Open Society

factors like whiteness and Christianity itself, which cultivate majoritarian grievance and encourage a sense of being targeted for “persecution” by outside forces, also make fertile ground for the proliferation of conspiratorial beliefs. In other words, despite having privilege and social position and a “church family,” certain individuals and groups are still highly susceptible to authoritarian attitudes, paranoia, and succumbing to the faux-comfort offered by conspiracy theories.

These theories often contain elements of projection. Take for example QAnon, with its fixation on a supposed cabal of Democratic leaders, Hollywood elites, and LGBTQ people who traffic children for nefarious purposes. In actual fact, child sex abuse is common in authoritarian religious communities, in which powerful abusers can find cover and access to victims, and can often count on their communities to cover their offenses up. Right-wing Christians, including the significant percentage of them who adhere to QAnon beliefs, do not want to face this reality, so they look for (and conveniently find) external monsters to fixate on.

For many conspiracy theorists, the false beliefs they’ve adopted are not just covering up their insecurities, but are also either themselves closely related to the believers’ identities, or are protecting something that is. When identity is at stake—one’s identity as a “good person,” for example, or, in a way that is often not directly spoken but that conspiracy theories give cover to, one’s whiteness and the privilege it comes with—that’s some very heavy emotional baggage to lift.

Most conspiracy theorists, unless they somehow find their own way out of the thicket they’ve gotten lost in, will be reached, if at all, through patient personal engagement that feels largely unthreatening.

Dr. Rosanbalm, the Duke psychologist, said both absenteeism and behavioral outbursts are examples of the human stress response, now playing out en masse in schools: fight (verbal or physical aggression) or flight (absenteeism).

“With food, just like with fashion, whenever something is cheap, somewhere along the line, someone is being taken advantage of,” says Gao.

Interest is a quality that tends to elude measurement – except when it is deliberately (and perversely) reduced to ‘behaviours’. The third diagnostic criterion has always been about interests; within ABA and its variants, that has been reframed as about behaviours.  Behaviourism is a reduction of dimensions which creates an illusion of scientific worth by focussing only on what we can ‘know for sure’.  However, the effects of what we don’t exactly know can be as ramified and real – and use up more real energy to integrate – while also sometimes being fun to pursue (Stern 1987).

Another frequent accusation is of ‘mind blindness’ – apparently a ‘dysfunction’ that is especially prominent in autistic pathology.   This is fundamentally wrong from two very different angles.  It is wrong because nobody actually can ‘read’ or ‘see into’ another person’s mind.  Tuning in to another’s interests and substantially sharing prior assumptions can situate people in a comfortable dialogue in which good hunches happen about each other’s hopes and fears.  This is not much like reading, it is a lot more like dancing or sailing or improvising music together, and concerns reciprocal noticing,  intuition, engagement and attunement (Stern 1985, Bohlis et al, 2017,  Milton 2012, Green 2011, Constant et al 2018).

These youths’ descriptions of supportive strategies for BIMS stress the importance of compassion and collaboration from trusted adults.

When discussing meltdowns, they highlighted three main ideas: Know the things that can make me “feel out of control,” learn my strategies to help me regain “control” and understand the things that can make me feel worse.

Of the four BIMS phenomena, the participants explicitly identified meltdowns as most prominent in their lives.

In order to remain in alignment with the children and youth’s narratives, burnout, inertia and shutdown were grouped together using the participants’ language: “feeling exhausted” for burnout and “feeling frozen” for shutdown and inertia.

The children and youth utilized analogies to depict their experiences with “feeling out of control” and feeling “exhausted and/or frozen.” These analogies elucidate that the aforementioned phenomena are multifaceted experiences that include emotional, physical and cognitive components. These multifaceted components are represented through three codes: in my body, in my mind, and in my heart. Passages in the interviews that described physical sensations, bodily reactions or behaviors were coded as in my body and passages that highlighted cognitive processing, thoughts or beliefs were coded as in my mind. Responses that emphasized an emotional experience such as feeling overwhelmed, helpless, frustration or shame were coded as in my heart. Together, these multifaceted components depict how these phenomena are experiences that include the children/youth’s whole being.

The participants use an “old computer” and a “heavy blanket” to represent a combination of feelings: decreased physical energy, lagging, slowness, and being physically stuck. Specifically for shutdowns, one youth identified that their physical tiredness can occur when they are feeling overloaded by environmental stimuli:

When asked about their experiences with meltdowns, the participants shared instances that led to a meltdown. Their descriptions highlighted that a build-up of burnout and stress, and feeling drained from an accumulation of task demands, may lead to experiencing a meltdown. This indicates that these participants may experience burnout and meltdowns simultaneously.

The children and youth in this study placed very high value on compassionate support and understanding from the adults around them. The youth who described the greatest success in their current management of BIMS described situations in which they had generated and implemented strategies through collaboration with an important adult (usually a parent or education aide). This finding supports a shift in the direction toward something we like to call “collaborative regulation.” Collaborative regulation could be seen as similar to a co-regulation approach [e.g., as described by Gulsrud et al. (2010), which used mother-mediated joint attention to support emotional regulation in autistic children], in that it acknowledges the influence of others on an individual’s level of arousal; however, collaborative regulation goes beyond co-regulation to acknowledge a shared responsibility for monitoring and supporting a person’s state of arousal. Additionally, a collaborative regulation approach, as we would like to put forth, emphasizes mindful and deliberate planning to set an individual up for success and includes consideration for the physical, sensory and social environment. Collaborative regulation can facilitate opportunities to provide positive support and in turn, reduce feelings of humiliation, regret, and fear (Ting and Weiss, 2017). Adults can work together with autistic youth to scaffold useful strategies (Ting and Weiss, 2017) when they are feeling exhausted, out of control or frozen. Scaffolding includes sensitivity toward children’s emotions, providing encouragement and validation, and valuing children’s active participation in goal achievement (Hoffman et al., 2006). Buckle et al. (2021) identified that some autistic informants depend on scaffolding from their external environment when overcoming inertia (e.g., completing a task side by side with another individual) as it provides visual prompting, which further facilitates task participation and follow-through. Therefore, through collaborative regulation, autistic youth and teachers can determine together when and how to best apply scaffolding techniques in the classroom.