Have you heard the term “emotional labor”? (This was a new one for me.) Emotional labor is the “mental and emotional work we do to maintain relationships with other people, whether that relationship is an intimate one, or simply coexisting with strangers in a public place” (Ada Hoffman). Emotional labor can include initiating interactions with friends, setting up activities, listening to someone talk and showing concern, being friendly to people at your place of work, etc. For some people this type of emotional labor is effortless, but for some people (especially those who are neurodivergent), this can take a lot of effort.
What I think us neurotypicals sometimes forget is that autistic folx are doing emotional labor all the time! Below are things that are considered emotional labor and can be extremely difficult and extremely easy for autistic folk. I am getting the following information from Ada Hoffman, an autistic writer. You can find more of her writing here.
- Trying desperately to figure out people’s facial expressions, when reading faces doesn’t come naturally to you. (This and other items on the list are still emotional labour, even when they are unsuccessful. Building a bridge is still labour, even if the bridge falls down.)
- Trying to figure out how to respond appropriately to a social situation, when actually you are baffled or just want to go away.
- Trying REALLY HARD to organize your shit even though you have executive function problems.
- Enduring sensory discomfort, like lights and noise and other people, so that you can do an important thing that unavoidably involves them (and everything does).
- Suppressing types of stims that you know will bother people around you or otherwise draw unwanted attention.
- Trying to figure out the appropriate way to say a potentially hurtful thing instead of just blurting it out.
- Asking people explicitly how they are feeling or what they need, because you know it’s important and you know you won’t figure it out on your own. Working up your courage and asking even though you know some people are offended by being asked.
- Asking for accommodations, especially in an environment that you’re not sure will take you seriously.
- Working up the courage to do social interactions that you know will be exhausting but necessary.
- Trying to figure out ways to do basic things like make friends or express your emotions safely, when the NT way of doing them makes no sense to you.
- Dealing with the ableist things people do and say all day.
- Dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, and the MANY OTHER very common comorbid conditions of autism.
I am hoping as we start to realize that seemingly effortless things for neurotypical people take effort for neurodivergent people we will have more compassion and understanding. Below are some ways that I am going to try to show that compassion as a clinician.
- Simply teaching my clients to advocate for themselves is putting all of the responsibility for accommodations on them. Job sites, schools and other professionals need to be educated on how to offer accommodations without waiting for them to be necessary. And society as a whole needs to be reframe the idea that “accommodations” make someone less then.
- Simply teaching my clients to read body language and interpret facial cues is putting all of the responsibility of smooth social interactions on them. Neurotypical individuals can just as easily learn to be more concise with what they want and explain how they are feeling in clear terms instead of being cryptic. This would take a great load off of neurodivergent folx.
- Normalize stimming. Interviews with autistic folx indicates that stimming can be very self-soothing. So, if we try to take that away or tell them to stop we are also taking away a coping mechanism. It seems silly to me that just because neurotypicals find a stim “annoying” the neurodivergent individual is responsible for stopping in order to make the neurotypicals more comfortable. Neurotypicals can learn to be flexible.