Part 2- How we have Approached Mannies WRONG all this time.

Since my brain explosion, I have been searching for scenarios in my life where it can apply, I haven’t found one yet that I can’t translate. I hadn’t tried to apply it to my youngest until this morning when he had a meltdown over going to school. I put it to the test. While applying it, I came to the realization just how WRONG I had been all this time and how with this new knowledge, I was finally going to be able to give my child the tools he needed to function.

The Best Intentions

We’ve all had the best intentions with our Manny loved ones. Our goal is to help them function in a Automatic world so they can live and be successful, functional adults and use their amazing talents to contribute to society. Whether you are taking your partner by the hand who was never taught how to live in this world or teaching these concepts to a child you love, it’s always from a place of love and caring, otherwise, why make the effort right?

Our goal as parents might even include minimizing misunderstandings from those they come to work, interact, and have relationships with.

We think we are giving them the BEST help possible

We start by trying to teach them COPING SKILLS. We EARNESTLY try to help them. It hurts us to see them suffer and coping skills seem to be the best thing to allieviete the pain they are experiencing.

We think coping skills will be the best way to blend in the world around them and as it turns out, the ability to function in this world is largely determined by this set of skills in their tool belt.

We pat ourselves on the back thinking we are so amazing and patient and wonderful to take the time to do this. Which is true I guess… “A” for effort. I’m sorry to be the bearer of this information, it’s painful to learn this next step when all we ever wanted to do was help them.

The PROBLEM with coping skills

Before the torches and pitchforks come at me, just hear me out. I’m not against coping skills, but I realize now, we’ve just been USING THEM WRONG.

Consider this scenario:

Imagine you are enjoying a peaceful vacation (life), you are lounging by the pool, you are enjoying your time and the weather (the life you envisioned for yourself). Suddenly you feel water splash you, it doesn’t stop. You’re annoyed someone could be so inconsiderate. They obviously don’t understand the social etiquette of not disturbing someone else’s vacation. You have a right to be able to go on vacation without someone else disturbing it for you, right?

As you approach the pool, you see it’s your 10-year-old! And they’re drowning! (They receive a ND Disgnosis). You didn’t even know they didn’t know how to swim. You just assumed they knew by now. (You assumed they were wired like you.) Your world is turned upside down. YOU NEED to save them. Never in your wildest dreams did you picture this vacation with a child in this type of distress (you never envisioned a life with a “special needs” child). But everything you envisioned doesn’t matter anymore, you just want to help your child (your desire to help is pure). You can see they’re barely a couple of inches into the deep end. They could probably touch if they weren’t thrashing so much, but they can’t concentrate, and to them, THEY FEEL, like they’re drowning, and they are swallowing water. It’s painful to see them feeling so helpless, so distressed, so overwhelmed.

Scenario one:

Naturally, your first instinct as a human would be to jump in and save them from the distress. You dive in, unafraid of the water, you know how to swim. You grab them and get them to the side of the pool where you can get them to calm down and regular their breathing. Crisis averted. Phew.

You ask them how this happened. They can’t explain it. You ask them what they were doing. They can’t exactly pinpoint it. They were playing with some new friends and then all of a sudden they couldn’t reach the bottom. It was scary, overwhelming, super traumatic. The water just looked so fun. Everyone made it look so easy. They didn’t even realize how deep it was until it was already too late.

You wrap your arms and a towel around them and wonder how this could have happened (you may wonder if you something to cause it?) Your whole family swims fine (no one else is ND). They all know how to swim (all NT). How did you not see it coming? Were there signs that I missed? Your mind is left wondering about what this means for their future and the road that lies ahead. What happens if he was to fall into water one time while we’re not around (will they be able to survive in this crazy world.) What if his friends are playing and they invite him to play? What next? You want to do whatever you can to love and support them in this life so they can enjoy all that life has to offer.

The answer seems super clear. Logically you would teach them to swim (automate their sorting and help them process). It solves the problems. Water is an unavoidable thing in normal vacation life. They’ll be able to enjoy their vacation, they won’t be distressed, they won’t have to worry about exiling themselves from social situations because of their fear of water and not knowing how to swim. We’ll also teach them to be courteous vacationers, don’t be too loud, don’t splash too much, etc… Those things are important, we’re trying to teach them how to live with others on vacation peacefully. We can even teach them to stay near the edge until they feel confident in their swimming skills. We can even give them tips and tricks (coping skills) while they’re learning how to swim that can help them feel more safe and confident.

This is CLEARLY the answer. This is what we REALLY THINK WE DO when dealing and helping our Manny loved ones. Because this is what a loving parent/partner would do. And we LOVE them more than ANYTHING.

But it’s NOT what we are doing.

Scenario Two:

Imagine then, that instead of jumping in to save them you walked to the side of the pool. With “great concern” for their life at stake, you try to get their attention by waving at them. Between their desperate attempts to keep breathing, you ask ever so kindly if they could please not splash so much, because you can’t help them when they keep splashing you. You PAT yourself on the back for being SO PATIENT. You think they’re being so dramatic and difficult. They continue to thrash, it’s making a scene, so you ask them to be a little quieter. More people are starting to look, you are so embarrassed. You try to tell them you are here to help so they can calm down. You have the BEST intentions. You want to save their life. You throw them a lifesaver, they’re thrashing around and so distressed, they don’t even know how to grab it. This frustrates you, you gave them the tool to save their life, you just want to help them live and not drown, they’re not even taking it! You slip in the water, trying not to make a scene and drag them out. Trying to quiet them along the way. You’re so embarrassed by the scene they’re making and being so loud, you know you’re definitely not blending in with the other vacationers.

Do you see how YOU look like an insane person? They’re clearly drowning, they don’t know how to think and respond clearly right now.

But now what? Well, your goal is to teach them to be able to be like all the other vacationers (learn to live in this crazy world). No one else is drowning. You also don’t want them to disturb other vacationers (cause any scenes, have meltdowns). It’s not proper social etiquette to do that. So we come up with the best things we can think of.

• We can tell them to never go into ANY body of water again.
• You can say to never go near water ever again without an adult present.
• We can say never to go near water without a floaty, ever again.
• Sometimes we say they can go back in the pool, but ONLY if they promise to drown quietly, and without expressing their distress. You even offer to teach them how to drown quietly.
• We remind them to NEVER splash other vacationers, that’s rude.
• We tell them to ONLY STAY in the SHALLOW END WHERE YOUR FEET TOUCH. You make them promise to never get distracted and drift to the deep end again. Something that’s nearly impossible to promise anyways.

This sounds like a narration of some strange Stepford Wive’s vacation. I would think most people would think scenario two is completely ridiculous.

How this relates to life and the Manual Processing world.

Ok, so you’re thinking “I want to teach them how to swim! I thought that’s what I was doing all this time!” We’ve always had good intentions. We love them so much, after all.

Every time you ask your Manny to leave their necessary box or to file something in their necessary box that doesn’t belong. You are literally throwing them in a body of water without teaching them how to swim.

You teach them coping skills on how to deal with drowning so that they can appear to be functioning in society. But the VERY ACT of trying to fit something in their necessary box that doesn’t fit, is an impossible task. The pieces don’t line up right. That square peg, won’t ever fit into this round hole. Similarly, the perceived RISK of LEAVING their necessary box to exist anywhere outside (where they stack all their miscellaneous files- the TRASH BIN) is WAY too overwhelming, and the benefit of leaving is either NON- EXISTENT, or TOO LOW. Keeping them in their necessary boxes, making them socially isolated, disconnected from loved one, and unable to function outside of the necessary box.

When they ONLY have those two boxes in their head, there is no file sharing, there is no place for your request to get processed for them to understand you.

To teach them to swim, you must teach them there are more boxes than just TWO. Many of them really don’t know. These boxes also become AUTOMATIC AND BEGIN TO PROCESS THINGS WITHOUT CONSCIOUS OPERATION.

Why you will NEVER fit in their two-box world

Because a 2 box world consists of ONLY two choices (black and white). You can’t fit. If we could see their necessary box like a puzzle, we could see that from this perspective, we can’t fit if we don’t make sense. They WANT us to fit, so they try and try and try to make things fit. You will always get pitted against the necessary box. You will always eventually lose. It may last for a long time, but your Manny might lose his mind in the process.

Necessary	Not Necessary
MAKES SENSE	Makes NO Sense. This is the trash bin
Essential, required, important, purposeful	Seen as irrelevant, useless, Things here don’t make sense and have no purpose
Easy to understand Clear purpose These things take priorty	Only retains things from here temporarily to make loved ones happy

IN ORDER TO FIT IN HIS LIFE, YOU HAVE TO HELP HIM SEE THE POSSIBILITY OF OTHER BOXES.

Adding Boxes ACTUALLY CREATES A SIMPLER more efficient filing system.

Necessary Box Is a Puzzle with specific sides

Picture this scenario. You come into the living room to find your Manny doing a 1000 piece puzzle on half of the coffee table. He’s using one light beside him to light the side of the table he’s using. You assume he’s aware of the whole table but chooses to just use this side. Because you’ve used this coffee table during the day, you assume he knows its bigger and chooses to work in this narrow space. You see the puzzle is super complex and he’s focusing super hard. Turns out all the puzzles in the house got mixed up together. He’s sorting the pile and putting his puzzle together. Ideally, he’d like to get it done before he goes to bed, so he’s not wasting time, he’s intensely focused. You want to help. You at least want to do your puzzle next to him, his puzzle is really complex so it doesn’t make much sense to you. You want to spend time with him and you want to be near him. So you start working on your puzzle. You want to interact with him, so you hand him a piece that looks important to you, you are asking if he thinks it fits. He looks at you like you might be a little crazy, he can clearly see there is nowhere for this piece to fit. He can tell based on the pattern of his current puzzle that this piece was made from a different cutter. Even if more areas of his puzzle got put together, this piece would never fundamentally fit his puzzle. This puzzle piece just doesn’t BELONG to this puzzle.

You keep saying it will fit. (You know it does, it belongs to your puzzle). You want his opinion about how it fits. You think it’s clear he can see you’re talking about it fitting in your puzzle. You keep trying to convince him it fits. Then you demand he believes you when you say it FITS. He thinks you’re crazy, nothing about what you are saying or what you care about makes sense. You continue working on your puzzle, frustrated and annoyed he can’t seem to see that those pieces clearly fit. Unaware of what he’s doing, he keeps trying to shove your puzzle piece into his puzzle. He thinks this is what you are asking of him. He keeps trying to believe you at face value, that it will fit. It doesn’t fit his, just like he knew before he even tried, now he wasted his precious time. He wants to throw it in the irrelevant pile. You convince him that it’s important to you that it needs to stay out, it’s important that he keep it out, while you work on your own puzzle. To avoid a fight, he leaves it out, it’s making you happy. His puzzle gets bigger, He’s running out of space. (mentally exhausted) He needs to take all irrelevant puzzle pieces to the irrelevant pile (not necessary box) to be thrown out. He needs the space for completing his puzzle. He has zero space (zero tolerance) for pieces that DONT FIT.

He still has more sorting to do so he begins to clear off the coffee table to make room for the pile he has to sort. You TRY to convince them this piece is a BEAUTIFUL piece that has a purpose, its worthwhile, this puzzle piece is important to YOU. It may even be a piece from YOUR necessary puzzle, but he doesn’t see you are even working on a puzzle, so he can’t see how that piece, even if it is beautiful or important will ever fit in his puzzle. You think you’re not asking much, you just want him to keep it on the puzzle table. You continue to assume he knows that you are also trying to do a puzzle next to him, it seems clear, it’s right in front of him. You want to share your coffee table with him. It’s hurtful he keeps dumping your pieces. You and your pieces don’t feel important

You continue trying to share the coffee table. He keeps getting stressed out, he thinks the table is too small and the pieces you keep holding on to are pointless. He’s trying SO hard to be nice, he’s been taught that he should be courteous about sharing the coffee table. He’s even learned SOME rules about how to share a coffee table. He feels he is being so generous to keep these pointless pieces out while he works on his puzzle. (coping skills)

 

You feel so crazy. You can’t stand sharing a coffee table with someone who won’t let you have your pieces on the table. You KNOW there’s plenty of room on the coffee table. You get so frustrated you stand up and finish turning the lights on. ALL OF A SUDDEN he can SEE you have your own puzzle on the other side of the table. All this time he thought there was just his necessary puzzle and the discard pile on the table. The table is much bigger than he thought. He was TOO over-focused on his own puzzle to realize that there are other puzzles. Now he can see so clearly why you kept saying those pieces meant so much to you. Some belonged to your necessary puzzle, some belonged to other puzzles that you were doing. You also realize now that he really had NO idea other puzzles could exist beyond his own. IT seemed to be so obvious to you, even in dim light, but he was concentrating so hard on sorting and getting this puzzle done, he never even looked over to notice.

4 Box realization

This is what happens when your Manny begins to understand there are MORE boxes than just HIS necessary box. When he finds out YOU have a necessary box too. Or that there’s a box for all the pieces that don’t make sense, but apply to others, (the enrichment box). Once that LIGHT comes on and they can SEE there are more choices, they can learn to function better, they won’t be stressed about the pieces that aren’t fitting into their puzzle because these pieces still have a purpose and other puzzles they belong to. Explaining the concept of more boxes provides a logical explanation of where to sort these questionable things.

But My Manny understands more than two boxes because he’s OK with making me happy.

Sometimes it’s confusing because it SEEMS like he understands you, it seems like they’re learning to function, it seems like they’re making headway. Coping skills alone only teach them to be quiet about their confusion. We think that because they seem to be coping, and they’re not freaking out, that they understand things. If you were to flat out ask your Manny about something outside of their necessary box makes sense. They will tell you NO. They do it because it makes you happy. They temporarily file it under “things that make her happy” and leave these pieces out for a while on the coffee table of their brain. This is ALWAYS TEMPORARY.

So for example, Your Manny may seem like they’re being understanding and tolerant and functioning higher than they seem because they are allowing all these miscellaneous pieces to exist in their life. This has happened SO many times with my Manny. We think we have tons of “aha” moments where he finally understood me. All he understood was THAT something might have been important to me, so he would leave it on the puzzle table to make me happy. We think they finally get it because they are doing so well. This “Progress” only lasts for a while until they get overwhelmed with things. Then they must essentially clear their table

 

2 box System Always Leads to Burnout

Your Manny might have multiple miscellaneous pieces he’s willing to juggle, and depending on the coping and soothing skills he’s been taught will determine how long it takes to get to burnout, and how UGLY the burnout will look. This limbo land, miscellaneous pieces, or unsorted files, can only last until there are TOO many puzzle pieces that crowd their space. THEN it must go into the trash because THOSE puzzle piece DONT fit their puzzle. They’re ONLY thinking they have TWO options to keep a clean puzzle table.

 

Dating an Manny and the switch

This switch is one of the hardest things for NT women to understand. This switch seems calculated and manipulative. Like a trap, or false advertising. THATS NOT TRUE. When Mannies fall in love, its like the heart halts the brains sorting process. The heart takes over, the brain holds its breathe. For the first time they are feeling things theyve never felt before. They appear so in love with you, so sweet and sincere in how they love you. It’s ALL TRUE. That REALLY is who they are. After a while though, you and others keep adding pieces to their coffee table, they also keep finding things that make their necessary puzzle bigger and it’s taking up MORE Space. They CANT keep any more of your miscellaneous pieces on their table. Even when it makes you happy. It’s TOO FULL, TOO overwhelming, they CANT DO their puzzle anymore. It needs to get cleared OFF. At SOME point, Mannies HAVE to clear off the excess of their puzzle table. They aren’t going to throw away a piece of their necessary puzzle to make room. That makes zero sense to them and defeats the whole purpose of doing their puzzle in the first place. So remember, the only item up for possible elimination is your pieces. With only a 2 box mind, there is only 2 choices to keep the space clean. So they move all the miscellaneous pieces to the trash bin, and they get back to concentrating on their puzzle. The partner is left feeling so confused at how they could be so emotionless, he no longer cares about her puzzle anymore.

 

THE MISSING PIECE (pun intended)

THE WHY

The part that YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MISSING is that He’s NEVER been aware that you have a puzzle too. It’s not that he used to care about your puzzle, he never knew about it, he just held on to your puzzle pieces. He didn’t understand the purpose, other than it made you happy. He didn’t see that the pieces were part of something bigger. His understanding stopped worrying after the action brought you happiness. It’s not malicious. Goal was accomplished and his brain was too overloaded to be able to process the way. He was too busy doing his puzzle to ask why holding the pieces made you happy. (The WHY being they were important to your OWN puzzles).

Let that sink in. And then let it sink in a little deeper. And then tomorrow, it will sink in again even more. HOW could they not know I had a puzzle too, how could they not know there weren’t other puzzles in existence? I was DOING my puzzle right in front of him? You would think that he knew about other puzzles, right? That’s why he was sorting his pieces in the first place. BUT as it turns out, he was TOO busy SORTING to make the connection that it meant other puzzles existed.

Foundation for depression

Because they are dealing with this incomplete filing system, they are faced with false dichotomies that are very real for their current situation (They assume there are no solutions except the two boxes, necessary or unnecessary) BUT THIS IS THEIR TRUTH. This sinking feeling is actually a misunderstanding, it falsely draws them to the conclusion that no matter what they do, they will either be miserable to make their loved ones happy or for them to be happy while they make their loved ones miserable. This causes them to feel HOPELESS about their situation and ever finding happiness and contributes greatly to depression.

Teaching them about 4 boxes will teach them how they can fit you in their lives.

Whether you realize it or not, your Manny has been trying to figure out you and your behaviors and how to fit you in their lives from day one. His brain observes everything about you, decides if the information is relevant to the necessary box and then tries to toss it out. Chances are, you don’t make sense to them. Therefore, with the analytical logic of their 2 choices, and the fact that they cannot make you fit a piece that’s not the right fit, they think it’s impossible to logically incorporate you, and keep sorting.

But they LOVE YOU. That’s why they do the very definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Because regardless of your opinion, or how they act, they DO feel emotions. Those emotions and LOVE for you is what pushes against that analytical 2-box mind.

JUST GIVE THEM A COUPLE MORE BOXES, MAKE SURE THERE IS A PURPOSE AND LABEL FOR EACH ONE.

Their analytical side will take over from there. THEIR MINDS ARE AMAZING. I’ll explain more on how to do that in my next post and HOW to do it with children who seem to not be able to be reasoned with. (Kids and spouses who are too overwhelmed to consider leaving the necessary box) And how you can extend your hand to reach them.