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ASPartOfMe
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Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 66
Gender: Male
Posts: 34,244
Location: Long Island, New York

15 Jan 2023, 10:43 am

The Problematic Issue of Boundaries and Autism
Jessica Penot, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor in Madison, Alabama, who specializes in treating trauma and autism spectrum disorder. She has over 20 years clinical experience in a variety of settings. She is the founder and director of Tree of Life Behavioral Health and has spoken and written about autism on platforms including The Art of Autism. Penot was diagnosed with autism in her 40s and has spent a significant amount of time working to understand the specific challenges and traumas women with autism face. Her research and work focuses primarily on issues involving the underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of women with autism and the impact it has on their lives and mental health. She is an advocate for neuroaffirmative approaches to treatment and works to help facilitate women with autism in moving from being self-critical to self-compassionate. Her perspective on autism comes not only from her clinical experience, research, and study, but also from her experiences living as a woman with autism spectrum disorder. Penot is also the author of 10 novels and books about exceptional women and girls who are born different and need to find magic in their “otherness."

Quote:
​I have struggled with friendships since childhood. This is intrinsic to autism.

Recently, a friend group I had been in completely dissolved. I struggled to understand all the reasons my friend groups always dissolve but I was able to sit down with my aunt, a notable social worker from Michigan—Kathleen Guiles, LICSW—and she helped me understand a major piece of the puzzle. She said, “It seems like you have no understanding of boundaries.”

I thought about it. I understand boundaries from a textbook perspective. I can set them in extreme situations but I realize that I probably violate others' boundaries and let other violate mine all the time. This is because my social impairment makes it difficult for me to see when a boundary is being violated. It is also because I have been trained since childhood to mask my autism and focus on others' needs above my own. My position as a therapist actually makes this worse. In this last situation, a woman entered my friend group a year-and-a-half ago and immediately began talking about the women in the group with me. I handled her constant negative talk of others like a therapist. I tried to help her set textbook boundaries and stop enabling and confront them. I became her counselor and I reacted to all of her behavior like a counselor, but the damage we were doing was far-reaching. I began to perceive my friend’s behavior exclusively through her perceptive lens. My advice to her led to fracturing within the group as she began confronting everyone and telling everyone it was because I thought they were toxic. Slowly, friends left the group.

This is a fundamental problem with all relational interactions for people with autism. Since we have had deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships in almost all contexts, we live lives of isolation. This means that when someone really wants to be close to us, we get really excited. In this case, I was so happy that this person wanted to spend all their time with me, I really couldn’t see anything else. This is common with many of my clients as well. I have had clients enter abusive and toxic relationships knowing they were bad just because they were happy someone was willing to spend time with them.

I posted about boundaries on my Neurodiverse Women page and the consensus there was that people with autism view themselves as burdens.

How do we overcome this as people with autism and how can those who love people with autism help them? It all starts with self-acceptance. It starts with teaching those with autism that it is OK to say no to things that make them unhappy. It is ok to say no if we don’t like something even if what we don’t like seems weird to neurotypicals. It also starts with realizing that just because you are autistic doesn’t mean you are always wrong. We don’t need to make neurotypicals happy, and sometimes they can be wrong.


Some sage advice from Jessica. This is something I and probably at lot of others here need to be reminded of often. I can be so hype focused in the moment I forget.


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman