Facing the tiger
When explaining stress responses in training I often use the analogy of the tiger.
It goes something like this:
If a tiger came into this room some of us would run, ( flight response) some of us might fight the tiger ( fight response) , some of us might play dead or stay still ( freeze response) , some of us may study the tiger and try to figure out what it wants, cajole it, play with it ( fawn response) and some of us might puff ourselves up or pretend we also are a tiger ( Fake response).
(There are other F’s but just keeping this simple)
We might try a combination of these.
We will usually pull on past experiences to respond to this as we have similar situations
When it comes to Autistics we are always facing the tiger. Traditionally people have insisted that the issue is within us or insisted that we ‘learn to cope’ with the tiger ( stress/ anxiety)
They tell us to take deep breaths, count to 10 – which sure can help to calm someone’s system except the problem is the tiger is still there, facing us
We can’t really count the tiger away and it doesn’t respond to our deep breathing either
The tiger for us is social rejection, ridicule, sensory bombardment, shame, judgement, discrimination, alienation, abuse, othering, dismissal and so on
And no one has really focused on the elephant in the room which is actually a tiger- a giant tiger of society that oppresses and hurts us, that scares us.
So, next time someone suggests that you as an Autistic person ‘learns to cope’ or that your Autistic child just needs to ‘build resilience’ – maybe ask them how they would feel if they had to face that tiger every day.
Ask them what it would be like for everyone to tell you that you just need to ‘cope’, ‘work harder’, ‘focus’, ‘breathe’ with that great big scary tiger staring at you and you fear for your life.
Ask them how they would ‘cope’ with that level of anxiety, feeling unsafe and being on high alert in order just to stay alive, not really living but staying alive.
Sometimes people are under the impression that only some people have the ‘ability to mask’ and my answer to their abelsim is that everyone has this ability because it’s a survival instinct, one of our most basic mechanisms to keep us alive
Can you see why we need to change society? Why we need to remove the tiger from Autistic lives?
Can you see what life is like for the majority of us?
And that we are not the ones with the power to make all the change- we need others to change our social world so that we can just go about our lives free from the tiger – who knows what our lives would be like then eh?
