An autistic acquaintance of mine never enters the Dutch supermarket the Jumbo, that uses yellow as their main color. She panics when she sees the color yellow. A curious problem. But these kinds of problems are quite common in autistic people. They suffer from avoidance fears.

An avoidance fear is when you are a little afraid of something and start avoiding it, which naturally makes you more and more afraid of it. So when you become more and more afraid of the horse you fell off. Because autistic people are very bad at recognizing their own feelings, it can easily happen that we accidentally incur an avoidance fear.

A few years ago I noticed that I was cycling in the middle of a B-road, with ditches on both sides. Every time I had to turn a bit closer to the ditch to let oncoming traffic pass, I almost had a panic attack. The cause of this problem was that the city council had redesigned one of the roads I take from my home to downtown.

This street along a canal was always a one-way street for cars, while bicycles were allowed to go both ways. In the direction of the city there was a cycle path right along the water. But a few years ago, the municipality declared this road forbidden for cars and turned it into a bicycle path. Right next to the water there are now white tiles to warn cyclists about the canal in the dark. As a result, it has now become very normal to cycle one meter from the edge.

So nothing special at all. But by cycling on this street a meter from the edge for a year, I had accidentally run into an avoidance fear. As a result, I had also started cycling a meter from the edge on the b-road.

Autists can very easily accidentally cause avoidance fears in themselves

After I noticed this, I made sure for a few months that I cycled as close as possible to the edge on the b-road and the fear disappeared by itself.

But this is not the normal way of dealing with autistic fears.

When a neurotypical child shows unreasonable fears, parents begin by telling him not to fake cry and pay as little attention as possible to the fear. But when an autistic child has an unreasonable fear, experts advise parents to take that into account as much as possible. As a result, the autist develops an avoidance fear and the problem gets bigger and bigger.

Neurotypicals are taught to say that noisy rooms distract them. Where autists are taught to tell them that noisy rooms are too stimulating for them, making it difficult for them to concentrate. In essence, this means exactly the same. But it sounds weird.