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

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.

Engagement is the polar opposite of overwhelmed, self-doubting passivity.

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:

Being a bit slow to react is completely fine, and communicating when you are ready in an email or letter is a proud act of neurodivergent defiance in its own right.

Many Autistic people believe they do not “deserve” to voice their needs unless they are in unfathomable pain. To challenge that instinct, practice articulating very mild forms of discomfort the moment they arise using this exercise.

While there are situations where Autistic people must filter our actions for the sake of safety, we generally can maintain our own inner sense of what we believe in, and work to surround ourselves with people who do respect how we function.

Though many Autistic people initially believe that our masks will protect us from ostracism, in time we come to realize that to be masked is not to be freed from judgment but to be imprisoned by it.

Developing the skill of engagement requires that we start speaking up at moments when we traditionally would have silenced ourselves, and that we broaden our notion of which forms of discomfort deserve to be voiced.

sensory overload mode.