COMPULSION, AND YES, FREEDOM TOO
Eugene Marcus

Facilitated Communication Institute
Never mind that I am a slave to my compulsions.  New people in my life always see me that way, and friends never worry about them, but never value them either. My own view is that my life is enriched and made livable by the habits that enslave me. My feeling is that my enslavement is a voluntary one in that nobody else forces me to be compulsive, or even gives me permission to be compulsive.

My wish is to one day be free of my compulsions, but not any day soon.  By being an inconvenient and loud slave to compulsion, I have learned things I never would have through silent cooperation.  I have tested the limits of my real and unreal friends (even those people who wanted to be my friends,  but only when I was play-acting a role –  not being myself.) My compulsive behavior has allowed me to set my own agenda in situations where the most I could have hoped for was "eats and treats." My compulsive behavior is a long-playing defense against well meaning people who cannot guess what I really am thinking of or wishing for. How can I be a non-compulsive person but also not compulsively agreeable? Because I can see that in compulsive agreeing is a big risk of losing my path and my dreams. Being myself but also being my social self is a real complicated mess sometimes.  

(At this point in writing this essay, I typed , “You are hoping we will not be going to ‘new watch,’ aren’t you?” and Mayer [my facilitator] typed “Yes.”)

Here is an example of what I mean. I always am asking the people around me for a new watch. Mayer has recently asked me not to talk about that when doing FC because it takes away from our work time and makes the work slow and hard. Talking about a new watch, though, is my best way to take a break from hard work.  Deciding how to handle this involves making sure that Mayer knows not to get too distracted about what I am saying and making sure he doesn’t just ignore what I am saying.

Does that just make me a prisoner of all my best friends? (Better to just be a rebel with everybody is what I think sometimes.) My life is both blessed and cursed by friends who know me much too well. The blessings are obvious, since the best support for autistic people comes from those who really understand us. But they are not our best support when we feel like we need them for survival, in ways that they don’t need us. One of my greatest wishes is for a friendship in which my friend and I are fully equal in all ways. Here is why that feels important. There are ways in which an undeserved friendship is always suspicious. To have a friend who comes and goes as he pleases is to have a friendship that can’t be trusted.

Only a true friend can go with you to the places where you are not supposed to go by the rules of school or psychologist or parent. With that kind of friendship, you can explore the compulsion in itself, and not through the eyes of teachers or psychologists or other judgmental types. Before that, you only get to focus on the power struggle. But once you have companions in your compulsion, then you are willing to look at it and not just fight about it. My watch is some thing I fight about with most of my staff. But with Mayer, I can be able to feel capable of always having a clock in sight whenever I start looking for one. This makes two things happen. The first is that I am willing to stop obsessing much more easily with him, because I know he doesn’t care very much. The second is that when I do obsess, I get to notice little things about clocks and my reaction to them. For example, I react more casually to a clock that only changes numbers every minute, not every second. Part of my attention is on the details of clocks, but more is my using clocks as a way of knowing myself and the world I live in. Perhaps this is the key to obsessing. Waiting for me to have no obsessions is probably a non starter. Some times it may work but staying completely obsession free may not be possible.

I just interrupted my typing of this article to point to my wrist and to ask Mayer, like I have a number of times today already, “New watch? Watch broken? Wait and see?”)  Mayer and I have had that conversation a thousand -- new watch -- times before and we will probably keep having kind of similar ones forever. Does Mayer regret these meaningless chats? Well if he does, he keeps quiet about one and maybe ten repetitions. Maybe he feels like I do, that at least when we have these chats we are in familiar territory. Needing to return to things in my words is not exactly the same as needing to do the same repeated activity. My words are substitutes for what I really want to say,  but my obsessed actions are the things I really want. Doing things like staring at my watch is a reality, but talking often is only the approximate thing close but totally distant from what I wish I could say.

What can I do to be powerful as well as relaxed? Are they twin goals that can work together, or will one always lose?  That is one of the hardest things for a person who obsesses to realize, that the same thing that relaxes him is making him powerless. You may not associate compulsiveness with being relaxed, but that is exactly what it is. Seeming behaviors are really ways of actions making us feel better.  So when I am repeating the same words again and again, I am calming myself. And the fact that it seems like I am talking in a more and more excited way is usually when the other person is not wanting to be a part of my compulsiveness. Friendly people are able to be a calming influence by treating my compulsions as sneezes, and saying “Bless you!”  But if they get mad at me for sneezing, nobody can relax, not me or them either. Now and then I meet a new friend who needs no extra help in understanding me. And that makes me feel very lucky. Good friends allow me to be unsure of what I am doing and not make me decide things,  understanding that deciding is very hard for me.

My hope is for the day when my compulsiveness is only one of many ways I am in charge of my world. At the moment it is one of the main strategies I have available. But hopefully the day will come when I am in control of my emotions and of my life. Which one comes first? The people who plan for me think, “First learn to control your emotions and then you can have a life”. The people who know me best would not agree. They argue that my life is my own already, and that nobody but me should be able to decide anything big or little on my behalf. I find myself agreeing with both of them depending on the situation. Depending on who is helping me, I am often happy to give in and let them take control of what it takes for me to get something done. Staying relaxed while another person controls me is a sign that I totally trust them. Can you imagine how hard it is to surrender when you don’t trust someone will use their power over you wisely? And yet that is what is asked of those of us who receive support every day.

Compulsiveness can be a useful weapon, but like all weapons it can be misused. I look forward to burying my weapons someday and traveling unarmed through the world.  Maybe then people will see the man behind the armor more easily.  Some day, we will all disarm.  I will drop my compulsiveness when my staff decide to drop their desire to keep me under control. Can our mutual disarmament get negotiated? I really hope so.