Sex & Autism 12: Stonewalling or conversational vapor lock?

When all the conditions are right (or wrong, depending on how you want to look at it), a car can refuse to start. The starter is getting electricity and engages, the motor turns over. The car ran just fine earlier in the day.

It’s just not starting now.

You sit and deal with your frustration of not being able to get to where you want or need to go. No matter how many times you turn the key, the engine does not catch.

This could be a phenomenon of physics referred to as vapor lock. Somewhere between the gas tank and the cylinder, liquid fuel changes state to a vapor and disrupts the fuel pump’s ability to move fuel.

So what do cars have to do with sex and autism? Quite a lot, actually. Let’s talk about conversational vapor lock.

I have spoken with a good number of autistics who experience something like this, however I want to speak about myself for a moment. I believe I know my experience better than anyone else’s and I hope you can learn from my struggles.

My wife and I will be having a conversation. It might be a fun one. It’s probably a difficult one. Most likely a critical conversation. I sit with my wife, and in my mind I develop the thoughts, pictures, and constructs of what I want to say. I know what I want to say! I am petrified that I won’t correctly translate my thought from Tommy to English. I freeze. I don’t want to fuck this up, even though I know saying something— anything!— is better than silence.

Contemplative silence is one thing… and this is not that!

According to John and Julie Gottman, one of the Four Horsemen of the relationship apocalypse is stonewalling. Many skilled relationship therapists believe it is the most damaging of the four. To anyone not in my head, this internal struggle often appears like stonewalling: I do not want to engage in the conversation with my wife and will do almost anything to avoid engaging.

Internally, I’m screaming for help. My inner critic who really just wants to keep me safe from all the possible hurts out there tells me “you’re just going to make things worse!” My mind tells me I won’t get it right, and I’m better off not trying to translate my thoughts at all.

So quietly I sit, struggling in my head. I’m in conversation vapor lock. Thoughts don’t get from wherever they come from to my mouth.

Just like the automobile, I need to move thoughts into English and then speak them. As I struggle, I need to jump start the translation process: Just say something.

Anything.

In the old days, we would spray some carburetor cleaner into the intake manifold to give the engine and fuel system something to work with. Your speaking anything can be enough to break the conversational vapor lock and restart the thoughts to words process.

Next time the words just won’t come out, give this a try, speak something, and see if it helps.