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List of topics to suggest to researchers
Right now the important thing is for us to generate ideas for what we’d like to know and how to phrase what we’d like to know. So getting questions and topics into this section is important even if the wording isn’t great.
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35 Replies
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What are some unexpected pockets of autistic women in the world? I’m a poet, and my theory is that a huge percentage of women professional poets are autistic. It might actually be a prerequisite — you have to look at the world differently to write poetry.
Is there a connection between autism in women and queerness or alternative relationship styles? I’m poly and I’m noticing that a ton of people in that community are neurodivergent or questioning.
I dye my hair bright colours because I find it makes people nicer to me. Right now it’s pink and orange. It’s they can tell from afar that I’m a little bit weird, and go into the conversation expecting quirkiness rather than normalcy. Does anyone else use hacks like that for socializing?
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This! I shaved my head for a long time, and the best part was that people immediately expected me to be odd. Now I have hair, and miss the ease of interaction.
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I used to do that too, green and red hair, quirky clothes etc. But living in a foreign country worked even better. When people notice
you’re weired they just dismiss it as probably typical of wherever you’re from. Little do they know… I do find that expats in general tend be more neurodivergent than average. -
I started dying my hair blonde for that reason haha. It works!
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What is the interaction between MBTI personality types and autism? For example, are most autistic women NT types? Is it possible to be autistic and an F type?
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A while ago I read an article mentioning a study that apparently didn’t find any significant correlation between being autistic and IxTx MBTI type, but it did find a correlation between being an IxTx type and having grown up with an ExFJ mother! So the conclusion was that an IxTx becomes neurotic and unhappy (some of the traits of autism) only because of unreasonable pressure the primary parent puts on them to conform and be more social, which is the opposite of how they naturally are… In other words, an autistic INTx is a traumatised INTx. It certainly made sense in my case (INTJ, with an extremely unhealthy ENFJ mother).</div><div>
Elsewhere it is mentioned that INTJ and INTP are the most represented types among autistic people, but I wonder if that is only bias – because INTx traits are most like the traits traditionally described as autistic – such as kids being “little professors”. There might be some autistic people of any type.
I think research on the experience of autistic F-types would be useful, because they seem to be overlooked. Autistic feelers in general confuse the hell out of me, especially FJs. While ticking many of the boxes for autism, at the same time they have motivations that to me seem totally neurotypical.
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Very interesting research you mentioned about IxTx types with ExFJ parents. It does seem like such pressure at home could push a child to develop unusual coping mechanisms.
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I tested and identify as an INFJ and I wonder the same thing.
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Warning this is a special interest area of Penelope!! 🤣 I love talking about this also and find it sooo curious and interesting .
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INFJ here. I’ve taken classes in the past with INFJs and I believe a lot of people I was in those classes with are autistic – a few know they are, most don’t.
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INFJ here but I’ve met autistic ISFP (my sister) and autistic ENFPs. (mother and grandmother). They are warm and kind so you wouldn’t think “autistic” but they talk a lot and cant read the room.
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NT and INFJs are overrepresented here because they are the ones most likely to care about self actualization.
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This is a good point. The intuitive personalities will be more drawn to a theoretical discussion of autism.
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I am so curious about this as well! And for adult women, how can you get an accurate MBTI type when you’ve been masking intensely for your entire life? I’ve tested as consistently ISFJ as an adult, but the more I learn about autism, the more I wonder whether that’s my actual type, or if I just have an ISFJ mask on in an attempt to get people to tolerate me. I’m 100% a Feeling type, but for the rest of the letters, I can’t tell what’s genuinely my personality, and what’s a result of me trying to cope with autism/burnout/brain fog, etc…
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Self-knowledge helps, as well as familiarity with what other types are like. Probably the most useful is to understand cognitive functions before typing yourself. Fi and Fe feeling functions are extremely different, and as a feeling type you are strong at only one of them. The tests alone are often inaccurate. When you read descriptions of ISFJ, do you resonate with that?
Of all cognitive functions, Si is the most likely to absorb behaviour patterns from the early environment, and Fe is the most likely to morph in order to align with the current environment and appease people around them. Both functions do it naturally, so if they are your main two (as is the case with ISFJ), it would make sense that you are not sure how much of you is masking. On the opposite spectrum, someone with an xNTJ type (who don’t usually use those functions) would likely be quite clear on which behaviours are masking and which are not.
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Thank you so much Gordana! Your advice was really helpful; I did a deep-dive on cognitive functions tonight and I think I am likely an ISFJ after all.
Your comment that it would make sense for an ISFJ to be unsure about which behaviors are masking was a real breakthrough for me. I think ISFJs are sometimes unfairly stereotyped online as black-and-white thinkers with a lack of intellectual curiosity, so part of me had wondered whether a real ISFJ would even be questioning their type at all!
I definitely resonate with quite a few aspects of ISFJ descriptions, with the exception of the “traditional/conservative” characterization. I do lean a little toward the intuitive (N) side of things (pattern recognition, big-picture thinking, thinking in metaphors), but having looked at the two types’ function stacks I think ISFJ is the better fit. (And the pattern recognition and big-picture thinking probably just comes along with the autism!) 🙂
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@cate Do read the INFJ description too and see if it might resonate better. And see if your beliefs, habits and preferences are similar to how you grew up.
ISFJs are not always traditional or conservative, it depends a lot on the early environment. For example, an Si-user who grew up in a church with will likely be religious and keep the same habits as a grown-up, but an Si-user who grew up in an arty / irreligious / hippie family will likely be very different. I know an ISFJ whose type baffled me because all the functions and their stack were clear, but he seemed to have too much Ne… until I met his mum with whom he is very close and who is a textbook ENFP!
In the end, it is not the personality type that matters, but understanding our patterns and needs. Personality typing is just a tool. Good luck with self-exploration!
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If you have grown to hate someone and then realize they are autistic, are you more able to tolerate / forgive / accept them? If not, is that because no matter the cause they’ve crossed too many lines? Something else? If so, are you able to see the relationship in a different way now? At first, hate felt like too strong of a word here, yet the person I’m trying to make sense of is my mother-in-law so the word is the right one. X-)
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OHHH good one!
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I am 99.9999999% positive my ex-fiancé is autistic. When I was researching autism in females online, he saw it and practically screamed at me.
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I used to get frustrated at this autistic woman who worked w me at the drugstore when I was in high school. Mostly because she clocked me as autistic my first day and I thought I was masking SO WELL. NT and INFJs are overrepresented in this space because we are the types that care about self improvement most
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This is such a good one! I’m convinced that my MIL is autistic, with some “look-at-me” tendencies from being raised as one of nine children in a family dynamic where she had to compete for attention. My husband (who has some definite narcissistic traits himself 😂) just thinks she’s a narcissist. I am hoping to learn more about how to tell the difference between autism and narcissism in women, because I think if he could see some of her behaviors through that lens, it might be healing for him.
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Did anyone show symptoms of autism before the age of three? I was born in 1970 and was told I didn’t talk until three, that I would rock, not make eye contact, etc. My mom brought me to a specialist at about four years old and was told that I was intelligent and not autistic. She proceeded to tell my mom that I reminded her of a boy she worked with who showed the same symptoms and wound up going to Harvard Medical School. She said to my mom, “I’ve seen this before but I don’t know what it is!”
I was sent to a psychiatrist at six, in special Ed school until 10 and suffered so much in regular school. When I would ask what the problem was, I was told “nobody knows.” Needless to say, I had no self-esteem and felt like a freak.
I struggled my entire life and didn’t get any kind of answer until I was 47 years old. Plus, it took me years after I suspected I was on the spectrum until I found a therapist who was knowledgeable about late diagnosed or adults who think they might be autistic.
What I want to know is, any of you on here have similar experiences? We’re you sent to therapists, special Ed but not given any kind of diagnosis?
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As a baby I didn’t copy adults’ facial expressions and wouldn’t stop crying. I crawled only backwards. I learned to read at one and a half, before I could properly talk (my native language is phonetic, so it’s just vocalising letters). Allegedly my grandparents would make a show of it when neighbours or friends were around, letting the “genius baby” read random newspaper titles… I’d hide under the table when there was sudden noise such as a motorcycle passing, or somebody using a hairdryer. I couldn’t recognise faces and had screaming tantrums “for no reason” until I was three, the age I started rationalising my fears and being my own therapist really.
After about three, I was a well-behaved child, if a bit too detached and independent for my mother’s liking, who (I now know) has a preference to enmesh. When I was about seven, she went to the most renowned child psychologist in the city for advice, because I was apparently “difficult”, meaning I didn’t do what was expected of me despite being extremely smart. The point is, mum doesn’t ever (to this day) explicitly say what she wants, and expects others to oblige without even herself knowing what she wants. But she didn’t tell the psychologist that. The psychologist never even talked to me. But she told the mum that if I was as intelligent as described, I must be a little spoiled master manipulator, lying to her all the time, so she should be more strict with me. That’s when the abuse started…
As an adult I had only bad, or at best neutral experience with health professionals. Their theory was that I can’t be autistic because I make eye contact, or because I live independently. To add perspective, I didn’t learn to keep eye contact and smile while talking until my mid-twenties. I guess a very typical story for somebody my age (born in 1975, still undiagnosed).
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I was born in 1969. Admittedly I’ve only become aware I’m spectrum within the last month or so. I’m not nearly as far along in the discovery process of putting the pieces together as some of you.
I haven’t had a talk with my mom to explore my behaviors from this perspective so there’s much I don’t recall that was normalized; my dad’s not on this Earth anymore. I’ve come to realize he likely was autistic. There’s so much to unpack with our family dynamic that’s only now beginning to make sense to me.
One behavior I am aware of extensively as a child: I was reading books before 3. As far back as I remember I don’t recall visiting child physiologists. It may be that the way they were testing and sorting was the approach at that time. My behaviors were categorized as very high intelligence and I was constantly being placed into that category beginning in pre-school within our public school system.
The last few weeks have been a lot of reflection, brutally self-regulating to slow down on my need to consume large volumes of information and learn about autism and all things, crying (a lot of that), acceptance, analysis, moments of massive fireworks in my brain, and some grace …
I try to keep perspective that child psychology specifically as well as parenting support systems just were not where it is now at the time we were young. It’s not an excuse; it’s just ‘is’. The system is still NOT where it needs to be and that’s why this work is so important.
Thank you both for sharing. 🥰
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Literally the day I was born the doctor said he’s never seen a baby like me before. I barely cried and instead looked around the operating room wide eyed haha.
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Can you stop thinking? If yes, what does that feeeel like? If no, did you know that some people can stop thinking?!
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Not usually but my adhd meds can shut my brain up when needed. On the positive side I’m never bored since my brain is always active.
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For me it’s anti-anxiety meds and a puzzle game on my phone until I’m sleepy enough to pass out. Rarely a drift off to sleep kind of feeling.
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How? My brain doesn’t ever want to shut down.
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I can stop thinking. And yet I’ve been churning over for a week (!) if I should answer this or not, because it is not quite what people have in mind when they ask. And it’s a longish story.
It doesn’t help me go to sleep at all, because it turns out without any thoughts the mind is even more awake. It doesn’t make me want to engage with the outside world more, but it does remove anxiety, and makes it much easier to face the world. It is useful and amazing, but very contradictory.
Up to my mid-20s I thought it would be impossible, because not only was my mind plagued by non-stop activity, but I was also convinced that people who don’t constantly think are stupid, complacent and not worth my time. Then, unrelated, I got fixated on learning to transcend. No meditation technique worked, and being a results-oriented person who doesn’t care much for the process, I decided that staring into a candle flame in a lotus position or repeating mantras won’t work any better if I kept it up for years rather than hours or weeks. Unfortunately spiritual teachers are sketchy about defining transcendence, and I became suspicious that it’s because most of them don’t know what it is like. Pouring over literature I found in an old yoga text that tracedental meditative state is a state of mind without thoughts. I thought, WTF? But there was nothing to lose, and having the signpost, I did it by brutal force. I Iiterally wouldn’t move until I stopped the thoughts, but it only took a day. And it was more difficult to counter the preconception and prejudice than actually stop them. What happened was like finding a gap that allows me into another part of the universe. It turns out that stopping thoughts is equivalent to a qualitatively different state of consciousness. And yes, there’s a feeling of non-duality and oneness with everything, timelessness, being everything and everywhere and with everything at once… But that’s another topic completely. The point is once you are “there”, you can’t do anything else. You can’t even speak or write things down without breaking that state. It changed the trajectory of my life and it opened up so much to me, but at the same time made it extremely hard to continue the day-to-day living. To live and interact with anything or anyone, you need to go back into the thought-ful state of mind. With time the euphoria goes away and you just get used to being able to slip through the escape valve, but you come to see it as valuable, but really special. Like a comfortable old friendship. The real challenge then became how to design a life that is integrated and meaningful while including interaction. And that is both easier than before (because less anxiety, and the escape valve) and more difficult (because I can’t take anything at face value anymore).
I think that a state of mind “without thoughts” for normal people doesn’t mean literally without thoughts, but mental activity mirroring / containing the world around them. Then when they want to go to sleep, they just close their eyes, the thoughts contain only darkness and stillness, and that’s it. Our thought space seems to be much bigger and more out-of control, and just closing our eyes does nothing to calm it down. And transcendence does calm it down, but keeps one awake. So as I mentioned, I can stop thoughts, but it’s not what people usually mean by it.
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There’s a typo in my post above that changes the meaning and I can’t edit it anymore, so here: my impression is that the state without thoughts, even though valuable, is not that special. You get used to it, you are not a better person for it.
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Not specifically a question but I think it would be good for the researchers to see what connection (if any) between autism and autoimmune/inflammatory disorders like cystic acne, chronic fatigue, allergies, thyroid problems etc.
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Agreed! And I’m also curious about the link between EDS/hypermobility and autism, and the mechanisms behind it. I saw a research paper the other day that mentioned that there might be an immune dysregulation link between the two, and I would love to learn more about that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/
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I’d like to see research on the correlation between mothers going to work and autism in the US – comparison to the UK and/or England would be good too. And also changes to preschool & kindergarten.
This is what I’m wondering – most women in the US had little opportunity other than to stay home parenting their kids until 19??
And families stayed closer together in the US until when? I’m guessing it changed in the urban areas faster?
I know my grandfather moved across the country to get away from his racist family that were descendants of slave owners.
So at some point moms started having less and less support from family nearby and neurodivergent ones had more opportunities to work. So it was easier to send the kids to daycare/school. When daycares, preschools and kindergartens were small and shorter, the caregivers could probably spot the kids that needed some extra emotional support/learning that they weren’t getting at home. But those moms couldn’t work full time because none of them was longer than a half day when I was in kindergarten. Did the schedules expand because more moms went to work? Or vice versa? Same with class sizes? Either way, larger classes meant more kids were getting emotionally neglected, and instead of 1 or 2 in 15 kids needing extra support and kindergarten being pretty much all social and play based, now they are classes of 24-30 running the full school day and then maybe aftercare and way more of them are struggling and oh yeah, now they push reading and academics that early. Anyone remember those “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” posters? It was true, and sadly not so much anymore. And with families dispersing more, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins aren’t around to take up that slack either.
I know my grandma worked and had 5 kids. And my mom had to work too. I remember there were so many of us “latchkey kids” who were unsupervised and alone every afternoon after school, from maybe 5th or 6th grade through high school. Maybe earlier. I think I might have been walking my brother the mile home from school when I was in fourth grade and he was in first?
Before I had my kiddo I had learned that having a primary caregiver for at least the first year, and preferably the first three was important. I didn’t learn that I needed to learn to self regulate, and that by not working at eye contact or babbling back that I was neglecting my kiddo. I babywore, I breastfed until 3.75 and I still neglected my kid. And I’m still doing it now because it takes so much effort to self-regulate. I’m doing better, but I can still see I have a lot of room for improvement.