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Look Me in the Eyes

Eye Contact – Linda Hanson Denmark

Look Me in the Eyes

“Are you listening to me?
Look me in the eyes when I’m speaking.”
It hurts
But I can look at your eyes
Blue eyes with lots of gray
Dry eyes that never cry
Like my eyes are crying
Because you hit me
So I will look at your eyes
So I will hear what you are speaking
But I can’t hear you
When I look at your eyes
It hurts

By Linda Hanson Denmark

Humans are supposed to be able to read other peoples eyes. I have no idea what exactly they are supposed to be reading in the eyes. I am not wired for that. I can make eye contact but with quite different results.

When I was a child, eye contact was forced. I was afraid of the consequences if I did not look at my parents eyes. The result? I had a great fear of blue eyes most of my life because of my abusive father’s blue eyes, which made looking at any blue eyes extra difficult. My mom had hazel eyes, with very interesting colors and patterns. Her eyes made me squirm and I had to focus on the colors. I decided that she had turtle eyes. Eye contact hurt and never did help me understand anything better.

When I first look at someone else’s eyes, I always focus on one eye, then wonder if I should be looking at the other eye instead. I can’t for some reason, look into both eyes at the same time. I may look back and forth rather quickly until I settle on which eye to look at. Then begins an in depth study of colors, patterns, eye shape, condition, small veins showing on the white of the eye, size of the pupil, etc.

I study the colors in the makeup if it is a female wearing makeup, making a mental palette of the colors whether I like them or not. Loose eyelashes, eyelash color, length, thickness; nothing is missed. It sometimes feels like artificial intelligence in action. Scan, scan, scan, record.

If the other person is wearing glasses it gets even more complex. I study the lens to see if it is convex or concave, tinted or not; study the frames, and am absorbing and making mental images for my already very full library of memories.  Meanwhile, the words spoken by the person I am attempting eye contact with are gone. I usually have to ask the person to repeat what they said and briefly look away while I listen.

Some people believe that eye contact can be taught. If the neurological wiring is not there for reading whatever we are supposed to be reading, I think trying to teach eye contact to an autistic might be about as effective as teaching a blind person to make eye contact. The blind person may be able to learn to look in the direction the voice is coming from but they will not see.

Could the person demanding or expecting eye contact feel that without eye contact the autistic is not listening? The opposite is true. Could it be that the person expecting eye contact is uncomfortable not being able to read the eyes of the person to whom they are speaking, like the eyes can somehow mirror back their words to see how the hearer is affected by the words? That won’t work if the autistic person can’t do the looking and the hearing at the same time.

Is eye contact really for the benefit of the autistic person? Is it so that we will look less autistic? Is sameness a requirement of being human? Am I less human because I can’t hear the words and look in the eyes simultaneously?

Define human.

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Aging & Autism

When I was first diagnosed with autism I was already into my senior years. I was experiencing more difficulty in some areas and was relieved to finally have an answer and know there was not a brain tumor or something else causing my problems. The problems weren’t new to me. I had similar difficulties as a child and had then seemed to have improved to where I could live a more normal life most of the time. When my diagnosis was being explained to me, I asked the neuropsychologist why I seemed to be having more difficulties in some areas, like executive function, anxiety, and the sensory processing issues I have. She explained to me that as I developed as a child, some parts of my brain that would manage something in a neurotypical brain were not doing the job. So some other parts of my brain that already had their own job to do, took on a second job and did both. Simply put, now that I am getting older, some parts of my brain have quit their second job.

Images from my QEEG

The QEEG helped me understand what she was talking about with some parts of my brain doing extra work. Now here I am at age sixty-nine with the return of many of the issues from my childhood. My neuropsychologist explained it well. One part of my brain will send the job to another part of my brain which says “I can’t do that anymore” and sends it to another part of my brain which may or may not handle it. This slows down my processing speed considerably. Picture it as if you ordered something from amazon and instead of sending it to your current address, it is first sent through a relay of all the addresses you have ever lived at. It may take awhile before the package arrives.

I think all the time, even in my sleep. Once in college an instructor presented my Statics & Strengths class with a problem concerning bridge expansion. Nobody could figure it out including me. My brain would not let go of the problem and several weeks later, I woke up in the night, got a pencil and paper and wrote down the solution. I took it to the instructor the following day and he said it was textbook perfect. I have also had occasions where I got up in the night and wrote down a poem that had formed in my mind during the night while I was asleep. Now I have been thinking day and night on what the prognosis is for my future.

Reasoning that parts of my brain that were working overtime are now cutting back their workload, I think that as I age I will not get any worse than what I experienced as a child. It removes some anxiety about my future just to know that I got through it once. It will be easier this time because I am not being abused and I do have a means to communicate even when I am handicapped in a person to person conversation.

There is not a lot written about aging in autism. I am only speaking from my own experience because my research did not turn up any helpful information. What I have found in my own experience is that I am much more affected by sensory processing issues, like light and noise. It’s not all bad. I had a grandson spending the night recently and I went to get something from the medicine cabinet after the lights were off. He told me I have superpowers. I had not even thought about being able to see in the dark because to me it was not dark. There was enough light for my light sensitive brain to see clearly but to my grandson, it was not enough light for him to see anything.

I can’t express this better than Dylan Thomas did in his poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” from which I am quoting the first stanza.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Colored pencil drawing – Linda Hanson Denmark

I have inserted one of my own drawings to explain my application of the stanza. In my own case my vision is not dimming. My flame burns brightly but my candle is melting. I am going to rage against it by using what still works well and hoping to communicate with others to impart some understanding of what has not been well documented. If other aging autistics will do the same, perhaps it will shed some light for younger autistics who want to know what to expect. It may be as different from one autistic to the next as the word spectrum implies.

For now, I am focusing on all the skills and gifts I still have and using them as fully as possible, while my candle still has wax to burn.

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Complex PTSD and Autism

Quote from Wikipedia:

“Adults with C-PTSD have sometimes experienced prolonged interpersonal traumatization as children as well as prolonged trauma as adults. This early injury interrupts the development of a robust sense of self and of others. Because physical and emotional pain or neglect was often inflicted by attachment figures such as caregivers or older siblings, these individuals may develop a sense that they are fundamentally flawed and that others cannot be relied upon.”

Complex PTSD becomes even more complex when the abuse happens to an autistic child. Coping mechanisms that neurotypical children have may not work at all for an autistic child. In our family, the father was abusive and the mother enabled and assisted with the abuse, and sometimes just ignored it. Never did she step in to protect her children. Three of my sisters, two biological and one adopted, developed multiple personality disorders from the abuse and have required years of therapy to help them make somewhat normal lives for themselves. One of my adopted brothers has an alcohol problem and the other became an abuser himself. I also spent several years in therapy years before the autism diagnosis was made. I was at that time (1990s) diagnosed with PTSD, Selective Mutism, Recurrent Depression and Disassociative Identity Disorder. I went through extensive testing several years ago and the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder were added. So yes! It is complex indeed!

What happens with my C-PTSD is that rather than there being just one trigger or a few triggers, there are many unforeseen triggers. The reaction when triggered is like a reliving of the original experience, whether it was a rape, having my neck broken, being strangled, or being shocked with the stock prod. I feel exactly what I felt when the original trauma happened and it is often incapacitating. If I am in a public place, it can result in quite a scene as I experience what happened all over again. I can taste the blood in my mouth from having been hit across the face with my father’s belt for refusing to lower my pants, just from observing a child about to get a spanking and resisting. I can feel the waves of electric shock go through my body and collapse as silent screams resonate through my mind, from hearing someone mention using a stock prod. It goes on and on because I am not even able to remember all the traumatic events that happened during the seventeen years of living with my “parents”. Often I have to go through several episodes of a recurring memory, reliving it over and over until my adult mind can convince me that it is not going to happen again, that it is over. Then I can have a brief respite until something else triggers a reaction. This is Complex PTSD.

Often I will express myself with poetry while working through a remembered trauma. An interesting observation I have made when looking back at my poetry is that it seems to be written by a child at the level of development I was at when the trauma happened. I attribute this to the raw power the memories had to return me to the actual incident, as though having to go through it all over again.

The following poem was written after my husband suggested getting a stock prod to control a particularly mean buck goat we were having issues with.

The Stock Prod

When I think about the stock prod
I think about the pain
Of never knowing when our dad
Was going to strike again.

He’d often catch us unawares
Or if we turned our backs
He’d jab us from behind and
We just never could relax.

Sound sleep was impossible
With shocks to start the day
It made him laugh to see our fear
To him it was just play.

An instrument of torture
For kids and livestock too
‘Til the animals all trembled
When he stepped into their view.

One day old Babe, the milk cow
Was so consumed with fear
That when he tried to milk her
She just wouldn’t let him near.

She fought and kicked and trembled
In fear of Master Jack
So he picked up a two by four
And broke the milk cow’s back.

She needed a good lesson
Or so our father said
It didn’t teach her anything
‘Cause then the cow was dead.

So then instead of milk to drink
We had half a ton of meat
They ground her up cause she was tough
We kids declined to eat.

And then out came the stock prod
We cleaned our plates up quick
While daddy sat there grinning
As he jabbed his power stick.

So if you think the stock prod
Is a necessary tool
And the goat needs a good lesson,
Can’t we just send him to school?

By Linda Hanson Denmark – 2003

I often communicated with my husband through writing or poetry. Because of my difficulties expressing myself because of my autism, I usually was unsuccessful in explaining things or making a good case for something I felt strongly about. After my husband read this poem, he abandoned the idea of getting a stock prod and agreed to let me sell the offending goat and get a nicer one.

Child abuse when inflicted on any child can cause Complex PTSD if it occurs on multiple occasions. However, the same abuse on a child that has autism, can complicate and increase the difficulties the child already has to face every day for life. All child abuse is wrong. How wonderful for all the autistic children who have loving parents who cherish them and are helping them through all the daily challenges! I hope that in some small way, sharing my story may help even one child. Perhaps even one parent can speak up and protect her child.

Complex PTSD does not go away.

Autism does not go away.

One of these can be prevented.