Autistic people are often protective of their own space.
This space could be their home, or a particular room in their home.
Autistic people will have a 'room' in which they will spend much of their time, to which they will always withdraw. That 'room' is a safe place.
People will often interpret withdrawal or exclusion as rudeness or coldness on the part of autistic people.
This is a neurotypical interpretation of autistic behaviour. And it is a complete misreading.
Further, if this misinterpretation is expressed in words and behaviours, it can be deeply wounding to autistic people on the receiving end.
Withdrawal or exclusion represents an attempt on the part of autistic people to regulate the world and its information and create a certain predictability in an unpredictable world.
People are unpredictable. People are irregular. People can upset plans and routines. People can be tiring. People can be exhausting.
Autistic people will withdraw and exclude. Withdrawal and exclusion are less acts of conscious will than physical and mental necessities. It can be a matter of survival. The same with respect to meltdowns. When a autistic person has a meltdown it is NOT because they are trying to control a situation but because they can no longer control their response to a situation due to being overwhelmed. These things are NEVER a matter of conscious choice. Looking back on behaviours that seem irrational, people will ask 'why did you that?' and 'why do you do that?' Try understanding any answers given in terms of that make sense of a person's autism, not in terms of neurotypical behaviour. It causes an autistic person untold anguish to be constantly judged by 'normal' standards, and deemed cold, rude, uncooperative, irrational etc. And it causes them to withdraw to a safe space that they can control.
An autistic person experiences the world as intensely and overwhelmingly chaotic, even before the added unpredictability of 'events' and persons.
Autistic people are charged with the task of managing the information of the world without the benefit of internal filters and editors. That means that they are hit with a flood of information with a mass immediacy, experiencing everything at once, without buffers and breakers. EVERYTHING is present and immediate AT ONCE. Autistic people will experience difficulty negotiating the world given its constant changes, difficulties with communication, and amplified sensory input.
Withdrawal into a safe, secluded space is essential for regulation.
That space can also involve time away from people.
Autistic people need routine, regularity, and repetition to help them negotiate the world's information mass. Neurotypical people are equipped with internal editors and filters and hence do not have the same need. Inter-personal communication draws autistic people into a world they find difficult to negotiate, reading cues and responding appropriately, understanding meanings and unstated nuances, reading between the lines. Most exhausting of all is the communication that falls outside of routine, or waiting for a communication that doesn't come when expected.
For all these reasons and more, autistic people find people challenging and unpredictable. A safe space is a retreat, a protected zone that is predictable, sensory friendly, and evenly-tempered. Autistic people are loathe to let people enter that space. People introduce an element of unpredictability, thereby undermining the safety. That space is a space away from the challenges that come with communication in the neurotypical world.
Predictability is imperative for autistic people. Such predictability is impossible in the external world, and hence autistic people need to learn how to manage their exchanges in that world. This makes a safe space all the more essential for an autistic person's peace of mind.
Autistic people experience the world as chaotic the best of times, and so will find ways of making their environments regular and predictable. Changes upset that order and will be experienced as overwhelming, for the reason that they upset all the plans and processes that have been put in place to regulate the world.
Autistic people thrive when they know exactly what is going on in their world. They can also cope with the external world when they are given notice of the day's order of events are, who they are going to meet, and where, when, and why. Which is precisely how the world doesn't proceed!
The world is chaos! Autistic people find even the simplest of social interactions to consume an inordinate amount of energy. So they limit interactions and reduce lines of communication if they can.
And if they cannot, they will retreat to their safe space.
They can control the events of that space.
It can lead to an existence of splendid isolation. Or cruel isolation.
But the predictability of loneliness is infinitely superior to the uncertainties of waiting on and responding to irregular, unpredictable others.
This can be related to struggles with executive functioning.
An autistic person likes things to be out in the open, where they can see them. Out of sight, they can be lost.
They like everything to be in the same place within their safe space. When things are moved around, they can end up being lost. A thing which is not where it has always been could be anywhere. This causes immense anxiety.
Autistic people may have 'special' connections just as they will have 'special interests.' Every object tells a story.
The objects an autistic person shares his or her life with will have an existential significance. Neurotypicals will be inclined to see this as evidence of loneliness. This is yet another misinterpretation. Those objects will be projections of some aspect of an autistic person's own personality. Lacking positive outlets in a chaotic world, these aspects will be developed in and through the objects of an autistic person's own, predictable and orderered, world. Autistic people may well struggle with throwing objects away, seeing them as extensions of their own personal, part of their story and history. You do not discard family and friends. These objects will appear to be clutter to neurotypical people, who will advise/order autistic people to throw them away. They don't understand the trauma this would produce. Objects can be intensely meaningful to autistic people, even if others can see no overt or external meaning. Such objects are an animate presence in an autistic person's safe space as a shared space. This lack of understanding can make autistic people
extremely anxious about allowing people into their space. They fear the changes they will bring.
Further, an autistic person will tend to focus on and process details before seeing the bigger picture. This is the opposite to neurotypical people, who will tend to see the bigger picture before processing the detail. This means that in the outside world autistic people are processing x-times the information of neurotypical people. Autistic people can appear to be slow (and even stupid) to neurotypical people, when the truth is that they are processing a mass of information in the same timescale. It also means that autistic people will know every small detail in their own environment and will notice when things have been moved. This can provoke a reaction that neurotypical people will think extreme and irrational. They do not realize that the movement of things will not just upset the stable order of things in the world of an autistic person, it will also indicate the presence and threat of unwanted and unpredictable change in future. An autistic person will find the intrusion alarming – this is the very force which a safe space is designed to exclude. Autistic people will notice immediately when things have been changed around and moved. Autistic people insist on consistency in all things. Neurotypical people may find such conistency boring. Autistic people do not, given their intensity of focus. If a neurotypical person cannot cope with an autistic person's executive dysfunction then they do not deserve their other-worldy hyperfocus!
An important point to grasp returns to the perceptions of rudeness and coldness with which these observations began. One reason why autistic people are loathe to allow people into their space arises from the fear of having their behaviours perceived negatively by uncomprehending others. This fear, sadly, tends to be confirmed by repeated miscommunications with people, causing austistic people to withdraw into their safe space all the more.
An autistic person's safe space is a haven and a refuge from an uncomprehending and uncaring world, a bastion of sanity, and a hive of imagination, too. For autistic people, who have experienced a lifetime of miscommunication and rejection, that space is a lifeline.
