Times your AS kept you calm in a dangerous situation?

[IContainMultitudes]

I've read quite a bit about how people with ASDs are sometimes surprisingly calm in dangerous situations, which is rather counter-intuitive considering all of the problems that people with ASDs often have with emotional meltdowns and panic attacks and the like. Have you ever been in a dangerous situation where you were surprisingly calm? The only one that stands out in my memory was a time in High School where I was in an art class where one of the people suddenly pulled out a can of pepper spray and sprayed someone else in the face with it (I have no idea why). Most of the people around me were freaking out a little bit as the teacher told everyone to evacuate the room, but I just calmly got up and went outside with no problems. I find that kind of interesting to think about since I usually don't stay that calm in any situation that feels a little dangerous; I panic a little bit if I'm on an airplane that hits a bad patch of turbulence, and I usually get shaken up pretty badly if I narrowly avoid having a car accident.

 

[petrossa]

All the time. Been in a war situation, many a life threatening situation. Went through situations that would completely f up someone without much effort. (my wife died of cancer i cared for her at home and was present during her euthanasia, prepared her corpse myself for burial)

I am very happy with this gift.

 

[Billi]

In highschool I ended a fight by taking a knife away from a guy. He had already tried to stab the other guy a few times. He turned his head, and I twisted the knife from his hand. A few days later word got out that I had taken the guys knife, and people said he was going to beat me up. He never did, probably because I returned the knife to him in private.

I have worked around machinery nearly my whole life, so fire and flooding, and general conflagration don't scare me. I am very safety conscious. I once calmly asked a passing co-worker to bring me a fire extinguisher when I had an electrical fire on a machine. I was reaching into the electrical cabinet to turn off the power, when he bolted back with the fire extinguisher, I turned from the cabinet and he said wisps of smoke were coming out of my hair. They called me smokey for a while.

I stage managed community theater for several years and people liked my calm demeanor back stage, even when things were going all wrong.

I recently had someone pull a gun on me while I was riding my bike. He demanded money, then my bike, I laughed and kept riding.

 

[gonzerd]

I wonder why this is. What's the social side of panic? Is it contagious in a way, and maybe we are more or less immune to those things. Or maybe it is that aspies are more used to panic, experiencing anxiety in many everyday situations, keeping us in some kind of heightened state of alarm.

I've been in several muggings, but it never got to the point where I handed something over. Basically I wouldn't understand the situation, go in some kind of reasoning, asking a lot of 'how do you means?', which eventually got me out of the situation. (What do you mean 'give you everything?' I hardly have anything. You can buy it over there if you want. Money? Ha, like I have money. And I have to just give it to you? Strange. Look, if I could, I'd help you, but I really can't afford it, I'm sorry.)

There are some analogies with this

There have been, accidents (one example could be a guy taking a 1000 ft fall while mountain climbing. The members of his party were in shock, and I just ran to the nearest ranger cabin to get a helicopter up there) and the war zone that was the house I grew up in, with fights I had to break up and calls to emergency services when my mom was od'ing again. In a way I was too calm, not asking for help for myself when it was actually needed. There's also this temporary separation on an emotional level with more over the top situations, a sense of being an observer (who participates), but still an observer, like it's not happening to me, although I realize it does happen to me. And that sense of being an observer is something that's almost always there anyway, not just in stressful situations.