Our development is not chronological.
It is teleological.
The journey does not proceed in tidy steps; it circles, accumulates, waits.
Gestalts accrue - fragments, scripts, sensory impressions - often in silence. And only when enough has gathered, and when safety allows, does expression emerge. The destination shapes the route. The end state calls back to pull the pieces into alignment. This is recursive growth, not linear progression. It cannot be timeboxed.
It cannot be rushed.
This is why so many professionals fail to understand what they're seeing. Even the psychological theories they draw from are mismatched to us. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with its tidy pyramid - safety first, then belonging, then self-actualisation - fails to account for the way autistic minds often move.
We will sometimes engage in flow states of intense focus and joy - scripting, patterning, spinning, lining up, creating — even whilst skipping meals, ignoring thirst, disregarding physical discomfort entirely. Because for us, the act of satisfying the internal Quality World Picture - as Glasser might have named it - is not secondary to survival. It is, in many ways, the very condition of our survival.
… The destination shapes the route. The end state calls back to pull the pieces into alignment. This is recursive growth, not linear progression. It cannot be timeboxed. It cannot be rushed…
#autism #autistic #gestaltlanguageprocessing
open.substack.com/pub/autside/...