“The Dreaded Rug-Pull”

Have you ever had the rug pulled from under you? If you’re autistic like me you may well be visualising a cartoon scene of a character literally pulling away a carpet from under another, but what I’m meaning is those moments when it feels like everything has changed and the world has shifted on its axis. For example – you might have been feeling that things were going basically OK at work, when a colleague says “we’ve been putting up with you for years but we don’t really like you”. In that moment, the whole landscape of how you thought the people around you related to you (and each other) shifts, you’ve lost your figurative footing, and are lost, fallen over and humiliated. I’ve used an extreme example but my autistic life has been full of moments when I’ve felt as though everything has suddenly rearranged itself in a new shape and I doubt everything I previously thought I knew.

A colleague used the expression “the dreaded rug-pull” in a seminar I was in for Neurodiversity Celebration Week and it struck me as a wonderful expression for incapsulating part of my autistic experience. There are times – like the one above – where I fail to pick up a coded message or an implication, and later realise I’ve been getting everything wrong. I’ve had several managers who were so subtle or nuanced in giving constructive feedback that I had no idea they wanted something to be done differently until they criticised me for ignoring their feedback all year. (I literally had had no idea that the feedback was being given.)

There something else though that “the dreaded rug-pull” chimes with in my mind and I’m not sure if it’s an autism phenomenon, or to do with anxiety or what, so would welcome feedback. I can best describe it as self doubt so extreme that my automatic assumption is that I’m wrong, leading to me setting aside everything I’ve ever believed in a split second because I trust what I’ve just heard more than myself. That is the moment of “rug-pull”.

As an example, I’ve been a civil servant for what feels like AGES and I can write briefing for Ministers fairly easily. It’s a basic civil service skill that I’ve possessed for a number of years. But if someone were to say to me “oh no, you’re getting that all wrong – that isn’t how briefing is supposed to be” then my mind would do the rug-pull thing and think: “oh heavens, I’ve been wrong all these years, everyone must have been laughing at my pitiful attempts to write briefing behind my back”. In less than a second my over-thinking brain would have hastily reconsidered my entire career in light of this new “information” that I’d been doing a fundamental thing “wrong” and be working out how to handle this new knowledge that I’d always been a failure and not known. It would be a LONG time later before my self-beating-up brain considered the possibility that the person talking to me had been wrong…

If you’re autistic, you may be quite used to things seeming to be your fault, and prone to mis-identifying the underlying issue perhaps because you’re not great at identifying emotions. You may be used to rejection and sensitive to it, and all those things make it harder to stand up for yourself and believe in yourself. All of those things could make you doubt yourself and defer to others rather than stand up for yourself. But I still thing this “dreaded rug-pull” idea has something autistically-extra in it. The number of times I’ve effectively reassessed my entire belief system in light of some new, doubtful, un-backed up “information” long before conscious thought has begun to wonder if the new information is true, makes me wonder if this is an autism thing. Can other autistics relate?

This post is dedicated to ZH who first used the expression “the dreaded rug-pull” to me.