"Cultivating Unmasked FriendshipsâFind Your âStrawberry Peopleâ
In his writing about Autistic fawning and people pleasing, Samuel Dylan Finch describes how he used to push genuine friendships away. He associated loving a person with working hard to keep them happy. Conversely, if someone was consistently warm and giving, Samuel didnât trust it. He didnât think he could reciprocate real affection.
âI had this tendency to bail on [the] friends, partners, acquaintances, whoever, that were the most generous, warm, and emotionally-available,â he writes.[7]Â âFor people-pleasers, weâre so used to working endlessly hard in relationshipsâitâs disorienting when we arenât asked to.â
Samuel felt more at home in insecure, hot-and-cold relationships. He dated abusive people, was exploited by professional contacts, and neglected new acquaintances that had the potential to become something more. After years of this, he recognized he needed to rewire his brainâs social pathways. What felt familiar clearly was not good for him. So he sat down and made a list of the people who deserved his friendship.
âI made a Google doc of people who were âtoo niceâ to me,â he writes. âIn my phone contacts, I put emojis by their names. I put strawberries next to people who were super loving. I put seedling emojis by folks who taught me things that made me think or grow.â
Samuel reached out to his âstrawberry peopleâ and told them that he wanted to prioritize his friendship with them. He admitted heâd discouraged their affection in the past because heâd been afraid of disappointing them. And from then on, whenever he got a notification on his phone and saw a strawberry or seedling symbol, he made sure to answer quickly, and enthusiastically. He didnât cancel plans with these friends anymore or create artificial distance. He centered them in his life.
By and large, Autistic people donât operate by social intuition the way neurotypicals do. Every notification we receive tends to be given equal weight, no matter how well we know a person or how we feel about them. This is particularly true for maskers, who can be so terrified of upsetting anyone that they seek to be equally friendly and responsive to everyone. It can be useful to outsource the social instincts that might come naturally to the average allistic person by labeling certain individuals as high priority, or turning off all notifications except for those from a specific group chat or app. Instead of having to make manual decisions about whom to respond to and in which order, the âstrawberry peopleâ system reinforces the idea that certain relationships are more important than others, because they help you cultivate a more solid sense of self.
Within a year of his making these changes in his life, many of Samuelâs âstrawberry peopleâ had become members of his found family. They had his back as he worked through therapy for PTSD and eating disorder recovery. The strawberry people even became friends with one anotherâSamuel writes that they all talk in a single group chat.
Developmental psychology research has observed that Autistic people often have insecure attachments to other people, beginning from a very young age.[8] A personâs attachment patterns are shaped by their early relationships, particularly the stability of their bond with their primary caregiver. The quality of a personâs early attachments also tend to predict the quality of their later relationships, both romantic and otherwise, and their ability to accept comfort and emotional support from other people.
As developmental psychologists define it, a child with secure attachment uses their caregiver as a grounding, supportive âbaseâ from which to explore the world. A securely attached toddler may venture around an unfamiliar playground a bit, fiddling with the playground equipment or trying to make new friends, for example, but they will return to their attachment figure periodically to check in and feel safe. When left alone, a securely attached child will experience sadness or distress, but they are quick to relax and feel soothed once their caregiver returns. As they grow up, securely attached children become adults who can bond with other people with relative ease, and who can handle conflicts and challenges in their relationship with a high degree of stability and trust.
There are several attachment patterns that developmental psychologists consider to be dysfunctional. For example, an anxiously attached child might be afraid to wander away from a caregiver for fear of being abandoned, and when left alone may experience extreme distress that they donât easily recover from. In contrast, an avoidantly attached child may fail to engage much with their caregivers. Autistics have been observed to exhibit whatâs called an anxious-ambivalent attachment style at rates that are elevated compared to the neurotypical population. People with an anxious-ambivalent attachment are difficult to soothe and reassure, and donât see close loved ones as a safe, âsecure baseâ they can find comfort in when lost or threatened. As adults, people who are anxious-ambivalent tend to get into patterns of intense emotional dependency, combined with insecurity. They yearn to be accepted yet doubt that they can be. When other people try to connect with us, we rebuff them without even realizing it.
It bears mentioning here that developmental psychologists define what a secure attachment âlooks likeâ based on how it presents in neurotypical children and adults. Neurotypical children who are securely attached check in with their parents in a very easy to recognize way, using eye contact and vocalizations that many Autistic children might find unnatural. Furthermore, many of the signs of having an insecure attachment style are difficult to distinguish from neurodivergence (and from being traumatized after living in a neurotypical world). Avoidant attachment, for example, is marked by a child turning their back to their caregiver and failing to seek them out for comfort when distressed. While these behaviors can indicate a child doesnât feel supported by their caregiver, it can also be a sign theyâre Autistic and averse to touch, eye contact, or verbal communication.
From an early age, many Autistic people experience rejection and lack of understanding from our primary caregivers. We also may be punished or neglected because we have failed to seek out comfort in neurotypical-approved ways. Our attempts at connection, such as playing next to another person but not making eye contact with them (sometimes called parallel play), may be mistaken as a lack of social interest. An intense Autistic meltdown may be mistaken for us being incapable of being soothed, and taken as a sign of an anxious attachment pattern. For these and a variety of other reasons, many Autistic people do wind up feeling very insecure in our attachments to other people, or having our heartfelt attempts at connection rebuffed or misconstrued. Neurotypical attachment ârulesâ essentially make it impossible for us to be viewed as suitable for regular, healthy bonds.
One way that an insecure attachment style sometimes manifests in Autistic adults is feeling discomfort when receiving praise or attention. You may not even recognize the positive attention youâre getting is socially appropriate, because youâre so used to being mocked or picked apart, or else being swallowed up in intense or abusive relationships. It can be beneficial to get an outsiderâs perspective to see if someone really is being âtoo niceâ to you, as Samuel put it, or if youâre just so accustomed to mistreatment that niceness strikes you as suspect.
Here are some questions to help you reflect on whether you push secure attachments away.
Are You Pushing Your âStrawberry Peopleâ Away?
When someone gives you a compliment, do you feel like you have to downplay it?
Are there people in your life who seem âtoo niceâ? Who are they?
Are you afraid of trusting people because they might abandon you?
When someone gives you positive attention, do you feel creeped out?
Are you afraid that kind, loving people deserve âbetterâ than to be friends with you?
When someone gets vulnerable with you, do you find ways to downplay it?
Do you have a hard time showing people that you like them?
These questions get to the heart of the protectiveness and self-doubt that lead many Autistic people to keep our emotional distance from others. Most of us have a slew of good reasons for fearing people. When I was younger, many of the people who took an interest in me were women who wanted to help âteachâ me how to be better at womanhood. Sometimes classmates and coworkers would cozy up to me because they wanted my help with their classwork or writing. I started assuming that if someone took an interest in me, it was because they wanted to fix me for their own amusement, or because they thought I was useful. I figured every compliment I received was me being âneggedââa tactic where people highlight your difference or offer a backhanded compliment in order to make you feel insecure.
Itâs challenging for Autistic people to tell the difference between friends who genuinely like us, and superficial acquaintances who are responding favorably to our masks. One way to probe the difference, though, is to look at people who have stuck around when you havenât been perfect. You wonât ever be able to relax around someone if their approval is conditional. Here are some questions I use to help distinguish between the people who are worthy of Samuelâs strawberry emoji, and those who are only interested in the agreeable, âfawnerâ me.
Who do I feel comfortable expressing disagreement to?
Who helps me think about my opinions and choices in a nonjudgmental way?
Who tells me honestly when Iâve hurt them, and gives me a real opportunity to do better?
Who treats me with respect no matter what?
Who leaves me feeling rejuvenated or inspired?
Who brings out the wild, playful side of me?
Is there anyone I want to try being more open and unfiltered with?
When I think carefully about these questions, a handful of very thoughtful, reliable, nonjudgmental friends come to mind. Their affection is consistent, and it shows in small gestures, like remembering the details of stories Iâve shared. When we disagree, these friends try to understand my perspective, or reflect thoughtfully on why I might see things as I do. If I say something flippant and hurtful, they tell me for the sake of our friendship, but they donât relish me feeling ashamed. They share what they want from me, ask for help when they need it, and donât hold it against me when I fumble in my attempts to be there for them. These friends are also typically the people I can share messy emotions or half-formed opinions with, and who I feel comfortable being weird, petty, or silly around. Their support provides me a safe place to land when Iâm angry, sad, or obsessing over some random thing a coworker said that I canât yet make sense of.
On the flip side, Iâve found that I can identify who is not destined to become a âstrawberry personâ for me by pondering these questions:
Who do I force myself to spend time with, out of a sense of obligation or guilt?
Who do I feel I have to earn the approval of?
Who makes me feel insecure and not good enough?
Who do I find exhausting to be around?
Who do I edit or censor myself around?
Often, the people who fall into this category are outgoing and do give me a lot of attention, but only in a surface-level way. They may show an interest in me, but their questions feel pointed, or like a test. Being around them doesnât help me relax and unmask; it puts me on edge. Some of them are people whom I really find funny or interesting, but whom Iâve witnessed ostracize or punish others for making a single social error or single choice they disagreed with. One person who came to mind was an incredibly charming friend whom Iâve noticed only ever tells me in a vague way that Iâve disappointed them, but refuses to actually explain what Iâve done, or why. Another friend who came to mind is an older writer I used to look up to, but who persistently lectured me about how I was too cold, too intellectual, and too âarrogantâ every single time we hung out. Even if some of her observations are right, I have never felt accepted or even liked in her presence. Sheâs not genuinely invested in my growth; she mostly seems to want to knock me down a peg.
The more time you spend with your âstrawberry people,â the more socially fluent youâll feel, and the less youâll associate human contact with having to put on a stressful, phony performance. Quality time with nonthreatening people can also help you develop social skills that carry over into other relationships, too. Neuroscientists have observed that Autistic brains continue to develop in areas associated with social skills for far longer than neurotypical brains are believed to.[9] One study, conducted by Bastiaansen and colleagues (2011), observed that though young Autistic people experienced far less activity than allistics in the inferior frontal gyrus (an area of the frontal lobe involved in interpreting facial expressions), by age thirty no differences between non-Autistics and Autistic people were evident. In other words, Autistic brains eventually âcaught upâ to neurotypical brains, in terms of how actively they processed and interpreted facial expressions as social data. Other studies have found that Autistic people over the age of fifty are comparable to allistic people, in terms of their ability to make sense of the motivations and emotions of others.[10]
Researchers arenât sure why these findings occur, only that they help to justify conceiving of Autism as a developmental disability or delay. For my part, I suspect that Autistic people get better at reading faces and understanding human behavior over time because we eventually develop our own systems and tricks for making sense of the world. We might have developed at the same pace as neurotypicals if weâd been given accessible tools earlier on. The social scripts and shortcuts that work for neurotypical people do not work for us, so we have to teach ourselves to develop social instincts.
Autistic people can get better at reading peopleâs facial expressions as we age, and with the more social contact we have. But we also deserve to live in a world where neurotypicals try just as hard to understand us. When we spend time with people who do not terrify us or make us feel socially threatened, we may be get more comfortable with eye contact, initiating conversations, and being assertive.[11]Â As an Autistic person, you may never escape social anxiety entirely, and you might always be a bit reactive to the threat of abandonment. You also donât have to learn to express yourself or connect with others in a neurotypical-approved way. If eye contact is painful and overwhelming for you, unmasking by refusing to perform eye contact is more important than getting comfortable with it. By engaging with healthy, supportive people, you can learn to open up and express yourself effectivelyâin a way that works for you. As you get more comfortable in your own skin, you may find that people are less threatening and confusing as an added benefit."
Excerpt from Unmasking Autism by Devon Price
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