How does dysregulation impact creativity and our special interests? And what does this mean to autistic individuals (like me) who might already be struggling to identify their emotional states and stressors?
In this episode, I discuss my own experience with dysregulation and creativity and share insights from autistic blogger and therapist Karen Sheriff and podcaster and neuropsychologist Dr. Theresa Regan.
The specific media resources mentioned in this episode are:
To read about the changes I made as a direct result of my dysregulation event please see What Writing on the Spectrum Means to Me
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EPISODE 8 TRANSCRIPT:If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com
Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver. Thank you for joining me today on Autistic POV. Today we're going to talk about dysregulation and creativity because this is
0:32 something that has been an issue for me and I think it's an issue for a lot of autistic people who are creative. And some of this I'm going to base on a recent series by Teresa Regan, who is a neuropsychologist who has a podcast called Autism in the Adult. Dr. Regan is not autistic, 0:58 but she does have a really strong background in autism and neurobiology and a son who's autistic. And I like her podcast. So she did a series on self-care, actually, that I thought was relevant to our topic of dysregulation in relationship to creativity. And she talked a lot about escape as a coping mechanism. And essentially, 1:23 she was talking about special interests, but also other escape behaviors, such as a comforting environment or person, things along that line. And she had a kind of different take on that, I think, than I do. She said that engaging in these kind of coping mechanisms tend to make us smaller. 1:44 And I'm not sure that she means that across the board. I mean, she did say they're not detrimental necessarily, but she does, she personally feels they're limiting. I don't always agree with that. And the reason I don't agree with that is because I personally feel that my own special interests are actually expansive. 2:08 I feel that my world has expanded through my special interests. So we're not exactly on the same page, I don't think, with the nature of the escape. But she did make some good points about it, and she listed some interesting strategies. And she talked about how autistics might not know 2:33 what's going on inside of us which is certainly true and it seems kind of counterintuitive because we are very sensitive but at the same time we don't notice certain things we might not notice when physical things for example likeBoysober
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