The most common cause of panic attacks is a strange feeling in your groin. Neurotypicals call this feeling “nervousness.” Take a few deep breaths and it disappears on its own.
(More than fifty years of severe panic attacks and in May 2025 I resolved it within 30 seconds. I was glad to be rid of it, but it felt like an anticlimax. For years I thought the feeling might mean something. But no, just nervousness. The first problem neurotypical children solve around the age of five or six with the help of their mother: The feeling that they urgently need to go to the toilet but nothing comes out).
Panic attacks can have thousands of causes, but you only need to learn four skills to get rid of them. Neurotypical children learn the first three skills on their own initiative at the age of five. Autistic children could very easily learn the skills at school at the age of seven. But no lessons are taught.
To be able to hold a conversation, ask for help, and complain, autistic people must learn to:
- Recognize whether people are listening to them
- Recognize whether people are interested in their story
- Recognize whether people understand them
- Be able to prevent conflict from arising when they misunderstand the message.
- When people are not looking at you, they are not listening. By nature, autistic people make eye contact exclusively when they are in a conflict. But in 99% of cases, the nose points in the same direction as the eyes. So it is quite possible to see where people are looking without having to make eye contact.
- When neurotypicals look up and yawn, they are not interested. If you keep talking, they stand up and walk away.
- When someone’s facial expression changes to something that aligns with your story, then they have understood you. Research by psychologists shows that autistic people recognize facial expressions twice as fast as neurotypicals. But psychologists never tell us what the importance of that is.
- If someone says something strange, they are making a joke, laugh. This is error correction. In verbal communication, there is a 30% chance that the message is misinterpreted. Often, the result is something slightly offensive. By laughing, you not only take the sting out of the conflict, but you also make it clear to the other person that you have misunderstood them.
It takes approximately 18 months to learn to apply these skills.
When something strange happens or you have a strange feeling, ask a neurotypical what is going on. They can often tell you exactly.
Severe autistics have a photographic memory and a visual thinking process. They have enormous amounts of information in their heads, whereas neurotypicals can only process half a page of text during verbal communication.
Make the summary visual and then translate it into words. When an autistic person makes the mistake of immediately translating the film in their head into words, they have the same limitation as neurotypicals. Autistics can also only process half a page of text.
The thousands of causes are problems that neurotypical children solve in their youth with the help of their parents. If you start thinking about these problems as an autistic adult, it turns out that you have solved most of them long ago. But you didn’t recognize them, so you never named them.