Sujai Johnston has spent about ten years working with families as a certified parenting coach, and she’s autistic. On Energy Economics for Parents, she gave host Christopher Fern an account of where an autistic person’s energy actually goes, and it starts somewhere most people never look: the body.
The stress signal is physical
When the brain decides something is a threat, it sends that message to the nervous system, and the nervous system answers in muscle. The stomach tightens. Then the chest. Then the shoulders. Johnston’s point is that this runs all day, from the time an autistic person gets up to the time they go to bed, and the people around them mostly can’t see any of it.
Which is why she pushes back hard on the standard reading of a meltdown. Nobody melting down is emotionally weak. They’re in pain, and they’ve been in pain for hours. Her example is the sound of a bouncing ball, which for her is tangled up with PTSD and lands like impending doom. Trying harder to be fine with it makes it worse, because the brain reads the override as evidence you’re still not safe.
She’s specific about which environments do the most damage. Institutional spaces—schools and hospitals in particular—are built with exactly the density of noise, light, and input that produces this, and they’re where a lot of autistic people are made to spend the most time.
Ignoring the signal doesn’t make it cheaper
Johnston walks through what overriding actually costs. The signal starts in the gut. Ignore it and it climbs to the lower back, then the chest. By the time it reaches your neck and face, your face is burning, your eyes are watering, your ears are red, and your voice is going in your throat. Sudden zero-to-sixty happens, she says, but it’s less common than this slow build. Most of the time the body has been asking for a change for a while.
She thinks the overriding is trained into us, and she means the word. So the cheapest available fix is environmental. Change the lights, cut the competing noise, reduce the input, and she puts the difference at half the stress and half the pain. Where the trigger isn’t a real danger—that bouncing ball is probably kids playing basketball—you can tell your brain it’s safe, and the all-clear travels back down.
With one exception she wants kept attached. If you’re still living somewhere that snappiness reliably turns into yelling, don’t tell your nervous system you’re safe there. It’s reporting accurately, and talking yourself out of it is just lying to yourself.
The tools can become the mask
The turn in the conversation is her own. She’s collected a lifetime of tools for managing sensory input, and at forty-eight, with all of them, sustained stress can still put her into a meltdown. She also noticed that some of the tools had started doing something else. Autistic people grab extremes to be socially acceptable, overcompensating for deficits they’ve been told they have, and past a certain point the coping strategy is another way of not being yourself.
Her example: she rocks back and forth when a conversation gets deep. She was shamed for it badly enough that she stopped. She’s taking it back now, and it’s what she left listeners with. If you rock back and forth a little when you talk, own it and love it, because it’s part of you.
Sujai Johnston’s work is at gentleparentsunite.com.
