Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) has developed many empirically validated techniques to help those with autism communicate more effectively.
The post Enhancing Communication Skills in Individuals with Autism: An ABA Approach first appeared on The Mom Kind.
Darlene Lancer, JD, LMFT explores the causes and effects of generational trauma.
Autistic burnout is a feeling of chronic fatigue and stress
The post Autistic Burnout: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on AngelSense.
Self-advocate Emily Carter explores the complex dynamic created when OCD and grief intersect.
Karen Weeks explores the unique talents of neurodivergent entrepreneurs, and shares the steps needed to begin a business.
Professor Ken Gobbo explores the working method of dyslexic artist Chuck Close, and how it can benefit the work of neurodivergent people.
Pediatric Neuropsychiatrist Dr. Sarah Levin Allen demystifies the work of people in her field, and explains the benefits of evaluations.
As humans, we all mask our true feelings at some
The post Behind the Mask: Understanding Autism Masking and How to Foster Authenticity appeared first on AngelSense.
Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash
Core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.
Life
Spirits
Love
Sensitivity profiles
Culture co-evolution
The human spirit within Gaia
Becoming aware of cultural bias
Reviving trust in humanity
Making sense of the world
Join us!
Life
Life creates conditions conducive to life – Janine Benyus
This simple definition or observation strongly hints at the fact that dynamic process of life consists of feedback loops.
Life is entirely entirely relational, it is sacred, cyclical, fleeting, compostible, nested, regenerative, and it forever remains mysterious for all participants.
Spirits
Any high-dimensional space that provides a reasonable description of Gaia, i.e. all of life, including the potential of homo ecologus, is best conceptualised entirely relationally, from the very bottom layers of physics upwards.
Life consists entirely of relationships, which are feedback/learning loops, and these in turn, in aggregate, constitute the building blocks of what in our human animal scale perception is experienced as consciousness. There is no shortage of people who conceptualise life this way. This becomes very obvious when studying Eastern spiritual and philosophical texts.
As humans, with our human limitations, we will never be able to scientifically “prove” to any quantifiable level of certainty that consciousness emerges in this way, but science will also never be capable of disproving that consciousness emerges and exists in this way. This in no way means that science is useless, it simply highlights the limits of science, which are part of the limits of human comprehensibility. In the same way, in the abstract symbolic universe of mathematics there are statements can’t ever be proven to be true or false, and we are not even equipped to identify all such statements.
At the spatial and temporal scales that are relevant for biological and ecological systems, the smallest feedback loops emerge between molecules, resulting the mind boggling complexity found in cell biology and the molecular genetic code. These feedback loops scale up to the largest feedback loops between bioregional terrestrial and marine ecosystems within Gaia. The widely popular anthropocentric conceptions of “consciousness” at best generalise to animals with brains, but exclude all other feedback loops in living systems from contributing to the lived experiences of consciousness at much smaller and much larger spatial and temporal scales.
Powered-up (positive) feedback loops are those feedback loops in which, over time, more information (whether molecules or in a more abstract code) piles up in some living cells or beings than in others. Such powered-up feedbacks are always temporary phenomena relative to the life spans of the living cells or beings involved.
The bodies of human animals grow to a certain scale, and then they stay intact for a human lifetime. During the lifetime of a human animal all the molecular feedback loops within the human body (between cells, between organs, etc.) are maintained in a de-powered (balanced) state, fed by external energy from living food, resulting in “waste” that consists of building blocks that are ready to be reassembled into new life by thermonuclear energy of the sun.
Similarly, social feedback loops between human animals grow into relationships, and healthy relationships then stay intact for a human lifetime. Throughout life, all the feedback loops within a healthy relationship are maintained in a de-powered state, fed by shared lived experiences and shared understanding, resulting in cultural output that consists of building blocks that are ready to be absorbed by the local ecology of care, and integrated into new relationships within the local ecology of care.
Panpsychism
A universe conceptualised entirely in terms of dynamic feedback/learning loops leads to a panpsychic philosophy in which consciousness is omnipresent, at all levels of scale, which is compatible with Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism. It invites us to consider non-anthropocentric viewpoints, it alerts us to the cultural bias that is inherent in modern industrialised notions of “intelligence” and “success”, and it draws attention to the lower and upper limits of human scale, including our cognitive limitations and emotional limitations.
Spiritual traditions
Buddhism also known as Buddha Dharma, is an Indian religion[a] and philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE.[7] It is the world’s fourth-largest religion,[8][9] with over 520 million followers, known as Buddhists, who comprise seven percent of the global population.[10][11] It arose in the eastern Gangetic plain as a śramaṇa movement in the 5th century BCE, and gradually spread throughout much of Asia. Buddhism has subsequently played a major role in Asian culture and spirituality, eventually spreading to the West in the 20th century.[12]
According to tradition, the Buddha instructed his followers in a path of development which leads to awakening and full liberation from dukkha (lit. ’suffering or unease'[note 1]). He regarded this path as a Middle Way between extremes such as asceticism or sensual indulgence.[17][18]
Buddhism focus on minimising suffering and unease corresponds directly to the strong active desire of hypersensitive neurodivergent people to minimise cognitive dissonance. It also hints at the social problems that arise when a culture has normalised or even insists on maintaining high levels of cognitive dissonance over extended periods.
Taoism or Daoism is a diverse philosophical and religious tradition indigenous to China, emphasizing harmony with the Tao 道 (pinyin: dào; Wade–Giles: tao4). With a range of meaning in Chinese philosophy, translations of Tao include ‘way’, ‘road’, ‘path’, or ‘technique’, generally understood in the Taoist sense as an enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality.[1][2] Taoist thought has informed the development of various practices within the Taoist tradition and beyond, including forms of meditation, astrology, qigong, feng shui, and internal alchemy. A common goal of Taoist practice is self-cultivation, a deeper appreciation of the Tao, and more harmonious existence.
Taoist ethics vary, but generally emphasize such virtues as effortless action, naturalness, simplicity, and the three treasures of compassion, frugality, and humility.
Daoist virtues and treasures align with the sensitivity profiles of many neurodivergent people and constitute a timeless critique of all anthropocentric empire building attempts going all the way back to the early Warring States period (c. 450 – c. 300 BCE), including a call for disengaging from and subverting such attempts.
Taken together, the core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are reflective of the commonalities found across many human scale indigenous cultures, including the virtues and operating principles found in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies. Foundational Daoist texts such as Zhuangzi also emphasise the important role of humour in subverting and weakening anthropocentric empire building attempts.
Love
All my work is rooted in caring deeply for the Earth, loving her deeply, and therefore never letting harm come to her… So i decided to tell the story of of my love for the Earth, which is staying alive, my love for life, my deep passion for life, because part of what has been exiled is life itself… I realized that what connects life to is love. The microorganism is giving love to the plant, the bee is giving love to the flower… The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.
– Vandana Shiva
The extent to which we are alive emerges from the products of mutual trust, commitments, and shared understanding and experiences in all our relationships.
By virtue of their scale and design, so-called “relationships” with abstract super-human scale anthropocentric institutions are devoid of genuine shared understanding and experiences. The more a culture forces people to trust and “invest in” such “relationships”, the less capacity we have for genuine relationships with living beings, the less our lives are shaped by mutual trust, and the less alive we are.
Once we understand these dynamics, and consciously reorient our lives towards human scale, the prospect of “collapse” of institutions can be understood from a sober perspective – as the expiry of a social license that was inherently invalid all along. There is so much for us to learn from indigenous societies that have not yet been fully crushed by the lie of homo economicus. This reminds me of Eduardo Kohn’s important book on anthropology beyond the human. Here is a good introduction:
We can understand relationships as continuous multi-modal de-powered dialogues within ecologies of care, including the resulting entanglements of our inner worlds.
A few days ago I listened to Richard Watson’s reframing of evolution, corresponding to what I refer to as collaborative niche construction and the compassionate framing of conscious evolutionary design:
It is refreshing to hear more voices arguing for reframing evolution in collaborative terms. This has become rare in the modern world, even though Kropotkin wrote about it quite eloquently over 100 years ago.
The compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy of the universe based on feedback/learning loops and the life affirmative language of ecologies of care.
Sensitivity profiles
All humans have unique sensitivity profiles that are shaped by our neurological baseline dispositions as well as all our lived experiences in the specific ecological contexts we have been embedded in. This is especially true for hypersensitive neurodivergent people, many of whom have experienced and been sensitised by traumatic experiences in a social world in which they are systematically marginalised, pathologised, and sometimes criminalised.
Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not).
The official diagnostic criteria for “autism” are deeply entangled with symptoms of complex trauma. Those who identify as Autistic and many other neurodivergent people clearly have uncommon baseline sensitivity profiles from birth, but then traumatic lived experiences in the modern hypernormative industrialised world pile on top. In the end it is impossible to say where “autism” stops and where “trauma responses” begin.
The conclusion is that every human is a unique repository of lived experiences. The paradigm of the modern medical model that is focused on diagnosing and treating individuals is limiting in many ways, and unless these limits are fully acknowledged, it can result in significant harm, especially amongst those who are intersectionally marginalised.
Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. Simplistic and pathologising diagnostic labels and therapies centred on decontextualised individuals will never be up to the job. Our unique sensitivity profiles, which encompass our entire nervous systems, in no way limited to our brains, shape our unique way of sensing and making sense of the world.
Those who have been actively involved in the neurodiversity and disability movements for a number of years, in particular neurodiversity activists who are committed towards genuine paradigmatic change, are advocating for intersectional solidarity beyond labels, and are taking issue with the cookie cutter categories found in the DSM that gloss over the uniqueness of every lived experience.
I relate to the following conversation with Minna Salami on multiple levels, especially given her transcultural context that spans Nigeria, Germany, Sweden, and other cultural environments.
Powered-up relationships (persistent unbalanced feedback loops) between humans generate cognitive dissonance, which is experienced as a dis-ease that demands to be resolved. There is ample evidence that ignoring or suppressing cognitive dissonance for extended periods results in mental, spiritual, and bodily diseases.
I have been testing this theory of cognitive dissonance for a number of years. It explains my own experiences, and it seems capable of explaining the experiences of many others I have shared the theory with. Interestingly, the theory nicely fits together with the results of Michael Tomasello’s experimental developmental psychological research, as well as with Camilla Power’s biological and cultural anthropological research.
Those humans who are labelled “hypersensitive” seem to be the ones who have a conscious awareness of cognitive dissonance and are compelled to take/avoid specific actions in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. Those humans who are not “hypersensitive” seem to be the ones who are able to tolerate cognitive dissonance over extended periods, and may not be able to connect the feeling or source of cognitive dissonance with their mental, spiritual, and bodily diseases.
Hypersensitivities and the uniqueness of sensitivity profiles hints at differences in the levels of conscious lived experience of specific events, and it leads towards a theory of compatible vs. incompatible sensitivity profiles.
The psychological bell curves associated with the Devil’s Sadistic Manual (DSM) effectively define the bandwidth of “culturally acceptable” human sensitivity profiles, and they discount and pathologise “culturally unacceptable” human sensitivity profiles.
Culture co-evolution
All major evolutionary milestones in the history of Gaia have co-evolutionary characteristics, including lessons from the the emergence and co-evolution of biological cells and the subsequent co-evolution of multi-celled organisms.
The empirical knowledge we have about cell biology teaches us a lot about the complementary roles of abstract symbol systems and semantics in co-evolutionary processes, it teaches us that evolutionary processes are inherently co-evolutionary, i.e. ecological processes rather than species-specific biological processes.
The semi-permeable membranes of cells provide a model for co-evolutionary processes between multiple living organisms that has been empirically “road tested” for billions of years by Gaia.
With the formal foundations of category theory, model theory, and denotational semantics, we are equipped to precisely articulate the interdependencies between abstract symbol systems and semantics, including the co-evolutionary processes that act on symbol systems and semantics.
Co-evolutionary processes between multiple cultural organisms are steeped in a paradigm of conscious collaborative niche construction rather than in mindless and extremely energy intensive and wasteful head-to-head competition.
Culture co-evolution at human scales entails the following:
The emergence of cultural practices between two regularly interacting human animals. Balanced relationships and de-powered dialogues are best understood and visualised as a feedback loop that results in a convergence and entanglement of our internal mental models and greater levels of shared understanding and compassion.
Within a human family or household that includes n human animals there are up to 1/2 n * (n – 1) relationships between human animals the co-evolution of relationships gives rise to additional cultural practices.
Empirically we know that healthy human cultural organisms consist of multiple families or households that collaborate and live together on daily or weekly basis to form a coherent economic resource sharing unit, i.e. a human scale cultural organism. Within a human scale cultural organism that includes m families there are up to 1/2 m * (m – 1) relationships between families that co-evolve and give rise to additional cultural practices.
Relationships between families consist of relationships between specific people. So at the level of a human scale cultural organism of l human animals and m families there are a total of 1/2 l * (l – 1) relationships between human animals that co-evolve, plus 1/2 m * (m – 1) relationships between families that co-evolve.
Furthermore, empirically we know that human cultural organisms maintain collaborative relationships with a number of other human cultural organisms, which in turn consist of relationships between specific people, resulting in the co-evolution of interacting cultural organisms.
This provides us with a human scale framework to think and reason about cultural evolution with an entirely collaborative frame of omni-directional learning.
From within a co-evolutionary frame it becomes obvious that all head-to-head competitions are best understood as short-term and energy wasting distractions that are best clamped down on as soon as they become detectable within a family, within a cultural organism, or between cultural organisms.
These are the cultural foundations that are top of mind in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies, and the resulting cultural practices are the product of 300,000 years of culture co-evolution. This tells us everything we need to know about the priorities of values in healthy life affirming cultures, and it explains the continuously growing popularity of the Open Space approach to omni-directional learning introduced by Harrison Owen in the 1980s.
Hunter gathers and the work of academics like Eduardo Kohn expand the above co-evolutionary frame to relationships beyond the human. The collaborative frame beyond the human is also clearly visible in the observations and writings of Pëtr Kropotkin from 1902.
The cognitive and emotional limits of human scale become visible and obvious in the non-trivial challenges of preventing and de-escalating head-to-head competitions and conflicts between cultural organisms. However, there are well-documented examples of egalitarian societies that have apparently been successful at minimising head-to-head competitions and conflicts between cultural organisms over hundreds and thousands of years. We would do well to learn from such cultures, and then to apply what we learn to the design of digital communication, collaboration, and design tools for the next 200 years and beyond. The number of initiatives heading in this general direction has been slowly but steadily growing over the course of the last 20 years. The work of Brett Victor is another example of an initiative that has been going for 10+ years.
Beyond human scale, we can relax and have faith in Gaia’s wisdom. This is very much in line with the spirit of Open Space. Where invited, we can provide palliative care to the dying super-human scale institutions, including relevant education towards safe and viable exit paths for the inmates.
The human spirit within Gaia
Humans evolved to make sense of the world at human scales:
The human nervous system is a sense making organ that evolved to integrate at human scale into a human scale cultural organism, within which culture operates mainly as an energy saving tool.
Human cultural organisms save energy by engaging in collaborative niche construction with a conscious primary focus on group wellbeing, and this has allowed humans to colonise and adapt to nearly all terrestrial ecosystems on the planet.
Collaborative niche construction often even extends to relationships between local human cultural organisms, but it does not scale beyond the cognitive and emotional limitations of human scale. Therefore conflicts easily emerge when the local group size or the local density of groups exceeds these limits. Maintaining egalitarian collaborative relationships between human scale groups is stretching the limits of the human capacities for language and culture.
As part of an Open Source human scale heritage for future generations of humans, it is precisely in the context of collaborative niche construction that transparent and appropriately designed digital technological guardrails around the human capacities for language and culture could become the tools that extend the reliability of human collaborative niche construction to larger scales, without centralising any decision making powers in the hands of strongmen.
It is time to replace the 10,000 year old misguided faith in power drunk strongmen by a scientifically enlightened faith in 4+ billion years of Gaia’s evolved wisdom.
Radical egalitarianism is the architecture of the adaptive intelligence of the human species. This architecture differs significantly from the nervous systems of other primates, because other primates do not have comparable capacities for language and culture.
The primate nervous system is a sense making organ that evolved to integrate into small flexible competitive alliances within the context of a social dominance hierarchy, within which culture operates mainly as a social power amplifier within conflicts.
Primate alliances amplify social power to weaken the position of social power at the top of the hierarchy, this is the paradigm of “collaborate only to compete”, which introduces an element of opportunistic cooperation that is only just sufficient for maintaining overall group coherence.
Primates do not consciously trust the collective intelligence of the group, and the primary focus of their mental faculties is the navigation of competitive social dynamics within a “collaborate only to compete” paradigm. This limitation, compounded by their lack of symbolic language, prevents them from developing a collective primate group scale repository of cultural wisdom and collective understanding of the local bioregional ecosystem that persists, is transmitted reliably, and evolves over the course of many generations.
If we think of human nervous systems as outlined above, it becomes obvious that:
The course of evolution of the human capacities for language and culture has optimised for continuous collaborative niche construction based on stable relationships within human cultural organisms.
Human gene-culture co-evolution will have favoured the dimensions of variability and diversity that we observe between individual humans today. Human neurodiversity is best studied and understood at human scale.
It only makes sense to explore adaptive levels of human diversity vs maladaptive levels of human diversity or uniformity by comparing human scale cultural organisms.
It is absurd to attempt to define “normal” or “adaptiveness” at the level of individual humans.
These observations give us a framework for positioning and reasoning about internalised ableism. WEIRD societies have become detached from the evolutionary roots of our capacity for culture. We are surrounded by Guy Debord’s Spectacle. Not only is hardly anything ever is what it seems to be, from an atomised individualistic position, surrounded by self-interested homo economicus, we can only anchor ourselves in the non-human biological world, and we have to treat all human cultural construction with suspicion.
This is a world where, in the absence of trust based human scale ecologies of care, institutionalised BS in the form of corporations led by strongmen is the only accessible anchor point for the social world, especially given that nearly all digital means of communication have been seized by corporations.
In the cultural metamorphosis that is in progress, Gaia is the only true authority. Every year she speaks with greater authority to all of us.
Becoming aware of cultural bias
To become consciously aware of cultural bias across all human endeavours, it helps to think of as academia as consisting of two subsystems that are connected via a learning / feedback loop, roughly as follows:
Human cultural output as part of Gaia
the humanities
mathematics
statistics and engineering
Human attempts at understanding Gaia
global studies and political science
the earth sciences
physics
chemistry
ecology
all of biology minus WEIRD bias in evolutionary biology
the medical sciences minus WEIRD psychiatry
the social sciences minus WEIRD psychology
With these distinctions in mind we can critically examine our understanding of Gaia in terms of the humanities, the mathematical disciplines, and the statistics and engineering that are framing our scientific investigations. We can become explicit about all the cultural assumptions that underpin the sciences. Mathematics stands out as the one discipline that is religiously focused on making all assumptions explicit.
Distinguishing human cultural outputs from empirical scientific human attempts of understanding Gaia brings internalised ableism into the focal point of a critical lens, linking it to the modern human predicament, and exposing the dangerous levels of pseudoscience in the dark triad of “scientific” disciplines hinted at in the conversation “Artificial Intelligence, Dark Patterns, and the Digital Economy” with Stuart Mills:
WEIRD economics (economics & business administration)
the psychologically “normal(ised)” WEIRD human (psychiatry & psychology)
digital automation of WEIRD behaviour (computer science & data science)
The questionable social license of this triad of WEIRD disciplines mainly tends to be constructed by referencing results from the other two elements of the triad, and manifests in a language that normalises violence.
The cultural challenge in engineering is an active disinterest in making all assumptions explicit, and instead, as needed, relying on WEIRDly convenient assumptions baked into the dark triad of “scientific” disciplines to advance the arrow of “progress”. This is reflected in the “shut up and calculate” attitude to unknowns and the glaring absence of any sensible scale aware precautionary principle.
A perhaps less obvious dimension of completely “normal” internalised ableism manifests in the age bracket in which homo economicus is considered to be “productive” or “useful”, i.e. employable and exploitable for profit, roughly the period between the ages of 20 and 65. Everyone outside this age bracket is by default considered to be an economic burden in modern society, including the “costs” of educating the under 20s and taking care of the over 65s.
The religion of economics has legitimised an obsession with maximising the quantifiable economic “utility” that can be extracted from a human life. How else could anyone ever come up with the absurd notion of “net worth”?
Within the frame of maximising economic utility, in-depth intergenerational dialogues beyond those that are part of the indoctrination system are undesirable. Homo economicus thrives in environments of stratified age cohorts (generations X, Y, Z, …) that are competing against each other, thereby reducing valuable bidirectional intergenerational learning, and creating opportunities for marketing and selling age cohort specific commercial services and products.
Reviving trust in humanity
Nothing in the atomised modern social world makes sense anymore, because human scale cultural organisms, including understanding of the life sustaining and adaptive importance of such organisms have been eroded from living memory. The human spirit has been broken, i.e. faith in humanity and faith in Gaia has been shaken to the core.
All the dynamics that characterise a breakdown of honest communication in good faith, or a lack of experience with de-powerd dialogue / non-violent communication manifest in fairly obvious symptoms:
Using persuasive techniques to encourage another to adopt an opinion (ABA and the entire behaviourist bag of tricks) – rather than listening and engaging in deeper compassionate dialogue to understand the other.
Casting doubt on observations and assessments of another, in domains or contexts in which the other is more intimately familiar with the context – rather than listening and respecting the contextually informed observations of the other.
Ignoring questions that express a desire from another to understand motivations and expressed feelings – rather than openly sharing motivations and feelings.
There are likely further symptoms …
The competitive frame of homo economicus fully normalises the compulsion of being seen as “independent and strong”. Fears of exposing vulnerabilities pave the path for a culture of ubiquitous mistrust and mental health problems. This is the cult(ure) of internalised ableism.
This state of affairs leaves modern humans in a desolate, isolated position from which extending deep trust to other humans has become seemingly impossible for many. Amongst other things, we see this reflected in the AutCollab Research data, which clearly shows how much Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people would love to help others, including strangers in need, but at the same time many are [very] afraid to dare ask for help.
The deep indoctrination in the myth of homo economicus has also made modern humans distrustful of themselves. The vast majority of attempts that people undertake to become “successful” within the dominant cultural frame leaves people to conclude deep down that “there must be something wrong with me” and likely “I did not try hard enough”.
The result is an epidemic of self hate and shame.
The effects of self hate are amplified by the social standards and pathologising labels documented in the Devil’s Sadistic Manual (the DSM). David Mackler focuses on self hate inflicted by parents on children, but there are many other avenues within the toxic social system that lead towards self hate.
To make matters worse, on the few occasions where people “succeed within the system”, they must find a way of rationalising and justifying their “success”. This entails suppressing any negative feelings they may have developed on the path towards success, which in many cases involved ethical corner-cutting and grandiose perception management in order to “win” the culturally prescribed competitive social game. In other words, becoming successful usually involves suppression of our innate human compassion for others and in some cases knowingly inflicting harm on others in order to “win”.
The result is an epidemic of deeply suppressed guilt hidden underneath outwardly narcissistic behaviours in order to survive in a toxic life denying society.
Yet another perverse effect of the predicament of internalised ableism is seen in some of the WEIRD therapies devised to address the pathologies listed in the DSM, which basically teach therapists techniques for:
Making people feel better about themselves by identifying other people who have harmed them, which inevitably involves some attribution of blame, and thereby to some extent it distracts from clearly seeing the systemic patterns of intergenerational trauma that are at work.
Encouraging people to believe that working on “themselves” will eventually allow them to become “successful”, and thereby pushing people back into the environment that is ruled by the toxic rules for “success”.
These toxic patterns will never seize to be perpetuated until the ideology of homo economicus is discarded. Growing numbers of WEIRD therapists are leaving their “professions” or are seeking to leave their “profession”. Over the years I have offered peer support to quite a number of therapists and recovering therapists. I deeply feel their pain.
Everyone in the WEIRD world is to some extent entrapped by the system. Even those who are (re)learning local human powered subsistence level ways of communal living and surviving, minimising their consumption, often rely on some level of financial “investments” to sustain themselves, and thereby end up with one foot or at least a few toes in the toxic system, contributing to its continuation.
A healthier way to think about our remaining entanglement with homo economicus is to understand it as a form of palliative care for dying institutions, by incrementally equipping the inmates with viable exit paths. We can encourage the dying process of institutions as they are incrementally abandoned and become entirely obsolete.
2025 is the UN International Year of Cooperatives. Cooperatives Build a Better World, showcasing the enduring global impact cooperatives have everywhere. This theme puts a spotlight on how the cooperative model is an essential solution to overcome many global challenges.
Buddhist and Daoist values and virtues can provide overarching guidance along the way:
Minimise the human and non-human suffering on the downwards slope of homo economicus, and
Maximise joy as part of the metamorphisis of human scale cultural organisms in the cultural compost heap.
An obvious way of minimising human suffering is to share the framing and reasoning outlined above with emerging human scale ecologies of care:
to equip people to be more gentle with themselves,
to reassure them that you know that they are doing the best they can within the bounds of their human cognitive and emotional limits,
and to remind them that everyone can contribute to the metamorphosis by letting go of internalised ableism, by appreciating and actively supporting the work of those who are the agents within the metamorphosis, and by relying on non-violent resistance as needed to prevent avoidable harm and to support the dying process of the system.
Our nervous systems are deeply connected at human scale. We are embodied spirits, everything is connected. Interfaces limit our humanity. We evolved to be fully present with each other, without interfaces.
A lot of what I have been writing about over the course of the last two years can be understood as an attempt of making the insights of neurodivergent people like DJ White with unique life paths more accessible to a somewhat broader audience, i.e. the audience of all those who are part of one of the millions of emergent human scale cultural organisms that are growing in the cultural compost heap. Beyond alignment with DJ White’s advice on committing to a sacred mission at human scale, I relate to his concerns for the oceans.
My re-examination of social systems transcends old categories. It uses a new method of analysis (the study of relational dynamics) that draws from a larger data base than conventional studies. It looks at a much larger, holistic picture that includes the whole of humanity, both its female and male halves; the whole of our lives, not only politics and economics but where we all live, in our family and other intimate relations; and the whole of our history, including the thousands of years we call prehistory.
Looking at this more complete picture makes it possible to see interactive relationships or configurations that are not visible otherwise. There were no names for these social configurations, so I called one the domination system and the other the partnership system.
Once we understand these configurations, it becomes clear that the real struggle for our future is not religious vs. secular, East vs. West, South vs. North, right vs. left, etc. If you think about it, societies in all these categories were, and are, repressive, violent, and unjust.
The real struggle is within societies in every one of these categories, between people who want to move to a more caring and equitable world and those who still believe insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness – and all the misery they lead to – are “just human nature” – the inevitable result of original sin or selfish genes.
We’re all familiar with relations of domination and submission from our own lives. We know the pain, fear, and tension of relations based on coercion and accommodation, of jockeying for control, of trying to manipulate and cajole when we are unable to express our real feelings and needs, of the tug of war for that illusory moment of power rather than powerlessness, of our unfulfilled yearning for caring and mutuality, of all the misery, suffering, and lost lives and potentials that come from these kinds of relations.
Most of us have also, at least intermittently, experienced another way of being, one where we feel safe and seen for who we truly are, where our essential humanity and that of others shines through, perhaps only for a little while, lifting our hearts and spirits, enfolding us in a sense that the world can after all be right, that we are valued and valuable.
Our human yearning for caring connections, for peace rather than war, for equality rather than inequality, for freedom rather than oppression, can be seen as part of our genetic equipment. The degree to which this yearning can be realized is not a matter of changing our genes, but of building partnership social structures and beliefs.
In the domination system, somebody has to be on top and somebody has to be on the bottom. People learn, starting in early childhood, to obey orders without question. They learn to carry a harsh voice in their heads telling them they’re no good, they don’t deserve love, they need to be punished. Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force. The world is divided into in-groups and out-groups, with those who are different seen as enemies to be conquered or destroyed.
In contrast, the partnership system supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is also no built-in need for abuse and violence. Partnership relations free our innate capacity to feel joy, to play. They enable us to grow mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is true for individuals, families, and whole societies.
From Partnership 101, Riane Eisler, 2021
Making sense of the world
We are all compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company at human scales. We evolved to experience cognitive dissonance as discomfort and to strive towards eliminating it at human scale.
It is only when looking at the time scale of human evolutionary history that we can recognise powered-up civilisations as a cultural disease instead of confusing them with a misguided “arrow of progress”, and in the process tricking ourselves into believing that “progress” can be the result of homo economicus and tools designed in the image of homo economicus, amplifying the worst possible human impulses.
The term “intelligence” has been shoehorned into a very WEIRD anthropocentric notion of “success” or “progress” that is designed to compel humans to “live up to” the doctrine of the cult leaders of homo economicus. When “intelligence” (artificial or otherwise) has been reduced to anything that helps us justify and maintain our addictions in the face of growing levels of cognitive dissonance, can we sink any lower?
It is terribly easy to design tools that surpass human capabilities. We have been doing this for several hundred thousand years. It seems this has been forgotten. We are “great” tool makers, and always have been. Great in quotes, because our cognitive and perhaps even more so our emotional limitations can get in the way of us understanding the full ecological implications of deploying our powered-up tools.
Advanced tools in the hands of power addicts have always been a bad idea. As the saying goes, “a fool with a tool is still a fool.” We have have made the mistake of worshipping the human capability for advanced recursive tool design as “intelligence”. The result is a human social world devoid of wisdom and growing levels of cognitive dissonance.
Wisdom is the capacity to understand the difference between the human capability for advanced recursive tool design and human ecological understanding.
Gaia is calling for a conscious paradigmatic shift in the design of our tools away from the life denying religion of homo economicus towards a life affirming religion of homo ecologus. In the same way that badly designed digital tools can amplify the worst human impulses, well designed digital tools hold the potential to amplify the noblest of human impulses on our 200+ years journey of coming down from the carbon pulse.
Fellow Autist DJ White urges us to at least try to gently land the airliner of industrialised civilisation in a suitably flat corn field instead of hoping for some miracle to refill the fuel tanks while continuing at full throttle.
Join us!
Autistic, Authentic, and Autonomous ecologies of care beyond the human grow organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time. Join us!
The post Gaia loves making senses appeared first on NeuroClastic.
Autistic culture is a world of infinite diversity beyond the neuronormative imagination. Every Autistic relationship is unique, and many of us are traumatised. We need appropriate tools to invest in deeply understanding each other. Cultural metamorphosis requires radically reframing everything we understand about cultural adaptivity in terms of co-creating ecologies of care.
Cultural metamorphosis
Autistic
Human
Animals
Relational building blocks
The ability to extend trust
Shared understanding
Shared value priorities
Shared interests
Complementary interests
Sexual preferences
Gender preferences
Relational health
Essential sacred commitments
Unique sacred commitments
Communication skills
Energy management
Sacred relationships
Friendship
Partnership
Romantic partnership
Therapeutic relationships
Therapeutic friendship
Therapeutic partnership
Therapeutic romantic partnership
Toxic relationships
Toxic friendship
Toxic partnership
Toxic romantic partnership
Join us!
In the times we live in the demand for peer support and reliable emotional support routinely outstrips the available supply. This is reflected in overall mental health statistics, in the level of burnout, and we also see it in the quantitative and qualitative results of AutCollab Research. This article is motivated by the common reality of Autistic emotional exhaustion and lack of adequate peer support, as well as by the massive trust problems created by homo economicus.
My writing, trying to make sense of the cruel dystopian world we have been born into, and trying to articulate potential avenues that allow us collectively to jointly co-create ecologies of care takes a lot of energy, in particular emotional energy. No one can do this alone. I certainly can’t and I don’t pretend I can. I need faith in humanity to write what I write, and this faith is based entirely on a small number of amazing Autistic human animals in my immediate ecology of care. For this I am immensely grateful every day.
The modern world needs more intersectional solidarity across all dimensions, more dialogues, more transparency, and more compassion. In short we need to invest in deeply understanding each other, and this is what we are increasingly seeing on the margins of society.
In the socially toxic world of homo economicus, many of the basic relationship building, maintenance, and repair skills have been lost or have become rare. To relearn these skills, we need an Autistic Relationship Manual (an ARM), connected to a helping hand and a compassionate heart, which can be only provided by our uniquely amazing Autistic peers. This article can be thought of as an ARM.
Cultural metamorphosis
Cultural metamorphosis is a radical form of collaborative niche construction that requires us to reframe everything we understand about the cultural adaptivity that is at our disposal at human scale.
Homo economicus has pushed all life affirming human cultures beyond the cut-off points of the anthropocentric bell curve. The hump of the anthropocentric bell curve has become a hypernormative cultural dead zone paralysed by sanctified institutionalised BS.
Cultural healing requires the kind of deep and profound shift in trust from established institutions towards mutual aid and the community co-creation at human scale that indigenous Mexican scholar Yuria Celidwen talks about:
We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.
This shift in trust is already happening outside established institutions. It can only happen via self-selected and self-organising groups. I sense this is what we are already starting to experience on the intersectional margins of modern societies.
The objective of the Autistic Relationship Manual is to get people to start talking again, to catalyse further intersectional dialoges, and to let go of unwarranted fears and unwarranted shame, whether this is due to trauma or inhumane hypernormative culturally imposed expectations.
Metamorphosis back to human scale can be imagined as a cultural development stage for global intersectional and neurodivergent solidarity beyond the human, undoing some of the harm perpetuated in throughout the colonial and neocolonial era, at least for the generations alive today.
In the context of cultural metamorphosis, Autistic human animals are the imaginal cells within human scale cultural organisms. Globally, there are a few hundred million of us, spread across all continents and bioregional ecosystems, and this number does not even include the many hundred million of otherwise neurodivergent human animals. Autistic human animals tend to be highly concerned about social justice and tend to be the ones who point out toxic in-group competitive behaviours. We assist each other in co-creating unique Autistic relationships, households, and human scale cultural organisms. We co-create our unique families in our own space and time.
Yes, real change takes real courage. It shakes the very foundations of people’s understanding of the world. In difference to what Adam Curtis is hoping for, what we are seeing at the grassroots level are millions of beautifully diverse small green shoots at human scale. This is deep change, beyond any centralised powers of control.
In the context of healthy egalitarian human ecologies, Autistic human animals are best understood as the agents of a well functioning cultural immune system within society.
Autistic
The unusual heightened baseline sensitivity profiles of Autistic human animals means that they have a reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance.
Autistic human animals are unconstrained by culturally defined gender norms and have the capacity to relate deeply to other human and non-human living beings. Their sensitivity profiles limit their ability to think hierarchically and engage in transactional human busyness.
In the hypernormative culture that dominates the modern world, it is hard to explain to non-Autistic people what the immersion in healthy Autistic culture feels like and what the development of healthy sacred lifetime relationships between Autistic people feels like. In mainstream society people don’t understand how Autistic human animals support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination.
Human
It should not require mentioning, but in the hyper-normative modern social world, it must be stated and emphasised that Autistic human animals are fully human.
As humans we share an evolved capacity for developing and maintaining cultures and languages. These capacities allow humans to collaborate in flexible and complex ways based on shared intentions, a shared understanding of each other, and a shared understanding of our ecological context.
Our capacities for culture and language allow us to establish and maintain commitments to each other and commitments across human scale groups. Such verbal or written commitments constitute an effective human scale cultural framework for coordinating human social affairs.
Breaking our commitments makes us physically, mentally, and spiritually sick. Humans evolved this way. This is how we have become cultural organisms. Fully acknowledging this evolutionary heritage we must conclude:
Every relationship is sacred. No one should ever be discarded. This also extends to non-human living beings. No life should ever be discarded. We honour Gaia by appreciating all the living food she provides us with by committing to nurturing and helping all those living beings that sustain us.
Beyond our capacity for culture and language humans have an evolved capacity for pair bonding within the context of human scale groups, which can be understood as networks of sacred relationships, each of which encapsulates unique shared experiences.
Animals
In the anthropocentric modern social world, it must be reiterated that all human are animals.
Just like all other animals, humans engage in sexual activities, and we do so in very diverse ways. As human animals, our capacities for culture and language have greatly increased the complexity of our sexual imagination, and this plays out in the infinite complexity in sexual behaviour and rituals that are found in different cultures.
Please note that Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of cultural gender identities and sexual preferences. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism.
Similar comments apply to the cultures of all super-human scale groups such as modern nation states and corporations. Such modern legal fictions are incompatible with our human evolutionary history, and “universally applicable” social norms defined by such entities are causing untold harm on a daily basis.
Acknowledging that humans are animals includes acknowledging the absolute cognitive and emotional limits shared by all humans. In terms of our cognitive and emotional capacities and limitations, we are all much closer to each other than most of us are ever ready to admit.
Being conscious animals helps us regain some urgently needed humility, and should encourage all of us to honour Gaia on a daily basis.
Relational building blocks
Every relationship between humans is sacred, and every relationship is unique. There are no cookie cutters that work for everyone. However there are relational building blocks that can be used to articulate the unique commitments, preferences, and needs that define a relationship.
The ability to extend trust
The ability to extend trust is defined by the health of the ecology of care we are embedded in. Autistic human animals who are embedded in Autistic culture and a reasonably healthy ecology of care tend to extend deep trust, especially to other Autistic human animals.
In our times this is an increasingly rare sacred gift, which is easily exploited in unsafe environments dominated by internalised ableism. Carefully nurturing and protecting these gifts is a collective responsibility within Autistic cultural organisms. There is beautiful work for us to do.
Too many Autists end up isolated, in particular those who have a calling to be activists, who are so sensitive that they can not bear all the suffering in the world. No one chooses to be highly sensitive. No one chooses a calling. We are born this way. And we are fully human animals, with human needs. We are Autistic. We are not broken. To thrive we need to be embedded in a healthy ecology of care.
Too many of us die completely misunderstood. Many of us remember dear friends who are no longer amongst us.
Deep mutual trust is a priceless collective asset that is increasingly providing healthy Autistic cultural organisms with a unique collaborative advantage over traditional family systems and organisational forms.
Shared understanding
Some level of shared understanding is a prerequisite for any relationship to even get started. For example in this context it helps to know if the person you would like to form a relationship with is an Autistic human animal, as this can greatly reduce the effort and energy needed for communication.
Shared value priorities
Most humans, even across cultures, share many similarities in values. What really matters for relational health is transparency and clarity about the relative priorities of the values that matter most to us.
Shared interests
Shared interests are part of the bedrock of relationships between Autistic human animals, much more so than between non-Autistic human animals, who tend to have much broader interests in topics shaped by the surrounding culture, and a less deep interest or understanding of the topics they are happy to engage in.
When multiple interests are shared between Autistic human animals, it can result in unique friendships and romantic partnerships that go far beyond the limited neuronormative imagination of what is possible.
Complementary interests
Complementary interests are an optional part of the bedrock of relationships between Autistic human animals, more so than between non-Autistic human animals. Mutual respect and curiosity about complementary interests predisposes Autistic human animals towards collaborative niche construction and the formation of unique human scale cultural organisms.
Sexual preferences
Sexual preferences are an essential building block for all romantic partnerships.
Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of sexual preferences. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism.
Relax! When two Autistic animals meet, be prepared to be surprised and delighted!
Gender preferences
Gender preferences are an optional building block for romantic partnerships with Autistic human animals.
Hardly anything in the biosphere is binary. Yet the entire global digital edifice is built from zeros and ones. What could possibly go wrong? A substantial number of Autistic human animals identify as non-binary and have difficulty comprehending the concept of culturally defined gender norms for ways of pair bonding.
Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of cultural gender identities. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism.
In wider society gender expectations represent a minefield for Autistic human animals. A substantial number of Autistic human animals are equally uncomfortable with the both binary genders and corresponding cultural behavioural expectations. I have no idea of what others expect from me or what to expect from them if they identify as one of the two default binary genders. Every relationship is unique, and develops in a unique way. Cookie cutters don’t make sense to me.
Relax! When two Autistic animals meet, conformance with any WEIRD gender norms are often one of the least relevant aspects of the relationship.
Relational health
Every relationship between humans is sacred, and every relationship is unique.
The health of a relationship can be defined as the absence of cognitive dissonance in relating to the relationship from the perspectives of both parties to the relationship. It is sufficient for one person in a relationship to experience cognitive dissonance for the relationship to become strained.
The WEIRD modern social world many people were born into today has destroyed the collective ability for deliberation at human scale. As a result modern life is experienced as incoherent from the individual perspective, which is subconsciously attempting to generate coherence at human scale. When that process fails, nothing seems to make sense anymore.
The modern social world we live in can only be understood from the margins, because the very notion of sense making has been confused. This is no surprise, because our capacity for sense making operates at human scale.
Essential sacred commitments
There are no cookie cutters that work for everyone. However there are essential commitments that are part or the foundation of all healthy relationships.
Availability – both parties are committed to a comparable level of their availability to the relationship, which is determined by level of intensity of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments.
Full transparency – both parties need are committed to full transparency across all aspects of the relationship, which are determined by level of intimacy of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments. Of course full transparency means that some things may become impossible, and then one or more relationships in an ecology of care may need to evolve, including shifts in the circles of intimacy as needed. There is no need to discard any relationship. A binary all or nothing approach is a symptom of living in a toxic transactional culture.
Compassion – both parties are committed to mutual compassion across all aspects of the relationship to an extent that reflects the level of intimacy of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments.
Fairness – both parties are committed to egalitarian norms of fairness across all aspects of the relationship.
Conflict prevention & resolution – both parties are committed to promptly sharing and addressing cognitive dissonance when it occurs in any aspect of the relationship.
Unique sacred commitments
Beyond the five essential commitments, the foundation of every relationships is defined by further bespoke sacred commitments that reflect the uniqueness and the level of intimacy and maturity of the relationship.
Jointly developing and evolving sacred commitment is an important part of collaborative niche construction that requires us to
Communicate our needs and preference unambiguously
Learn to respect the unique needs and preference of others
Use dialogue to arrive at a point of shared understanding that eliminates cognitive dissonance for all parties involved
If cognitive dissonance remains in a relationship, it indicates a difference in sensitivity profiles. Reflect on whether it is conceivable that preferences converge over time or whether the cognitive dissonance is sustainable on an ongoing basis – it likely isn’t.
Therefore resolve cognitive dissonance by increasing your shared understanding, and rely on genuine compassion to adapt your preferences. The result is a unique relationship, defined by a unique set of mutual commitments and mutual respect.
Communication skills
Once relational health is understood in terms of absence of cognitive dissonance in a relationship, it becomes clear that all relationship problems can be analysed and understood in terms of communication failures.
Such failures need to be addressed by mastering and applying the essential communication skills needed to co-create, nurture, and as needed repair relational health.
De-powered dialogue – is the skill to engage in dialogue that remains free of social power dynamics, i.e. both parties actively avoid unilaterally imposing arbitrary demands or making use of coercive techniques. This skill can also be understood as the commitment to non-violent communication. Continuous dialogue in combination with commitments to transparency and compassion for each other allows almost all relationship problems to be worked out.
Consultation – involves the practice of always asking the other party for advice before making any decision that may affect the other party or the scope of the relationship in a significant way. The practice of consultation does not imply an expectation that all advice received must be followed, it is best understood as a commitment to mutual learning and as a tool for activating the compassion needed to maintain the relationship.
Conflict resolution – involves the consistent application of the conflict resolution strategies and tools that have been agreed in mutual commitments. In the case of reoccurring conflicts, it may be necessary to revisit and as needed update mutual commitments to avoid cognitive dissonance from becoming established.
Open Space facilitation – is an essential skill when embarking on economic partnerships. Deliberation in open space is the foundation for omnidirectional learning, for arriving at consensus based decisions without generating cognitive dissonance, and it allows groups to address potentially wicked problems.
Care circle facilitation – is an essential skill for the activation of compassion and related skills for reducing cognitive dissonance and restoring emotional energy levels.
The social motivation of Autistic human animals is deeply rooted in the desire to share knowledge and in the desire to learn, and this has big implications for the communication protocols that are used in Autistic culture. Very similar to hunter-gatherer societies, egalitarian Autistic cultural organisms are highly expert in group deliberation and decision-making which respects both difference and unity.
The topic of communication problems and failures in the context or relationships is broad and deep. It is complicated by internalised ableism, i.e. the communication habits for “success” mandated by homo economicus.
Hyper-competitive cultures value abstract social status symbols more than developing a shared understanding. This leads to entirely predictable yet unavoidable communication challenges that define Autistic social experiences. Ambiguity and plausible deniability is essential to “win” in social games. The objective of clear communication and the desire to be understood gets replaced by a desire to be perceived in a certain way, and a desire to “influence” people in certain ways for personal advantage.
When modern humans spend 8 to 16 hours per day in hyper-competitive work places and in consumer oriented digital spaces, ambiguous and deceptive forms of communication start to bleed into all aspects of life, resulting in a form of spiritual bankruptcy in which human spirits have been fused to the misguided fiction of homo economicus, resulting in chronic “normalised” cognitive dissonance.
Energy management
Our cognitive and emotional limits and reserves can be understood, quantified, and communicated in terms of energy spoons, for example by agreeing that 1 spoon = 1 hour of dedicated time.
Human minds are the tools that connect the physical dimension of our existence to other living creatures, and to a rich internal spiritual world, which integrates our own perceptions into a seemingly coherent representation of the external world around us. Human minds can develop amazing capabilities, but at the same time, our cognitive and emotional capacities are limited.
All our activities affect the levels of three complementary energy reservoirs:
Our reservoir of emotional (relational) spoons
Our reservoir of creative (internal) spoons
Our reservoir of labour (physical) spoons
The above diagram illustrates how these energy reservoirs are connected to dialogues, communication in open space, and routines in the physical environment to regulate emotions and stress.
We recharge our creative and emotional (relational) batteries by exhausting our physical batteries
We recharge our creative and physical batteries by exhausting our emotional (relational) batteries
We recharge our emotional (relational) and physical batteries by exhausting our creative batteries
Additionally Our emotional (relational) batteries can also be recharged when all participants contribute comparable numbers of emotional spoons to a dialogue or a dedicated circle of care
Sacred relationships
You have a full relationship driver’s license when you have established one or more lifetime friendships, partnerships, or romantic partnerships.
Sacred relationships are the fundamental building blocks of life. This extends to all living beings that are part of Gaia. When it comes to relationships between humans, there are three different categories of relationships that we can trace back to our evolutionary heritage.
Romantic partnerships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of sexual reproduction.
Partnerships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of egalitarian resource sharing within the context of human scale bands of hunter gatherers.
Friendships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of omnidirectional learning and mutual aid between human scale bands of hunter gatherers.
Note that these categories intentionally avoid the arbitrary distinction between “work” and the rest of life, which has only been invented to make the inhumane fiction of homo economicus tolerable for large parts of our lives. The resulting alienation and required split in our daily modus operandi of social affairs is a major contributor to the so-called mental health crisis, alongside the human created metacrisis that now has become and existential threat for our species and for many other species.
In this Autistic Relationship Manual (ARM) we define relationship driver’s license levels that can help us to incrementally relearn basic relationship building, maintenance, and repair skills and minimise human and non-human suffering during the unique cultural metamorphosis that is unfolding.
Since all human relationships involve two people, certification at any level is incredibly straight forward, a particular level is reached if the two humans that constitute the relationship certify the level to each other.
Certification of a learner license is a simple commitment to each other to learn from and with each other on the journey towards a full license.
Certification of a full license is the set of all the commitments to each other that are reached after seven years on a learner license.
Lived experience shows that any relationship that is still intact after 7 years is a lifetime relationship or has the potential to be a lifetime relationship. This holds for romantic partnerships as well as economic partnerships and friendships.
The guidelines articulated in this article are based on more than five decades of lived experience, including the development of an organically growing number of lifetime friendships, a long term romantic partnership that got reconfigured into a local economic partnership, and over 12 years of nurturing and operating a cosmolocal egalitarian human scale worker coop, i.e. the collective experience of a lifetime economic partnership between close friends.
The key to relational health is mastery of the relationship repair and reconfiguration skills needed to reduce and eliminate cognitive dissonance experienced by one or both humans in the relationship. Cognitive dissonance manifests in emotional pain. If allowed to persist it can become a chronic disease and a silent killer of a relationship.
The three categories of scared relationships usually build on each other, i.e. a friendship can evolve into an economic partnership, which in turn can evolve into a romantic partnership. Evolution is ongoing, and transitions between categories can occur on both a learner license or on a full license, and in both directions, depending on whether the level of intimacy and depth of collaboration is going up or down.
Across the board, along the journey so far, all relationships that completely expired and discontinued were relationships with institutions and humans trapped in the hypernormative world of homo economicus, i.e examples that illustrate the transactional and ultimately self-destructive nature of homo economicus.
Mastery of relationship repair and reconfiguration skills allows mature relationships that have lasted at least 7 years to be maintained indefinitely. It is a matter of being able to identify and address cognitive dissonance in a timely manner, on an ongoing basis, and as needed to step up or step down the intimacy level of the relationship to eliminate cognitive dissonance.
This relational approach to life is incompatible with the transactional cultural frame of homo economicus.
Relearning and mastering the relational approach to life is at the core of the cultural metamorphosis that the human species is currently undergoing.
Sensitive Autistic animals see and feel the pain of others, this compels us to help, this compels us to fight for social justice and for the overall wellbeing of Gaia. We see the trauma behind internalised ableism. We are in pain because we feel the pain of others.
Within the modern world, hypersensitive Autistic human animals are traumatised from a very young age. In particular all children are exposed in Homo Economicus from a very young age, by well intentioned parents and educators, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of the modern world.
So far, metamorphosis is confined to millions of embryonic human scale sprouts growing in the compost heap of homo economicus, engaging in omnidirectional learning. Increasingly these sprouts are connecting, resulting in the evolution of cosmolocal networks of friends on the margins of modern societies.
Friendship
You have a full friendship license if you have one or more lifetime friends in accordance with your emotional support needs.
Be honest with yourself and others when your friendship is at risk of expiring.
A friendship only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendships, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the friendship to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.
Partnership
You have a full partnership license if you have one or more lifetime friends that you collaborate with on livelihood co-creation and egalitarian resource sharing.
Be honest with yourself and others when your partnership is at risk of expiring.
A partnership only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join an open space for peer support in partnership repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious partnership, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the partnership to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.
Romantic partnership
You have a full romantic partnership license if you have one or more romantic partners that you share your life with in accordance with your emotional support needs and sexual preferences.
Be honest with yourself and others when your romantic partnership is at risk of expiring.
A romantic partnership only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendships, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the romantic partnership to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.
Therapeutic relationships
You don’t yet have the full relationship driver’s license if you are still on a learner license, i.e. you have yet to establish one or more lifetime friendships, partnerships, and romantic partnerships.
As needed, join a circle of care to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learners license for friendship or romantic partnerships, or join a creative open space collaboration to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learners license for economic partnerships.
Therapeutic friendship
A therapeutic friendship is a form of learning by doing in which you incrementally learn how to co-create and nurture lifetime friendships to meet each others emotional needs.
Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your friend as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for both of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills.
The bedrock of all relationships is the ability to engage in deliberative dialogue to confirm a shared understanding of the shared value priorities and the shared interests that define the friendship, and then to articulate this shared understanding in terms of mutual commitments.
As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendship.
Therapeutic partnership
A therapeutic partnership is an on-boarding process in which you incrementally learn how to co-create livelihoods and nurture lifetime egalitarian resource sharing partnerships.
Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your partners as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for all of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills.
A partnership only expires if a team has allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. Partnership health is maintained by operating an ongoing advice process on an ongoing basis regarding all decisions that can affect others in major ways, and by regularly meeting in open space to coordinate activities and as needed revisit priorities to adapt to changes in the wider ecological context.
As needed join an open space for peer support in partnership repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious partnership, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the partnership to prevent cognitive dissonance and misunderstandings from building up.
Therapeutic romantic partnership
A therapeutic romantic partnership is a form of learning by doing in which you incrementally learn how to co-create and nurture lifetime friendships that include meeting each others sexual needs and needs for intimate affection.
Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your romantic partner(s) as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for all of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills.
A romantic partnership only expires in case you allow cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support to learn about relationship repair and reconfiguration skills and, ideally jointly, explore how to apply these skills to your romantic partnership.
Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your romantic partnership, for example by learning how to articulate emotional needs, manage and regenerate your emotional energies, and jointly evolve the commitments that underpin the romantic partnership to eliminate any cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.
Toxic relationships
Your relationships are at risk of becoming toxic if you don’t have a relationship driver’s license and are too afraid to embark on a learners license, yet still proceed to establish friendships, partnerships, and romantic partnerships.
In this scenario you need to learn to be more honest and compassionate with yourself and the people you attempt to co-create relationships with.
Be gentle with yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. You are a sacred Autistic human animal. You are part of Gaia, and there are always people who deeply care about all aspects of your wellbeing. You may just not yet be clear about who these people are or where or how to find them.
It is when “relationships” become things to acquire and potentially discard that things become toxic. In the fast-paced hyper-competitive world of homo economicus the art of evolving, reconfiguring, and repairing relationships has been lost or is underdeveloped.
Homo economicus takes a transactional approach to all aspects of life, and thereby it fully “normalises” economic and emotional exploitation. This traumatises hypersensitive Autistic human animals and sets them up for recurring exploitation and the disastrous effects of chronic cognitive dissonance throughout life.
A commitment to activism, unlimited compassion for all living beings, and a seemingly self-destructive ability to extend and re-extend deep trust is the only healthy viable survival strategy. In a healthy society hypersensitive Autistic human animals help prevent the worst parts of our evolutionary heritage from overshadowing the strong uniquely human collaborative tendencies that distinguish us from other primates.
To be clear, the emergence and prevalence of toxic relationships is entirely a cultural issue, it is an issue of extreme social inequalities, hyper-competitive social norms, and an issue of (neo)colonialism. It is not an issue that can be blamed on specific individuals. Many people live in seriously toxic cultural environments. The emotional pain of trauma prevents them from being honest with themselves and others. They know of no other patterns, and deep down shame is a big issue. Sadly, in the modern world, psychologically genuinely safe relationships have become rare.
In a genuinely safe relationship there is no need to keep fears to yourself, or to feel ashamed to ask questions or articulate your needs.
As needed join a circle of care to learn how to muster the courage and learn the basic skills to embark on a learner license for friendship or romantic partnerships, or join a creative open space collaboration to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learner license and learn the basic skills for operating economic partnerships and egalitarian worker coops.
Toxic friendship
A friendship that is at risk of becoming toxic lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments to meet each others emotional needs.
Don’t lightly throw away your friendships! Learn how to repair, reconfigure, and upgrade your friendships before they become toxic beyond repair.
Toxic partnership
An economic partnership that is at risk of becoming toxic often lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments towards egalitarian resource sharing.
Embarking on a genuine economic partnership, especially with more than two people, is possibly one of the most difficult ventures that modern humans can attempt, as it involves unlearning all the toxic cultural assumptions that have been shaped by the religion of homo economicus.
And yet, or rather precisely for that reason, it is becoming an increasingly relevant basic life skill within the compost heap of modern industrialised societies.
To avoid partnerships from becoming toxic, it is necessary to learn how go through fire, to have difficult conversations that most people never dare to have, to either come out with all relationships intact at the other end, or to know how to arrive at a consensus about the relationships within the partnership that have become toxic beyond repair. In this process, all affected parties need to come to the table, and appropriate peer support from those with relevant lived experience needs to be in place to bear the emotional load.
Toxic romantic partnership
A romantic partnership that is at risk of becoming toxic lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments to meet each others sexual needs and needs for intimate affection.
Embarking on a romantic partnership is the second most difficult venture that modern humans can attempt, only slightly behind embarking on a (multi) lifetime economic partnership, as it involves unlearning many of the toxic cultural assumptions that have been shaped by the religion of homo economicus.
Relearning how to co-create, nurture, and repair loving and caring romantic partnerships is becoming an increasingly relevant basic life skill within the compost heap of modern industrialised societies.
To avoid a romantic partnerships from becoming toxic, it is necessary to learn how go through fire, to have difficult conversations that many people never dare to have. In this process, both parties need to come to the table, as needed with appropriate peer support from those with relevant lived experience, to bear the emotional load.
In a genuinely psychologically genuinely safe romantic partnership there is no need to keep your fears to yourself, or to feel ashamed of anything that may have happened to you, that you may have done, or that you may feel.
For Autistic human animals it is important to be fully aware of the beautiful infinite diversity and possibilities of Autistic relationships. This can not be reiterated often enough. We are not limited to the WEIRD culturally defined sexual preference norms and gender norms.
Join us!
Autistic, Authentic, and Autonomous ecologies of care beyond the human grow organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time. Join us!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eytfo-bjaPw%3Ffeature%3Doembed
The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.
– Vandana Shiva
The post Autistic human animals – a factor in cultural metamorphosis appeared first on NeuroClastic.
Sustained Potential as a Biomarker of Language Functioning in AutismApril 15, 2026 - 4:17 pm
Living Alone with ADHD: the Good, the Bad and the UglyApril 12, 2026 - 8:20 pm
Managing ConstipationApril 1, 2026 - 9:11 pm