Exposure Anxiety - The Invisible Cage: An Exploration of Self-Protection Responses in the Autism Spectrum and Beyond

It progressively shapes the individual torn between experiencing it as the sanctuary and the prison. Exposure Anxiety makes it hard to stand noticing you are noticing. It can make love a form of torture, repel you from the sound of your own voice, make you meaning deaf to your own words and those of others and compel you to avoid, divert from or retaliate against the very things that which most have the power to reach you. Exposure Anxiety progressively co-opts the identity of the person as separate to the condition or it leaves them aware but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation. Exposure Anxiety is the involuntary social-emotional self-protection response that needs no enemy. It turns the world upside-down, makes no yes and yes no and co-opts and defies conventional, non-autistic teaching techniques.

Exposure Anxiety has many faces. By defeating it at its own game, Donna demonstrates how the person can progressively be inspired to fight for themselves and attempt to emerge, from the undercurrent, as the tide.