Autistic Relational Experience : Case Study

Suspicion as Hostility: A Lived Account of Autistic Relational Experience

A Case Study

I cannot speak for all autistic people. I speak only of my own experience, which clinicians recognise as autism. What follows is a precise description of how that neurology shapes certain interpersonal dynamics for me.

I experience the withholding of empathy, when combined with monitoring, as hostility. In such encounters the other person registers not as a fellow human being but as something machine-like: critical, judgemental, and sealed. Any conscious effort on my part to ease the interaction is frequently interpreted as manipulation and therefore as further evidence of hostility. The only remaining option is authenticity. Under these conditions authenticity appears as visible anxiety and stress. That anxiety is then commonly misread as confirmation of whatever suspicion the other party has already projected onto me. The greater part of the evaluative baggage is theirs, not mine.

Were the same person to approach me as one human being to another, without pre-loaded assumptions, the physiological and cognitive state would change. I would relax. Interchange would become more natural and reciprocal, and the other would form a more accurate picture of me. The repeated experience of the opposite pattern has produced a strong principled opposition to projection of any kind—onto myself or onto anyone else. To judge a person by one’s private expectations rather than by what they have actually said or done is a failure of both accuracy and ethics. When the criteria used to assess risk or character are themselves inaccurate to reality, the resulting data are systematically false.

The asymmetry is innate and recognisable. Why lower one’s own shields when the other approaches with shields already raised? The dynamic resembles the elementary dominance contest of sustained eye contact: the party who looks away first is coded submissive, the party who holds is coded dominant. I can win that contest when I choose, yet I find the space it creates uncomfortable and unnecessary. I prefer to look away and end the exchange. If the other interprets this as submission and therefore as proof of their superiority, that interpretation is their prejudice. I am not ranking them; I simply decline to play the game.

Avoidance of eye contact is a recognised autistic trait. Many non-autistic people rely on eye contact more heavily than autistic people do, and its absence readily generates suspicion. In close proximity an autistic person is more often tracking a different variable: whether the other is likely to dehumanise them or to interrupt an ongoing train of thought in order to exert control. The preferred state is to remain free in private interior space without external scrutiny. People who are informed about autism already understand this preference. Those who are not project an entire set of assumptions that feel, from the inside, both oppressive and irrational.

The power games are not initiated by the autistic person. The autistic person is ordinarily seeking only the freedom to think without interruption. Anger arises when that freedom is constrained. Once the autistic person is forced to carry the projected material of the uninformed party, that same party frequently then labels the autistic person abnormal or a threat to the social order. The act of dehumanisation is thereby converted into justification for treating the dehumanised person as the danger. This loop is a recurring feature of autistic social life. It is exhausting. It is one of the principal mechanisms by which autistic people experience burnout and progressive withdrawal from interaction. It is also a central reason many autistic people prefer solitude.

Accurate public understanding of these dynamics is therefore not a peripheral courtesy; it is a practical requirement for reliable assessment. Without it, observers misdiagnose, react inappropriately, and then blame the autistic person for the resulting distress. That sequence constitutes a failure of empathy, an expression of hostility, and a deficit of ordinary humanity. To demand that an autistic person successfully perform an abstract social software that does not match their neurology, rather than adapting the interaction to the needs that actually exist, is not a humane stance. It is simply ignorance.