REFLECTIONS ON THE SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR PEOPLE LIVING WITH ASPERGER'S SYNDROME

Adapted from the open-content textbooks collection at Wikipedia

The work on Marc Segar's Survival Guide stopped early in Marc Segar's life. Marc Segar's book does not say anything about managing a job, getting married, or raising kids.

Marc Segar's list of "typical" behaviors of people is interesting. It does not mean that these behaviors are desirable, or that they are not necessarily helpful for atypical people other than understanding how they are different from a majority of people. What I find much more helpful is, what typical and atypical people have in common, because that is going to be the basis of mutual understanding, when it happens.

Difficulties in multi-tasking

First of all, only few people are good in all these things Marc Segar lists. To use the list to value oneself against what is normal may be harmful rather than useful. If the Monotropism hypothesis is right, the difficulties for autistic people are multitasking - to think of all these rules all the time is extremely stressing for single-minded people. Lots of typical people feel the same, even if their capacity to multi-task may be better than those labeled as autistic. Besides, if you are a male and try to assimilate with normals in order to get a girlfriend, there might be a risk of becoming a nice guy syndrome.

Self-esteem as a key to social interaction

The key for understanding other people and being understood is to understand that what people feel often matters much more than how they look, dress or behave. People's empathy labels them attracted to what feels good, and pushed away from what feels bad. That means people like you more if you feel good, and like you less when you feel bad. Thus working towards yourself feeling good rather than pleasing other people's norms is the key for social interaction. If you work on feeling good for yourself, other people might pick up on it. On the other hand, if you feel insecure trying to pretend to be someone else, people feel that as well and might turn away after some time.

What is normal anyway?

It is worth noting that the question "what is normal anyway" keeps re-occurring when talking about psychology in general, and that question may possibly be answered in the works of five- time New York teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, and also the author Thom Hartmann. The central premise behind these works is the fact that the compulsory school system is designed to "socialize" children into the work force by making them docile, predictable, willing to take the word of leaders as truth, and dependent upon others for a sense of self worth. This goes a long way towards explaining neurotypical behavior, and why neurodivergents don't fit in: Neurodivergents simply fail to be socialized this way.

Learning from each other

It is becoming increasingly obvious that every autie has a different life experience that every other autie can learn from, and everyone is therefore encouraged to contribute to this work by adding new sections in a brainstorming fashion, though it is worth bearing in mind that the rules in Marc's book are clear, unambiguous, constructive, and typically promote Positive Mental Attitude (PMA). Those rules however, aren't always explained, which may be a problem in this work since other collaborators typically need to understand the reasoning before being able to build upon the ideas.

Marc seems to have spent much of his life working not only on this problem, but on how to express the things he has learned properly. His work is quite difficult to live up to. His work, and its continuation as a Wikipedia open-content textbook, is NOT intended to be an instruction manual to teach autism spectrum people how to become non-autistic. These are both designed to be used in many different ways, particularly in ways not yet envisaged, in the same way that a map shows how to get from any of many different locations to any of many other locations.

A note to professionals

In the 60 years since autism was first "discovered", remarkably little has been established about it, and virtually all of the "discoveries" ultimately come from autism spectrum people themselves.

The fact that social skills training is now being used as a treatment is due in no small part to the line at the end of Marc Segar's Survival Guide which reads "autistic people have to understand scientifically what non-autistic people already understand instinctively".

I fear that this line may have been misinterpreted, or not articulated properly. The idea of social skills training is based on the interpretation "autistic people have to understand scientifically what non-autistic people LEARN instinctively", and it entirely misses the interpretation that autism spectrum people may need to understand scientifically how non-autistic people instinctively learn.

I'm not sure whether Marc Segar understood this before he died, but I am absolutely sure that he was very close to it, since he left clues in his guide referring to "solving the puzzle" and how non-autistic people think.

Perhaps a good example of the impact autism spectrum people have had on this world is the fact that "the autism problem" is so intractable. Autism spectrum people are the most likely people to "solve" it and from this perspective, it is impossible to do so without knowing what the non-autistic world is. It strikes me that perhaps the wrong question is being asked. What we should be studying is what non-autistic people have that autism spectrum people do not. Knowing this appears to be part of any practical "solution" anyway.

To this date, Marc Segar's guide is the only thing I have found on the internet that actually talks about how non-autistic people think in any constructive way. The majority of the self help material available today is locked away under copyright with steep license purchasing fees to access, and I find it deeply offensive that Marc Segar's work probably contributed to the development of it all. Even more so that this document might be used that way.

I sincerely doubt that if I purchased any of the self help material available that it will be as useful to me as Marc Segars guide. There is clearly far more information contained in it than it may at first seem, and this is in part what this book is about.

The aim of the ongoing WikiBook based on Marc's work is to collaboratively write an updated survival guide for autistic people. Feel free to contribute to it so that we can not only learn from each other's experiences, but help people living in a non-autistic world to understand ours!

Click here to go to the home page to view the full range of autism fact sheets at www.autism-help.org
This autism fact sheet is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation. and is adapted from an open-content textbook at WikiBook's.