Eye Contact and Autistic Dissociation: One Expample

“Dissociation is the ability to cut off from what is happening around you or to you. In its simplest form it is daydreaming. It is a skill all children have and which children with autism tend to overdevelop in managing a world they find overwhelming for a whole range of reasons.” (Donna Williams at http://www.donnawilliams.net/333.0.htm)

I can remember the overwhelming experience having eye contact with others sometimes had on me as a child. Too much bright, bold, painful sensory information was received when directly looking into someone’s eyes for a sustained period of time (see paintings below: Look Me In the Eye, Buzzing Bones, SIZZLE POP and STRIKE ME). Coping came by disengaging from the experience. I would hover up by the ceiling and watch the girl below who was me. When the girl looked into the eyes of people I would use the too much information she got to fashion alternatives to those eyes that would cut down on the overwhelming sensory information (see paintings below: Eye Fish, Eye Trees, Eye Land and Eye Tulip).

For me, the more dissociative experiences I had, the more refined my creations from eye information became. In the Goldenrod series one might not even realize the information originally came from eye contact. However, once pointed out most people notice the eye shape in the background (see paintings below: Goldenrod 2, Goldenrod 3 and Goldenrod 4).

Today I am able to use eye contact in a pretty typical manner most of the time. The sensory information I pick up from engaging in eye contact is no longer often painful. Many of my sensory needs have changed over the decades of my life. However, even today when I am under stress I do not have typical eye contact. Avoiding eye contact is one of the things I find myself automatically doing to minimize the quantity of incoming sensory information. I do not consciously think about avoiding contact. It just happens because that is how my brain works. I think this is similar to the way non autistic people do not consciously think about using eye contact each time they speak to one another. They simply do it because that is how their brain works.

Below is my story created in a poem and several paintings. This poem and the paintings are in my book Painted Words: Aspects of Autism Translated. The paintings are also available in three sizes of prints and in packs of five greeting cards at www.judyendow.com under the Art tab.