Yeah I am married to an autistic person and they think that they are being explicit and clear but are absolutely not. It harms their relationships all over the place and they are constantly thinking less of other people over it.
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
Yeah it’s super easy (autistic or not) to think you’re being very clear when you have the full idea in your head, but you’re actually not. It’s like if you’re trying to describe a purple elephant and say “the thing that moves around and is purple and has a trunk”. Those words clearly describe a purple elephant if you already have the concept at the forefront of your mind, but for somebody without a purple elephant in mind, you could just as well be describing a purple car or a guy from the purple equivalent of the blue man group carrying around a big chest of clothes or a purple tree that can move around.
You’ve just described the entire language of Toki Pona. The same string of words can mean “bear” or “elephant”, and I copied a phrase someone used to mean “tiger trap” and it was read as “bamboo arch”.
You should look up the double empathy problem. Its been shown that autistic people don’t struggle to communicate or be understood by other autistic people. Its only between autistic and non autistic people where the issues arise but only one side gets all the blame when the failure is both ways.
If non-autistic people are constantly misunderstanding autistic people maybe there should be some meeting in the middle instead of broadly declaring neurodivergent people to be the problem.
They did not in any way “declare neuro divergent people to be the problem.”
If you go around your day and are constantly being misheard, it’s more likely that you’re mumbling than it is that every other person just has bad hearing.
Their comments are making broad statements about autistic people and putting the onus of understanding solely on them, when communication is a two way street.
“Everyone” doesn’t have trouble understanding autistic people; other autistic people are more able to socialize with autistic people than neurotypical people are. Being a minority just means the people who are able to socialize well with autistic people are outnumbered by people who can’t/don’t/won’t.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but this is untrue really, majority does not imply correctness, occam’s razor just does not apply to hundreds of individuals with their own possibly independent complex motivations and circumstances. There are plenty of things most people are just wrong about and a select few are correct about etc.
This misses the point completely and kinda pisses me off. If you go around all day constantly BEING A FUCKING AUTIST you’re gonna find out that everyone seems just as retarded to you as you seem to them. It’s not a fucking matter of diction, dickhead! ;) (sorry, the alliteration was too tempting there, you’re not a dickhead) The problem is that for the autist, every conversation tends to be a serious conversation, because it quickly becomes evident that people get pissed off at us in conversation, which makes us really bad at casual conversation.
It’s not a matter of diction, it’s a matter of literally being an alien consciousness in a world of, frankly, monkeys. Thanks ahead of time for the downvotes for my honesty.
I mean it kinda seems to me like you’re just grasping at your condition as an excuse. I am also on the spectrum as is my brother, and surprise, I had to learn how to better express myself.
Just throwing your hands up and blaming everybody else for your problem makes you the problem.
Sounds like the person you’re married to is kind of a dick, honestly. Thinking less of other people for not understanding your own unclear language just shows a massive lack of introspection. As a local autism, though, I definitely disagree with the last point, as a significant difference between someone who has autism and someone who doesn’t is that language is understood differently (I would know), and that means you can both understand and be understood incorrectly very easily. This post is kind of deliberately divisive anyway, but I believe the point of saying something and being misunderstood, despite your best efforts (hopefully), still stands.
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
Not really, when you’re in the minority of course you’re going to be outnumbered. But autistic people tend to have an easy time getting their point across to each other, compared to neurotypicals trying to have a mutual understanding. Neurotypicals tend to be very performative in conversation and don’t really say things they actually intend to contribute to the conversation half the time (small talk is a form of this that has gone way too far). They’re also usually evasive & implicitness-oriented, the cultural nuances/expectations/perceptions of the “right” and “wrong” way to convey something tend to get in the way of understanding very straightforward and mostly objective things. They’re generally pretty condescending when you don’t converse how they expect you to, and they judge a lot about your character, emotions, intentions, etc. based on how you speak, and will speak to you very differently based on outside factors. You can take 100 almost-strangers, and neurotypicals will speak in noticeably different ways with different amounts of honesty and indirection for each person in the otherwise same context.
Instead of just saying what they mean and listening to what you say, they throw in a bunch of random culture-dependent social cues and context irrelevant to the conversation that you’re supposed to subconsciously/naturally pick up on to interpret their speech in a different way. And you’re basically just supposed to guess whether something is socially significant indirection or not.
Neurotypicals basically just have the urge make simple conversation unnecessarily complex and care a lot about invisible or implied stuff affecting the conversation. It’s not their fault of course, they were just born that way.
I don’t have ASD but I can’t keep count of the amount of times I will say something very plainly and the other person will try to find some hidden meaning in it or make egregious misinterpretations/false dichotomies based on a statement (basically the “i like pancakes” “so you hate waffles”? tweet), so I can relate. Autistic people are usually far more direct in conversations in my experience, and don’t use nearly as much fluff/unnecessary performative conversation. Of course that’s not to say Autistic people are just flat out better socially than neurotypicals, there are many things I personally find difficult to understand about friends with ASD that can make conversation hard (mainly people who have both ASD and ADHD though, not a fun combo for having conversations, getting ultra-fixated on random irrelevant stuff and just flat out omitting important things frequently even worse than neurotypicals do), it’s just that they’re usually very straightforward.
This is probably inappropriate, but maybe stop applying ridiculous egoic baggage to comments which are carefully crafted to be as far away from that sort of shit as possible, specifically to be able to actually communicate something and in the hopes of avoiding the car crash conversation with normies so often becomes, then. because that’s going to be what the problem is, because it’s the same problem every time, the other person reading random inappropriate shit from unrelated subjects into a conversation with a targeted, delimited scope.
The most frustrating thing about being autistic is that I’m the one labelled retarded because y’all don’t know how to drill down into a subject and stay focused. It doesn’t reflect how we see things, let’s put it that way, y’all are a bunch of fickle fruit flies to us.
Your partner deserves someone better than you who won’t villainize them for being autistic. Fuck off nt trash, you’re the problem for not putting in even the slightest amount of effort to understand us while demanding that we 100% tailor our speech to you
Yeah I am married to an autistic person and they think that they are being explicit and clear but are absolutely not. It harms their relationships all over the place and they are constantly thinking less of other people over it.
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
Yeah it’s super easy (autistic or not) to think you’re being very clear when you have the full idea in your head, but you’re actually not. It’s like if you’re trying to describe a purple elephant and say “the thing that moves around and is purple and has a trunk”. Those words clearly describe a purple elephant if you already have the concept at the forefront of your mind, but for somebody without a purple elephant in mind, you could just as well be describing a purple car or a guy from the purple equivalent of the blue man group carrying around a big chest of clothes or a purple tree that can move around.
You’ve just described the entire language of Toki Pona. The same string of words can mean “bear” or “elephant”, and I copied a phrase someone used to mean “tiger trap” and it was read as “bamboo arch”.
You should look up the double empathy problem. Its been shown that autistic people don’t struggle to communicate or be understood by other autistic people. Its only between autistic and non autistic people where the issues arise but only one side gets all the blame when the failure is both ways.
If non-autistic people are constantly misunderstanding autistic people maybe there should be some meeting in the middle instead of broadly declaring neurodivergent people to be the problem.
They did not in any way “declare neuro divergent people to be the problem.”
If you go around your day and are constantly being misheard, it’s more likely that you’re mumbling than it is that every other person just has bad hearing.
Their comments are making broad statements about autistic people and putting the onus of understanding solely on them, when communication is a two way street.
“Everyone” doesn’t have trouble understanding autistic people; other autistic people are more able to socialize with autistic people than neurotypical people are. Being a minority just means the people who are able to socialize well with autistic people are outnumbered by people who can’t/don’t/won’t.
Wow thank you for sharing. That’s a great starting resource
Removed by mod
I don’t have a horse in this race, but this is untrue really, majority does not imply correctness, occam’s razor just does not apply to hundreds of individuals with their own possibly independent complex motivations and circumstances. There are plenty of things most people are just wrong about and a select few are correct about etc.
This misses the point completely and kinda pisses me off. If you go around all day constantly BEING A FUCKING AUTIST you’re gonna find out that everyone seems just as retarded to you as you seem to them. It’s not a fucking matter of diction, dickhead! ;) (sorry, the alliteration was too tempting there, you’re not a dickhead) The problem is that for the autist, every conversation tends to be a serious conversation, because it quickly becomes evident that people get pissed off at us in conversation, which makes us really bad at casual conversation.
It’s not a matter of diction, it’s a matter of literally being an alien consciousness in a world of, frankly, monkeys. Thanks ahead of time for the downvotes for my honesty.
I mean it kinda seems to me like you’re just grasping at your condition as an excuse. I am also on the spectrum as is my brother, and surprise, I had to learn how to better express myself.
Just throwing your hands up and blaming everybody else for your problem makes you the problem.
Isn’t that what the meme is saying but from the perspective of what it’s like to experience autism
Sounds like the person you’re married to is kind of a dick, honestly. Thinking less of other people for not understanding your own unclear language just shows a massive lack of introspection. As a local autism, though, I definitely disagree with the last point, as a significant difference between someone who has autism and someone who doesn’t is that language is understood differently (I would know), and that means you can both understand and be understood incorrectly very easily. This post is kind of deliberately divisive anyway, but I believe the point of saying something and being misunderstood, despite your best efforts (hopefully), still stands.
I don’t think we can garner that conclusion so quickly with one statement they made about their partner
Not really, when you’re in the minority of course you’re going to be outnumbered. But autistic people tend to have an easy time getting their point across to each other, compared to neurotypicals trying to have a mutual understanding. Neurotypicals tend to be very performative in conversation and don’t really say things they actually intend to contribute to the conversation half the time (small talk is a form of this that has gone way too far). They’re also usually evasive & implicitness-oriented, the cultural nuances/expectations/perceptions of the “right” and “wrong” way to convey something tend to get in the way of understanding very straightforward and mostly objective things. They’re generally pretty condescending when you don’t converse how they expect you to, and they judge a lot about your character, emotions, intentions, etc. based on how you speak, and will speak to you very differently based on outside factors. You can take 100 almost-strangers, and neurotypicals will speak in noticeably different ways with different amounts of honesty and indirection for each person in the otherwise same context.
Instead of just saying what they mean and listening to what you say, they throw in a bunch of random culture-dependent social cues and context irrelevant to the conversation that you’re supposed to subconsciously/naturally pick up on to interpret their speech in a different way. And you’re basically just supposed to guess whether something is socially significant indirection or not.
Neurotypicals basically just have the urge make simple conversation unnecessarily complex and care a lot about invisible or implied stuff affecting the conversation. It’s not their fault of course, they were just born that way.
I don’t have ASD but I can’t keep count of the amount of times I will say something very plainly and the other person will try to find some hidden meaning in it or make egregious misinterpretations/false dichotomies based on a statement (basically the “i like pancakes” “so you hate waffles”? tweet), so I can relate. Autistic people are usually far more direct in conversations in my experience, and don’t use nearly as much fluff/unnecessary performative conversation. Of course that’s not to say Autistic people are just flat out better socially than neurotypicals, there are many things I personally find difficult to understand about friends with ASD that can make conversation hard (mainly people who have both ASD and ADHD though, not a fun combo for having conversations, getting ultra-fixated on random irrelevant stuff and just flat out omitting important things frequently even worse than neurotypicals do), it’s just that they’re usually very straightforward.
how’s this thing having so many upvotes when it clearly demonizes neurodivergent people from a generalized statement from a specific case?
This is probably inappropriate, but maybe stop applying ridiculous egoic baggage to comments which are carefully crafted to be as far away from that sort of shit as possible, specifically to be able to actually communicate something and in the hopes of avoiding the car crash conversation with normies so often becomes, then. because that’s going to be what the problem is, because it’s the same problem every time, the other person reading random inappropriate shit from unrelated subjects into a conversation with a targeted, delimited scope.
The most frustrating thing about being autistic is that I’m the one labelled retarded because y’all don’t know how to drill down into a subject and stay focused. It doesn’t reflect how we see things, let’s put it that way, y’all are a bunch of fickle fruit flies to us.
Your partner deserves someone better than you who won’t villainize them for being autistic. Fuck off nt trash, you’re the problem for not putting in even the slightest amount of effort to understand us while demanding that we 100% tailor our speech to you