Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Engineers: Where Does Autism Begin?

A colleague of mine jokes (I think it's a joke) that NASA, at its height was the largest employer of special needs people - people with autism - in the world.  She was equating, essentially, engineers of a certain stripe, with having autism.

Indeed I've heard and read with some frequency that there's a correlation between parents who are engineers and their children who have autism and, in actuality, I've seen that often.  I've also seen children with autism whose parents are anything but the fact based, cerebral, math based, fascinated with complex problems and categorization making folks who are less emotionally based than the non-engineering population.  This is how we colloquially think of engineers.  This is not a piece on the objective research - some has been done without, to my knowledge, clear findings.  It is a piece on the spectrum of, well, of the spectrum.  Now I'm not assigning everyone at MIT and Georgia Tech with diagnoses, but rather am noting observations.

I know lots of engineers (some of my best friends....really.)  Many fit the same profile of strong analytic with weaker emotional capacity, including one who spurred this piece.

I'll call him Dave.  He's smart, successful, creative, kind, thoughtful, an overall great guy.  We've been friends for decades.  His wife is a mental health professional colleague of mine and she called me to discuss her frustration at his lack of emotional availability regarding a certain situation she was experiencing.  She noted that it had been a pattern through the decades of their marriage.  He was more of a "the facts are the facts, accept them, cope and move on" type of guy.  An engineer.  She's more of a "I'd like to discuss this, and then I might like to discuss how we discussed this.  What's the process we've gone through and the patterns we have about how we discuss our emotions...." type of gal.  Typical for many, including many therapists (not said critically - I'm the same type of guy.) 

I pointed out to her that as an engineer, his emotional bandwidth might be constrained a bit by his engineering sensibilities.  He didn't dismiss her emotional needs.  Rather, he heard them, acknowledged them and then expected some amount of "move on" from her.  I explained to her that Dave loves her (and their kids) dearly and would do anything for her (indeed, I could list many many things he's done for them all that were clear and open signs of love and compassion.)  But there were times, she said, that she just needed more emotionally. 

I offered to her the thought that she might consider getting some of her emotional scratches itched elsewhere.  In therapy, with friends or a consultation group, for example.  I suggested that as an engineer he might well be one of those guys who is built a bit differently regarding how he experiences the emotional realm.  He has emotional bandwidth and articulation, just not enough to meet all of her needs.  She appreciated the thoughts and, at least for the meantime, seems to be OK with a different understanding of her loving husband. 

So Dave and his wife got me thinking.  How similar is Dave to folks on the spectrum who often struggle with identifying their emotions, not to mention with empathy, the ability to consider and join in another's emotional experience, often to such a degree that it really gets in the way of their social success?  And I don't know that I have an answer, but rather, a reflection. 

It seems that there may be a spectrum, pardon the word, for how folks have emotional capacity and range.  Again, I'm not suggesting this as a diagnostic issue, but rather as one of emotional style, admittedly a slippery description that is open to vast interpretation.  But we all know of folks whose emotional range and reserves are stiff and limited.  Folks who are quite uncomfortable, unaccustomed and even unable to describe their emotional responses to things with subtlety and precision.  Does that define them as having autism?  Hardly.  The accepted diagnostic criteria discusses many more aspects that surpass this relatively restricted issue of emotional availability. 

And yet, it makes me wonder where we'll be in 50 years as we learn more about how to make these definitions?  And how will we determine with accuracy the dividing line between functional and less functional emotional capacity and its intersection with the other aspects of what we understand autism to be? 


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