjunction between the two?
It was only many years later in adult life, after ongoing therapy and some decades of self-reflection and analysis that she came to understand that she had developed a disjunction between what the authors now know as her Core Self – her core affective, perceptual, and embodied Self – and her more artificial, rational, and reflective Tertiary Self.
Q14. How does she know that swimming and collage can be beneficial for individuals with autism?
By analysis of Pum’s personal experience and collaboration with her perspective and insights of her experience of autism, the authors consider the benefits from two energetic and demanding sensorimotor activities, swimming and collage, which she knows to be beneficial for the integrative access between higher and core levels of her Self, and that she believes can be made beneficial for individuals with autism.