Anxiety in Autism
There are three anxiety concepts that are going to help you to understand anxiety in general, and in an autistic child. 1. Anxiety is a result of how someone is perceiving life experiences. 2. Anxiety is almost always future focussed – anticipating a potentially bad or painful situation will happen based on experiences from the past. 3. Anxiety is about Control and Prevent Before we get into these three concepts, however, let’s first talk about what anxiety might look like in autism. In autism, anxiety can present itself in many ways, such as: Being more insistent on routines or rituals. Avoidance behaviours. Meltdowns. Self-harming including head banging, scratching, cutting, or biting themselves. Aggressive behaviours towards you or others. Obsessive behaviours like lining objects up, ritualistic behaviours or spinning objects. Stimming behaviours like rocking, spinning or hand flapping. Echolalia Anxiety – repetition of words, phrases or noises when stressed. Selective Mutism in social situations or when anxiety is felt. The challenging part of this list above, is that you may see these behaviours whether anxiety is present or not, so becoming observant about what is going on for your child will be imperative to helping you to help them to manage their anxiety. If the behaviours above are associated with anxiety, they are really just a symptom of what’s going on for your child, not the cause. To understand the real cause let’s look at the first concept from today’s lesson. Lesson #1 – Anxiety is a result of how someone is perceiving their life. When we experience an event, we experience with the five senses – we see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, and/or smell it. The sensory information goes into the brain for evaluation. The brain asks: “What is this that I see, hear, taste, touch and smell? Have I seen it before? Do I have a reference point of this event, or an opinion? What does this event mean and what does it mean about me and my survival?” The brain accesses the memories that are kept in the hippocampus and says, ‘What have we got stored in our memory bank hippo? Is this experience dangerous or safe? What do we need to do about this?” Depending on how your child is evaluating the events, based on their memories, beliefs or reference points, they determine a response – a physical response: their emotions and their bodily response like sweating, shaking or tensing; and a behavioural response. The behavioural response will always be an attempt to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. When trying to understand your child’s anxiety, we need to try to get a sense of how they are perceiving the events they are anxious about? There are several influences that have come from your child’s experience of life to date that may have become contributing factors to an anxiety mindset. Some of these could be: Someone of influence tells them what they should or shouldn’t do and they feel they have to play by those rules or else. Developing a fixed viewpoint of right vs wrong leading to inflexibility and fear of doing something wrong or fear of failure. Where your child is at in their brain development isn’t giving them the whole picture of how an experience will occur. Difficulties with social imagination can cause an autistic person to struggle to understand someone else’s point of view or predict their behaviour. They only see the outcome through their own perceptions and thus the world can feel very confusing and unpredictable. Experiences from the past where they have been hurt, scared or had an adverse outcome becomes their reference point of something bad happening again in the future. (PTSD may also be a contributing factor). Not yet having the skills to deal with a difficult situation (eg social situations) which may lead them to feel anxious and want to avoid certain situations. Inability to communicate or express their emotions and thoughts accurately. An actual threat to their physical or emotional survival (eg loud noises can feel like an actual threat to someone with sensory processing challenges). Because the brain is always interested in survival, it’s always looking to pursue pleasure or avoid pain. It’s trying to feel good and avoid feeling bad. That will always be the agenda behind our behaviours. It’s important to understand that what may seem like a perceived threat to you, may be an actual threat to them. For example, being in a shopping centre and being exposed to what feels like loud or traumatising noise, can feel like a literal threat to your child’s survival, but may seem insignificant to you. Therefore it’s super important to delve into the world of your child and try to understand – what must they be thinking to be feeling this way? What information are the referencing to be thinking and feeling anxiety? #2 – Anxiety is almost always future focussed – anticipating that a potentially bad event could happen. What makes this thinking / feeling / behaving loop even more complicated when it comes to anxiety, is the brain doesn’t just think about what’s happening in this present moment. It’s constantly thinking about what’s coming up. It’s accessing the hippocampus to reference memories, learnt knowledge and beliefs and using it to predict any potential problems in the future so it can activate the appropriate physical and behavioural responses that will prevent them from physical or emotional harm. The problem is, when the brain does this, the person feels this in real time. It doesn’t matter to the hippocampus whether the event is happening in the now or is imagining or anticipating a future, it still sends the same messages to the body to react the same. That means your child is often responding to an anticipated future in real time. You could be seeing avoidance behaviours or coping behaviours in a child when there doesn’t seem to be anything happening right now. Because their body is responding as if the threat is
