Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person's Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically

Aron et al. (1992). Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596.

We do need to be able to soothe that anxiety, however, which is where the final step of practicing distress tolerance comes in.

If I could go anywhere right now and do anything that I wanted, where would I go? How would I spend my days if I didn’t have to worry about anyone watching and judging me? Which important values that I hold dear have I been neglecting? Who do I miss spending time with? What possibilities feel forbidden yet exciting to me? What do I really like? Wha

This brings us to the second stage of boosting our distress tolerance: disregarding opinions that aren’t useful to us or that come from a person we don’t respect.

If you’re distressed at even the idea of your parent, partner, or close friend disagreeing with you, you may want to slowly work to extract your self-concept until your felt closeness looks more like this:

There is a psychological measure of interpersonal closeness called the Inclusion of Self in the Other Scale (or the IOS)[18] that I think illustrates this well.

In a word, we need to work on our distress tolerance. If we can allow someone to frown at us, insult us, talk about us behind our backs, or even outright reject us without folding, we have won back an important part of ourselves.

Improving our distress tolerance comes down to four steps: Separate your perspective from someone else’s. Disregard opinions that you do not respect. Check in with your own values and feelings. Self-soothe and regulate your anxiety.

Engaging in discussion or conflict is useful when another person respects us, values our well-being, and is open to changing their mind, but when it comes to immovable people or the opinions of strangers, we have to be able to tolerate the distress of rifts that can’t ever be mended.