Over at Kitaiska Sandwich, Sarah has a great post about the upset that her autistic son feels when things get broken or spilled. In reflecting upon the reasons for M’s upset, she finds that his response may not derive simply from a sensory experience, but also from a certain amount of grief over the fact that things can cease to exist. This post is one of Sarah’s best, and I urge you to read it if you haven’t already.
I’ve decided to post a slightly modified version of my comments to Sarah’s piece, because I identify with her son’s feelings so keenly, and because her post helped me to articulate my own experience regarding objects and the associations that they carry with them.
I recognize in M the grief I feel in myself when something breaks or gets lost. I’ve had that kind of grief all my life. It’s not overwhelming grief, as when a person dies; it’s more a sense of keen disappointment at something passing. And that something isn’t just the object, but the associations I have with the object. In fact, I’m not sure that it really has to do with the object per se, although the object is definitely the marker.
For many of us on the spectrum, objects aren’t just objects, but full of associations. I have very strong emotive associations with the things I own—which is one reason that I don’t own a lot of things, and that I don’t buy things that can be easily broken or lost. (In order to avoid cluttering my house, I am always giving things away, which I find both difficult and extremely liberating. Somehow, knowing that they will go to another good home is different from simply losing them or finding them broken.)
I can remember the day I got each of the rocking chairs in my living room: where I got them, who I was with, what the light was like, what time of year it was, and how I felt. The same holds for everything I have. Everything has some sort of emotion or memory attached to it—even the very ordinary set of dairy plates that I bought at The Dollar Store when we first moved into our house. Given that we autistic people tend to have extremely vivid visual and emotive memories, an object can end up being resonant with feeling, even if it looks like a very mundane object to other people. So, when something gets lost or broken, it can feel as though its whole history has gone with it; the event is a reminder that those experiences are in the past, and that time moves on.
There’s a sadness there that goes way beyond the object. I wouldn’t minimize the extent to which a child feels this sadness; what people sometimes lack in language, they more than make up for in depth.
I’m thinking that an autistic child may believe that his or her parents have the same strong associations with objects, and so may feel upset on the parents’ behalf, which only increases the level of distress. I can remember feeling that kind of empathic grief from a very young age, because my parents tended to react very emotionally to things, and I felt their emotions very intensely. If parents can stay calm in the midst of a mishap—as Sarah has been doing—it lets the child know that the parents are not grieving broken items, and it undoubtedly helps the child shift perspective. As I grew and spent more time around people who reacted calmly, I began to react more calmly as well.
And, of course, objects associated with painful memories can trigger very difficult emotions, which leads me to wonder: when an autistic child ends up in an otherwise unaccountable meltdown, could it be that he or she sees a reminder of a painful, frightening, or overwhelming experience?
© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
This was a very enlightening post, Rachel. I have often wondered what kind of emotions and memories my child associates with certain toys and TV shows that he played with and watched when he was cared for by a nanny who abruptly and without notice left our employ after taking care of him daily for nearly 1.5 years.
He has brought up her name recently and I have been ignoring it because I don’t want him to feel hurt that he left. I just don’t know what to do. I redirect and talk about other things. He seems to follow the redirect.
I had a feeling that there was a lot of history tied to the accumulation of things he has as he can recall every single toy he has, where he got it and asks me for things from when he was a baby or if he does not know where something is. I have often looked for the missing object only to discover that I too do not know where it is and am always bewildered at his ability to know where his stuff is (he has so much) and if it is out of place. Thank you for this. It is very valuable to me as a parent.
Karen, I don’t think that it would hurt to address the issue of the nanny directly and in an age-appropriate way. Your son may be trying to integrate that experience into his view of the world. I found that with my daughter, I tended to address things like this by saying, “Yes, the person left, and that was sad, wasn’t it?” Or some such. I always felt that I had to address whatever feelings were there, but with a certain kind of lightness so as to not let her get bogged down in them. Of course, the roles are reversed here: I’m an autistic mom to an NT kid, so the recipe that works in my kitchen may not work in yours.
I think that this whole issue of attaching strong associations to objects may account for why autistic kids tend to hang on to toys, books, videos, etc. that are not considered “age appropriate.” It seems to be a way to hang on to the vividness of the memories in one’s life. In that respect, it’s a very positive, adaptive thing to do. The key is to let certain things go so that you don’t need to rent a storage space just to hold all the objects!
If an object disappears, and it was associated with my parents (both dead), or my childhood, I can feel as if I have actually lost a piece of myself. It can be disorienting. It is almost as if I have to rebuild my “self,” at least do some major repairs.
Wow, Bruce, you’ve just articulated one of my major life challenges: the fact that I have almost no objects from my childhood. I have a cameo brooch that was my grandmother’s, some Kennedy half-dollars (pre-1964) that my grandfather gave me when I was a kid, a Raggedy Ann doll that I got when I was 4, and a Hungarian doll that I got when I was 5. Oh, and I have a lot of old family photos, but because my childhood was so unhappy, I don’t look at them much at all.
Because of my estrangement from my family, I have no access to all the various objects I remember from my childhood. A couple of years ago, after my father died, I found a video tour (on a real estate website) of the house that he and my mother had lived in for the last several years of their lives. In the video, I saw all kinds of objects that I remembered from long ago, and it was strangely healing to me to look at them all. I went back to that video tour, over and over. I still think about how great it would be to actually see that stuff again, but my brother owns the house now, and I am very much persona non grata as far as he is concerned.
The whole thing has been a big issue to me for years, and it’s a significant loss. I don’t experience it as having lost a piece of myself; the experience is one of having lost the things that spark memories of long ago. Perhaps that’s why I write so much; it’s a way to make sure that I can go back and remember how I felt or what I did. Somehow, my writing has the same effect on me as looking at an object; it brings me back to the place I was when I wrote it, at least for a time.
You have hit on a kind of grief I think about often. My grandparents’ families left Russia in the early 1900s. Like many immigrants and refugees who leave home against their will and in a hurry, they were unable to take much with them. None of what they did bring survived long enough for me to see or touch it.
My whole life, I have been insanely jealous of people who have photographs, documents, and objects that belonged to their grandparents. When I was 19, I went with a friend to visit her grandparents in a tiny rural village in Mexico, where her ancestors had lived in the same house since at least the 1700s. It made me think about what it really means to lose your homeland, or to never have one to begin with.
War and natural disasters separate people from the places and objects that would trigger memories and allow them to be passed down, and so they wipe out generations of history.
Now I understand why I was intent for so long on finding ancestor photos and my genealogy, and why I was so overjoyed when I stumbled upon them. One night several years ago, during a bout of insomnia, I decided to see, once again, whether anyone had put up any information about my family on Ancestry.com. As I’d done numerous times before, I put my mother’s maiden name into the search engine, and all of a sudden, I found an entire branch of my family, going back to the 1700s in Poland! After contacting the person who had posted the information , I got a CD in the mail, containing a 600-page genealogy and scores of ancestor photos. My ancestors didn’t bring much to this country, but they brought their photos, which absolutely amazed me. I have a number of them on my wall, and they’re among my most prized possessions.
It’s amazing how I can relate to this. There are “things” around me that have nothing to do with the item but the memory surrounding the item. I have purged so much clutter from my house but I refuse to let go of those things that mean so much. I have a simple plant in my office. To anyone else, it is just a plant. To me, it’s a long story of love. It makes me feel warm & happy to look at it as I relive the moment I got it and why I received it.
I’m glad to know i’m not alone.
No, you’re definitely not alone! I have a plant that I love as well; I received it at my naming ceremony in the synagogue about 10 years ago. It was given to me by a friend, and it was practically just a twig at the time. Now it’s leafy and tall, and whenever I look at it, I think of that ceremony and what it meant to me.
This is really interesting. I have very certain few objects that have tremendous significance for me.. Some of them would seem silly to others, a rock that my Mimi used as a doorstop. Things like that. Dickson and Julia seem to get very attached to objects in this way. Actually I’m not so sure it’s the attachment, but the severe disappointment when something is lost or broken. Dickson really has a hard time with it. Just tonight we went through a whole thing about some $10 ear bud headphones that have gone missing. I didn’t really have a way to understand this until reading your post.
As an Aspie myself, however I don’t have this issue. But! I have a theory as to why that is. See my mom is constantly changing something. We moved around A LOT, I went to a bunch of different schools, she’d rearrange furniture, repaint walls. Things were constantly moving, showing up and then disappearing. In my life growing up, Aspie or not (which no one knew), if you didn’t get used to change it was going to be difficult for you. So, I think it’s interesting how our lives shape us, and our responses to things.
Thanks for the great post!
And they say Aspies don’t adapt well! Such nonsense.
i was an army brat, and have much the same experience.
as a result, at 41, i still find it difficult to stay put, and i realize how unusual this is for people with AS. on the other hand, i’m pretty sensitive to my surroundings, and have specific requirements that i’m not always aware of until i’ve spent some time in a place.
hm. maybe i should make a list…
Wait…wait….Did someone say lists? I love lists. Yes, yes, please make a list.
just kidding.
of course, i’ve already MADE the list, and remade, several times already.
And you’re not sharing??? Sheesh.
Yeesh, I had a hard time throwing away stuff that wasn’t mine in the first place–my MIL has been aggressively cutting down on clutter since her divorce, and she periodically foists stuff on us. Even things that I’ve never seen before can cause emotional associations it seems (I kept a Christmas ornament from my husband’s first Christmas, I couldn’t resist). Even though these things aren’t even mine, and my husband doesn’t seem to have much attachment to any of them (he grabbed the most important things to him years ago when he moved out), I find it hard to let go of them.
I find that I also take on the emotional associations of other people’s objects. When I was writing my first book, I spent a lot of time looking at old photographs that had been handed down by the family of the man whose life I was chronicling. By the time I was done, all of man’s stories about the people in the photos had become part of my consciousness, to the point that the photos still resonate with feeling and association whenever I open the book at look at them (or even see them in my mind’s eye).
Thanks for pointing out Sarah’s post. I hadn’t visited her blog before and have very much liked what I’ve read so far.
For me my attachment to objects is all about what they represent in my mind. I can be in possession of something for a long period of time and not feel much about it, while other things become meaningful for me right away. They tend to represent some meaningful experience in my mind, and seeing or holding the object brings back that experience.
There’s also some stuff that started out not meaning much, but through having some involved history with it, the object takes on greater significance. I’m driving a car right now that has more things broken on it than working. I’ve had to do all sorts of messing around with getting it jumpstarted and flat tires and trying to fix seatbelts and driving differently because I can’t count on it accelerating when I push down on the gas. The strange thing is, I’m finding now that I’ve grown attached to this car that for years was just a way to get from here to there. When it was working fine, it was just a car. When it needed attention, I inadvertently became invested. That realization took me by surprise.
I’ve had the same experience of getting invested in the things that I have to work on. And since I tend to like working with objects (cleaning, organizing, taking apart, reconfiguring, and so on), they take on a lot of history!
The first time I read about how some autistic people relate to objects, I was more than a bit shocked, because this is what I do.
I don’t get emotionally upset, but I have always felt sadness and grief when something is broken and thus loses its purpose/meaning. I always felt really strange about it, but it’s really good and interesting to see this isn’t unique.
I can also relate to what you said upthread about losing what you had in childhood. I don’t think I have anything from before I turned 18, and everything sentimental I had before 25 is gone as well. I actually feel kind of adrift knowing I don’t have these things and most of what I have now I’ve only purchased in the past 10-11 years.
That feeling of being without childhood things is one of the reasons that I have saved so many of my daughter’s childhood things for when she is older, along with things of mine that I associate with her childhood. If she doesn’t want them, she’s free to throw them out, but at least she’ll have the option.
I wrote a bit of a long e-mail to a friend about this a couple of weeks ago, because it was tied up in an existential crisis I was on the verge of having. I’m not having it now because I worked out the problem and have found a solution. But I am still feeling kind of lacking because of all the things I don’t have any more.
I know my nieces and nephew have a lot of things that they had as children, and that’s not getting thrown out any time soon. I’m glad for that, too, that they’re not losing these things.
[...] or so. Well today I finally found time to open my reader, and ran into an interesting article by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, about the ways in which autistic people become obsessively attached to there physical [...]
[...] When Objects Resonate with Memory appears here by permission. [...]
I was thinking of those post as I did some spring cleaning a couple days ago. I’d been keeping hard copies of my notebooks for every single show–not my show bibles, which NEVER get thrown out, but just my scratchpad notebooks. And even knowing that there is not a single piece of information in any of them that doesn’t exist somewhere else in more efficient form (or that anyone would ever ask me for anyway), it was so hard. I flipped through them and could remember just about every single day of each production, and what was going on in my life at the time, and the weather, and the people I was working with, and the places we went out for drinks, and on and on…I found some old cassette singles, which I did succeed in throwing out. Because when will I ever need to listen to Hootie & the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand” ON CASSETTE again?! It’s not that I don’t have it on both iTunes and CD…but it was one of the first pieces of music I ever bought for myself, and I remember that day at the record store when I was 12.
I’ve had to really cultivate an ability to throw things out and be realistic about what I need to keep, especially since I now live in one third of a 600 sq. ft. apartment. I would watch the show “Hoarders” with a huge sense of “there but for the grace of god go I.”
There’s a great line in one of my favorite books, “White Oleander” that I end up repeating to myself whenever I have to get rid of stuff…the main character Astrid’s last foster mother is forcing her to sell all of her possessions. She says “You want remember, so just remember.”
…should be “THIS post.” Geez, proofreading fail, chavisory.
When I was younger, I used to save more things, but as the years progressed, I realized that I’d have to start offloading or I’d never have the kind of clear, uncluttered space I wanted. At this point, we have a very nice attic, so anything I want to save goes into a box up there. I save a lot of things for my daughter. So far, it’s “paid off,” since I got to show her some pieces that I wrote when I was in high school, and she really enjoyed seeing them.
I can “just remember” a great many things (I seem to have an elephant’s memory), but I like the idea of being able to hold things in my hands while time traveling.
It would be difficult to know whether or not any of my kids’ unexplained melt-downs are caused by something like this, but I do know there have been some melt-downs with all three of the boys where something has broken and the object is thrust at me as if I could fix it. One unfortunately common one is when they’re rough with a favorite DVD or VHS and it gets broken.
I’ve always assumed that it was the loss of the coveted item that caused the “over-reaction.” But, considering what you and Sarah have written, I have to wonder if it’s more likely that the loss of the associations (the calming effects the videos can have, the happy moments when the new video is first discovered, the family moments of times where we’re watching it together) is more the source of the frustration and emotional reaction. That would also explain why, when the item is replaced, it takes the boys a while to warm up to this same-but-not-the-same item.
As always, thank you for sharing your insights!
Thanks for your comment, Stephanie. I’m always glad to share — especially when it might help give someone further insight into his or her kids.
[...] or so. Well today I finally found time to open my reader, and ran into an interesting article by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, about the ways in which autistic people become obsessively attached to there physical [...]