Episode 4 - Literal vs Metaphorical

 Carrie:  Hi! You're listening to In the Kaleidoscope, a podcast where…

Laura: …parent Laura

Carrie: …and child Carrie, talk about family dynamics when the parent is neurodivergent and the child is neurotypical.  Welcome.

Carrie: Today we are starting with the concept of literal. We're talking about literal versus figurative versus metaphorical, probably a little bit of black and white. [ laughter] And, and the reason we're thinking that this is like a good jumping off point is that we've had a couple of conversations over the last few podcasts, where it's like, we've noticed that when children try to approach something, literally, they can take it too far, like all the way into adulthood. We've also noticed that sometimes our neurodivergent friends, uh, get baffled when it doesn't make sense literally, right? When something doesn't actually make logical, literal sense. Then you have to kind of work it out and figure out what was the figurative mystery here.

Laura: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a thing for me now. I finally understand this with and with my partner, he will say something we'll get into a fight, he'll say, well, you always do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my response usually is, “I don't always do that. Sometimes I do other things.” And lately I've just had to stop my brain and go, he's expressing an emotion. He is not trying to state a fact and he's being metaphorical when he says “always” or “never”. I literally have to stop myself and inject those thoughts into my head before I respond. And sometimes I'll just say it out loud. You are being metaphorical here, and I'm going to process it metaphorically and not literally.  [laughter] She's laughing.  

Carrie:  Yeah, I love the idea of being in an argument. Somebody uses the always because everybody does that and they're always being--they're “always” being told to not do that.

And then they still do it and I love the idea of like a great response of being like, you are being metaphorical. [laughter] You know what? I am. I am in fact being metaphorical right now. Right, right. I feel so heard.

Laura: The English language includes a great deal of metaphor and poetry. So it is a valid use of the English language.   [laughter]

Carrie:  That's so funny.  [laughter]

Laura: I tell you. And you and I have that lately. I think it was like, was down there visiting at Thanksgiving and we were walking along talking about something and you were just poking fun at me. You poke some fun at me about something. And, I kept walking about 20 paces later. I was like, well, you know, I don't always do that. Sometimes I do this and this and this. I like totally circled back to it. And you were like. “Mom, I was teasing you.” [laughter] I was like, Oh, that's one of these moments. And I guess, um, I guess I'm only noticing it about myself that I had done this, but I've probably done it my whole life, but I did not notice it until  literally this year, every other time I have felt like I've been kind of like in the flow of the conversation or whatever, but someone's saying something that I know is not accurate to fact in my mind on my sheet of like topics I have this connected with the word lying, because in my brain—

Carrie: Oh, interesting.

Laura: …sometimes it feels like if I'm in the middle of an argument and somebody throws an “always” or “never” at me, I'm thinking they're derailing the conversation by now lying about me because I don't actually do those things “always” or “never”. Sometimes I do sometimes I don't whatever but like, and then I get angry because I'm being besmirched, you know, and they just it kind of escalates everything. Whereas if I'm able to go okay they're not, but at the same time when I am stating a fact, I want the fact I'm stating to be acknowledged as a fact, and not be taken personally, like sometimes arguments will start around here because I'll say something like, “the mail is not in here yet, is it?” And all I want is a yes or no answer. And the answer I get is, “well, I need to put my shoes on, I haven't gotten to it yet.” It's like, I get this whole paragraph, and all I want to know is, is the mail on the table? Because if it's not, I'll just go get it.

Carrie: So, you know, that's difficult, right? Because I think that maybe, it's hard for me to believe, [giggle] how about that? But maybe you are just saying the mail is not in here yet, is it?  It's just the content, right? But humans, maybe neurotypical, maybe any--hard to tell, um, actually, I guess, you know, tone blindness is tone blindness, but humans, if they're sensitive to tone, they perceive neutral as negative. So just stating content, like saying content will be perceived as a judgment, right? And it's, it's very challenging to receive content declarations like that and not assume a judgment because, what I would do if I were trying to ask that question, would be to like try to make it very friendly. Oh, and I definitely see you doing this in life. When you put on friendly voice, I'm just gonna do friendly voice. I accept it. I'm like, yes, I understand friendly voice. You got it. Turns off the fear response. But it is true that, just stating facts, because there's so much room for interpretation usually triggers a threat response.

Laura: Well, that's for neurotypical people. Okay. I'm going to really draw a dotted line here, because I just want people to just tell me facts and I want to just ask a yes or no question and get a yes or no answer.

Carrie: I'll say this, at work, I enjoy working, like once I know who is and isn't neurodivergent. Like with neurodivergent people, I just spew facts at them.  

Laura: Yeah. Yeah, baby.

Carrie:  I'm making like, I'm making like a shooting gesture.

Laura: Like a deck of cards. It's like the deck of cards.  

Carrie: Here's a bunch of facts for you, you know. And at most I ground the anxiety that comes out of what happens when the facts don't line up and people start to be like, all those facts, there's problems in there. And I go. Totally. And we're not going to freak out about it. [laughter] We're going to take deep breaths and we're just going to like work through the facts until the facts make sense. That's what I do all the time.

Laura: Rational. [laughter] Makes complete sense to me. So I don't think either one is right or wrong. I don't think either one is right or wrong. And again with the conversation with my partner and eventually, I want to extend this to what it was like being a parent talking this way is that, if you're with a person, mostly neurotypical people who are going to take something personally no matter how you present it,  because they've got a thing. They've got a thing in their brain that makes them sensitive to being criticized, say.

Carrie: Yeah. That's not fun. That that's, that's, that's not good.

Laura: Well, so at a certain point, I feel justified in saying, okay, that's you, I am just talking.  And you need to get that I am just talking and not constantly make me do the extending into your universe. It's gotta be a two way thing.

Carrie: The truth is, if you have a partner or an intimate person in your life, they have to learn that you just say facts. And they have to believe that or they're not going to understand you as a person, and that's just the way it goes. And that person has a hard time being close, right? It's just like, that's what closeness is.

Laura: Well, and sadly not having known this about myself until a year ago. I really did kind of absorb a lot of the tone policing I've received through my life. And okay, maybe I'll just say it this way and someone will like it better. So then let's take this conversation and move it to, I'm now the parent, and I am throwing facts at you guys. Like you asked me a question, I throw you facts.  And I'm going to think case in point about the lovely episode in your life where I yanked you across country from Los Angeles to new England in middle school, in the middle of the year.

 I can see now from where I am now, that's just a bunch of whammies. And it also was after two months of my having been gone, because I was working across country and you were with a sitter for two months. And then I came back from working two months and I said, Oh, we're now moving 3, 000 miles away from everybody. And your questions to me were not about, Oh, am I going to get a bedroom? Or, oh, am I going to, blah, blah. Oh, we're going to have more money. Those weren't your questions. Those were all the good points. You know, but those weren't your questions.  I'm going to lose all my friends. In the middle of the year, what's this going to be like? And I tried to give you facts.  I mean, which were to me facts. You're a fabulous person. You're going to make friends easily, of course. No big deal. And none of that helped until I got kind of more into the metaphorical zone, which was where I said you, “you have attracted this kind of person to you up until this point, you're going to go to this new port, and you're going to be the same person who attracts those same people to you.” That's a non-starter for me, from a fact point of view, because of course that's not factual that's hopeful, that you can maybe look at a trend. But I had to believe it enough so that when I told you, you also believed it, at least enough to keep you from completely having your brain fried by this. Now you've got your perspective on this that I would be delighted to hear, and to learn about that time in your life. So, in a sense, it's almost like as the neurodivergent parent, in circumstances like that, those are the times where you choose to mask and you choose to be the other kind of person, the more nurturing, more metaphorical, more figurative person, because you're talking to someone who really defaults to that more. Do you know what I'm saying? Is it making sense?

Carrie: Yeah. Well, it's interesting to hear your take on that because I mean, I have memories of those conversations and I know how it went, and it's just taking me a second to sew it together, make sense of it. It's interesting that you think of that as masking is kind of what's going through my mind. I think that for a child who is looking for reassurance, what you said was still in a way factually true. You know because, you're still just saying the facts. You have attracted this kind of person. There's no reason to not think---or there's no reason to think you wouldn't attract those people, those kinds of people again, and the facts are, there are other people that are similar to these somewhere else. Those are all technically facts. And then the kind of more squishy bit is like, do you have the capacity to do that? We'll find out, you know, but right now we'll give you the impression that you do. And I think, I think what's weird….I really--this is like a lot to process all at once. I didn't realize you were going to like talk about this.  

Laura: Sorry. I took it there. I took it there.

Carrie: My loading time is really long on this. There's sort of like a light indoctrination quality to what you just said, like masking on purpose, because It makes it palatable for the child to go do something---

Laura: Well, it’s genuinely comforting them in a way that they will feel the---like what I didn't say and what I never understood or acknowledged, because I didn't feel it was the idea that you were going to miss the friends that you had, and you were going to miss the people we knew.

Carrie: I mean, that’s a whole thing because there are a lot of people in my history that I missed that we didn't talk about, you know, there's like a lot of missing that was unacknowledged.

Laura: Because I don't miss people. When I move on to the new thing, I move on 100%. I don't experience that.

Carrie: Do you think that’s a you trait, or do you think that's a neurodivergent trait for you?

 Laura: I do not know. I would love to invite any autistic person listening to this to get back to us.

Carrie: I feel like you missed me.  

Laura: I don't--I, I mean, I, I adore you. And if I think about you too much, I miss you too much.  And so, then I shut it off. I've got a valve that I shut off. And I learned that from going to summer camp every summer, violently loving everyone I met there because they were the only people that truly accepted me.

Carrie: I see.

Laura:  You know, so for one, two, three weeks out of every year, I would be bathed in love. And then I would have to go back to this universe where I was being bullied and you know, whatever, all the stuff that was happening. And so I had to just--I'm going to see ‘em next year. I have to turn it off. So, I became very good at just living, leaving, which is why I move around so much. And I had no resistance to moving. In fact, sometimes I would feel like I'm wearing out a place and I'm going to go someplace new so that I can kind of reset. This was all long before I knew anything about being neurodivergent. For me, this is how Laura is, I don't think I miss people the way you see missing people described in like literature and movies or whatever. I don't, I'm kind of an out of sight, out of mind. I'm kind of a, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with kind of person.

Those are my two kind of themes. So, to be like empathetic toward you about the past is the past and I would probably have projected that, I see that as a weakness to be too clingy to the past and clingy to people that aren't around. And that goes all the way to your dad and how I didn't understand you were going to miss him when we moved across country and stuff like that, you know? So, I mean, if you had told me, I might've understood. What I'm saying is, it didn't occur to me that you were going to actually miss individual people when we moved across. I just figured you'll find replacements. That's what'll happen. Is that a neurodivergent thing or is that a me thing? I don't know.

Carrie:  Uh, yeah, we'll find out. Somebody might tell us if they relate or not. I have not necessarily felt like that was a neurodivergent trait. I see a lot of friends missing, pretty deeply. I know that this concept of missing is a whole, uh, there's a lot of depth there, I think, between us, because a lot of like---yeah, this is a whole other conversation, I think.

Laura: Well, just because there's something I do want to point out before we move on, was I love that we caught in real time you processing something. And I want to point out that I have had to--- this is a skill I've had to build, is waitingthrough the processing. When somebody I love is processing something in front of me, I have had to learn, I think this very much is an autistic trait, because I will just plow through and get to a conclusion as fast as possible and recognizing that I have needed to learn how to love someone who processes more deliberately and probably more deeply, or as I shoot right to a conclusion, like super-fast, but like hyper processing speed. And with the people I deeply love, I will do that. I take the time to do that.  I don't do it with everybody, and I don't do it every time either.

Carrie: Yeah, I try to say it out loud, you know, it helps my friends, because sometimes they won't hold space, they'll just rapid fire talk right past me. There are things I'm considering, like essentially what I'm doing in the processing time is not only registering how it made me feel, but also why and where the surprise is coming from and then like, what is and isn't safe to communicate right now. It's not like just what you said, I don't understand, right? Like, I definitely understand it. It's just the implications and all the connections to it. And then also like, those are very old memories. I try to say it--- No, no, no. I know. I know. I know. I know.

Laura: I'm just saying this. This happens a lot where people have to take a breath. I know you totally understood what I said, that's not in question. It's more like what your response--how do you actually feel about it? Where is it in your body? What is it bringing up for you? What does it mean? And  making a deliberate choice about what you want to share about it. Those things are all like me, I have had to learn to be present in that moment and not try to co-opt it, or try to push a conclusion. I suppose this--and we said this was about being literal, but I think this is also a lot about just communication in general. Like when you are in inner---

Carrie: Words.

Laura: Yes. [laughter] Rhythm, pacing, tone. I guess in this conversation, like if I was gonna draw a conclusion, which I will try to do with every episode of what I'm hearing. As an autistic parent, if I had known then what I know now…. holy cow, would I even have made all those decisions I made? I made a lot of snap decisions because they made logical sense to me at the time.  And I

didn't question or even investigate the repercussions of those decisions. I just figured everyone's going to be fine. And these were big decisions moving across country---for a little kid is a big deal.  And I had already done it a couple of times, so I thought, hey, no big deal. You know, like again, with the steam of me, just thinking of you guys as peers. And also if you're not involved in the decision, this is just happening to you. So, I can be literally telling you, okay, it's going to be---we're going to have a bigger house. We're going to have more money. I'm going to have a job I love for a change. It's you know, blah, blah, blah, this and that, this and that. And those things might all be true, but I was not---I did not investigate. All the other things that were also true, which is that this is---any change, good or bad is stressful. And this is a big change for a little body to have to go through.  And maybe all the autistic parents listening to this already know all this stuff. And they're like, you were just a bad parent in those instances that you did those things. [laughter] This could absolutely be true. Cause again, I'm just going off of my one data point.  I wish I had known more about the resiliency that my brain has for change, is not something I can expect of every person around me and especially somebody who's a little kid. I can't just assume that's there because they happen to be my spawn.

So I, you know, I mean,  it's, uh, I know….

Carrie: I mean it was hard.  I believed you when you told me those things. It was a weird time. I was also a child going through puberty at the same time, too. So, my body was confusing me in the middle of that transition. And I think in an earlier episode, I was talking about how important aesthetics were to me. I didn't even know that. And I got stuck with this jacket I thought was so ugly. And so, I just opted to be so cold instead of warm in the middle of winter. There's just like a lot of confusing teenage body stuff that happened at that time, way more kid complex than even what we just talked about here. Just being embodied through puberty at a time when they're in an environment where, for multiple reasons, you and I were not acknowledging bodily needs like physical or no, it was very, very logical. You know, we were deep in logic as a unit and that worked fine in some instances, but in a lot of places where we ran into trouble as a family unit, it was kind of like missing that body piece.

Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Carrie: Being a human. Yeah. Yeah. Attempting to humanize. Maybe we should revisit this at some point because I'm curious to remember why we brought up this particular memory as the example, because there's so much here.

Laura: Well, it was me communicating to you literally.  When there were feelings happening.

Carrie: I could tell you a time when you did that and it was very helpful to me, like this may be a memory, something we've already talked about, but I'm in third grade, and this woman -- this girl, my peer, I'm in third grade, so she’s not a woman. We're both children.

Laura: She’s a woman now. [laughter]

Carrie: Yeah, but she's doing things like, really sassy things, you know, I think the experience was were at Girl Scouts, and she knew who my crush was, his name was David. And in the middle of Girl Scouts, she was like, “I asked David to kiss me and he did.” And then I sat there like, oh my gosh, how could this be? Oh, maybe she doesn't know. Then she sat down and she looked at me and she said, ”does that bother you?” And I was like “nooo”, I don't know. I feel like the game here is that I am bothered. So I'm not gonna do that. [laughter] Also, I went home and I was like, how could she? you know, and you just went through the facts, like what could be happening at home, where she could be in her mind, as a child.

Laura:. So, to me, I heard your literal words were like,” why is she doing this?” And I was like, okay, let's peel apart why she might be doing it.

Carrie: That was helpful.

Laura: Okay. [laughter]

Carrie: That was great. You know?

Laura: But a lot of times you could just go, “Oh, it's shitty that she's doing that. That's just shitty.”

Carrie: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be less helpful because, I was literally asking. This is what I mean. I feel like we might want to revisit this topic because, there's something to talk about between a child asking for literal information and the fact that you gave me literal information back whenever I asked for it.

And there is, there's a lot of kids who don't get that. They get, they get the metaphorical, figurative response that's missing the literal info. Now, getting information when you're not asking for it, too much, overloading. But as a kid walking in and being like, why would she blah? I think a lot of times parents don't realize that is a literal ask for information or it could be, and you could provide the actual information when asked, which is like, I mean, it's a similar story.

It came up in my mind because it's similar to when I'm like, I'm going to leave all my friends. How am I going to recover? I think probably what we didn't cover was like, I am sad that I'm going to leave all my friends, right? I'm grieving, I'm about to grieve now, but you still gave me the information I could use to stitch together how I'm going to make friends. There were nuances to it, there were problems when I got there, like I only had one pair of pants and everybody noticed because I was wearing the same pair of pants every day in Massachusetts that I had from LA---

Laura: Which was because living in LA, she had shorts and skirts, so it's not like she didn't have clothes.

Carrie: It’s warm.

Laura: So she had to wear that same pair of jeans over and over.

Yeah, I know. I only had one pair of pants, and then it's just like, for a minute, we went and got ‘em.

Laura: But you were tan. You were tan in the middle of January. [laughter]

Carrie: I was so tan. I was tan and I was like, I had no embarrassment. I was like, leave me alone. I'm from L. A. This place is lame.  I was so sassy.  [laughter]

Laura: Okay, so do you want to pick this up more the next time? It's going to be a few weeks from now that we actually record.

Carrie: Yeah, I think we can think about it. I think that there's something there, you know, I guess the thing that I would say to you publicly, if we keep it in the podcast, “you're listening to podcasts”, um, is that it's not all about what you did wrong. It's not all about that. It's like, it's also some stuff that really works that other kids don't have access to. I used to call my friends. And have them come talk to you when they were stressed about certain things, because you would just give them information that they weren't getting from other parents.

Laura: Interesting, yeah.

Carrie: Like sometimes you just need the information to be able to know what the hell is going on.  

Laura: And I did have an assumption going on. My assumption always was that, if the individual human being in front of me is advanced or has matured enough to have the question, they deserve to have the answer. And it's not like saying you're too young or we'll get to that, you won't understand that now or whatever. If they're asking the question, they need to understand it right now. That was always my conviction or, you know, they need to understand something.

Carrie: If anything, it seems like when I review my history here, it seems like what I could have used is if I didn't directly ask for information, but it's like, could you tell--I don't know how to fill that in. I don't know what to do to for that.

Laura: I think I could have been more intentional about--- I'm very good at asking, what do you think about something? I could have been more intentional about asking, how do you feel? More, where is this in your body? I mean, nobody knew anything like somatic back then, but  now I would say, ask the person where are you feeling it? I do that with my adult friends now. Where are you feeling it in your body?

Carrie: I do that too.

Laura: Yeah. It's like revelatory. It's almost like there's three, well, it's the body, mind, spirit thing that you're trying to cover all of them when you're processing something with somebody, so yes, you want the intellectual answer. You want to be in touch with your feelings about it, and you often get to that by figuring out where you're feeling it in your body, trying to present that complete picture. Whereas me as an autistic person, I was so in my brain all the time, I was very cut off from my feelings because I was told all of my feelings were invalid as a masked autistic person. So, I was masking all of them until the last four years of therapy that I'm finally getting in touch with my feelings.  So that's another whole thing we can talk about. And maybe that's the thing we can talk about next time too is, feelings versus thinking for the two neurotypes. And you know, how do they overlap. So yeah, more of this. We've done it for this one too, and do you want to do the closing thing? And I think we should, I like our little “bye!” at the end.

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah.  Okay. Thank you for joining us on our podcast In the Kaleidoscope. I hope you tune in next time for the next episode, which seems like it's going to be, what'd you say it was?

Laura: It might be the body, mind, spirit.

Carrie: We'll find out.

Laura: We'll figure it out. Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, it'll be a continuation of this discussion of some kind. Bye!