Dysregulation, Creativity & Special Interests: An Autistic Perspective EP 8

How does dysregulation impact creativity and our special interests? And what does this mean to autistic individuals (like me) who might already be struggling to identify their emotional states and stressors?

In this episode, I discuss my own experience with dysregulation and creativity and share insights from autistic blogger and therapist Karen Sheriff and podcaster and neuropsychologist Dr. Theresa Regan. 

The specific media resources mentioned in this episode are:

• The dichotomy of being an autistic creator (Sheriff)
• Powerful Self-Care: Awareness of the Internal (Reagan)

To read about the changes I made as a direct result of my dysregulation event please see What Writing on the Spectrum Means to Me

To get all of my media via email please subscribe to Writing on the Spectrum (always free) to get follow the podcast only, please follow in your favorite podcast app.

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EPISODE 8 TRANSCRIPT:

If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com

Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver. Thank you for joining me today on Autistic POV. Today we're going to talk about dysregulation and creativity because this is

0:32

something that has been an issue for me and I think it's an issue for a lot of autistic people who are creative. And some of this I'm going to base on a recent series by Teresa Regan, who is a neuropsychologist who has a podcast called Autism in the Adult. Dr. Regan is not autistic,

0:58

but she does have a really strong background in autism and neurobiology and a son who's autistic. And I like her podcast. So she did a series on self-care, actually, that I thought was relevant to our topic of dysregulation in relationship to creativity. And she talked a lot about escape as a coping mechanism. And essentially,

1:23

she was talking about special interests, but also other escape behaviors, such as a comforting environment or person, things along that line. And she had a kind of different take on that, I think, than I do. She said that engaging in these kind of coping mechanisms tend to make us smaller.

1:44

And I'm not sure that she means that across the board. I mean, she did say they're not detrimental necessarily, but she does, she personally feels they're limiting. I don't always agree with that. And the reason I don't agree with that is because I personally feel that my own special interests are actually expansive.

2:08

I feel that my world has expanded through my special interests. So we're not exactly on the same page, I don't think, with the nature of the escape. But she did make some good points about it, and she listed some interesting strategies. And she talked about how autistics might not know

2:33

what's going on inside of us which is certainly true and it seems kind of counterintuitive because we are very sensitive but at the same time we don't notice certain things we might not notice when physical things for example like when we're

2:50

cold or hungry and and we also have a hard time or at least in my case I have a hard time identifying emotional states So Dr. Regan talks about recognizing when we are about to be put into a fight, flight, or freeze kind of situation.

3:13

And she looks at special interests or these kind of escape mechanisms as a flight reaction. And I think she's absolutely right in this. I think that's absolutely true. Again, I think that there's a value to it, but I also think it can be problematic. And I've had that issue myself. I recently,

3:40

and I talk about this a little on the blog, I recently finished my fiction story, my vampire story, and I sent it to Kindle to read it on Kindle. And when I did, I hated it. It was kind of the equivalent... When I was a kid, my father, almost everybody in my family were artists.

4:01

And my father, whenever I finished something, he'd look at it and he'd say, turn it upside down. And so you turn it upside down and you automatically see it just jogs your brain so that you automatically see everything that's wrong with it. It works. I don't know why, but it does work.

4:20

And the same is true of writing. If you write something, and then you print it out or read it on another device, you automatically see things that your mind was just kind of skipping over before. So I sent this story to Kindle, and I was not happy with it, and I thought it was done,

4:39

and it was kind of upsetting, and I decided, you know, I don't think I really want to write fiction at all. I thought, I just want to write about spiritual topics because I did that in the mystic review and I was successful with it.

4:54

And I should just write a book, a book about dreams and do the mystic review and that's it. And I decided, why am I even doing a podcast on autism and creativity if this is the direction I'm going? So I actually took the episodes in this podcast down. I redid the site.

5:13

I put up some old media I had on metaphysical topics. And I decided this was what I was going to do. So it's an interesting reaction. And I think in this case, this is absolutely a stress-induced flight reaction. And a lot of creative people, not only autistic creatives, but a lot of creative people in general, I think,

5:38

succumb to this. But as autistics, we're more likely to fall into this pattern because we do, many of us do routinely escape from stress through our special interests. For me, ever since I was a little kid, projects were my coping mechanism and continues into adulthood. And I'm grateful for this trait. It's, it's,

6:05

helped me to do things like the blog and writing and things in my home that I probably wouldn't have accomplished without this drive to always be engaged in a project. But there is a flip side to it because it's not always logical. And when I decided to completely stop writing fiction and talking about it and

6:31

talking about autism and everything around that, I tore it down. And tearing things down is not, that's not a good thing usually. That's Clarissa Picola Estes in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, talks about the goddess Medea, who when she was disappointed in love, killed her children.

6:56

And Dr. Estes says that a lot of women are like that with their creative projects. When they go wrong, they destroy them. So that's what I did. But I wasn't just doing that only. I was doing that because I wanted to escape into a new creative project. And

7:18

Luckily I came to my senses and I reversed all that. I mean, I lost a couple of days of my life doing that, but luckily I did. But my point here is that it's an escape mechanism that could be good or bad. I don't think it makes us smaller. I don't think it's necessarily a limitation.

7:41

I think it can be expansive. I think it could open up the world. I think it can take us wonderful places. But I do acknowledge that it can be destructive too. So I launched into this brand new project. I escaped my stress and my disappointment by launching myself into this new project

8:00

that was going to be all about metaphysics and dream work which is a special interest of mine and always will be but it's not it's not the central thing it's not what I want to be the central thing so but I did it and it was interesting because I read a really good blog

8:18

article about that and I will put I will put the name of the author in the show notes but her name is Karen Sherriff And she has a blog on Substack that I read. And she expanded on something Dr. Regan said. Dr. Regan said, when we escape like this, we should look at it for clues,

8:43

clues about what is going on in our interstates. And I thought that Karen took it a little further because she said how she looks at it is in terms of let's investigate. And I love that. And she had had experience where she had put

8:59

a post on tiktok i believe and it had gone viral so she was constantly getting pinged about this post and trying to keep up with responding and and dealing with all that and it was dysregulating for her she got very stressed and she took down

9:16

all her social media and she started thinking about how she wanted to move i think to devon She wanted to move essentially to the country. And she was actually like thinking about this. So this she was in a flight reaction. She was trying to escape.

9:31

And she said when she kind of came to her senses, she thought, well. let's investigate. And I love that approach. And she looked at what she was going to do almost the way you would look at a dream, which I think is brilliant. And it's along the lines of what Dr. Regan was saying,

9:49

but in a little more expansive way, I thought. And so she said to herself, well, what does Devin or wherever she was going to move represent? Like it represents peace and freedom and solitude and all these things that She was lacking all these things that the situation with the social media blowing

10:09

up and not being able to handle it. She needed these things. So it made sense to escape to that. And I thought, wow, that's kind of what happened to me when I decided to take down all my autism media and all my things about creativity and fiction writing.

10:28

It was because I wanted to launch myself into completely focusing on metaphysics. And there's nothing wrong with focusing on metaphysics. I mean, I kept a metaphysical blog, The Mystic Review, since 2010, and I still write in it. And it's a special interest, and it always will be.

10:47

But since I got my autism diagnosis, spirituality is not the overriding theme of my life. And it's kind of like, and I've mentioned this before, but Sarah Gibbs in her book, Drama Queen, talks about how And relationships were the overriding theme of her life until she got her autism diagnosis.

11:06

And then she realized that she was looking for answers in relationships with men. And now she had the answer, which was autism. So she didn't have to do that anymore. And a similar thing happened to me with spirituality. I'm still very interested in metaphysics. I still write down my dreams. I attend a dream group.

11:25

I'm really into young and dreams. And it'll always be a part of me. But it doesn't define me anymore. It's not who I am. It's not the place where I'm trying to find the answers. I mean, dream guidance, yes. I think it's a really good compensating mechanism for autistics. Well, maybe do an episode on that.

11:44

But it's not who I am anymore. So going off to chuck all my old media and escape into this metaphysical media was... was an odd move. It was a dysfunctional, dysregulated thing to do. So I thought, let's investigate, you know, what does that mean? What does metaphysics mean? And it happened to mean the things that I needed.

12:10

And these were things, this was all about interstates. This is about doing things in the external world to try to regulate our inner state. And this is something that most autistic people have had to learn to do for themselves because the neurotypical world, I think the neurotypical world is very regulating for neurotypicals,

12:34

but it's not very regulating for us. So that's part of the reason, in my opinion, we develop special interests and that we have this relationship really brilliant, beautiful way of escaping that can get out of hand. And I think it's good to be aware of that. So I found all of this material really interesting.

12:55

And I think it's something to be aware of as creatives. I have personally like cognitive therapy. It's great in theory, but it's personally, and if you like it, I don't want to discourage you, but it's personally never worked for me. I go from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye.

13:15

My escape mechanism of plunging into projects is something that happens almost instantaneously for me. I don't think I'll ever learn to like nip it in the bud. But that doesn't mean you can't wake up and think, what am I doing? Where am I? And why? And I think it's the why that's important. So... Being creative is stressful.

13:40

It's very stressful. There's all kinds of things mixed up in it, like perfectionism and being criticized and fear of being seen. There's so many things that, particularly to autistic individuals who may have history with being criticized or bullied or dismissed or made to feel all kinds of terrible things, It's tough for us.

14:03

It's tough to do things and to put it out there. And it's not anything that you should beat yourself up for if you find it dysregulating, because at times it will be. It just will. And sometimes when you get dysregulated and you escape into like some crazy kind of direction you didn't expect to go in,

14:21

you discover something amazing. And that's happened to me before. But sometimes you're just kind of, making a mistake, you're kind of leaving something important behind. And I think it's important to be able to see that to pull yourself back. So that's what I wanted to talk about today.

14:38

I'm sure there's more to say on this, more to say on escape mechanisms, more to say on stress. But this is what just one small aspect of it that I felt applied to me. So I made the decision that from now on, when I find myself changing directions unexpectedly I'm going to just stop and say let's investigate

15:01

and and see what might have precipitated it and see why I might have chose that thing and then take that insight and kind of factor back into what I'm doing which I think is what I did I realized through that episode I realized that I was pushing myself too hard I needed to dial things back.

15:25

I needed to adjust my expectations and my own writing ability. I needed to take steps. That doesn't mean something like that will never happen again. Probably the first bad Amazon review I get on this story, I'm going to freak out and take it off Amazon, but eventually probably put it back up. But my point is,

15:46

There's insight to be had from these things. It's not a total waste of time. And I think it's important that we look at it. And there are times it does hurt us. I still don't think it makes us smaller, but I think it does hurt us at times. So that's what I wanted to talk about today.

16:02

I know it's kind of a quick episode, but I hope it was helpful. And I hope to see you again next time. I'm doing the podcast now on the first and third Fridays of the month. So I will see you guys again in the third Friday of April. And until then, this is Barbara Graver of Autistic POV.

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And thank you very much for listening.

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