Why I Do Not Grieve “Lost” Family Meals

I know the sage advice of the cultural authority—the advice which predicts healthy psychology in children whose families share meals together, sans technology, in conversation, on a daily basis. Thankfully, this social demand is not one which ever took root in my psyche, and it is for this reason that I haven’t had much trouble departing from it.

Because my daughter has low tolerance for the sound (and sight) of people eating, we must provide accommodations for her during meals. Such accommodations prevent our family from having the kind of shared dining experience that psychology gurus (or maybe sociologists) recommend for emotional and relational health. Even if my husband and I are able to eat and converse together, Little Miss is never included in this experience, and she’d rather not be.

Will she ever tolerate the sights and sounds of people eating? Will she grow out of this intense aversion to this kind of sensory experience? Maybe. If she does, it will be through an organic shift in her own sensitivities and not because we (her family) have set a goal for her to work towards.

Does it matter if she never feels safe or comfortable sharing a meal with others? In my opinion, it does not.

I could grieve over this—the possibility that my daughter will never enjoy a meal and conversation with the rest of the family or that she won’t be able to enjoy romantic meals at restaurants with a partner as she matures, but why? What need have I to grieve experiences for which Little Miss has no authentic desire? For her, there is no sacrifice. She is completely content eating while immersed in some content on her iPad with headphones. We make up for lost time in conversation at other points in the day. No one is missing out on anything.

On the other hand, were we (her family and therapists) to set a goal for her to join us without her support tools, were we to force her to repress her actual duress in the face of harmful stimuli for our own selfish benefit, then she would bear the sacrifice.*

She’d bear the sacrifice of her autonomy, her comfort, and her sense of safety. This would usurp her right to consent, and it would groom her for future abuse by others.

Perhaps this sounds extreme. Allow me to connect the causal dots. When an autistic person incurs extreme duress by sensory stimuli (this is due to divergence in neurological processing—there is no therapy to alter our actual experience of duress from harmful sensory stimuli), and said person is pressured to act as if said stimuli does not bother them, then this autistic person is being trained to prioritize the needs of others (for their compliance to social norms) and ignore their own. Most often, autistics who have been groomed by culture to ignore their own visceral needs engage in flight or fawn behavior as a response to the regular, repeated trauma of enduring distressing stimuli.

Flight behavior, in these situations, often takes the shape of dissociation, which is the act of projecting one’s consciousness away from the body in effort to tune out or ignore the actual duress of the body. Onlookers may be completely unaware of dissociative behavior in autistics, but the mainstream social authority does not seem to care, as long as the autistic person behaves in a socially acceptable manner.

Fawning behavior looks like an active admission that “I’m fine” or “this isn’t bothering me,” which are falsities intended for the benefit of those subjecting the autistic person to unsafe sensory experiences. Often, we engage in fawning behavior when the fear of social consequences outweighs the pain of sensory discomfort. In this event, we aren’t merely behaving in a socially acceptable manner, but we are risking our own sense of internal well-being, for the sake of someone else’s. After all, it is often the ego of the social authority that insists on compliance and conformity. The absence of such (compliance and conformity) threatens ego security in those with social power, and in many cases, the consequences of such threats are reprehensible—social alienation and shame, which for many, outweigh the cost of repeated subjection to harmful sensory stimuli.

Autistics should not have to choose between social acceptance and actual physical harm.

Thus, I do not grieve the “loss” of shared family meals. Not when conformity to non-autistic standards is actually harmful to my family. The rule (shared family meals, sans technology, yield positive relationships and healthy psychology) clearly does not apply to the particularities of my family. In fact, were I to force compliance by my daughter, in the name of that hypothetical end goal, I would actually damage my relationship with her and injure her psyche. In this and many other cases, autistics are the exception to the rule. Not only do non-autistic (neurotypical) rules not apply to us, but conformity to such actually causes long term damage to the autistic psyche.

I oppose forced conformity.

I advocate for personal autonomy.

*This is actually the approach of many occupational therapists. In fact, during Little Miss’s EC evaluation this past school year, the district OT lectured us on how to implement exposure to reduce my daughter’s sensitivity to auditory stimulation. I plan to write an article explaining why exposure is not an effective therapy for sensory vulnerabilities on my Substack.