How Do I Become Less Obedient?

Autistic Advice#12: Noncompliance is a liberating social skill - but it must be developed.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Welcome back to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular advice column where I respond to reader questions about neurodiversity, accessibility, disability justice, and self-advocacy from my perspective as an Autistic psychologist. You can submit questions or suggest future entries in the series via my Tumblr ask box, linked here.

Today’s question comes from a rebellious and anarchy-minded Autistic person who wants to get better at breaking unjust rules — but they’re debilitated by guilt, and the fear of getting caught. They write: 

Thank you so much for writing in with this question, Anon. So many of the questions I receive from readers involve striving to develop a stronger sense of self with a greater capacity to exercise agency. A complex brew of social exclusion and trauma teaches many Autistic people to prioritize the values of other people over the beliefs and ideals that we hold ourselves. 

Masking Autism is all about rendering oneself more compliant to external pressure and authority. Our bodies are rebellious and our minds prone to asking difficult questions, and we are punished for threatening the existing social order in these ways until we learn to stop. 

We learn to leap into action the moment someone looks displeased with us, showering them in attention, falling over ourselves with apologies, and sacrificing all of our energy and peace in order to smooth over even the faintest hint of conflict. We pretend to agree with statements we find objectionable, try to find the sense in the actions of the ones who beat and insult us, and if our experiences are contradicted, we always assume that we are wrong. 

We all know by now that Autistics who mask their disability suffer from physical health complaints and mental health issues at elevated rates. But perhaps the most terrifying byproduct of masking is how thoroughly it shatters our internal compass. Many masked Autistics report not even knowing what they believe, or what their boundaries are. Defining ourselves beyond how we are perceived feels forbidden, like abandoning all morality and social connections whatsoever. 

Getting beyond that initial phase of unknowing and coming to trust oneself as an Autistic person is the major task that readers embark on in my book Unmasking Autism. And unmasking oneself enough to identify one’s true feelings and most deeply-held beliefs is a challenging task that, for many of us, demands multiple years of intensive reflection and work. 

What Hiding My Autism Costs Me
It’s painful and exhausting to ‘mask’ Autism — but I have no other choicehumanparts.medium.com

When understood within context, Anon, you’ve already come remarkably far. You know what you believe and you’re able to question some of society’s most entrenched and oppressive of standards: its laws. You’re aware of how the law has been used to systematically strip groups of people of their personhood and freedom. You understand that the unquestioned power of the law is a force for oppression and inequality, and that it can only be fought effectively through breaking it. It’s clear that you are amenable to the forces of discord and deviance, at least within the confines of your heart. 

That means it isn’t your mind that has to change, which is great, because research tells us that cognitive persuasion is the hardest, slowest part. You’re down with disobedience and nonconformity. Now you must translate that belief into action. And what’s getting in the way of action for your right now? Distress. Anxiety. Perhaps the sensible fear of getting caught. 

These emotions put us into a freeze state much of the time, which makes it very difficult for us to initiate activities, disagree with people, and exercise agency in any way at all.

This means that the first thing you should focus on is raising your distress tolerance. And this is actually a wonderful project, because in addition to making you a more skillful thief and rapscallion, heightening your distress tolerance will also improve your ability to stand up for yourself in the heat of the moment and not be swayed by abuse or manipulation.

So how do you get there? There are many ways to increase distress tolerance, and I’m kinda sorta working on a whole new book for Autistic people designed to improve our self-advocacy skills, but for now I can give you several tips, starting with this one: 

Deliberately set out to do something that you want to do, but which will make someone close to you unhappy — and even when it feels terrible, keep doing the thing anyway.

If you’ve never been all that disobedient before, you can and should start really, really small. For example, you can wear the slightly revealing or gloriously trashy-looking garment that makes your mom roll her eyes and sigh despondently every time she sees you put it on. You will feel judged and disapproved of when you put it on, but that is fine. Your goal is to sit with the uncomfortable feelings and continue with your desired behavior anyway. 

Saunter down the steps in that highlighter-yellow Garfield crop top with your chest hair flowing over the neckline, and harness as much courage as you can muster. It’s okay if you feel like a beacon of sin. Just keep it moving. Your emotions are not the target here. Your behavior is. You can feel however you are feeling in the moment so long as you keep acting like you’re free. 

A cartoon of a bee trying on a flash outfit and feeling a little embarrassed, courtesy of the artist floccinaucinihilipilification. 

Do you have a favorite TV show that a partner or roommate vocally hates? Try watching that show around them without apologizing or defensively joining them in mocking the program. At first, you probably won’t be able to enjoy the show while in their presence. You’ll feel self-conscious about everything they find annoying or cringe-inducing about the show, and so focused on their reactions that you can’t relax. That’s okay. Allow those feelings of embarrassment and guilt to exist and pass through you without giving up. In time, you will be able to ignore these reactions more, and enjoy the activity. 

You want to see the needle of discomfort moving down just a little, like Link’s body temperature meter in Tears of the Kingdom when he puts on a breathable outfit in a hot climate. You’re not gonna go from roiling hot to frosty cold in an instant. But after a certain point, you won’t be actively in pain anymore. Things are just gonna slowly suck less, bit by bit, until they are finally okay. That’s true of most major life adjustments, I find. 

Probably the best way to develop self-advocacy skills while growing in your distress tolerance is simply by telling other people no. Do this without explanation or hedging. Nitpicky aunt wants to hear all about your dating life? “No, I don’t want to talk about that.” Unreliable ex-friend wants you to do them the tiny favor of moving their entire home gymnasium into a new third story walk-up? “No, I’m not available.” Manipulative shift supervisor wants to cajole you into sticking around for another three hours to close? “No.” 

As many advice columnists smarter than me have already intoned, “no” is a complete sentence. “No” requires no explanation. “No” is not subject to debate. “No” can be repeated over and over like a broken record if a disrespectful person acts like they can’t hear it. And you can walk away at any time to make your “no” physical and impossible to argue with, when someone has proven they don’t respect your boundaries. 

There are external, structural factors that influence how easily we can say no, of course. It’s far riskier to turn down the demands of a manager who has the power to fire you or a caregiver whom you rely on to stay bathed and fed. And you should never feel ashamed of recognizing such pressures and acting strategically when you’re under them. 

You’re not a failure for acting with your own self-protection in mind, and giving a potential abuser less ground to mistreat you is sometimes the healthiest boundary-setting that you can do. This is when techniques like grey rocking and limiting how much information or personality that you share can be deliberately used. These strategies can be wonderfully helpful if your wellbeing is under threat. 

That said, feeling unsafe is not the same thing as actually being under threat — and if we mask and people-please reflexively, we are likely treating many completely harmless situations of disagreement as if they were mortal threats. It’s important to learn to distinguish between a situation where you have no freedom to speak up, and one where you can live authentically as yourself, and simply get more comfortable with not pleasing everyone. So in any situation where you are free to, try saying “no” and riding out how scary it might feel. 

When you first say “no” without explanation or apology, you will feel anxiety. That’s okay. In fact, you should pat yourself on the back for reaching the borders of your comfort zone. It is in this area of unfamiliar, slightly scary, yet possible action that we are able to grow. 

You might panic the first time you tell your spouse you’re not cooking dinner every night anymore, and he’ll have to figure out the meal planning himself, or the first time you let a call from a manager go unanswered while you’re off the clock. Great! You are training your body to recognize that nothing bad happens when somebody is a little peeved at you. You’re detaching your sense of safety from another person’s feelings, and tearing apart that enmeshment hurts the way ripping off a band-aid does. 

If these quiet forms of disappointing people and sitting with distress already feel like too low of a bar to clear, you’re ready to practice being openly weird or confrontational from time to time. This is junior-varsity level distress tolerance work, where you really get to flex the muscle of claiming space and even creating mild conflict where it deserves to exist. 

A shopping mall. Photo by WeLoveBarcelona.de on Unsplash

Mateo has dealt with intense social anxiety for much of his life. A persistent fear of talking to cute girls & boys or of participating in class eventually deteriorated in his adulthood into more serious withdrawal, and after a while Mateo couldn’t even leave the house. With the help of a social anxiety and agoraphobia therapist, however, Mateo was able to get back out into the world, and even start talking up strangers again. Mateo tells me one of the most effective elements of this therapy involved deliberately being weird in front of strangers. 

“My therapist and I would go to the mall, and he’d have me ask people at the shops bizarre things,” he says. “I’d ask where the CVS was multiple times in the same conversation. I’d get the cashier to help me locate an item that was obviously right in front of me. Or I’d ask someone if my sunglasses made me look like I was from Iowa.” 

None of Mateo’s unusual requests were harmful, and he and his therapist made sure to only visit the mall for these challenges during slow periods in the middle of the week, so that he wouldn’t ever be a genuine bother to a worker caught in the middle of the rush. Still, Mateo felt quite uncomfortable behaving so strangely in public — and this was by design. 

This technique helped Mateo in several ways. First, it illustrated to him that there really wasn’t any problem with being harmlessly annoying, or with risking looking dumb. It also trained Mateo to lean into possible weirdness instead of fighting like hell to avoid it. He’d always been so worried about standing out that he’d avoided demanding any attention whatsoever — so his therapist pushed him to see that drawing a few stares or odd looks wasn’t so bad a thing. 

Today, Mateo is an actor with several film roles, and he performs stand-up comedy at open mics multiple nights per week. He credits his agoraphobia therapist’s unconventional approach with turning his life around. Mateo knows that he can roll through uncomfortable moments and getting baffled reactions from people now. And most of the time, people react to odd comments or confusing situations with a far more good-natured reaction than he ever would have expected before embarking on his therapist’s challenges at the mall. 

“People like me more now that I’m more weird,” he says. “I don’t even try to be quirky, I just let myself be.” 

If you’re a masked Autistic with an intense fear of violating unwritten social rules or even intractable laws, you can implement your own version of this challenge yourself. Be a bit unusual on purpose. Do something harmlessly forbidden. Disagree with someone openly when you’re supposed to be polite. Bring up a bizarre conversational topic out of left field, simply because you are interested in it. Expect to feel strange about it. And then do it anyway. 

After you’ve practiced dwelling in increasing levels of discomfort, then you are ready for the second step of becoming ungovernable: learning how oppressive systems enforce the rules (and often, fail to enforce the rules), and then exploiting these patterns for your benefit. 

One of the core competencies of becoming disobedient involves noticing how systems misrepresent themselves and often break down, in comparison to how those systems claim to the public that they work. Many of the laws that supposedly govern this country have absolutely no executive actually body enforcing them, for instance. Only a small minority of laws concerning property, drugs, traffic, and violence are ones that the police regularly enforce. The rest are left to the civil court system — meaning you have to sue somebody to see them enforced — or in some cases, they aren’t enforced at all. 

For instance, if a prospective employer discriminates against you for being a pregnant woman, they have violated the law, but there’s no cop or governing body you can call to come over and lock the employer up. Meanwhile, your boss can get you arrested if he catches you slipping a few dollars from the till. Becoming aware of the inconsistencies in how rules are enforced and investigated can help liberate you — because it will make you aware of both systematic unfairnesses and small gaps you can exploit.

Here’s a personal example for you, Anon: most universities have a lot of highly specific policies about how students are meant to receive disability accommodations, and the proof a professor is supposed to require in order to give out extensions. But as an instructor, I’ve never had a school actively monitor me to make sure I’m complying. 

On paper, I am never allowed to accept assignments after a course’s end date. In practice, I have let students send in late work and added it to their final grade plenty of times. If I haven’t finished grading assignments and filing my final grades anyway, there’s no reason I can’t add a couple last-minute submission to my to-read pile. 

On paper, I am supposed to tell the financial aid office exactly when a student stops participating in my classes, so they stop receiving money. In practice, I can say a student was active in class just long enough to qualify for the scholarships and loans they might need to pay their bills, regardless of whether that’s true. Educational institutions fail their disabled and struggling students by overlooking their needs all the time. It feels good to be able to use this lack of oversight to my students’ advantage instead. 

So Anon, if you’re not ready to steal from a massive corporation or provide shelter to a transitioning teen fleeing a Republican state, break rules in a more modest, craftier way. Try finding a pointless-seeming rule at work, school, or another institution that you’re certain you can break without anybody noticing. And then break it, and wait a while, until you experience the relief of knowing that you got away with it and could do it again. 

Jaywalking on a quiet street is a clear-cut, low-bar example. It’s an activity that us long term city-dwellers engage in without hesitation, but it can really startle people new to urban life. That’s not because us city mice are innately braver or more anarchistic than country mice, we just have more practice with crossing busy streets. We learn how to handle the brief anxiety of noticing a car looming down the road a safe distance away from us, and we know a cop is unlikely to stop us for claiming some space.

 Jaywalking is only against the law thanks to the work of automotive industry lobbyists, who wished to obscure their own responsibility in pedestrian deaths. By violating this regressive policy in a smart way, we can push the borders of the legal and the socially acceptable back toward the pedestrian’s favor, in our own tiny way. Biking groups like Critical Mass take part in much the same thing, claiming their full use of the road by forming large packs of cyclists in the middle of the night. 

Ring up your organic pomegranates as bananas, if the grocery store doesn’t have a security camera. Fail to report a birthday check from your grandma on your taxes. Pull a Sick Jan and claim a home office exemption. Or try filling out a few class-action lawsuit forms for purchases you can’t prove that you ever made. It would cost large corporations far more money to investigate each individual claim than it does to just dish out the standard payment to anyone who applies, so there’s little risk in filing them. 

One anarchist that reviewed your question, Anon, recommended finding alternatives to circumventing the law that come with less risk than shoplifting: 

“I’m pretty sure for most people things like dumpster diving or asking pizza places for ordered but uncollected pizzas or grabbing other people’s leftover food at food courts is a better, less risky solution to the needing food problem than shoplifting is,” he says. 

“I started with [doing work as part of] Food Not Bombs, where what I was doing (feeding homeless people in public) was illegal but also at the time was very low risk of arrest and was the sort of thing where if I got arrested for it, my family would have seen it as a plausibly moral act, which would not have been the case with shoplifting.” 

As someone who has shoplifted a fair amount (and been detained for it, back when I was a teen), I am inclined to agree. There is a delicate art to learning how to shoplift, and you have to be able to read the particulars of how a store’s security system works, the roles various employees play, what undercover loss prevention specialists might look like, and how brazen of a theft you can get away with in order to do any of it comfortably. You may be better off Freeganing food and distributing it to hungry members of your community. Groups like Food Not Bombs can train you to do that. 

Sometimes, valiantly breaking laws requires a little legal education. For example, as someone who believes do-it-yourself hormone replacement therapy can be liberating to trans people living in states with transphobic laws, I have had to teach myself about the legalities of ordering hormones online. And I have learned that it is not illegal to order testosterone off the internet, or to posses it — but it is illegal to ship into my country. 

When I stockpile extra testosterone for my community using sites like IndiaMart, my orders face a decent chance of being confiscated at the border by United States Customs & Border Patrol. When this happens (and it has happened), I receive a letter from Customs telling me that a shipment with my name on it has been seized, but that I can submit paperwork to recover if I believe the confiscation was a mistake. 

If I fail to challenge the confiscation, nothing bad happens to me — and nothing legally can. The United States government can’t really go after my seller in India either. It’s not worth making a whole international affair out of. And so I can just order my T again, eat the cost of the lost order, and wait for it to arrive. Usually, it does. 

Just this morning, I realized that a package from a bidet company had been sitting on my doorstep for over a month without being claimed. The name on the package doesn’t match the name on the mailbox for the apartment unit; in fact, nobody with that name has lived here in the two years I’ve been around. From all I can tell, a person who used to live in this building must have ordered the bidet without updating their address, and so it was sent to the wrong place. They’ve probably already received a replacement from the company by now. 

This morning I decided to do a little harmless mail fraud and install the bidet. It’s an incredible contraption — it requires no electrical power or complex installation, just the attachment of a splitter to the drainpipe at the back of the toilet. With the help of this device that would otherwise be winding up in a landfill, I’ll be cutting my toilet paper usage down by a sizable percentage. And I got the little thrill of painlessly crossing a social boundary, which is something my pathologically demand avoidant self loves. 

I’m Pathologically Demand Avoidant. It Rules.
A need for freedom & healthy suspicion of authority has protected me, not hurt me.medium.com

Autistic people are born to be noncompliant. When bureaucracy makes a job more complex than it has to be, we often see how to cleanly and elegantly cut through the red tape. When an elaborate social ritual such as securing a date makes no sense to us, we develop our own systems to end the bullshit and state our desires plainly. We tell people when they’ve got the facts wrong, and we don’t laugh at the racist and sexist jokes others ignore for fear of making Thanksgiving dinner awkward. 

We should never have these defiant impulses beaten out of us. Society is worsened by the fact that it silences our nonconformity. And at a time when children are still being kept in cages at the United States border and getting ripped from their families simply for being queer, we need conscientious law-breakers more than ever. 

For many reasons, Autistic people live at a sharp disadvantage compared to neuroconforming people. We do get fired for failing to fake smiles at customers. We get thrown out of the house for refusing to pray to a God that hates us for self-soothing with masturbation. If we refuse to behave demurely or modestly we may fail to find a spouse. 

For these and so many other reasons, we are poorer and more excluded than other people — and we’re also targeted by laws that say we shouldn’t be permitted to immigrate, receive organ donations, or alter our bodies. And so, Anon, I hope that you can get well practiced in the skill of defiance. In order to get by, many of do have to learn how to steal our food, upset our loved ones, and be guided by a principled spirit of noncompliance. The more of us learn to live by these skills, the stronger we all will be.