Zoe: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Autism and Theology Podcast. Brought to you by the Center for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Krysia: hello 

and welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology Podcast. I'm Krysia, and it's great that you've joined us this week. This podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, sharing relevant resources and promoting ways that help faith and non-faith communities that enable autistic people to flourish.

If you'd like to access the transcript for this episode, it can be found in the link in the show notes. And CAT has a webinar on the 12th of February with John Allister called Picturing Autism Biblically Cannonical Approaches to Neurodiversity. And again, the link to register for this is also in the show notes.

So today on Cat Chat, I have Zoe and Ian with me, and we are gonna chat around. Dealing with things that are quite overwhelming when things are kind of consistently thrown at us through our phones and computers and how we manage stuff and open a conversation on basically looking after ourselves when we're just consistently given lots and lots of updates about lots and lots of things.

Zoe: Yeah, it's one of those funny ones we like came up with this topic after a kinda natural conversation just saying like, we were all feeling a little bit like overwhelmed with like the intensity and I guess not just like the intensity of the information, but also feeling like. Like, what's the word? When you feel like you should be doing something, but you can't necessarily do anything and then you feel guilty for that.

And like all these things can be overwhelming no matter like where you sit on political spectrums or where in the world you are or where your kind of biggest concerns lie because. There's a lot going on everywhere. Um, and it kind of came from being like, actually a lot of people are probably feeling similar to us, and I think Krysia and Ian will talk more about like neurodiversity in those feelings.

Um, but yeah, we thought it would just be helpful to chat, um, chat about like how we deal with those things. As Krysia has said.

Ian: Yeah, I, I'm open to suggestions around how best to deal with it, because the truth is I don't always manage it well. I spend a lot of my time really frustrated, really overwhelmed, um, ruminating on social media, if I can use that word, um, because there's just so much going on and it's just, it, it, it really is a nonstop stream.

And lately it seems like a nonstop stream of bad news. I don't, I, I, I don't want to be. Too overtly [00:03:00] political, but especially as an autistic person living in the United States, there's a lot right now happening. Right. Um, not just in the United States more generally, but particularly as an autistic person.

We have an HHS secretary who is, um, opposed to the existence of autistic people. Right. Um, who is. Uh, who is changing vaccination recommendations based on the, the thoroughly debunked, um, link between vaccines and autism. So it's just, it's, it's false information and, and going to cause so much harm. And that's not all right.

There's plenty of other things going on, but it's just, it's, it's. Uh, for autistic people, it feels existential in a way. Um, that I, that, that it, that not everything always does, although it can. Right? Um, we talk sometimes about that autistic sense of justice, um, and the idea that people, that autistic people really feel strongly, um, when they see unjust things happening or when they see something that, that they think shouldn't be happening.

And I think that's the, um. I think that's true. So no matter what's going on, if it feels unjust, if it feels like it's something that shouldn't be happening, it's something that gets to us and that becomes really, really hard to let go of, um, that we're really unsatisfied with, really upset about. And there's always something, right?

There's just, it's just 24 7, especially when you take in the. Entire globe and how small the world has become because of social media, because of 24 hour news cycle, you just hear about everything and there's always bad stuff happening. So there's always something that can, that can occupy your mind and can and can consume you if you let it.

Um, and so how do you. How do you manage to step away while still caring about those things that we need to care about? How do you become disengaged when you need to be for your own mental health without becoming callous or staying content with it? 

Krysia: Right. Yeah. And I guess also where so many autistic people kind of broadly fit into so many other marginalized groups.

When we think about, um. There's research and publications kind of showing the kind of correlation between being autistic and being queer, and the fact that we know there's underrepresentation of autistic folk in black and brown communities. That's only going to magnify in terms of what people are facing from both a global perspective, but also an in-country specifics perspective.

And I guess also, and I say this probably from my own perspective. I find sometimes I join the dots quite a lot more quickly than perhaps some of my non-autistic peers do. So I see a pattern and I go, oh, yikes. Look what's going on And linked to that thing of justice, it's how much do I [00:06:00] contribute to this conversation?

'cause being part of community is really, really important and a lot of. Kind of really consistent ongoing news outlets, whether that be bad weather or political unrest, or they're changing. Um. Diagnosis pathways in a part of the country or however it might manifest it almost. 'cause you're consistently being fed stuff.

You feel very, very isolated sometimes I find. But if you sometimes enter into community spaces, you're then kind of almost part of some people just talking at you. So it's balancing that need of what is the right community spaces and conversations to be in for you.

Zoe: I think something really helpful for me, like as well, thinking when we have these conversations, a really helpful article is Katie Cross's article on, um, social media. And I can link it in the show notes, but basically she talks about the fact how like.

Uh, like what we hear on the internet, we are like bombarded with so much on social media, so much on news outlets. And while it's really amazing that we can know what is going on in the world at any given moment, we as humans are not like, made to hold that much information in our heads. Like it's up until like a few hundred years ago, most people would maybe know what was going on in like the town or the city, close to them, but not necessarily like immediately. And certainly not on a global scale to the same extent, and I find her article really helpful because it says like, okay, like it's understandable that we maybe feel overwhelmed, especially when stuff impacts us.

It's understandable because we're not like, she refers to like the fact that we hold the world in our mobile phones, like we have access to all of this. And it is natural that that is overwhelming and scary. So I think that's a really helpful point, being like, okay, well. There's a reason we get overwhelmed.

There's a reason we get desensitized to these things as well. And I think, yeah, that's just a helpful starting point for me to be like thinking of strategies of like how to deal with it based on the fact that isn't natural to know this.

Ian: Um, not to, not to dwell too completely on the problem before suggesting any solutions, but going, going back to what Krysia said, I think what's, what's often described as the autistic tendency towards what they call. Catastrophization, right? Catastrophizing May is, is really that ability to connect the dots, really to see where things are headed and to put a theological spin on it.

To me, this is, this is how we read the prophets, right? The prophets aren't predicting all these catastrophes are inevitable. Bad things are coming, although there are always bad stuff. Predicted in the prophets, but it's always, if we continue down this road, if we continue turning away from God, then this is what awaits us, right?

So we need to [00:09:00] get back on the right track. And I think for autistic people, I, I think there's a reason a lot of autistic people gravitate toward the prophets is because we know that feeling, that feeling of being able to see if we don't change course, this is headed for a very, very dark place. And we need to fix this and we need to fix it now, because it, it seems that obvious.

To us where this can head. And it's not always that obvious to, to neurotypicals. And I don't, I, this is not autism as a superpower or anything like that. I just think we do make those connections. We do see further down the road sometimes because I, I, I don't, I don't claim to know why, but, but partly because, um, partly it's.

It's what makes us really, what makes autistic people in particular really terrible at about social media in that I think that, um, the same thing that's true for sensory inputs, that we have no throttle. We just sort of take it all in and that's why we get so overwhelmed, uh, from sensory inputs so quickly.

I think the same can be true of information that we don't throttle it, we just take it all in, and I think neurotypicals sometimes are a more able. To toss aside what they don't think is relevant or don't think is interesting or doesn't apply to them. Um, and I think that's harder for autistic people. We take it all in and it all sits in us and we put those pieces together and we we're making connections.

So it's not that, um. I mean, it's unique. It's not better, but it makes us, I think in a lot of ways it makes autistic people worse suited or, or more ill matched to social media because it's just this overwhelming fire hose of information and we're, we're, we're catastrophizing about it because we see where so much of the bad stuff is heading.

Right. 

Krysia: Yeah. And I think especially where so many of us, obviously it's not. Everywhere and everybody, but there are a significant number of autistic people who do use social media as their main communication with other people outlets. So if we are having consistent interference from consistent outer input and we haven't yet maybe got, had the chance to switch up a newsletter clip, or it's suggested to our feed, I get this all the time.

It just goes, would you like this new story? No, I don't want this new story. I've already, especially if it's from a rep, a source that I don't want to read. I don't want to read it. I don't need that in my. Line of fire. And I guess also this shows kind of why we need almost a theological stand and understanding as well as understanding why being autistic is political.

It people might think it isn't, but actually when we think about how our livelihood and our essence of self can be used by the people to decide whether we deserve things or whether we are kind of human or not, and whether we should get service support, whether we should kind of get. Things like reasonable adjustments and other things like that.

Actually, that's why it's political. That's why we need almost a theological response to kind of say that this is [00:12:00] grounding everything to help us make sense of what's going on. 

Zoe: I think it's so interesting as well, just like as you're both kinda like speaking and sharing those things, it's like a funny one because I think a lot of people, the response is like, I'm just gonna come off social media because I can't cope with it.

And for some people that's definitely the right decision. But I think you're like what you're saying in terms of like, well actually like one that can be people's main mode of communication and two like. If you feel you need to speak out about something, like someone has to, like, you need to be speaking out about what you're passionate about, and social media does give a really easy way of doing that in terms of accessibility, like.

It is no longer just like the celebrity or the politician or the newspaper that says their opinions like anyone can, and that means that more diverse voices are heard. So it is just this funny one of being like, okay, acknowledging that sometimes social media is not helpful, but also acknowledging like, well, like autistic people have something to say, and social media is an accessible way of making sure your voice is heard.

Yeah. And then I guess that kind of segues into like practically speaking what our like thoughts would be because it comes back to that, like how do you safely engage to like, still make sure you're not just being silenced by the overwhelm of all, but still not like, cause more like challenges for yourself in the process.

Ian: An analogy that, that we use all the time in ministry about self-care is, uh, and maybe you've heard this before, I don't, this is not terribly original, but when you're, um, taking a flight and they do the, the, um, safety checklist and go through everything and they say, if, you know, if, if the cabin depressurizes and you're traveling with someone or with young children, make sure you put on your own oxygen mask first.

If they drop right. And that's. Like that to me is such a good metaphor for self-care. Like you have to, if you don't take care of yourself, if you allow yourself to be so thoroughly overwhelmed that you can do nothing, then you, you then you can do nothing. Right? You cannot change anything that you are overwhelmed by if you allow yourself to be so overwhelmed.

That you're, that you, that you, um, that you shut down. Right? Um, that's not to, that's not to point fingers or blame victims, but, but part of what healthy social media use, even for autistic people who use it as a means of community, means that you have to step away. Sometimes you have to be able to have some hobbies.

That will distract you enough. And this is one of the things that I do, right? If I'm just sitting around doing nothing, I will check my phone every couple minutes, right? Just scroll on my feed and see if there's anything new. And it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a problem. Um, but if I'm doing something, if I'm reading a book that's really engaging or if I'm working on a jigsaw puzzle or something like that, [00:15:00] then I can go hours without checking my phone.

So I can still stay up to date as much as I need to. Right? Because the reality is we don't need to know everything that happens every 10 minutes. Um, we can stay informed without. Endlessly doom scrolling. Um, so doing something that distracts me thoroughly enough that I'm, that I'm away from it for a while, um, can actually be helpful.

And the other thing that I do is I try to gravitate towards social media that is less algorithmically driven, right? Because algorithms are designed to keep you. In a heightened state of emotion, which most of the time is anger, right? So they are designed to send you as much controversial information as you can because it keeps you engaged.

So I end up using Blue Sky a lot more because you have a lot more control over your feed that isn't as algorithmically designed. There's a block function that if you just say, you know what, I don't like, I don't like hearing from this person. I think that they're. They're not the type of person that I want to engage with.

You block 'em and you never see them again. Right. Um, so it's much, you have much more control over what you see. This is not meant to be an endorsement, but for me that's really important because I can, I can, I can curate what I'm looking at rather than just being fed a bunch of stuff. That's only gonna make me mad.

Krysia: I do have to say I have quite a, a liberal. Relationship with the mute button, especially when it's things that are recommended to me rather than things I have sourced. Because I think there are people that say really important things that we can be really challenged productively. And obviously it's not talking about, um, questioning the value of people's lives or perhaps, um.

Seeing how it will be bad weather. We can see all these really bad things that can happen, but actually I do have a habit of kind of, you can challenge people. But then there's a fine line between the two. So especially at the moment where we've had, um, storm goretti. Um, so I live in Kent. I'm very fortunate that I have water at the moment, but a significant proportion of Kent has had massive water outages.

So all the newsletter outlets at the moment, for example, are reporting and in inventive number of postcodes that haven't got water, the number of hospitals around universities. It's just consistently ongoing. Um. And I think with the movie I find on my phone, I click on one news article, Google will recommend another three to me.

So before Christmas, I wanted to know if it was gonna snow. 'cause I'm nosy for the next three weeks. Afterwards, I had things going, storm alert, storm alert, snow alert, snow alerts, and it's consistent. So I'm very aw aware that even one little decision can completely change. So I just went, swipe, swipe, swipe.

And [00:18:00] I guess for me, in the moments that I do feel destabilized, overwhelmed, and I think sometimes overwhelmed, although it has a really negative opinion kind of impact on us. It's very much a, almost a calling out of perhaps the reality of sometimes what we are facing. Um, it is okay to feel uncomfortable, but it's also okay to turn things off and talk to someone about it.

So I have a few people that I would directly go and talk to things about, um, and have that community safe space where I can go, I'm not happy with X, or I've seen y and it's back to kind of. Unsettled me and be able to have those really productive conversations. Not so much in terms of, oh yeah, well it's all fixed, but we can sit in discomfort together.

And I think that's really important as well as me physically doing the things. That's obviously, I like the communication bit, some of the apps, but not the scrolling bits. So I'll try and differentiate between the two on there as well. And like Ian, although I haven't used my blue sky for a while, I do quite like the fact that you can really carefully curate.

You put on Blue Sky. I really do appreciate that. 

Zoe: Yeah, I really like what you're saying there, Krysia about community, and I do think that is such a helpful kind of like, not solution, but a way of managing things is like bringing your brain out of the social media world while still thinking about these topics.

Like I think. You know, like we've got like a few of my friends at uni have a group chat and we're all doing PhDs. We're all kinda researching similar-ish things, and we're like, if something big's going on in the news quite often it'll make it into that group chat. And I think even just having that, like as you said, kinda sitting in like, like discomfort or like, I can't remember the wording you used Krysia, but that like just taking it out.

Like we are like community, like humans, like community. We need community. We desire like relationship with each other a lot of the time and I think that like it almost grounds us back in reality, doesn't it? It takes us, even though you're still engaging with a topic, it takes us out of this like weird, like digital space.

Even if it's still digital, it takes out that kind of like abstract like article or after article. And I also think it allows, like,

Krysia: it allows us to use those critical thinking skills that I think we really need, especially with some of the news outlets that are perhaps like to really put really sensationalist stories we can go.

Yeah. Did they actually mean that, is that a helpful kind of thing? Or is there actually something that, an overwhelmed response is absolutely just and right response to what's going on. 

Zoe: Yeah, and I think there's also something to be said about it helping with like desensitization. I am so bad for that.

Like just like scrolling and then you like see so many things and you forget about it and then you stop caring. Like you see so many people getting like. Um, injured on social media or like you, like, I guess an example [00:21:00] of this is like George Floyd or like the Minneapolis stuff. Like you see horrible things happen that you wouldn't normally be seeing, and then you kind of become desensitized to those things because it's like just the way it is.

And I think having conversations with other people prevents that desensitization because you're sitting in that space for a little while. You're engaging with other people. So I guess that, yeah, I think like naturally. What you've said there, Krysia has really highlighted the importance of like a really healthy thing while engaging with stuff is having a separate space with people.

Um, not just like in a comment section where anyone and everyone will share their opinions, but just like a healthy space with people you trust and, um, not necessarily agree with, but people you trust and yeah, wise people who you're willing to. Discuss things with and know that as a safe space, I think is really healthy approach, I think for me as well.

Like, sorry, go ahead. 

Ian: No, I was just gonna, I was gonna make something even more explicit that you alluded to, which is the idea that, um, that for people who are. Who are less comfortable, who being out in the world, who don't necessarily get out or have friends, uh uh, you know, a significant community, quote unquote, in real life, even though I hate that terminology, that are offline friends, right?

Even if your main community is found online, you can still have. Community that isn't social media driven, right? So even if you meet all your friends on Twitter or Blue Sky or Facebook or whatever, you can put together a discord server or a group chat or something like that and have community that isn't algorithmically driven, that isn't subject to all the pressures of, of social media, where you have a chance to engage more directly with people in a community that you trust.

And, and I do think that that's really important.

Zoe: Yeah, absolutely. I guess that's also where like it's important for churches. Like I'm not saying churches should always engage with political stuff if it's not like, um, like sometimes yes, I think that's absolutely true, but then like obviously like it's complex within churches, but I think that's where it's also important things like in churches, making sure there's space for people to build relationships as well.

Not just people who find that easy on a Sunday school in and chat. And I think that's where I. A lot of our conversations about church are in a million miles away from this because it is that kinda creating safe spaces so that people belong and feel included and feel welcome. So partly so that there's conversations like this can take place between people and safe communities, like it's, these things are all connected, I guess.

And um. Yeah, it's all part of the bigger picture belonging as, and it creating safe spaces to have difficult conversations and also see when we're struggling with being [00:24:00] overwhelmed by the news or whatever else. 

Krysia: Yeah. Because I guess theology is, our theology of our church is gonna drive perhaps what action we might take and how we hold spaces and what topics we might see as kind of more okay to discuss than others.

Um, but I guess. Zoe's overriding point kind of drives kind of beyond the superficial of let's all be smiley and happy. But how, when we gather, when two or more of us gather, how do we hold each other to have difficult conversations when we are being affected by what's going outside on outside our church or what's going on inside our church, but we're not aware of or are very aware of?

Zoe: And I think as well, that's where things like within services, like prayers of intercessions, like that can be hugely helpful for people who feel overwhelmed, feel helpless, like creating spaces within church services even where people can bring the things that they're really struggling with and feeling like just that kind of like out of what is going on in this world.

So there's space to bring that to God within a service. And yeah, again, it's creating safe spaces. 

Krysia: Thank you for joining. The fantastic discussion that Zoe, Ian and I have had, I say this afternoon 'cause we're recording in afternoon, but actually for Ian, he's in the morning. So where, wherever in the, kind of wherever you listen to us, whatever time you listen to us, thank you for joining us.

If you have any questions, you can message us at Autism Theology on Blue Sky or Instagram, or you could send us an email at cat@abdn.ac.uk. We also have the webinar and other things in the show notes, so please do click on them. We would love you to join you for the webinar and also for the other kind of things like Katie Cross's work that we have put in our shared notes.

Zoe: Thank you for listening to the Autism and Theology Podcast. If you have any questions for us or just wanna say hi, please email us at  cat@abdn.ac.uk. or find us on Twitter at Autism [00:27:00] Theology.