'There is choice in every moment' - IFS for autistic experiencing

Autistic experiencing and IFS therapy - discovering and releasing from autistic corners

Neurofriendly Therapy

I am getting to know the parts of me in IFS therapy. And as I am also now offering this modality of therapy to my clients. I‘m trying it out to test the waters - see how aspects of autistic experiencing may appear within the parts exploration and how this might come up in my work with others.

I won’t share all of what I explore in therapy, but I am happy to write about certain aspects of it and how it relates to autistic experiencing.

So the part I’d like to just explore in writing right now is a part that likes being told what to do. I notice so strongly how that part feels relieved when someone says, ‘…if you do this, then that’ll work’ of ‘Just do that’ or responds to me in an advisory role. (Although sometimes I also have a rebel part which wants to tell peoples’ advisory parts to ‘go away’ to be truly honest with you’!).

I realise that there is a strong autistic aspect to this constellation of experiencing.

For instance, I am currently a subscriber of Which magazine. It tells me what products to purchase. Overwhelmed with choice and the issue of detailed research, this part feels reassured by someone else doing the research and telling me what to buy. And that’s fine really. It’s not a big issue – it’s a great solution for the part that gets exhausted by too much research. I got myself a walking machine because the part that likes to be ‘told’ stuff was told that walking is one of the best things you can do.

But when does this part that ‘likes to be told what to do’ become a problem?

Well, it could be high risk in so many ways couldn’t it?

Staying somewhere past the point your body is telling you to leave. Complying with someone because they’ve adopted an advisory tone, regardless of whether what they’re advising is good for you. Following a rule you never actually agreed to, because it arrived disguised as consensus rather than as a request.

I remember working with a client who had a rule which was ‘you can’t leave a party – you just stay till the end – that’s what everyone does so you do that too’. Even though he was exhausted, he had been ‘told what to do’, not explicitly by anybody, but just by a societal norm that lived in the ether. Sometimes in therapy with neurodivergent people what we look out for are curses that have descended without us quite realising and seeing how it may be possible to break those curses. That day, I remember clearly in therapy, we were talking on the phone about that rule around ‘when to leave a party’ and he was so surprised when I said, ‘how is it for that part to know that you can leave when you want to, you can leave when your body has said it has had enough’. He was surprised.

What broke the spell, I think, wasn’t a new rule to replace the old one. It was that the authority moved. It went from living outside him in the unquestioned etiquette, in what everyone else apparently does - to living inside him, in his own body’s signal of enoughness. That’s the whole difference between a rule and a choice. Lighting up the element of choice is one of the foundations of neuro-affirmative therapy. Ableism, which hides in plain sight in phrases such as ‘you’re too sensitive’, ‘no one goes home from a party early’… these expectations of how a person should be disintegrates choice in a way that we don’t notice. The image that comes to me is of ableism being like an iron that completely flattens autonomy and self-direction until it seemingly disappears.

When we begin to practice listening to our parts, we can begin to honour their needs and that’s where choice comes in. Consent to stay or consent to go.

I sometimes call these stuck places ‘autistic corners’.

It makes me wonder where the autistic corners are in my own life – and are they to do with parts that have an external locus of evaluation or are they to do with going with one rule because having too many choices makes life just too uncertain and the boat of life that I’m in just way too unsteady.

I eat the same yogurt for breakfast every day. It eliminates the issue of choice and means I get blueberries every day, because I read somewhere that they are a superfood therefore I must eat them. All of my parts are happy with this decision.

But where are my autistic corners that I haven’t even noticed? Where do I get stuck in rules of life that I may not even notice are there?

Intarsia in a studiolo originally from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, Italy, now housed at the MET, ca. 1478–82 — Source.

(This image calls to mind how at the heart of it all is being able to find our way to our inside selves that know the way forward. There are doors that can open if we can listen in).

Towards the end of our therapy session my IFS therapist said “There is a choice in every moment”. It felt to me like a glowing pebble of possibility. To the autistic corner part of me, that corner of me looked at that and felt a sense of relief.

And so I pass this pebble onto you. “There is choice in every moment”. Just imagine that!