Autistic Traits:

Autistic Traits – How they feel, what they look like, and what an assessment is looking for:
An autism assessment is looking for differences in three core areas: (1) sensory differences, (2) behaviour and interests, and (3) language, communication, and social interaction. If you’ve just been diagnosed as an adult, or if your child has just been diagnosed, you might have seen a lot of clinical language used about autism, and a lot of words like ‘deficit’, ‘impairment’, etc. This document aims to provide a different perspective on autism by breaking down the clinical terms into examples of what autistic traits and characteristics can feel like for autistic people, and what they can look like in young autistic children.

An important note about the autism spectrum: the spectrum is a circle, not a line. People are not more or less autistic than each other; they have different autistic traits at different intensities. All autistic people have some level of sensory differences, social and communication differences, and autistic behavioural traits. A particular trait can vary over a person’s lifetime, or become more or less intense depending on their stress levels, environment, or emotional state.

1. Sensory Differences:

Autistic people experience the world differently. Autistic senses can be more or less intense than non-autistic ones – so autistic people can seem over-sensitive or under-sensitive to various kinds of sensory input.

This can feel like:

• Lights being unpleasantly or painfully bright, when no one else seems to have a problem
• Sounds being too loud or high-pitched when no one else seems to have a problem; or being unable to ‘tune out’ background noise
• Certain textures being uncomfortable, unpleasant, or intolerable. Some foods might be inedible due to their texture, or you may be uncomfortable touching or wearing certain fabrics.
• Difficulty with proprioception (the sense of where your body is in space – this affects balance, navigation through space, and your ability to know where your body parts are when you’re not looking at them); frequently tripping over things, bumping into things, or losing your balance.
• Decreased interoception (the sense of internal states in your body; forgetting to eat or drink, or not knowing when you’re hungry or thirsty; having to consciously concentrate to check whether your body needs anything
• Feeling some types of pain or touch more or less intensely than others
• Not being able to form images in your mind. Many autistic people experience this to some degree, and some autistic people do not form mental images at all. For more information about this, go to https://aphantasia.com/what-is-aphantasia/
• Prosopagnosia, or ‘face blindness’ – recognising people by their hair, glasses, mannerisms, voice etc. instead of their facial features. Some autistic people cannot recognise faces at all; many have some difficulty remembering or recognising facial features. You may have difficulty remembering where you know someone from if you see them in a different context, or you may take extra time to recognise someone who has changed their hair or made some other significant change to their appearance.
• Being very sensitive to heat and/or cold – getting too hot or too cold long before other people do, or being able to cope with higher or lower temperatures than the people around you can.

This can look like:

• Avoiding bright or flourescent lights, getting upset or trying to escape when in a brightly lit environment, covering their eyes or hiding under furniture to get away from light
• Disliking loud noises, high-pitched noises, many overlapping sounds, or hard-to-process sounds like speech; being unable to hear you if there is too much (or any) background noise; covering their ears; yelling or banging objects to block out other sounds
• An aversion to particular textures or touches – wanting to wear clothing inside out to avoid labels and seams; having a strong disgust reaction to certain foods; becoming upset or trying to escape when asked to touch certain textures
• Bumping into things, having difficulty balancing, or missing surfaces when trying to put objects down
• Struggling with tasks that involve touching or pointing to a precise place Sticking to the walls and corners of a room, or running their hand around the outside wall/fence of a space
• Not seeming to know when they are hungry, or when they need to use the toilet; autistic children may have more toileting accidents when there is a lot of other stimulation and input to process, or they may be toilet trained with occasional accidents for a long time.
• Getting too hot or too cold easily, or seeking out heat or cold.

2. Behaviour and Interests:
An autism assessment is looking for specific behavioural differences: deep fascinations/passions (or ‘special interests’); repetitive physical behaviours and movements (or stimming); a strong need for routine and autonomy; and an aversion to change and surprises.

This can feel like:

• Deep rather than broad interests: being fascinated by and/or passionate about one particular thing (or a few different things)
• Not being interested in common small talk topics (the weather, people’s appearances, what people did over the weekend), not understanding the point of small talk, and/or having difficulty knowing what to say in small talk conversations
• Frequently or constantly fidgeting or moving some part of your body, or feeling uncomfortable when you can’t move or fidget. This could be something less obvious or visible, like clenching a certain muscle, grinding your teeth, or curling your toes.
• Needing to know what’s going to happen or what the plan is, and hating when the plan changes
• Doing well when you stick to routines, and becoming easily irritated or upset when your routine is disrupted
• Feeling very irritated or upset if someone comes into your space or moves your things, particularly unexpectedly

This can look like:

• Being intensely interested in a particular subject and wanting to talk about it constantly
• Wanting to watch the same movie, TV episode, YouTube video etc. on repeat
• Being able to focus on their particular passion for hours at a time
• Flapping their hands, rocking back and forth, or moving in other repetitive ways (This is called ‘stimming‘, and fulfils a huge range of functions – some of the most common are expressing and/or regulating emotions, coping with sensory input, and helping to confirm where parts of the body are in relation to each other and the environment).
• Becoming easily upset at changes in routine – The world can seem enormously chaotic and unpredictable to autistic children, and routines give them invaluable knowledge about what their world will look like. Disrupting these routines can feel to the child like the entire world they knew has been abruptly pulled away, and they now have no way of knowing what will come next.
• Repeatedly asking questions and confirming information they already know – This is a common behaviour that has a couple of possible explanations: autistic children have a strong need to know what’s coming so that they can prepare themselves, and constantly asking the same question/s helps to reassure them that their knowledge and assumptions about the future are correct. Autistic children also often repeat behaviour that led to a positive interaction, because the reasons why some interactions are positive and some are negative are very unclear to them. If they got positive attention the first time they asked a series of questions, they may be repeating the questions because they want the same positive attention and don’t know another way to get it.
• Lining up toys – Autistic people commonly find joy in order and categorisation. Autistic children can spend hours lining up or categorising toys or other collected objects (stones, buttons, pegs, etc.) – they may not look like they’re enjoying themselves, but many autistic adults report that they remember having enormous amounts of fun doing this as children!
• Getting upset if things in the house are changed or moved around (particularly their things or things that they use frequently) – Autistic children can sometimes struggle to remember where things have been moved to, which can be intensely frustrating – imagine that every time you left your kitchen, someone came in and swapped the placement of your knives, forks and spoons around. Changing where things go in your house can have the same effect on your child.
• Leaving or trying to leave places they don’t want to be (a classroom, a high chair, the presence of a disliked person)
• Becoming unresponsive when asked to do something they don’t want to do, or that they don’t know how to do

3. Social Interaction, Language, and Communication:

Autistic brains are wired differently to non-autistic brains, and this can be most obvious in social settings. Autistic people may have difficulty navigating conversations with non-autistic folks, or working in a non-autistic group, and they may find socialising or being around other people exhausting.

This is largely because autistic communication and social interaction is fundamentally different to non- autistic communication, and autistic people are generally expected to bridge the entire gap themselves – mimicking a non-autistic way of communication and socialising that doesn’t come naturally, while suppressing their automatic reactions, feelings, and ways of communicating.

This can feel like:

• Frequently making social mistakes that you aren’t aware of until you realise people are upset with you
• Feeling like everyone else has some sort of psychic network communicating information you’re not getting, or like there’s a second conversation going on at the same time as the one you’re having, that everyone has access to except you

There kind of is a second conversation going on – non- autistic people automatically process each other’s facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language and add it to the words that have been said when interpreting the message, and they usually aren’t aware that they’re adding in all of this extra information. This is why it can seem like non-autistic people are incapable of saying what they mean, and why they can seem to add meaning to your words that isn’t actually there and then respond to the extra meaning they made up.

• Masking your natural or honest responses because you know they aren’t socially acceptable
• Exaggerating your tone of voice, facial expression and/or body language, or being constantly conscious of what you’re doing with your face, voice and body when around other people
• Deliberately copying phrasing or intonation from people you know, or from characters in movies or TV shows
• Finding eye contact uncomfortable or unpleasant; not knowing where to look in one-on-one situations
• Being more comfortable in situations where you have a defined role or script to follow

This can look like:

• Not seeming to know how to start talking to or playing with other children
• Becoming upset during interactions with peers for no apparent reason

There are dozens of unspoken ‘rules’ for social interaction that typically developing children will know automatically and unconsciously. Autistic children don’t know any of these rules and have to explicitly, consciously learn them. This leads to a lot of mistakes, and in young children, a lot of frustration when an autistic child thinks they have grasped a rule, and then another child breaks it.

• Spending a lot of time alone

There are a few different reasons for this. Some autistic children just prefer being alone; some like being around peers/adults but find social interaction tiring and need a lot of breaks; and some want to be around other people but can’t work out how to be included.

• Repeating phrases or sentences from movies or TV shows
• Lack of facial expressions, exaggerated facial expressions, or facial expressions that don’t seem to match their feelings
• Speaking in a monotone or flat tone, exaggerated tone, or in a way that sounds rehearsed or performative
• Delayed speech, or communicating without speech (e.g. preferring to use gestures rather than spoken words)
• Misinterpreting other people’s emotions, or not seeming to know what to do about them (e.g. not reacting to another child crying)

There is a pervasive myth that autistic people lack empathy – this is absolutely false, but it is true that autistic people, particularly children, may not react appropriately to other people’s feelings. An autistic child who sees another child crying may not react because they don’t know how to help; they may have been taught to treat other people as they would want to be treated, and know that they would want to be left alone if they were upset; they may be overwhelmed by the noise of the other child crying and unable to process anything; or there may be a combination of factors going on.

• Not seeming to want to tell you how their day was/not responding to questions like “what did you do at school today?”

• Not making eye contact

Many autistic people find direct eye contact uncomfortable, unpleasant, and/or overly intense or intimate. Autistic children are more likely to be able to pay attention when their gaze is directed at their own hands, the floor, or an object.

• Difficulty with turn-taking in conversations – interrupting, talking in long monologues, changing the subject abruptly, walking away or starting a new task while the other person is still speaking, etc.

Two non-autistic people having a conversation are automatically processing an enormous amount of non-verbal information, without even being aware of it. It’s this information that tells them whose turn it is to speak, whether the other person is taking a breath or is finished speaking, how long they should speak for, whether the other person is interested, bored, or upset by what they’re saying, and a ton of other information. Autistic people do not pick up on any of this automatically, and have to consciously learn to read these cues. Young autistic children will not have mastered any of this yet (and are almost certainly just as frustrated as their peers that conversations never seem to work out!).