Two years into Z’s head injury we went to a pain clinic. The program was for families with a teenager in chronic pain, and people flew in from all over the country. Z was the only musician who couldn’t play music anymore. But there was an all-state field hockey player who hadn’t played in years but still went to every practice. There was a girl who’d been a ballerina her whole life and then suddenly couldn’t dance: she’d grown half a foot, and now her body was built for basketball. Her proprioception was off and now movement felt like violence.

About an hour in, I understood two things. First, everything they were telling us to do was what doctors had been telling me to do for Z for two years — and I hadn’t been doing it, because the things are boring and I didn’t trust them and I wanted there to be something else. Second, every parent in that room was autistic. The whole program was a parent intervention. The kids were only there because no parent would come to a thing called What You’re Doing Wrong.

Leading up to this: doctors kept telling me that Z feeling pain didn’t mean his brain was getting more damaged. He’s feeling pain? We’re done. Stop the exercises. Then the pain would feel worse, and Z and I would demand new tests, and the tests would show nothing was getting worse, and I’d be so angry I wanted to sue everyone. That exact story was all over the room: parents hunting for some other cause, because the remaining explanation was us not following orders.

Here’s the science the clinic taught, which I could finally hear once I understood whose intervention it was. Pain is output. It’s not a meter reading damage — it’s your brain issuing a signal, and the brain learns what to issue. Touch a stove, and a normal brain files it away: don’t do that. A perseverating brain files it differently: there’s a stove in this house, there’s a stove, there’s a stove.

One in four people will have chronic pain at some point, and most of them adjust, some without ever calling it chronic pain. What makes pain take over a life isn’t usually the injury but the brain not being able to redirect. And low ability to redirect is the definition of autism.

Also, autistic people have a survival skill of mislabeling our own sensory wiring as toughness. Me: I don’t feel heat and I get burned all the time. That’s not high pain tolerance, that’s sensory integration dysfunction — missing output. Meanwhile I process cold as actual pain and wear a coat in weather nobody else considers weather. Too much signal, too little signal, never the normal amount: that’s autism in every domain. Pain is one of those domains.

The clinic also said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: chronic pain patients are the loneliest people there are, except for autistic people. Loneliness isn’t a mood, it’s a disorder, and it travels with chronic pain — which means an autistic kid in chronic pain is getting it from both directions, and his brain treats the pain and the loneliness as one fused thing. The longer nobody intervenes, the better the brain gets at reminding him. The pain isn’t worsening. The brain’s commitment to it is.

So what works is exactly the list you’ve been ignoring your whole life: exercise, regular sleep, going outside in daylight, eating like an adult, seeing people. Plus one trick that sounds fake and isn’t — when the pain spikes, put your whole face in cold water. It switches the brain off the pain channel. Not for long. But doing it every time teaches the brain there’s no reward for ringing the alarm, and the alarm rings less.

CBT doesn’t work for autism — it runs on the frontal cortex, and if we could leverage self-discipline to change our lives we wouldn’t have autism. But chronic pain is the exception, because pain functions like an external deadline. We can’t do discipline for abstractions; we can do it when something is ruining our lives in a way we can feel. The clinic’s whole bet is that the pain itself supplies the urgency the autistic brain is missing. It’s the only context I know of where CBT works on us.

So the clinic worked on us, eventually — but not because the science was new. The science fits on a post-it note. What took two years was the diagnosis nobody was willing to say out loud: the kids weren’t refusing treatment, the parents were. Every demand for a retest was me looking for a cause that wasn’t me. The program never confronted us about it, because you can’t — we’d have left. They just kept calling it a clinic for teenagers, and waited for each parent to look around the room and recognize the place.

Z kept in touch with the kids. The compliance problem was ours — the parents enforce the rules or nobody does. But parents can’t fix the loneliness half, and the clinic knew it: the kids left with a group chat, the only other people on earth who understood chronic pain. It didn’t last years. It didn’t need to. Each kid got to watch the others move forward.

I’m starting a small group for autistic people with chronic pain, because I want to see what happens when we talk about the pain without having to explain the autism first — the sensory problems, the perseveration, the routines we can’t change, the loneliness, and the constant question of whether to listen to your body or teach your brain to stop sounding the alarm.

We’ll meet on Zoom once a week for six weeks. There are four spots and two are taken. The cost is $195.

If you want one of the last two spots, reply to this email and tell me a little about yourself. We’ll pick a meeting time that works for all of us.

The post I took my son to a pain clinic and every parent there was autistic appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Once you know your personality type, you read what you’re bad at and you think: so what? That’s how you know it’s your type. The thing other people think is your weakness is, indeed, your weakness. In their eyes. Because it’s important to them. It’s not important to you.

I’m an ENTJ. People always write about how ENTJs come off rough and don’t take time to say things nicely. This is correct. And I don’t care. I mean, I care when people tell me I hurt their feelings, but not enough to, like, become an INFJ — the master of delivering bad news with kindness.

Z took this picture of me. I was coaching someone and Z heard me say, “It doesn’t matter how much you love the idea. It’s not a business. It’s a wish.” Z sent me the picture with the caption: Breaking another person’s heart. I saved it all these years because I was proud.

I wouldn’t want to be an INFJ because they think everyone shares their values and then they’re disappointed in everyone for not living up to those values. If you tell an INFJ this is their problem, they’ll be like, yeah. I know. But they’re not going to stop orienting their lives around their values.

INFPs don’t make a lot of money and they don’t care. I mean, they care like I care about being nice: lip service to ensure it doesn’t get totally out of control.

We usually talk about type in terms of what people care about. But what we don’t care about is what makes us really unique. And what we don’t care about is intrinsic: it’s not changing. Every type gets to pick which problems count, and every type quietly picks the same way — the big, type-defining problem doesn’t make the list.

So each type solves a problem from its own wheelhouse instead. ENTJs solve that we don’t have a good enough army behind us. INFPs solve that they don’t have enough meaning in their lives. ENFPs’ weakness is never committing, but the problem they solve is not enough opportunities opening up.

So what’s important isn’t to see your weakness. You don’t care. What’s important is to see your blind spot. The blind spot is not the thing you care about, and it’s not the thing you’re consciously ignoring — ignoring takes awareness. It’s the thing in between.

Personality type is most useful when it’s about the blind spot, because no one can just tell you and you know. Personality type is most fun when it’s about weaknesses, because it’s amazing what each type thinks is okay. The next Personality Type Office Hours will be about the difference. We’ll meet Tuesday, July 28 at 5pm.

Here are new personality type posts:

ENFJs: Nobody thanks you for the fight that didn’t happen

ENTJ trap: Making plans to make plans

Why my INFJ writing group failed

INTJs don’t get lonely, you get understaffed

INFPs: You ruin your writing when you make it coherent

ENFPs: You leave before someone tells you who you are

The post You don’t care about your weakness appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention.

It didn’t work. The only way to get their attention was to participate in their fights. That’s what I think of when I look at this picture of my childhood home.

My parents’ fights were always the same fight: they both had big jobs, but my mom had better executive function (not the word we used back then, believe me) and she was furious that my Harvard-grad dad couldn’t manage his time.

The fight took many forms: Dad is not home by 10pm, mom is sad, she needs me to witness her anger. Or dad is home at 8pm but acting out his 1950s fantasy of coming home to no responsibility, so my mom throws dinner at him. I tell dad, “I’m sorry mom did that,” and we pick the food off the floor together.

Where was my brother? Invisible. He’d disappear. Not that he had good parents. He had neglectful parents. I had enmeshed parents. Oldest daughter syndrome is enmeshment.

The pattern is parentification, then responsibility, then isolation, then burnout. The parents don’t do it on purpose. They just inadvertently expect the daughter to make their lives easier, or shine a light they can mistake for their own glow, or both. Autism makes all of it worse, because oldest daughter syndrome is fundamentally a boundary problem, and autistic families are death for boundaries. But the girl participates. Once your value in the family is service, you protect that value, because it’s the only one you have.

My oldest daughter syndrome amped up when my parents had two more sons. I was 16. Throughout the boys’ childhoods I was the one protecting them from family violence. I talked to child services, talked to the school principal, fielded phone calls when the boys ran away from home.

Last month an old boyfriend called. He’s the despicable boyfriend on the first page of my first book. I couldn’t believe he was calling. Then he said something that shocked me: “How are those two brothers of yours? I remember you were with them all the time.”

A friend was dropping her kid off at school in Boston and asked me to meet for coffee. She’d cried half the day. She asked if I felt that way when I dropped my brother off at college.

I had no memory of dropping my brother off at college. She said, “I was with you! I remember it so clearly.”

I didn’t remember because I had a new baby and I was supporting my family financially. I took my brother to college anyway. He stayed with us on his vacations — each of my parents had a million-dollar home and I had a 400-square-foot rent-controlled apartment.

When I had my second kid, my aunt said, “It’s nice for you to have your own, after raising those two boys.”

“What two boys?” I asked. No one had ever said that before.

Once my parents divorced and I started to understand how much I was doing for the boys, I didn’t do less. I did more, with more devotion. Because if I stopped, I’d have no value in the family.

Eventually the girl breaks. If she breaks outward, the parents tell people she has oppositional defiant disorder, which is a family disorder we pin on one child. If she breaks inward, it’s cutting or an eating disorder or going silent — the only ways left to be the one taking care of herself, since nobody else applied for the job. Either way the family describes the break as the girl’s problem, arriving out of nowhere, after years of her being so easy.

Breaking is the good outcome. The girls who break young get to protect themselves. The ones who never break grow up and keep going. They don’t have kids, because their entire experience of children is that children are labor — they watched their parents resent the work, they did the work, and nobody volunteers for that twice. Or they become the one who takes care of the aging parents, and the siblings call her bossy and controlling. The parents call her bossy and controlling too, once the power flips. And it might be true. After forty years in the role, she is bossy and controlling. The family built her that way.

I assumed, without ever examining the assumption, that I would always be something like my brothers’ parent and they would always be something like my kids. They’re in their thirties now and they’re not interested. They want a sister, or they want distance, but they do not want the person who raised them, because needing her now would be pathetic. A sister who raises her siblings almost never gets to keep them, because they will not want the same relationship as adults, and hers is the version that requires them to stay children.

When I see an oldest daughter parenting her parents or her siblings, I want to tell her: this is not a real place for a girl to grow up, this love is not love that can feed you.

The girls don’t listen. I wouldn’t have listened either. So I’m talking to the parents — the ones whose lives are too interesting, too demanding, too unfair to do everything themselves, so it’s reasonable that their daughter picks up the slack. Parents never say it that way. They say, “She’s always been independent.” “She’s always been such a caretaker.” “She’s had a lot of problems.”

Three ways of saying the same thing: somebody had to clean the rooms, and it wasn’t going to be us.

The post Oldest daughter syndrome is a parenting choice appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding:

I measured the achievement kind of passion — the drive to get better at something and win. This is the thing competition researchers treat as the engine behind workplace success, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic for decades.

So I gave the standard competitiveness scale to 58 autistic women and compared their scores to the published averages for men and women. The autistic women scored significantly higher than neurotypical women. And they were statistically indistinguishable from neurotypical men. On the trait that predicts who will win at work, autistic women don’t look like other women. They look like men.

I get that 58 successful women and a borrowed comparison group, is not bulletproof. But research on autistic women is so sparse that 58 is a flood.

Women who’d tell you the most about competitiveness don’t spend their time filling out surveys for the love of science. So most research comes from mothers who bring their autistic kids in for free services. Those mothers aren’t tested directly — there’s a questionnaire researchers fill out about the mother, from watching her, to decide whether she’s probably autistic too.

This is because revealing to a mom that she’s autistic is the kind of thing clinicians will do almost anything to avoid. It’s like when a kid gets tested and walks out labeled ADHD, not autistic, even though it’s likely both are true. Getting real-time information about autism is nearly impossible because the conversation involves too much stress and conflict. (I’m the only one who is excited to give you that information.)

Anyway, I had access to a rare group in research: successful women who already know they’re autistic. I proposed a participatory study, where the subjects help decide on questions — the forward-thinking, subject-centered method everyone praises. The women wanted to talk about trauma. They wanted it on the record that most autistic women had traumatic childhoods — something the research already shows and no one will say to the women themselves, because no one wants to offend them.

The IRB would not approve the trauma questions. The ethics board whose entire function is protecting research subjects decided that asking autistic women about their trauma would be too traumatizing for them. So we agreed on a new set of toothless questions blah blah published paper blah blah.

But still, I had this clean little finding about competitiveness, and there was nowhere to put it. Harvard’s school of education said it wasn’t their field. The business school didn’t want research that says autistic women are as competitive as men, because professors built careers on telling successful women they are not as competitive as men.

So my data sat. For years. It’s still sitting.

What finally changed wasn’t the finding. I used to think universities owned research because they owned the methods. Then I realized that the methods are just the gates that AI is now crashing.

The finding didn’t become less true because nobody published it. The women didn’t become less right because the IRB wouldn’t let them talk about trauma. And the data didn’t stop existing because it belonged to no department.

So here it is. Imperfect. Unpublished. Belonging to no field. Which is still more than the people who study autistic women have managed to learn from the women themselves.

The post I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up.

The Scotts so clearly love their country and their team and each other, and they were having the time of their lives. I watched them wave their flag and wear their flag. And every day they wore kilts that encoded their Scottish family lineage — except for the drinking kilts, which are the ones it’s okay to spill on.

I was in my own city, enjoying their bagpipes, and drinking songs, and endless energy for fun.

But I felt like an outsider watching people who knew exactly where they were from, and I don’t feel that myself, even in my own city.

In the US you’re expected to say where your family is from. It’s a national pastime — everyone is from somewhere else and proud to name it. I remember when my kids first ran into this. I told them we’re Jewish, that after the Spanish Inquisition my family went to Eastern Europe and their dad’s family went to South America. “But what country?” they kept asking. “You have to say a country!”

There isn’t one. I can trace my DNA almost entirely to a small area where Poland and Latvia and Ukraine meet, and my family moved from shtetl to shtetl across it for generations. But those are all places that hated Jews. You can’t say you’re from a place that spent centuries trying to be rid of you.

And I’ll never feel from the US either. Every Jewish person I know has a passport and knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the people who didn’t get out of Germany in time were the ones who assumed they were safe. Every Jewish person I know is also exhausted and stressed by what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, which means the one place that was supposed to be the answer to all of this is its own source of dread. It is hard to feel part of something when belonging in one direction makes you precarious in every other.

So I watched the Scots and understood, with more force than I expected, that I could never be that, but also that I don’t actually want to be. The Scottish joy is the joy of the class clown: this will be fine, everyone will laugh, nothing bad happens to me. You can only move through the world that way if the world has agreed in advance to find you charming. If those same men had been Black, drunk in the street at 10:30 in the morning, they would have been arrested.

Their ease is not available to everyone, and I am not built for it. Jews can barely manage a party on Purim, when getting drunk is the instruction. It’s not our style. We are restrained where the Scots are gregarious, careful where they are careless. But I think it’s okay. What I was actually feeling amidst the fun, was how strongly I belong to something after all.

Not a country. A diaspora. I belong to a people defined precisely by not being from anywhere — held together not by a flag or a hillside but by the shared knowledge of having been moved along, over and over, and having carried the thing with us anyway. I feel it every time I can tell someone is Jewish: a small click of recognition, a guess at the family behind them, a culture I already know the shape of.

I didn’t know how much I felt this until I stood next to people who are not from the US — where everyone is displaced – but from Scotland where their tie to their place is everything.

Belonging means saying who you’re with and who you’re not. The Scots draw that line around a country. I draw it around a people scattered across all of them. I loved watching the Scots but I would not trade. One of the best things I did with two decades of raising my kids was try to give them this — not a country to be from, but a people to be of, so that wherever they end up standing, a few feet from someone else’s flag, they’ll know exactly who they are.

The post In my neighborhood the Scots started the party at 10:30am. Every day. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves.

I kept wondering: if I’m really an ENTJ, why am I the world’s most failing ENTJ? Where is my Fortune 500 company to run? The breakthrough came when I stopped looking at what I was accomplishing and started looking at what I was trying to accomplish.

Now when coaching clients tell me their type, I usually see immediately that it’s wrong. I’m also smarter about typing my own neurodiverse family.

My kids loved Cards Against Humanity, so we played all the time. Nino used an X-acto knife to cut offensive words out of cards, and the cards he couldn’t salvage he saved. The kids assumed they’d get a box of cards when they turned 18. Instead, they got every confiscated card from every expansion pack, meticulously organized by topic. No one needs this. It’s an OCD project Nino invented for himself to assuage his need to sort and organize.

Once I separated autistic sorting from his larger goals, I could focus on his overriding belief that everything should have meaning and connect to people. That’s how I arrived at INFP.

In this week’s Personality Type Office Hours, I’ll show you how to work around the test by separating personality type from neurodivergence to identify core motivations. Join us Thursday, June 18 at 8pm ET. Paid subscribers only.

Here’s the link to become a paid subscriber if you aren’t already.

Here’s the link to the zoom session.

The post Is that your personality or your ADHD? appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Quilts from Gees Bend

People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type.

The test breaks because every question assumes you can see yourself, and seeing ourselves is the thing those of us with autism can’t do. Scientists call this deficit theory of mind.

Take introvert versus extrovert. It’s not about how social you are — it’s about what exhausts you. But I never want to go to a party, and once I’m there I don’t shut up. Am I an I or an E? The official tiebreaker is whether the party recharges you or drains you, and for autistic people the answer is always drained, because people hate us at parties.

J versus P is worse. A J needs things settled; a P keeps options open. But autistic executive function means we have no consistent relationship to settledness. I’m a J about my aspirations and a P about everything that requires getting off the sofa. I want things orderly when they’re my special interest and flexible when they’re someone else’s rules.

And underneath all the letter confusion is the real problem: personality type is an exercise in relativity. The test is asking whether you’re an extrovert relative to the entire universe — not relative to your loud family, not relative to corporate America where everyone performs extroversion. Answering requires holding the whole distribution of humanity in your head and locating yourself inside it, which is precisely the theory-of-mind work autism makes hard.

Another reason autism makes typing ourselves difficult is that autism is about extremes. Normal people are okay at most things. For example, they’re okay at school and okay at sports. But autistic people are uneven: very good at some stuff and terrible at others. See: spiked brain. But also see: Gees Bend Quilts. Because those quilts are have the same architecture as more typical quilts, but they have exagerrated, uneven proportions.

The same exaggeration happens within type. If ENTPs are generally funny, cheat on their spouses, and can’t hold down a job, an autistic ENTP has been married fifteen times or has never worked a day in their life. We’re not different from our type. We’re our type with the volume knob broken off. But there’s a reason that Gees Bend quilts are on US postage stamps: the uneven composition is a surprising and beautiful and a national treasure.

So autistic people are less predictable, yes, but that’s also the reason we need need type more than anyone. This’ll be the topic of my Personality Type Office Hours on Thurs. June 18 at 8pm ET. During that session we’ll also talk about the typing method I’ve landed on after fifteen years of correcting peoples’ scores scores; those wrong scores are where I get all my best material.

New personality type posts:

INFP: Your inability to self-edit is finally worth money

INFJs confuse being understood with being loved

How to talk so an ENTJ will listen

INTJs don’t hold grudges, they archive them

ENFP: I spent two days reading about the Song Dynasty instead of writing this post.

ENFJs get sidetracked by rewards

The post Personality type posts + how autism breaks the test appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Chairs (1970) Tom Berg 

This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.

When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years.

I didn’t think anything of the fact that my brother and I were split up. I didn’t think anything of the fact that I went to work with my dad every day, even on weekends. As far as I knew, this was just how families worked.

It wasn’t until Penelope explained autism that my family started to make sense.

From a young age I knew there was something different about the way I responded to situations compared to most people around me. “Autism” was a word that carried a lot of stigma when I was growing up, so when Penelope first suggested it explained some of my behavior, I resisted.

The idea itself wasn’t new. Autism didn’t reveal something about me that I didn’t already know. What it gave me was a vocabulary and a body of knowledge for understanding things I had sensed for years but couldn’t explain.

My dad originally sent me to work with Penelope because he wanted me to understand the workplace. She helped me do that. But she also helped me understand my dad.

I had already accepted that I was naturally weird. What I hadn’t realized was that the same explanation applied to my parents, my brother, and many of the family dynamics I had spent my life taking for granted.

Nobody had ever told me my family was unusual, probably because we didn’t socialize much as a family. Once I understood autism, though, so many things clicked into place.

As I got older, my dad and I drank almost all the time. I thought it was nice because we were watching baseball together. Looking back, I can see that we never really learned how to talk to each other. We could sit together for hours watching a game, but whenever we had to talk about something important, we fought.

Learning about autism didn’t make me blame my family less. It made me understand them better.

The relationships that changed the most were the ones with my mom and my brother.

Before, I loved them, but I didn’t put much effort into showing it. I told myself that meant the relationships weren’t very important to me. Looking back, I think something else was happening. Distance was easier than trying.

Learning that all of us were struggling with some version of the same thing made me more empathetic. For the first time, I stopped seeing myself as the only person who had been hurt by our family dynamics.

Since then, both relationships have changed a lot.

Even though I live across the country, my mom and I spend a few hours every week watching TV together remotely. I tutor my younger brother in math and English twice a week.

I used to understand our family in terms of IQ. I went with my dad because we were smart and my brother went with my mom because they weren’t.

I believed that for years.

Now I watch my brother play the drums and realize how wrong I was. Autism doesn’t distribute strengths evenly. My brother can do things I can’t do. We all have minds that spike in different places.

For a long time I thought understanding my family meant ranking everyone. Now I think understanding them means paying attention.

I know the state of my family relationships was never entirely my fault. We were all shaped by the same family system and by our own autistic ways of connecting.

But I want to take responsibility for the part I can control.

I don’t want to work weekends the way my dad did. When I have kids, I want to spend my time watching them grow up. I want to be present. I want to be a good husband and father instead of always choosing what’s emotionally easiest in the moment.

Understanding autism didn’t change me, but it changed what I think is possible for me.

The post My dad hired Penelope to coach me. Here’s what happened. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.