Autistic “Memory-Foaming”

Why the difficulty (and sometimes inability) to self-advocate is so common to the autistic experience… and why it’s so insidious.

(content warnings: reference to sexual assault; reference to physical and psychological abuse and manipulation)

During a writing workshop I took this past year, I was reading a submission from someone in the group, and the following passage hit me like a brick:

“I learned the things most people don’t have to know, too, how to shut down my brain and just perform the motions when needed. I made myself into the perfect parallel, not a mirror but foam. Folding in when he needed to push down, anticipating his next move, and absorbing it in kind. I became resigned to his every need, trying to never let him get ahead of my mental preparation.” — Lizzie McCord

I unpacked this with my partner, and then with my therapist, and the concept of social memory-foaming formed. Here’s my attempt at a formal definition:

Memory-foaming is the process of losing, giving up, or having trouble forming a sense of self-identity, self-advocacy and self-determination in social situations, and molding oneself to someone else or to a situation. It often involves excessively conceding, bending, conforming and acquiescing to someone, either actively or passively, either as a reaction to specific feedback, or in anticipation of a certain response. It often involves making yourself as small, as accommodating, and/or as agreeable as possible, to the point of self-neglect and self-alienation.

Memory-foaming is different from people-pleasing in its process of self-unknowing, and in its process of identity-anchoring to someone or something else. It involves actually taking the shape of whatever or whoever you come into contact with, and being an adaptable, soft, malleable cast, often in order to fit in, gain acceptance or maintain connection.

In relationships, memory-foaming is different from compromise, generosity, accommodation, and balanced self-sacrifice mainly because of its characteristic ignorance or un-awareness of self, and the resulting extreme deference to someone else by default. It often involves the actual adoption and internalization of someone else’s perceptions and desires, and therefore often involves not knowing the difference between “mine” and “theirs.” As a result, just like real memory foam, it takes a long time afterwards to understand what was “me” and what was “them.” Sometimes, that understanding never comes.

Memory-foaming can manifest in small ways (e.g. saying yes to a certain activity even though you don’t want to do it), large ways (e.g. crafting an entire identity to fit what a partner wants), and potentially dangerous ways (sleeping with someone who you don’t want to sleep with). For obvious reasons, memory-foaming can sometimes be a feature of codependent, controlling or abusive relationships, but can also be a feature of otherwise “healthy” relationships. Anyone can memory-foam, especially those with childhood trauma…but I feel it is especially common for autistics. And I have a few ideas why.

1. Difficulty with interoception: In my view, this is one of the quintessential pillars of autistic experience — a slow or impaired ability to connect with our own internal experience and cues, whether it’s something physical like hunger, or something emotional like apprehension. In social situations, my interoception is often further slowed down because of the energy and focus needed to mask, interact, muster social banter, pick up on social cues, present a certain way, tune out background noise, make sure I’m not making the people around me uncomfortable, integrate all the incoming social information, etc. For me, this is part of why I can dissociate from myself in social situations. In this way, memory-foaming can be a way to connect, to anchor to a social dynamic or to another person in order to avoid social alienation. It’s much easier to avoid the difficult task of trying to tap into my inner voice and sense of self-advocacy, than it is to be isolated and rejected. It’s much easier to read, and become, the room than it is to try to read my own instincts.
2. A lifetime of being misunderstood: It’s hard to fully comprehend the cumulative toll of a lifetime of being misunderstood, corrected, dismissed, and abandoned. I remember reading a statistic that autistics and ADHDers are estimated to have received an average of 20,000 corrective or negative messages by age 10. If self-advocacy, including saying “no,” is misunderstood, demeaned and minimized by the people around you as a kid, especially if the basis for that “no” does not fit neatly within accepted neurotypical norms and social rule-sets, then self-assured individuation becomes inherently dangerous as an autistic person grows into a neurotypical world. It makes sense that an inevitable impact of being chronically misunderstood is a highly honed, ingrained reflex to, first, anticipate what other people want and expect (again, in order to maintain connection and avoid conflict)… and then to eventually become what others want and expect, without them necessarily ever asking or manipulating. After a while, it becomes a necessity of connection to take someone else’s desire or experience (perceived or communicated) as one’s own. Anticipate, absorb. After doing this for a while, it’s easy to get to the point of not knowing where they end and you begin. Memory-foaming becomes a coping mechanism to navigate and maintain connection through hypervigilance to, and adoption of, other people’s intentions and identities.
3. The third reason I think autistic are prone to memory-foaming can be seen as the result of the interplay of the first two reasons. So, we have an autistic person with some degree of intrinsic neurologic difficulty with identifying an inner voice, internal cues and core self-identity (1), who from an early age learns that self-advocacy and self-expression is a threat to connection and understanding (2). What often happens next is an internalized self-minimization that is reinforced by a lifetime of the following three things: social landmines strewn randomly in everyday interactions and relationships; increasingly frequent experiences of being manipulated by others, and; infantilization (sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle) from those around us (often from parents, older siblings, teachers, bosses, friends, partners, etc) due to subtle interpersonal differences that are a result of our unique neurodevelopmental timelines. These three things whittle away at any remaining ability to trust ourselves and perceive our inner voice. We become incredibly susceptible to social, emotional, psychological manipulation and, especially if there was ever any degree of codependency in our childhood, we move through the world often being, and I mean truly being, what someone else wants. We hollow out by instinct, and become memory-foamers. That is our role. In partnerships, we are the doormats, the over-extenders, the accommodators, the silent agreers. We make life choices, big and small, that are not in line with what we want. We don’t know what we want. Maybe we don’t even know what knowing what we want would look or feel like!

I hate to admit it, but I can’t even begin to tell you how deeply memory-foaming is part of the story of my social life history. Unfortunately, it seems to be a common and deeply-ingrained experience for many autistics. We can be prone to getting sucked into difficult, uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous situations. We are susceptible to manipulation, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. We can find ourselves in toxic, controlling, and narcissistic relationships. We can lose money, be exploited, and experience added trauma. We can know that the situation we’re saying yes to is negative, unhealthy or dangerous…but memory-foam to the manipulator, the abuser, because that feels familiar. Afterwards, we can sometimes have a hard time even seeing these situations for what they were. The imprint takes a long, long time to fade away.