Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. To many it is an invisible cage, leaving the person suffering from it aware, but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation. Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents a range of approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it. Based on personal experience, the book shows how people with autism can be shown how to emerge from the stranglehold of exposure anxiety and develop their individuality. It progressively shapes the individual torn between experiencing it as the sanctuary and the prison. Exposure Anxiety makes it hard to stand noticing you are noticing. It can make love a form of torture, repel you from the sound of your own voice, make you meaning deaf to your own words and those of others and compel you to avoid, divert from or retaliate against the very things that which most have the power to reach you. Exposure Anxiety progressively co-opts the identity of the person as separate to the condition or it leaves them aware but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation. Exposure Anxiety is the involuntary social-emotional self-protection response that needs no enemy. It turns the world upside-down, makes no yes and yes no and co-opts and defies conventional, non-autistic teaching techniques. Exposure Anxiety has many faces. By defeating it at its own game, Donna demonstrates how the person can progressively be inspired to fight for themselves and attempt to emerge, from the undercurrent, as the tide.
Hi,
Welcome, I'm Donna Williams.
Many people know me through the autism world but my books are read way beyond that field; people with all kinds of mental and emotional health issues, people from abusive backgrounds and in abusive relationships, students who have Nobody Nowhere as their high school text, people who stumbled on one of my biographical works and wrote that they suddenly changed their lives, even saved their lives, because of what they read, those who like wierdos and those who are fascinated by them and people who thought they were 'normal' and are left questioning whether such a beast really exists.
I know myself best as a compulsive creator. Whether its writing books or films, painting, sculpting, composing, gardening, a lot of my life revolves around creating. When I'm not creating I like being. When I'm not creating or being I'm usually giving. I don't have a lot of time for brooding or worrying because I enjoy crating, being and giving more so brooding and worrying only get to first base. If they want to get to second then I head them off one way or another.
I'm a sociologist and teacher, basically good fields for people who work with systems. My take on the world comes from being those things and an artist.
I'm totally into being equal. Heirachy isn't my thing. I'm one of those eccentrics for whom all people and animals and nature and objects are all equal and I live in a perceptual world in which all things are deemed possible. I struggle a lot with meaning-deafness and meaning-blindness but they are also blessings. There's nothing like relying on pattern, theme, feel for reminding us we are basically well trained ferals (and that training isn't always reliable or identified with).
I'm a Taoist. No, that's not a religion, its a philosophy. But it has a bearing on my feelings about religion and essentially everything. I believe that peace is the balanced acceptance of chaos and that we spend a lot of energy chasing myths that exist only in our internal worlds and getting upset when they don't exist larger than life forever and ever just for us out there in the external world. I believe in mini world in very simple things and that we have many selves not one, however much we might ignore all but the most shiny and convenient ones.
I'm silly, I'm complex, I'm a systematician and a human animal. I am committed not to ever take myself so seriously that I can't change. Freedom to change, adapt, improvise is like breathing and without it we stagnate and wonder why our 'perfection' got us into such a corner.
I've had plenty of labels; deaf, stupid, moron, spastic, psychotic, disturbed, autistic, but we are all far more than labels on a jam jar. Who cares about the packaging. I believe there is a 'me' even if I am always my self in the becoming of it.
I hope my books become friends to travel with, mirrors with which to better see yourself, adventures that broaden understanding of our species and bridges of equality between foreign realities.
Thanks for listening.
Warmly,
Donna Williams
www.donnawilliams.net
