Getting your needs met

It’s difficult enough to get the world to listen if you’re autistic and express your physical pain in a way neurotypical wouldn’t expect. But if you’re suffering mental, emotional or spiritual pain as a result of someone else’s actions, it’s particularly hard to speak up and be heard. Complaining can lead to blow back as the person complained against defends themselves. If you’re autistic, you may be quite used to things seeming to be your fault, and prone to mis-identifying the underlying issue because perhaps you’re not great at identifying sensations. So it’s quite likely that the prospect of expressing your distress is just going to cause more distress and so you don’t.

Therein lies one of the terrible difficulties of tackling abuses of power be they large or small. The person suffering is already in a vulnerable position and saying anything about what’s happening to them will make them more vulnerable. It’s easy to visualise what that might mean in one of the terrible high-profile cases of abuse that reach the media from time to time. The victim feels shame and humiliation because of what’s happened to them, and also knows that if they speak out they may not be believed and may acquire a powerful enemy. Thank heavens safeguarding processes and procedures are getting better and better known so that the victims in these awful cases are more likely to get the help they need. (If you have any concerns about safeguarding in any organisation, please contact the safeguarding lead, or if you don’t know who that is, speak to a manager.)

But scale things back and imagine a situation of things having gone wrong at work, as they do, from time to time. Suppose you were an autistic member of staff who needed particular reasonable adjustments and your manager ignored what you needed. You might have opened the conversation effectively, followed up with the practicalities yourself, but still your manager wasn’t interested and refused to engage. So what do you do? You’re already struggling at work because you haven’t got what you need in order to be able to work effectively (the reasonable adjustments). And you’re probably quite used to putting your own interests last and tolerating discomfort. All of those things could make you doubt yourself and defer to others rather than stand up for yourself.

So you probably let things go on too long. So by the time you attempt to act, you’re getting desperate. But your desperation doesn’t express itself in a neurotypical way, because (spoiler alert here) you’re autistic. A quite common autism desperation response is to provide vast quantities of carefully written and organised factual information on the cause of the problem. You “info dump” all the things in your head, you don’t want to leave anything out for fear of not being open and honest, and you leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions to avoid being patronising. It all seems perfectly natural to my autistic brain. If this is about asking for reasonable adjustments you probably even helpfully cite the relevant legislation…

But what is the effect on the manager who is recipient of this communication? They see a huge detailed dossier – this looks like an indictment! There are legal references – pretty scary! Clearly the person who wrote this isn’t actually suffering – or how did they find the energy to provide all this information? The complainant is actually a barrack-room lawyer out to make trouble! You’re busy – you don’t have hours to weed through this massive amount of information – you don’t know what they want except to be difficult and you feel stressed and got at. At this point you (the manager) probably decide that if the autistic person needed those reasonable adjustments so badly they wouldn’t have had the capability to get at you so badly. So all they’re doing is trying to get something they’re not entitled to and to get you into trouble!

Turning back to the autistic person trying to express their distress at not having the (modest, legally-sanctioned) reasonable adjustments they need, they find themselves on the receiving end of a righteously indignant short-tempered manager who previously didn’t take them seriously and now is actively angry with them. The situation is not going to play out well.

And why did this happen? Because an autistic person expressed their distress and needs in autistic terms (huge document) rather than as a neurotypical person expected. If the autistic staff member had engaged their manager emotionally as a neurotypical person could the situation would probably have arisen.

It’s rather a circular situation – when you can mask well enough to look and sound neurotypical such that people listen to you is probably not the time when you really need them to listen to you. So quite probably you don’t often get your needs met…