Being autistic is taking a normal interaction every human experiences and pretending it is unique to you and your autistic peers.
Is getting bullied for walking a certain way and talking in a “funny way” for their whole lifetime every human experience? Cause I didn’t experience any of those yet I’ve seen my friends go through it. Are you suggesting autism is not real? You must be living in a whole new world.
Charitably I am fairly certain they are making fun of this particular meme and not in general. This meme is certainly something many people experience autism or not, though there are reasons toys experience might stick out for those with autism.
I was, yeah. Thanks for not instantly assuming the worst of me. People like yourself make social media a better environment than it otherwise would be.
I mean it kind of is, in the sense that interactions are determined by your perception of things, and autistic people have a very different social perspective. So by that, they are in different interactions that others would have or that others could easily get out of.
Everyone has a different social perspective. Misunderstandings are very common in human discourse and they are often repeated. When this happens it is not solely because the speaker is autistic; there are many things that can contribute to our struggle to communicate with one another.
I know but regular people have more of a similar perspective than autistic people do. That’s why they’ll get teased like in this meme example, since there’s likely a social cue they’re not picking up on so they’re getting mocked. Everyone has different perspectives, but autism is definitely a big factor in creating these situations.
SO: my head hurts
Me: (pick any1) Where in the head? Any reason why? Did you hit something? Anything that might have caused it so we can buy some medicine or I can cook you something or whatever?
SO: idk, it just hurts, imma lie down.SO: I’m cold, I’m gonna take a hot shower.
Me: have you tried wearing bulkier clothes? A blanket?
SO: no. takes the third shower of the day $$
Me (later that day or in another day): force them to wear more clothes and throw a blanket at them in their chair
SO: oh, this is nice uses the blanket every day nowMe: How was your day?
SO: Bad.
Me: Anything out of the ordinary that you want to share to share the pain?
SO: No, its just bad.
Me: Do you want to watch anything, eat anything special?
SO: imma lie down.Sorry but no, i know that they aren’t vague intentionally but they are not clear at all when expressing their needs.
If they don’t feel well, they might not want to answer comprehensive questions. Just reading that feels like an interrogation.
Of course that it seems an interrogation of you imagine me saying all those questions one after each other. That’s just how I phrased the question. The problem is that they simply used to not express their needs and wants before they got to the point where they just couldn’t do it. Mind you, this was way before they started going to therapy and they are getting way better at expressing their needs and wants now so that they don’t break down too often.
Nah how about y’all just explain yourselves when asked it’s very easy. /s
On a serious note, I have ADHD so if you ask me “what’s wrong” I could go on for hours, giving you a list of symptoms, root cause analysis, contributing historical factors, short term suggestions, future suggestions to avoid the state and bias analysis of my own analysis for hours and hours entirely off the cuff.
It’s so hard with people who can’t, my brain often defaults to the assumption that they are just NPCs who simply lack the level of constant self-evaluation and internal monologue (which constitutes the abstraction of soul to me) and I have to fight it. At any given time I know exactly how I feel, it’s very natural to me to assume others must do as well, or their feelings just aren’t as deep.
Sometimes they are too exhausted to express their emotions and it’s not worth it for them, so they’d rather just deal with it on their own
I had to teach my girlfriend to stop asking so many questions when I’m upset. We made a game out of it so she could have fun learning it.
Sorry if I implied I asked all those questions at once. It’s more of a menu where I sometimes asked one or the other. My point was that they just communicated nothing once they broke down.
Alongside teaching them not to flood you with questions when you can’t deal with them, remember to communicate what you can to them before you break down so that they don’t feel helpless watching you break down without even being able to help or know what’s going on.
As I answered in other comments, this happened mostly before my SO got diagnosed and didn’t know how to deal with it, now with therapy we both deal better with it so I don’t flood them and they don’t leave me out of the loop of their needs and wants.
I’m perfectly capable of solving my own problems when I’m upset, I’m just not capable of communicating unless the stakes are serious. If the problem is a person, then I can dissociate and deal with the person as a threat while neglecting my own feelings. It’s toxic, but it gets the job done even when I want to go nonverbal. But I don’t want to treat my girlfriend like a threat and dissociate with her. That’s not right. And when she’s asking questions while I’m upset, the only way to answer them is to dissociate.
That’s the thing, communicating stuff before you become upset. For example, my SO used to come from work exausted and used to lie down in the sofa, slept until night, then maybe grabbed some dinner or just slept straight until the next morning. Sometimes we didn’t speak at all in 2 to 3 days because they woke up earlier than me, they then went to work in a hurry, no talking in work because work takes 200% of focus, and then come back home to their date with the sofa, and end up sleeping again before I finish my work.
Now we chat about our day at lunch even if we are not together and they vent about it whenever they can so that when they come back, I can make some time for them, and they also manage work stress way better than before so they don’t come back utterly exhausted every day. Learning that they could not work in the field they were working and live to tell the tale and taking the time to change fields with my support helped a lot too. The situation mentioned above was before they were diagnosed and they just bruteforced the workday in a super toxic way for them and those around them (me).
Why not just say what’s on your mind? Why disassociate instead of just chatting about it? How does disassociating deal with a thing instead of just postponing the issue until it’s talked about and your feelings are therefore addressed?
Because I’m literally on the edge of going nonverbal unless I dissociate. It’s called having a disability. Autism, to be precise. I can’t “just chat about it” any more than I can “just run a marathon” or “just beat up a mugger”. There’s people in the world who can do all three of those things, but they aren’t me.
I just want to understand the mechanics of it, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to come off as telling a blind man to just see 😅
Like for example, what is non-verbal? How does that occur?
Nonverbal is when the cognitive effort required to form words into sentences is too much to bear. Conversation is effortful even for neurotypicals at the best of times. Have you ever had a thrilling 3 hour conversation about philosophy with a friend and felt exhausted afterwards? For autistic people, the baseline effort is higher, and complicating factors are worse . Which topics are a minefield? What are the other person’s triggers? What idioms don’t mean what they seem to mean? How much introspection do I need to do to answer a simple ‘how are you’? Why does everything sound so loud? Do I have to answer questions right now? What’s the answer? How do I find out???
When I’m having a meltdown, there is nothing left in the tank that I can remove without compromising my ability to do things like “exist in the presence of light bulbs” or “not be upset by the fact I have hair”. I can either go to the effort of finding answers for my girlfriend when I’m exhausted, or I can just barely manage to not want to kill myself to escape the pressures of existence. Because every second of my life, the task of being okay with existing in the real world does take effort. Not much, but sometimes it’s the only thing I have energy left to do. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to do it.
One person isn’t the whole. They may just want to vent and aren’t wanting solutions. While that may be frustrating to you, it can be just as frustrating to your SO to want to vent and get solutions they don’t want
Of course I’m just some rando online I don’t know your relationship. I have a BA in Human Communication and this is just one of the most common arguments that happens in relationships
And that’s okay, but that’s not what has been described here. Being the vent ear is cool too, the point where it gets frustrating is when their vent method is to just be completely exhausted and lie down in the sofa until tomorrow when they get exhausted again and repeat… I have to force down some healthier avenues for them to vent and prepare themselves so that they don’t get perma exhausted in work, it just takes some work and some guessing of what they need from my part, because they sure don’t communicate when tired.
I’d argue your SO might not be displaying neurotypical behavior.
Between 50-85% of autistic spectrum people (plus a significant portion of people with PTSD or depression) experience Alexithymia, or significant difficulty in recognizing and analyzing their emotional state.
When I’m feeling bad, my SO frequently assumes I’m withholding the reason from him in some sort of passive-aggressive mindgame, and I have to remind him that I barely know what my mood is, let alone what’s causing it.
I’m getting better at it, but it’s a lot of work and I still regularly mistake stomachaches for anxiety.
I wrote basically this in another comment, they had a hard time recognising their emotional state and held until bursting out. This was way before they were diagnosed though, after a lot of therapy they are much better at identifying their state, or simply they try to keep in touch a lot more so that I can be there for them before they burn out.
As the neurotypical person in the relationship, my advice is to try to keep in tough more regularly so that your SO can detect if you are halfway through burning out so that they can help you before you become completely unavailable.
My SO also has generalised anxiety and ADHD, so I usually tell them that when they keep burning out for weeks it’s really painful for me because I feel very left out, which resonates a lot with them. I guess that this helps them to do the effort of keeping me up to date so that I can let them vent, hug them, ask which kind of food they would like to uplift their spirits… and all that stuff before they burn out.
my god this would drive me nuts. have you ever experienced pain?? why would your want to be bombarded with questions? give em a hug and leave be jeeeeez
Damn that’s a lot of people declaring that THEY’RE the ones who speak clearly and THE OTHERS only think they’re speaking clearly.
Brains are fairly unique to the individual. When you have an idea, this represents a unique neural activation pattern no one else has.
Being a social species, we often need to communicate these ideas to other people. This means we need to get that unique neural activation pattern into the other person’s brain. That’s where language comes in.
Language is a massive part of the brain that we work on our entire lives. The entire purpose of language is too make that part of our brain as close to identical as everyone else’s. This way we take our idea, convert it into a neural pattern in our language center, transfer that pattern using words and non-verbal communication, then the other person receives it hopefully without massive transmission loss. They’re now able to recreate the unique idea you have.
One of the defining features of autism is that the language part of the brain develops very differently in autistic people than neurotypicals. This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together. But communication between autists and NTs will be poor because of that difference.
Many people are arguing about who should change their communication to adapt to others. I don’t think this is a useful question because the answer is unique to the individual and is based entirely on need. If you’re an NT who needs to communicate to many people with autism, or have someone very close to you with autism, you will likely make an effort to build an autistic language map in your brain. If you’re autistic and need to communicate with NTs, you’ll likely build an NT language map in your brain. I can see these mapping strategies like using metaphors etc… in this very thread.
Unfortunately since autism is in the minority, there are more people in the latter group than the former. This means the pressure is felt by autistic people more than NTs. This is a natural consequence of the need to communicate in society, not an ethical dilemma. One natural consequence is that autistic people will prefer to have autistic friends to ease their communication burden.
Everyone accepts that there are people that they can’t communicate well with. People who speak a different language, people with a different culture, people who have a very different life experience, people whose brassica develop differently. All these groups will have a different language sector of the brain and communication will suffer. It’s not efficient for everyone to try to be able to communicate perfectly with everyone else. The goal is to be able to communicate very well with your friends and partners, communicate work concepts with colleagues, communicate basic concepts with most strangers, and avoid unintentionally making enemies with everyone else as best as you can. The onus is on each person to achieve theses goals for themselves.
There isn’t really a right or wrong in this situation.
This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together. But communication between autists and NTs will be poor because of that difference.
I’m just curious as to wonder why you say that? I am a sales/relations manager, I’m NT, and there’s a few autistic people I have work for me. Now I don’t have difficulties understanding them, if anything I run circles around them social-skills-wise as I know what they’re attempting to say easily. The other NTs that I know of also do pretty well at the social skills part of the job. The autistic people definitely struggle.
I’m definitely still learning how to train them more effectively, since I know they like things to be explained literally, but social stuff is so complex that they miss the bigger picture that is involved. I have never felt like I struggle to figure out what they’re thinking or saying though, mainly because I know them personally. But as for the customers understanding them, probably not.
I’m not about to read all of that but I agree I actually saw this in a teacher I had he refused to explain again, explain differently his mind couldn’t wrap around the fact that some persons couldn’t understand
TL;DR: effective communication requires that the language part of the brain of both people map VERY closely. It’s no surprise autistic people and NTs don’t communicate well together, but communicate very well within their own groups. How much you need to adjust your communication depends mostly on how important it is to get your message across, which if you’re a teacher should be a lot. It’s your job to communicate effectively lol. Your teacher was shitty!
Honestly I’m mostly replying to the “I’m not reading that but I agree”. That made me chuckle. Like I could have had “Aurora_TheFirstLight sucks” in the middle of that and you’re all “It’s cool I agree lol”
This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together.
I have a question. I don’t know much about this subject, so that is why I’m asking. Doesn’t this statement imply that the differences between brains from neurotypical and neurodivergent people are overall consistent? As afaik that’s not true, because autism is a spectrum, right?
And it’s like they try to get mad at you :(
i feel like this is my default state.
I still don’t know how i feel about it. Am i a dumbass who can’t communicate? Are others just fucking stupid? Who knows!
Both, I think. The fact that you’re here on lemmy tells me that you probably care about how shit works, which makes you an outlier, and it’s likely others who are stupid relative to you. On the other hand, you’re probably a dumbass who talks with people like peers and doesn’t know how to communicate with stupid people, or how to manage your expectations as stupid people will always misunderstand things no matter how good your communication skills are.
If people are doing that, it’s probably not “very clearly”. There’s most likely social context you’re missing that is making it heavily miss its mark.
Both things can be true at the same time. E.g. people sometimes are worked up thinking about some strawman they are discussing against in their head. So when I don’t virtue signal enough that I’m on their team or at least not against entirely against every single thing they stand for, those people sometimes take a very clear and to the point thing I say or ask and misconstrue it into meaning some horrific, morally objectionable thing.
Like, when people say that burning kittens on BBQs is a huge problem that we need to band together against, and I reply that I doubt that this is a widespread enough or well enough organized phenomenon that banding together would be effective, they take it as me admitting that I’m pro kitten-burning.
Sure, I failed to coddle them and front my opinion with how abhorrent those kitten burners are, but also nothing I said implied that in the slightest. I just thought that didn’t need mentioning, why say something so obvious?
God I feel this, especially felt it when I was a kid, where I would say the most innocent things and it was somehow interpreted as the most horrific insult. I was considered a “Demon Child” and I never understand why
