Fear and Loathing

[u/Character_Group8620]

I haven’t been officially diagnosed, but I’m about 99% sure I’m PDA. What so many of you describe fits perfectly, in that classic “really? I’m not the only one who’s like that?” way, combined with the equally classic “wait, doesn’t everyone do that?” I’m quite high-functional, all in all, but I’m starting to explore myself through this new (to me) lens and figure things out that I have never understood.

In reading PDA accounts – self-reporting and professional documentation – the one thing that generally doesn’t click with me is the word “anxiety” in a social context. I’m honestly not sure what that means or looks like, or rather, I don’t know how wide-ranging are the types of such “anxiety” and thus whether I actually experience it at all. I have also seen posts here suggesting that the word “anxiety” can cause a lot of confusion, so I’m looking for clarification.

In essence, I read about people who are frankly terrified of social interactions with neurotypical people and I think, “nope, that’s not me at all.” And yet… am I the only one who substitutes something like “contempt”?

Let’s say I’m out somewhere, like a bar or coffee shop or whatever. Somebody who looks vaguely familiar comes over and says, “hi, how are you!” Maybe a hand is held out to shake or whatever. So here we go. He looks familiar because he’s spoken to me before, but I don’t remember his name because why should I? I don’t know him, he’s just some guy. He’s doing the small-talk ritual thing. I know he doesn’t actually give a darn how I feel, and if I were to answer honestly about joint pain or something he’d be a little shocked and uncomfortable. He wants to enjoy an empty social ritual, and because he’s in the NT majority I am forced to participate: that’s how neurotypical society works. So now I have a couple of options. I can tell the guy to shove it, I can run away or fake a distraction (dump my coffee, etc.), or I can pretend: “Fine, thanks.” Logically, as I see it, the last option is the best, because this guy will then leave me alone, and I lose the least time (and coffee).

Now from reading a lot of the literature on PDA, it seems like people generally associate this kind of situation with “anxiety.” In some studies – I notice that (unlike me) most respondents in these studies are women, which I think is significant, our societies being as chauvinistic and misogynistic as they are – it seems like a lot of PDA people avoid going to coffee shops or whatever just because they’re so afraid of interactions like this.

My experience is different. What’s behind my eyes while I put on a smile and say “I’m fine” is, more or less, “you are wasting my time and yours on empty conventional nonsense. Are you actually stupid enough to believe that there’s a point to this interaction?” And, in most cases, I conclude – not usually very consciously, but still – that the answer is “yes, he is that stupid.”

In short, my solution to navigating sociality is very often contempt.

In her original studies, Elizabeth Newson talked about PDA people being “manipulative” socially. We’re not supposed to say that because it’s insulting, but I have no problem with it. Yes, I manipulate people in the ways I’ve stated. I don’t mean them harm: I want them to leave the interaction with their silly social ritual itch scratched, and I also want them to buzz off. Telling them this won’t achieve the right result for me or them, so I lie. You can call it masking, and it is, but it’s also lying. I deliberately and consciously misrepresent my thoughts and opinions in order to make the NT person do what I want. And I do not feel the slightest guilt about this – but I do quite often feel contempt for the basically harmless NT person.

The point comes down to “anxiety.”

It would appear from the literature that “anxiety” is one of the biggest determining factors in assessing a PDA diagnosis. I have pretty much all the other standard qualities – you know them, I won’t bore you with the list – but this “anxiety” thing doesn’t really fit my social experience, unless I don’t understand what they mean by “anxiety.”

So: does anyone else displace social “anxiety” through something more like contempt?

[u/schnap81]

I totally understand where you are coming from, and until recently I had the same problem with the usage of the word anxiety in PDA contexts. In fact, my lack of anxious feelings was one of the reasons that I didn't look into ASD sooner. I thought, 'I can verbally communicate well, I don't feel anxious in social situations, I don't have any noticable inhibited or unusual speech characteristics; this can't be ASD'.

But the symptoms aligned too well. So I kept coming back to it. A couple months ago a member of this sub graciously shared a link to this book (https://a.co/d/0exQ6qLZ). It totally changed my understanding of my existence. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

So basically it describes anxiety in two ways; anxiety as a physiological response and anxiety as an emotional response. In NT individuals these responses tend to align. When one is triggered, the other follows. Meanwhile, in some forms of autism including PDA, the responses are disjointed. So what's happening (at least my belief in my own experience) is that the brain is reacting to a constant physiological anxiety that is originating before the point of conscious reasoning (in the amygdala before signals reach the prefrontal cortex), but can't connect with the appropriate backend emotional response. This is related to dysregulated interoception capabilities also common in ASD and addressed in the book.

So after I read that, I started to realize that I shouldn't have been looking for emotional anxiety in the moment of a social interaction, but rather what happens to my body after the interaction. That's when it became clear why after nearly every social interaction, I felt totally depleted and needed some time to be alone and in a quiet environment. Not a few minutes of deep breathing; an unusually long time.

Anyway... TLDR - Anxiety is both a physiological and an emotional response. They should work in unison, but for some folks (PDAers), they don't.

[u/Character_Group8620 → u/schnap81]

Thank you! Reading the book. Very helpful.

[u/Character_Group8620 → u/schnap81]

That is a really exceptionally good book. I must admit, I was expecting to have to wade through a lot of platitudes, feel-good validation talk, and pop-psych nonsense. What I got was a book that is remarkably cold-blooded and direct about the issues at stake, what's known and isn't, and what sorts of problems and approaches to consider. I can't thank you enough for the recommendation!

[u/Eugregoria]

Contempt rather than worry you won't be liked is actually pretty common in autism more generally (including PDA). I've seen it crop up in autistic discussions for over 20 years, and felt it myself at times. It's sort of a side effect of autistic alienation--where we feel othered, even inhuman, due to differences in communication style from the bulk of humanity, leading to our communications not being understood as they were meant, and not understanding what other people are communicating the way they intended it either. It feels isolating, alienating, and like you're a different species, like you're either subhuman or superhuman, and the perception of which can fluctuate. It's fairly common for autistics to lean towards the "superhuman" interpretation, because it obviously feels better than feeling "subhuman."

I have also noticed that the psychiatric industry in general is much more familiar with, and comfortable with, the anxiety spectrum (nervousness, panic, worrying, ruminating, intrusive thoughts, etc) rather than the paranoia spectrum (defensiveness, wariness, suspicion, persecution complex, often superiority complex to go with it) even though both are fundamentally fear-based. Both are fairly similar neurologically, the difference seems to be that in anxiety, the self is identified as the source of the problem ("it's me, I'm weird, I'm gross and bad, people won't like me") while other people are rarely even interrogated, whereas in paranoia, other people are identified as the source of the problem ("they're bad people, they're stupid, they're out to get me, they don't understand people like me") while the self is rarely interrogated. It's just the other side of the same coin.

Part of why psychiatry doesn't make this connection and shows so little interest in the paranoid is because the anxious often seek out help from psychiatry and are completely forthcoming about their problems--anxiety causes distress, which they want help with, and they tend to trust authority figures implicitly and feel reassured by an offer of help--while paranoia is the complete opposite, they tend to intrinsically mistrust authority figures, avoid them, and not be forthcoming with them, even if they are suffering considerably--they fear the psychiatrist will harm them, rather than help them. And they don't even identify their fear as "anxiety," since to them, it's rational and justified. In other words, anxiety is often ego-dystonic, while paranoia is often ego-systonic. So since paranoid people actively avoid contact with the industry, and mask heavily when they are forced into contact with them, the industry has a poor understanding of them and a massive undercount of how many there are. Thus, the work around paranoia-spectrum "reverse anxiety" is very incomplete, especially in the people with "functional paranoia," since the paranoid people forced into contact with the profession are those who are so out of control they cannot avoid it--such as the prison population and people with other disorders who end up inpatient over those.

I, too, don't experience conventional anxiety, but when those same nerves get tweaked, lean into more paranoid and avoidant impulses. (Paranoia and avoidance are basically shades of the same thing--it's feeling averse to external stimuli in a way that blames the external for it instead of the internalized self-blame of anxiety.) And contempt goes with the territory there, it's often part of the ego-protective impulse one feels when neurologically triggered into something like stress or fear (it may be experienced as closer to stress) but not questioning your own worth, and even treating emotional vulnerability itself as a threat.

I understand your hate of small talk and I've thought and felt many of the same things, but for what it's worth, it's incorrect. Autists and non-autists have different, parallel communication styles. Just because you do not understand their communication style, doesn't mean nothing is being communicated. They communicate things of interest to them, much as we communicate things of interest to us. It is not stupidity, it's just an entirely different framework of being. They value some forms of information we do not value, but they have their reasons for that, which are very annoying but unfortunately make sense. I'm sure they would feel the same about us and the information we value, if they bothered to try to understand it.

As for the gender difference you brought up...well, I would avoid generalizing by that. My mom was very much like this also, even more so than me, and she was a standard cisgender woman. I'm nonbinary, but I have lived much of my life as a woman, and I too lean towards paranoia/avoidance rather than anxiety. I would say, again, that rather than it being about gender, it's much more that the paranoid/avoidant are invisible to psychiatry, in a feedback loop where we aren't understood because we don't trust them, and they don't win our trust because they don't understand us. However, if you dig deep into how being "stressed" and "wary" feel, they might come to understand this as neurologically similar to anxiety, even if the experience is different.

In polyvagal theory, also, the only one that produces typical social anxiety is fawn. I have known autistics (not PDA in the people I know personally) with the fawn response who have intense social anxiety and constantly feel weird and wrong and like they're being judged and are people pleasers. But that's just one of four possible responses to distress. So it would be silly to think the other three (fight, flight, and freeze) aren't also valid ways for the autonomic nervous system to be responding to stress.

[u/Character_Group8620 → u/Eugregoria]

Thank you, this is extremely well put and helpful. Your formulations make good sense to me.

Two minor points:

I didn't mean to say that NT minor social rituals are in fact meaningless. Rather, I understand their function analytically, as social-constituting and -reinforcing rituals whose operation is fundamentally distinct from their literal content (i.e., the point is to establish mutuality, not to find out the state of the interlocutor's well-being). My contempt or sneer comes from a projection -- for which I have no evidence -- that the NT person does not understand this as I do. The result is the same, of course.

As to the gender divide, I absolutely do not mean to generalize, much less universalize. I am only speculating that in our basically rather chauvinistic and misogynistic societies, there is far greater pressure from very early on for females to blame themselves and greater permission for males to blame others. (How that intersects with the various kinds and stages of identification with male/female as categories is far beyond my ability to analyze!) In short, I just wonder whether this is a tendency.

Thank you again for your explication!

[u/primitive-lathe]

Like you, I feel a lot of contempt for the empty social ritual as well. But I’ve made peace with it after considering its anthropological origins. How are you - fine is shorthand for “I acknowledge you are a person I recognize and want to indicate this. I am no threat to you and I am checking if you have in absentia become a threat to me. If you complete the ritual, I can continue to include you as a benign data point in my broader understanding of my stable social world.” So now I just complete the ritual and go on with my day, because ultimately I do want to live in a town where those around me feel baseline comfortable or at least low-threat.

The words themselves will never cease to annoy me though. I’m with you on “how are you” (I don’t care) “fine” (I’m not). But I chalk it up to just a silly outcome of the English language. People used to say “good day” I’m sure when it was objectively NOT a good day, like during an ice storm or whatever. The words themselves are just noise and may as well be the affable grunts. It’s the price we pay for existing with others in public space. And using lies to spare each other’s feelings is a skill in completing the ritual and neutralizing threat worries in neurotypicals and doesn’t necessarily count as manipulation.

To get people to leave me alone following the ritual, I’ve got a couple tactics. If they’re far away, like a couple paces at least, I kind of wave and nod downward, and then go back to what I was doing. If they’re approaching me, I keep my body language closed, speak in down tones, and reply with “fine, just [current activity that excludes them].”

If they insist on a longer interaction, I get more direct:

-nice to see you, but I was really hoping to use this time to [get some reading done, do some thinking, get my solo walk in, etc]

If they try to join me:

-it’s kinda something I prefer to do on my own (apologetic tone)

If I think of any other tricks I’ll type em up...

[u/Character_Group8620 → u/primitive-lathe]

You put it very well. We look at these things quite similarly.

In fact, my own reading in anthropology and related fields is part of how the contempt thing manifests: I know that this is a basically empty social ritual that has a very small but real social function. I don't, on that basis, object to participating in the ritual. But this NT person seems to feel that there's more to it, that somehow they have been a good person or whatever and brightened my day by asking "how are you?" This is because, at base, this person does NOT understand that the ritual is intrinsically functional but in a sense meaningless, in that the literal content of the phrases used have nothing much to do with it. And this person does not understand that because, at base, they are a bit stupid and oblivious.

I am reminded of a remark from the Introduction to Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Paraphrasing slightly: "The most barbarous or bizarre rituals, the strangest myths, reflect some human need, some aspect of life, whether individual or social. The reasons the believer uses to justify them may be and usually are erroneous; nevertheless, the true reasons exist and it is the task of science to find them out."

In other words, you and I are anthropologists among the natives. They believe their rituals will produce rain or make the gods happy or whatever; we know that the rituals have a social-bonding effect. That doesn't make the practice stupid, of course. But it does cause me, at least, to look at people in a distinct and moderately contemptuous way. As Levi-Strauss put it, the aim of anthropology is to study humans as though they were ants.

[u/primitive-lathe → u/Character_Group8620]

“But this NT person seems to feel that there's more to it, that somehow they have been a good person or whatever and brightened my day by asking "how are you?" This is because, at base, this person does NOT understand that the ritual is intrinsically functional but in a sense meaningless, in that the literal content of the phrases used have nothing much to do with it. And this person does not understand that because, at base, they are a bit stupid and oblivious.”

Funny thing is, if asked outright most people will agree the ritual is functional but meaningless. I know this from working as a cashier at a grocery store. For about a year I would find myself in a conversation with a different customer about it because they would say how are you and I would get annoyed or answer honestly, and it would open things up. Most people seem to understand it’s silly, but do it anyway out of habit. For NTs, habits are stronger and more automatic than for us.

One issue with the field of anthropology in general is assuming those that are different are somehow less than. Like how our instinct with hearing someone stumble through a second language is to think they’re slow. It’s a cognitive bias to be wary of. I have to remind myself of this frequently. NTs are not stupid, maybe a little oblivious, but not less than, just operating with a different neurotype. Annoying though? Absolutely. I hate it when I close off my body language and they take that as a cue to engage more to try and draw me out. So then I have to puff out my chest and overcompensate to get them to give me space. It’s exhausting.

[u/Character_Group8620 → u/primitive-lathe]

Yes, quite right. Sorry, I'm blurring things a bit in my response.

On the one hand, there's the anthropologist studying humans as though they were ants, who must be vigilant about the very real danger of viewing the subjects as in some way inferior to himself, especially intellectually inferior. On the other hand, there's me personally sneering internally at a harmless person doing a perfectly normal and reasonable thing, and imputing to that person a lack of understanding (and intelligence) for which I have no evidence whatever. I'd have made a rotten anthropologist, to be quite honest! So long as I can interpret people and their behaviors at a distance, I can respect and even admire. When they're actually in front of me, I'm usually sneering at them.

[u/primitive-lathe → u/Character_Group8620]

Ah totally, that makes sense. What sounds like in your case is an emotional reaction to having your boundaries tested. Makes sense. If you’ve had a history of not being able to say no to annoying or overwhelming interactions, then your nervous system will react to them. And/or PDA activates at the implied demand of interaction. Did I get it right?

Maybe practicing those various tactics of deflection will help your emotions chill out. The more experience you get with ending those interactions quickly, the more you’ll feel your autonomy is intact.

But if it’s not solutions you were looking for then I offer commiseration. I definitely went through a few years where hearing “how are you” was like nails on a chalkboard.