I realized the other day that the reason I didn’t watch much TV as a teenager (and why I’m only now catching up on late aughts/early teens media that I missed), is because I literally didn’t understand how to use our TV. My parents got a new system, and it had three remotes with a Venn diagram of functions. If someone left the TV on an unfamiliar mode, I didn’t know how to get back to where I wanted to be, so I just stopped watching TV on my own altogether.
I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn’t know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.
In children’s autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The “real” test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.
This aligns with the compulsory independence I’ve noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.
My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn’t occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can’t speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don’t buy this. Even if I’m aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn’t present itself as an option. Why?
My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else’s brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.
When I’m in a situation where I need help, I don’t have many of my components of communication. I don’t always know what my audience knows. I don’t have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don’t know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don’t often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don’t even know the basic plot of the situation.
I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I’m missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It’s the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.
Maybe. This is the theory of one person. I’m curious if anyone else vibes with this at all.
This is really fascinating and also relatable, perhaps for you too, dear girl(s).
I had never heard the term “compulsory independence” before, wow.
For me personally, it’s a combination of a few factors.
-Absolutely the communication barrier. People do not tend to have the patience to let me finish sentences under the best of circumstances. I have a hard time getting people to listen to me well enough to even understand what’s wrong.
Now extrapolate to how much more of a problem this is for a barely-speaking child.
-A pattern of experiences that started very early that inculcated that seeking adult help was not likely to actually get me effective help.
-Some degree of shame that I couldn’t do things that I did know I was supposed to be able to. And asking for help was so much more likely to get me grilled about why I couldn’t do something myself than to get me help.
-Something that set in more as I got older… If help isn’t absolutely, consistently reliable, then I’m better off not relying on it. Help from someone who I wind up always having to remind, for instance, is more stressful than just not having it. Never knowing whether the help is actually going to be there or whether the chances are 50/50 that I’ll have to find some last-minute workaround is more stressful than just knowing I’m going to have to rely on myself.
-Asking for help and having it not come through, having a friend flake out on you, for instance, is going to be more upsetting than just not counting on the help in the first place. And then I’ve just added a meltdown and sadness on top of not being able to do whatever it was I needed help with in the first place.
For me, I know when I get really frustrated and try to ask for help with something, especially as a small child, I would come across very belligerent and aggressive. I probably stopped asking for help because of that.
I think it’s also worth noting that to grow up autistic is to watch other people effortlessly and naturally do things that you yourself have no clue how to do. People will have conversations and seem to communicate a whole level of extra unsaid information, for example. You just sort of grow up in the mindset of “this is a thing everyone else is doing just fine, therefore it must be something that comes naturally to people, something I’m not supposed to need help with and people will be confused if I ask.”
So we don’t ask how to pay taxes, or how to get a new city-pickup-compatible rubbish bin, or if someone can help us organise all the stuff in the garage. Because this is stuff that people magically know how to do all by themselves, right? Just like everything else. It doesn’t occur to us that you can ask.
Part of growing up is learning that asking for stuff is almost always more work than just doing stuff yourself (or going without)