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Autism rule (midwest.social)
submitted 5 months ago by lengau@midwest.social to c/196
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[-] faltryka@lemmy.world 183 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] iiGxC@slrpnk.net 93 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Shihali@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 months ago

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".

[-] GnomeKat 49 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Catoblepas 44 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Soulg@sh.itjust.works 24 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Catoblepas 41 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 5 points 5 months ago

Wow thank you for sharing. That's a great starting resource

[-] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] aleats 39 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 32 points 5 months ago

Isn't that what the meme is saying but from the perspective of what it's like to experience autism

[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[-] 6mementomori@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

how's this thing having so many upvotes when it clearly demonizes neurodivergent people from a generalized statement from a specific case?

this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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