Neurodivergent Menopause

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  • Polyvagal Therapy and Diagnosability

    In my certification course Inderbitzen was advocating for polyvagal model, opining that he was not diagnosable currently, though he had been diagnosed with [ASD level 1] as a young adult. I believe he said ASD is state specific, rather than being a permanent, lifelong condition. (There was also an address by Dr. Porges who didn’t go as hard on the state specific argument, just that polyvagal model can be helpful, though a lot of people in the Q&A seemd to think he was saying polyvagal model was a cure. This is probably why Dr. Porges’ wikipedia page is such a no man’s land.)

    Inderbitzen quoted a meme about our society produces no non-traumatized autistic people. This argues that the state of having diagnosable autism comes from a kernel of difference in society.
    But maybe he was actually critiquing the ADOS2. He called it the gold standard, so that doesn’t seem like he what he meant to do.

    When I say I don’t know if I have autism, I mean that I don’t know if I fall in the 15th %ile of the most autistic people. I’ve definitely had my moments. I’ve been assembling a list of them. But I don’t know how many of those may have occurred in a premenstrual exacerbation state. I know a lot occurred in what would prove to be menopause.

  • Masking

    I’ve been working on this book for about 6 months and in the last couple of weeks I completed an ASD Clinical Specialist certificate, which was 30 hours of lectures or presentations having to do with Autism.  Some of it was new, and not all of it was stuff I agree completely with (like the effect of polyvagal therapy on diagnosability).  It favored ASAN ethics (As of 2022) on how Autism would ideally be treated.  That is, behavioral goals need to be based on benefit to the autistic individual versus extinguishing traits of Autism because they are autistic.  Eye contact, for example, could be motivated by co-regulation, versus lack of eye contact being inherently regarded as weird.  What is the difference?  Whether co-regulation is occurring.  Is the eye contact feeding you or eating you.  Are you curious about a person, and looking at their eyes is giving you more information, or are you being tricked into it with some other reward and it is drawing on your resources to do it.  Now I don’t know if I’m actually autistic, so I don’t know to what degree I may be masking and what it might be costing me.  But masking is associated with increased depression and suicide ideation.  I relate to Martha Well’s protagonist Murderbot who observes that autonomy can be terrifying, but having a module in your brain that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying. (Network Effect). 
    I was able to have ketamine treatment one time and there was some part of me aware throughout which knew what I was experiencing was weird.  Positive psychology and ACT both rely on the experiencing self vs. the remembering (or thinking) self.  Afterward I thought of how I was like the nucleus of a seed, though eggs have more familiar layers to consider.  And so I consider my career masking to be like the shell of an egg, my blogging personal (peer advocacy) is like the membrane, and then there’s the air bubble, the white, the noodly bits, the yolk sac, the yolk, and on the yolk is the nucleus.  

  • Dissociative Anesthetic Therapy Experience

    It was interesting experiencing the layers, and I came back understanding self and ego and layers in between. I had often wondered if self was at a nexus of the 6 neurocognitive domains or an emergent property involving them. Part of being neurodiverse is the possibility that the answer is individual.

    I cam back with the idea of it being like a seed, though seeds only have several parts so I came to conceptualize it as an egg with 8 parts: shell, air pocket, membrane, albumin, chalaza, sac, yolk and nucleus. For me, nucleus was Self and shell was Ego, or my LinkedIn profile. But while nucleus makes a lot of sense, it’s not absolute and depends on where ones strengths and values lie.

    The neurocognitive domains are laid out in the DSM5 model of what is broadly termed dementia, but also reflected in the neurodevelopmental disorders: Memory, Language, Judgment, Attention, socioemotional, and sensorimotor.

    I often contemplate how these map onto a venn diagram of physical, mental and spiritual. But I couldn’t decide, between Attention and Judgment, which is more purely mental. And that can be part of my neurodiversity.

    Image PF Voss

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