Have you ever considered how many tasks we do daily? It's in the hundreds. Most people go through these tasks every day easily. But for those with autism or high functioning autism (I have that) it isnt a bunch of duties, it's chaos.
Autistic people need routines and rituals. They provide a foundation or a platform that counters real life's list of unexpected daily duties. New emails that send you into turmoil as you know the next hour is spent on the phone with recording devices asking you to press numbers. When you finally get through you get cut off for some unknown reason. You know the drill. It doesnt help to recall decades ago when you had to attend to the very email in letter form where the process took days.
Partners or family members have a problem because if these routines are interrupted we can get triggered. A good example is house keys, if your partner leaves the house with your keys and her keys are in her own secure place, you cant leave the house without locking up, you get triggered to the point whereby you feel trapped, imprisoned. Yes, thats the result for some of us. That leads to overreaction and a downward spiral.
This triggering event is far worse for low IQ or severe autism because those souls dont have the higher IQ nor logic levels to counter effect of the the broken routine. I worked with a fellow once that was one of those people that had our shared security desk with a place for everything, the ruler had to be in its designated position as was everything else in their right spot. Returning from a patrol if one item wasnt right there he'd explode. Even the logic of me being busy didnt suffice. A foster son we have has severe autism and if his routine is changed he cannot cope and weeps.
So the real problem here is for those with some mental illnesses we rely upon routine and rituals as a foundation of our lives. If capable when those routines are changed we must try not to get upset, stop the trigger and think how hard it is for our partner to live a life based on not changing something that could trigger us. That means hard work for us, to downplay the effect of change but thats our responsibility even though its very hard to do. Dont feel guilty, just try.
TonyWK
