Steampunk Machinery, Magical Beasts, and Self-Compassion

A wise friend (Mykola Bilokonsky of the Public Neurodiversity Support Center) taught me that during times when I can’t be the nurturing, compassionate, decisive, emotionally intelligent parent-Jane that my inner children need (usually because I’m too distressed), I can summon her.

I do that a lot now. When I’m unable to find my way out of a terrible emotional place, I talk to her and tell her what I need, or I tell her that I don’t know what I need but I know she will. Usually after I’ve slept or deeply focused on something else, she shows up with some perceptive, compassionate whatever.

This is one way I can get the compassion I need to give myself when I’m overcome with anger or grief, and at risk of (or unable to pull out of) a rolling meltdown.

But it takes a bit of time to work.

And by “bit” I mean, like, overnight or half a day later, far far longer than is useful to calm a meltdown in a meeting, say, or at the doctor’s office, or (Spaghetti Monster forbid) talking to cops. Those times when things could go very, very wrong.

And though usually help arrives from my parent self in a few hours, it often takes too long to fix a ruined day.

In all those distress situations, for me, the most reliable medicine I know for snowballing rage or grief or panic is experiencing compassion from a trusted source. Yet when I’m really distressed… that’s when it’s been historically harder for me to inspire compassion from other people.

(I mean… Those of us who mask autism consciously or instinctively, we mask meltdowns in public for, like, existential survival reasons, right?)

So I need to be able to help myself. And to do that I need more tools for delivering self-compassion.

I need more ways to show up for myself, more reliably. I need self-compassion capabilities that I can’t disable with eroded executive function.

In pursuit of that, I’m trying to teach myself to respond to sudden strong emotions by calling up the feeling I get when I’ve experienced compassion in the past.

Because it has happened, and there’s a particular brain chemical mix that comes with the experience.

I’m not a neuroscientist but let’s just say it’s a tonic of boxytocin, flairotonin, and a dash of schmopamine. In proper proportion, these ingredients feel like safety. Received love. Welcome.

That would be a useful thing to be able to feel more often.

Neurotypical advice for getting more of that sweet sweet self-compassion brain chemical cocktail goes something like… Give yourself some compassion in these moments.

That never made sense to me, but then most neurotypical people don’t have to strip the walls of the rooms in their brains down to the studs so they can continually tinker with the wiring. They just plug shit in.

To solve a feeling/response problem I need a mechanism, a set of inputs and the machinery to transform them into brain chemical outputs. (Imagine H. G. Wells’s time machine except instead of traveling to Morlock-land it spits out little gift boxes filled with feelings.)

To use a different metaphor, I need a spell to cast. A call to prayer. An invocation.

I can trigger a brain chemical mix with a picture or a word or a color or a sound. I can let myself experience the sense memory associated with it, and then the emotion package arrives.

(I’m pretty sure neurotypical people do this too, but I think having a conscious process for doing this is one of those steampunk workarounds people with alexithymia build because feelings are arcane and shimmering and decidedly blurry magical beasts to us. At least I think so.)

In any case, I know from experience that I can call up a vivid and realistic emotional experience reliably if I know the right mental switch to pull.

Right now I’m focused on two things: finding the right switch to turn on the feeling-of-received-compassion machine, and building the habit of pulling it.

Interestingly, the first requires me to ask my autism to page through catalogs of detailed sense memories to fight the most reliable evocative one, and the second requires me to engage with my ADHD in the tango of routine-creation.

(Because oh yeah the source of most of my lifelong struggles and capabilities is the spicy #auDhd stew soaking my brain. I mean… of course.)

Adventures in brain tinkering continue.

I guess the point is this: I’m starting to break the problem of self-compassion down into smaller chunks, into problems I can solve and machines I can build, and that feels like the right path to be on.

PS: Myk, mentioned above, is taking clients and worth the money. He is neurodivergent, he’s living this struggle every day, and he’s good at real and trustworthy compassion. He’s made a difference for me.