Autism in Women and helping behaviour
Autism or ASD as it’s known now is a spectrum disorder that effects the way a person interacts with the world. We’ve been called calculating and logic based and unfeeling by professionals in the past. However, as more people on the spectrum are branching out on social media and other platforms. Attitudes towards ASD are beginning to slowly shift away from unfeeling little professors to something a little closer to home.
Women on the spectrum have long been overlooked. It used to be widely accepted that women could not have Autism and as such these women on the spectrum suffered. Autism does not often present the same way in women as it does in men. One of those reasons is that women on the spectrum tend to show a great deal of empathy and have a better emotional understanding than our male counterparts.
We may be little professors but that doesn’t mean we are heartless. Helping behaviour in an Autistic person is incredibly common. Wanting to make people feel better or to help fix a situation is an integral part of being human and people on the spectrum are human! Possibly more fundamentally human because many are not burdened by societal expectations.
Unfortunately, that means a lot of the helping behaviour that is exhibited can come across too strong or seem inconsistent with normal interactions and as such many grown women on the spectrum now limit their helping behaviours to those they trust and occasionally to their professional life.
Helping behaviour can be an incredible drain on the autistic person because it often involves a lot of contact with others and going outside their comfort zone. This means that many need to go away and rest to recover from being burnt out or melting down.
So when professionals in 2019 call people with ASD unfeeling or emotionally disconnected or worse. I laugh because they clearly have never dealt with someone who cares enough about them to drop everything and race to their aid. And that says to me that they should not be the ones diagnosing or “helping” people on the spectrum.