The Autisnob

Post Reply New Topic

I associate snobbery with class. If most autistics are middle class rather than working class, that would be a reason for autistic social class snobs to claim superiority.

I know you are very adamant about your theory that people on the autistic spectrum have a different, alternative set of social skills (including different body language), but I can't say I've suddenly been able to read aspies' body language better than normal; in fact, many aspies I've met are very emotionally unexpressive and have little body language to read (except, say, rocking as they speak). I tend to pick up best on body language that is simple and obvious; the subtle nuances of body language are usually lost on me.

*sigh*

If you read what I say, and not what I don't say, you'll notice that I say some autistic people understand some other autistic people's body language well, and that the understanding usually has to do with sharing a particular set of signals, and is not universal, there being many groupings this happens within, but it's not applicable to "all autistic people understanding all autistic people's body language," that's a gross oversimplification.

Also, just for reference, even though this is way off-topic in some ways, autistic people who seem to some people to have no body language might have quite a lot. Just because most non-autistic people and some autistic people can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. I have body language that a few friends of mine consider crystal-clear but that has been declared non-existent by others (my own brother considers me "hard to read" because of this, while a few other autistic people can read me like a book).

And that's not about me being "adamant," it's an actual experience shared by many autistic people. You can read people talking about it a lot when it does happen. This is because it happens. It happens totally independently of your or my opinion about it, it's just a fact of some autistic social interaction. This isn't theory, it's just plain fact that can be verified without resorting to theorizing. It happens, because various autistic people have said it happens, it's very striking when it does happen, and you can presume we're not all lying about it. The existence of various social skills in autistic people (and of autistic people at some times even outperforming some non-autistic people on some social tasks -- this not meaning a thing about superiority or inferiority) is another thing verified by research, not just by "theorizing".

Keep in mind also that when I talk about this I'm talking about on average being similar in that regard. Autistic people will have a wide range of social abilities with other autistic people (especially after controlling for living in an environment where those skills are not encouraged whatsoever), just as non-autistic people have a wide range of social abilities with other non-autistic people. I am sure that there are non-autistic people who read other non-autistic people wrong just as much as you read autistic people wrong. And keep in mind that there are many subtypes of autism as well, not just yours.

But what I'm getting at isn't just about that.

It's about the fact that, when studied, autistic people do have differences from non-autistic people, but those differences are not centered around social skills in any way. They are centered around differences (and which differences will of course vary) in thinking and perception. It's often the clash of two different ways of thinking and perceiving the world that creates the social confusion on both sides.

What I am saying, here, is that non-autistic people are generally unable to innately and instinctively understand autistic people, both on the level of body language, and on the level of how we think and how we use language and a number of other things.

And autistic people are generally unable to innately and instinctively understand non-autistic people, both on the level of body language, and on the level of how they think and how they use language and a number of other things.

Both autistic and non-autistic people share the same likelihood of having a tendency to assume that other people share the same basic perceptions of the world. This is a social skill in some situations (an excellent shortcut) and a social deficit in other situations (a good way to make faulty assumptions without even realizing it), for both sets of people. But non-autistic people are more often put into situations where it's a social skill (and come to over-rely on it beyond any actual observational skills), and autistic people are more often put into situations where the same trait is a social deficit (and come to distrust it or even forget it exists).

Autistic people are put into more social situations that involve having to understand people very much unlike them in these ways, though, and are thus more likely to pick up by adulthood a secondary set of understandings, that people are different from them in those ways.

For some people, this secondary set of social understandings becomes "the only way people are", and thus they think of other people (including other autistic people) in a simplified version of the way non-autistic people seem to think of other people. They would probably not have done this in another environment, but it's how they do it in this one. Even if they had the capacity to understand other autistic people, they haven't had the environment to learn it so that sort of skill atrophies.

Also, autistic people having certain social skills doesn't mean all the social skills are geared towards understanding other autistic people, or that these social skills will be the same in all autistic people. Autistic people do have social and communication skills though, even when they differ in their execution from non-autistic people's (and sometimes they are the same ones as non-autistic people but look different because they are autistic).

And having the capacity for certain social skills doesn't mean being in an environment that allows that capacity to develop. Sometimes also the person has to develop other skills (some of which may be social) at the expense of that one, even if that one would otherwise be able to develop. (As I mentioned in another thread, I think some people get locked into verbal communication -- which is a social skill if nobody's noticed!! ! -- and because of that are spending too much energy on verbal skills to spend much if any on comprehension of body language.)

And the situation I am describing does not even rely on autistic people's ability to understand each other. It relies on the fact that usually if an autistic and a non-autistic person communicate, both of them have trouble understanding each other and thus communicating in a way that the other can understand. The autistic person doesn't have to understand other autistic people well, in order for the non-autistic person to have difficulty understanding the autistic person.

So you're not only way oversimplifying what I've said (into a sort of caricatured version that has almost nothing to do with what I said, but is easy to make look ridiculous, because of course not all autistic people can read each other, and of course some can't read each other well at all, that's just a given) but also applying it where it really doesn't matter. For the communication problem to run both ways doesn't require the autistic person to be able to understand all other autistic people particularly well. It just requires the lack of understanding between an autistic and a non-autistic person to be mutual.

Throughout your lengthy post, you did not provide any one concrete example of autistic body language that differs from NT body language.

For example:

You didn't ask me for any such examples. Did you expect me to give them without you saying you wanted them?

Real understanding of body language doesn't involve taking one particular broadly-defined expression (such as "smiling") and assigning a specific meaning to it (such as "happy") and leaving it at that, and there is no way that a person could do that for either autistic or non-autistic people and come up with a valid "dictionary" of expressions. Your own descriptions are incomplete and simplistic, and it would not add anything to come up with an incomplete and simplistic "dictionary" to match it.

Especially since expressions vary from person to person as well as to some extent (depending on what aspect of the expression) culture to culture.

And, as I said before, there is no single autistic set of expressions that mean the same thing in every single autistic person. Autistic people's expressions can sometimes overlap with non-autistic people's expressions, too, it's not like there's always a total disconnect. Sometimes, also, autistic people merely are unable to suppress expressions that are normally culturally suppressed (but are pretty natural for human beings in general). And, as I also said, I was not talking only about body language -- social skills have as much to do with language usage as well.

One example I often give of a totally nonverbal social exchange between two autistic people who verbally confirmed the meaning later is this:

At a conference, someone I knew online circled around my table, and I acknowledged her presence (only half-voluntarily) by altering the speed I was rocking at in a way that conformed to a physical reaction to her movements and presence in certain ways.

Both of us understood the interaction for what it was -- essentially "Hi, I'm here, glad to see you're here too" -- and both of us verified it later.

I often do not give the usual signals of pain (although I'm trying to get better at that somewhat). My friend, however, can tell I am in pain, when my expressions go more and more "blank" outwardly (which is in itself an expression) and I respond less and less to other people, and tend to go limp and slack in general, at least to a point. (I guess I mean "more pain than usual" since I'm always in pain.) I have seen this expression of pain in some other autistic people as well.

If I do something very similar, but involving a somewhat more huddled-in body language, then I am intimidated by someone in the room. You can usually tell who by looking for the person I seem to be avoiding/ignoring the most thoroughly. It's not really ignoring, it's more like the opposite, I am very focused on the person and very afraid of them so I look at them the least.

If I am afraid of someone in general I'll often look as if I don't notice them (if you're reading by standard NT body language). When the CNN camera people came into my house I went the other way and looked firmly out the window. The reporter wrote about this as me "acting like she wasn't there". She didn't realize that if she was not there, I would not be looking exactly the opposite direction of her, without doing any of the things I'd be normally doing, etc. I was acting very much like she was there because I don't turn directly away from people when they're not around to turn away from.

One time I was in a restaurant with an autistic guy and a bunch of non-autistic people (noisy, overloading place, too, although it had the best crabcakes I ever tasted). Phil (the autistic guy) found out that there was an unresolved schedule conflict between ordering the food and going to an AANE meeting we were supposed to get to afterwards.

Phil started twitching his head side to side, his hands and fingers started going slowly up and rapidly pulled back, and he got a certain edge in his voice when he talked. I immediately realized he was freaking out about the blank space in his schedule where the conflict existed, and I came up with an alternate plan that was suitable, then told him about it and told him he didn't have to be overloaded anymore, and he relaxed.

The other people at the table worked in some capacity in the autism field or had autistic relatives, and not a single one of them had known what was going on with Phil. They made me explain in detail precisely what I'd noticed about his body language to indicate overload and particularly schedule-messed-up overload, and I gave them as detailed a description as I could. They thought it was amazing that I could tell all this just by looking, and I thought it was amazing that they couldn't tell this.

The reason I knew what was going on with Phil was partially my own experiences, but partially also because the edge in Phil's voice precisely matches the edge in my brother's voice at certain points in time, and it's not an edge I've heard in non-autistic people's voices ever. And the particular form of twitchy movements were also familiar. I hadn't deconstructed it into all those pieces at the time though, I just knew what was happening and also how to fix it.

Yes, a lot of this involves describing the entire specific situation things were in, but the thing is there's very little understanding body language outside of the particular situation. If you just take "smiling" or "crying" in isolation of all other things going on, it's nearly impossible to tell what it indicates. A person might be smiling (or crying, or smiling-and-crying) because of happiness, or might be smiling (or crying, or smiling-and-crying) because of grief. Without knowing what's going on both in the rest of the situation and in the rest of the body besides the mouth, you won't be able to tell which one it is, or if it's something different entirely.

And things like yelling... well it may be anger. It may be because someone's too far away to hear. And in an autistic person, it might be because it takes that much force to get the words out at that point in time.

All of these examples pertain to more than just the one person or two people depicted in each one. There are autistic people between which these things are mutually comprehensible.

But saying "rocking means one particular thing in all situations" or "smiling means one particular thing in all situations" or some one-to-one correspondence between expressions (stated in the most isolated-from-everything-else forms of course) and meanings... that's never going to happen as a realistic description of expressions, not for autistic people, not for non-autistic people.

If you want more examples, I've got tons of real-life examples of autistic people reading each other's body language well (and a fair number of us reading each other's body language wrong as well, considering that it's not "all autistic people can read all autistic people"). If you want specific kinds, I'll do my best to post them, although I won't consent to lose realism by posting some sort of one-to-one dictionary of body language to meaning.

Sorry if I say things exhaustively or talk again on someone else's points, I just want to make sure I'm saying the right thing.

I don't say obligation, but that if they want to interact with us then they should try, and that it's not true to say "I couldn't understand her so she is communicatively disabled" without first trying to see all the variables and if there's another possibility. She might not be able to hear, but also he can't sign; and she can communicate well with people who can sign (at least if in her sign language), so who is to say that she's the one with the communication problem? And if she reads his lips and tries to speak what she means, but he doesn't try to sign or write to her, why is that normal but the reverse accommodation? Only because it's more common to hear?



I don't think you're right in your conclusions (except about Rain Man). Not knowing that there is a problem doesn't mean that there's no expectation, it just means that they're not aware of what they expect. And the assumption that, since I don't meet their expectations, I must be stupid or stubborn or mocking them (all common), doesn't alleviate anything. It just means that they have given themselves a stronger reason not to question their still-unexamined expectations. "She's willfully ignoring my request" when I am frozen, requesting more information, or have done something but the wrong thing, because I didn't understand what I was being asked to do.

It doesn't matter if they don't understand the problem. I agree, I don't think they can be expected to, especially now when there's not much public knowing about it or advice on how (unlike with the deaf). But that doesn't negate the fact that they expect other people to speak and behave a certain way in order to be heard, and we do try, while they only rarely step toward us. I think there would be the same problem if they didn't know that someone was deaf or even what deaf is, and the deaf person didn't have the means to assert it such that they would understand. (If one had never heard of sign language, and the other couldn't speak.)



Although that's true that there is also autistic-autistic commincation trouble, I don't think that means anything with regard to whether one side is the side with the (only) communicative failure. NT-NT communication is also full of misunderstandings at every level, even with people who both think they are very good at language.



Good!



I mean not wrong as in hitting someone, but wrong as in 3 times 3 equals 27. Whether or not you know or should know how to multiply, if you perform another function instead then you will not get the right answer and (without intending to) will be making it more difficult for the person who is relying on your calculations.

For me, "stupid" is much stronger than "wrong" and I don't like to say it, but I also try not to say wrong morally when people just are having trouble understanding.



I am trying to say this: that there is a two-sided problem (anbuend has said it better in the post first on page 6) not just autistic problem, and that when autistic people say bad things about NTs usually it's just because they're tired and frustrated, not because they are thinking they're better. It's not that they think they're entitled to have NTs do all the understanding work (although probably some do think this, I do not at all think that it's as common as claimed in the first post), but that they are tired of being the only ones who do the work or see that there is work to be done, but if they don't do the work or don't do it well (only) they face consequences of being labeled bad or deficient. I'm inclined to forgive exaggerations based on frustration, as long as they don't do real damage; and it frustrates me when every difference is called deficiency because of autism so all miscommunication is autistic error (which I see often not only in this thread).

Last edited by cas on 14 Apr 2008, 2:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, more examples would be cool.

The only example I have from my life is when I went to my first meet-up of people with Asperger's syndrome. I was walking around in the restaurant with a deer-in-the-headlights expression on my face (apparently) looking around, trying to identify someone I recognized by a small photograph from the Internet. She recognized me by the behavior. I apparently usually have the same expression when I am lost or in an unfamiliar place or situation.

Some more such experiences:

Also after a long and exhausting interview (where the interviewer was leaning so far into me that the sound woman had to use my microphone to pick up his voice instead of his microphone, which was really stressful and overloading), and while about to be filmed again walking down a hallway, and being really overloaded, my friend and I were on two different sides of a cabinet/shelf-thing (able to see each other). I was leaning my face against the cabinet because it was cold and smooth and I like that during overload.

And I saw my friend at the other end and started tapping on the shelf with my fingers. (Combination of trying to calm down, and asking my friend if she was there and understood what was going on.) She tapped the other shelf in return (acknowledging that she was there, understood what was going on, and cared about me). Note it wasn't just the tapping itself, but the particular tone of the tapping. She had never done this before with me, but she knew what to do.

I also have a large collection of descriptions of communication and mutual comprehension of this sort between autistic people.

From AUTISM NETWORK INTERNATIONAL: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COMMUNITY AND ITS CULTURE:

And in a heading entitled "Autistic Socializing":



The same author wrote a piece called Alien Contact (you can read the whole thing at that link). He wrote about how he engaged in nonverbal communication (meeting over a common focus) with another autistic person, while a non-autistic person was not only oblivious to it, but oblivious to the fact that Jim himself was autistic -- she thought that she and Jim were alike (by being NT, which Jim isn't) in a way that her autistic daughter was different (by being autistic). He wrote:



That paragraph is intended to have a double-meaning: The mother thought she and Jim were the ones "from the same world" and the daughter was the "tuned-out outsider", while Jim thought he and the daughter were the ones "from the same world" and the mother was the "tuned-out outsider". (He's written a lot of things about how everything said about autistic people can also be said by autistic people towards non-autistic people: Not in order to put down non-autistic people, but to show non-autistic people that we, also, try at communication, and experience the same frustration when we're not understood.)

He also wrote an entire article called "Social Uses of Fixations" in the first issue (Sept/Oct 1992) of the newsletter "Our Voice", which he quoted from in the last long quote from him.

Things from "Our Voice" can be reproduced as long as you give credit to Autism Network International and their newsletter "Our Voice" and to the author (in this case Jim Sinclair). So here is a poem he wrote called "Autispeak". Please be aware that it's not all meant literally, it's meant as far as I can tell to be about the depth of communication possible between autistic people despite not having the standard skills for it.



In "Nobody Nowhere," by Donna Williams, she describes a Welsh stranger she meets ("Shaun", starting on page 166) and how they immediately recognized each other's body language. This was prior to Donna's diagnosis, and Shaun was diagnosed as "a special kind of ret*d" from having meningitis as a baby. But both recognized each other as having a common set of body language.

She also talks, around page 193, about meeting an autistic child:



She later describes assisting an autistic girl with falling asleep and calming herself down in general, by giving her a crystal to stare at and a rhythm to calm herself down.

By the way, she is about as far from an autistic supremacist as one can get, and she also notes that she doesn't mean "the worlders" are non-autistic people, it's a totally different term than "NT" and reflects her prior understanding of the social world.

In "Somebody Somewhere" she describes the same meeting with Kathy and Jim that Jim already described and quoted her a bit on. She also describes some autistic people being more similar to each other than others (and her and Jim being similar to each other in that way).

So those are some more examples of discussion of this among autistic people. (I have not read any replies from anyone, if anyone's sent them, I just continued after my last posting and decided to make another post rather than edit.)

Basically, this is relatively common

What you described reminded me of meeting Kassi for the first time. She was staring straight ahead, walking around in circles, and repeating things in a hollow voice like "I'm just going where I am told to go." I realized she was both overloaded and in a great deal of pain, and told her to sit down in the van I was in, after which she got the energy to actually talk a bit.

One thing that drives me crazy is that I can often tell (and I don't know which part of people's expressions tells me it) when someone is trying really hard to form words, and needs more time for the gears in their head to turn and the words to come out. I've noticed it both in autistic people and in people with Alzheimer's.

And other people don't seem to notice that very often, they just go on talking right over the person's silent attempts to talk, until the person just gives up trying or gets really frustrated.

I could also always tell when a mostly non-speaking (and non-typing) friend was overloaded, but teachers would say she was just trying to get out of things and press her on until she had a meltdown.

Recognizing various levels of overload and shutdown is something I'm relatively good at, although it's of course easier the better I know the person generally.

Sadly, the coding here is flawed. For instance, an NT smile can mean anything from "Gee, I'm glad to see you" to "If there weren't so many witnesses, I'd be wearing your intestines as a necktie".

They sometimes encode fear as narrowing of eyes, rather than widening (although this seems more connected to anger generally, it can be used for either emotion - they're not that different, after all), and sometimes getting louder just means they're being really intense about something. (I know several NTs who are having fun when they're loud - it's when the words come out in a hissing whisper that you're in trouble.)

That may be part of the problem - their codes change seemingly at random, based on sub-factors that I still have trouble catching. I can usually tell the difference between the amused smile and the enraged one, for instance, based on eyebrow activity, but even that doesn't always work.

Heck, I'm rocking gently now. I am content. If I rocked rapidly I would be upset? What of those that seem happy?

Didn't misunderstand. Don't agree with the underpinnings of your argument.



And I think this is a fallacious argument.

If my phone isn't wired correctly, and it is generating a lot of static that keeps important parts of the conversation from coming through, there's isn't a "mutually shared" lack of communication. My phone isn't working the way a phone was designed to work.



Again, I think this is waaaay off. Yes, both sides are failing to communicate, but it's because my brain isn't working the way a brain is supposed to work.




That's kinda sorta true, I guess, but....




Again, don't agree with the premise. You seem to be saying "There is nothing wrong with me. I'm just different." Which isn't true, anymore than it would be true to say that there was nothing wrong with the phone, they just don't have the "telephone skill" to understand a conversation where the phone was working "differently."




I'm disagreeing with your conclusions on that point.



"Neurological Minority"???




Okay, I am not entirely clear on what you've said here.

If you are saying that "the idea that autistic people and non-autistic people might actually have equal social skills, just applied to different sets of people", I disagree with this. If you are saying that I am reading that into what you are saying-- yes, I believe that is a fair way of interpreting it. Your constantly insisting that the "deficit" is two-sided, and your saying "that makes no sense" to the suggestion that the neurologically impaired are the ones with the deficit really makes it sound like you believe there is a skill that NTs might acquire.

If that's not what you are saying you are expressing it poorly.

Yes, with long practice, an NT can learn "pidgin Aspie" and even get along and communicate most of the time, but there will be times where the Aspie's neurological deficit is going to get in the way. It isn't a "two-sided" situation, and to suggest such is-- in my opinion-- counterproductive.

Now, as to the ethics of it.... yes, I believe that society as a whole has some obligation to help work these things out. Yes, I believe there needs to be education. But none of this falls on the individual NT, any more that it would be "immoral" for an English speaker not to want to learn French, or a pair of stairs not to be climbable.

Uhm, here's the problem. She is communicatively disabled. SHE CAN'T FRACKING HEAR. No matter how much you PC it up, she is missing one of the crucial abilities required for human communication. It's accomodation because human society evolved with hearing as one of its central forms of communication. It's accomodation because the hearing person can get along fine in the world without ever needing to communicate to a deaf person.





Yeah, I see your point here, and withdraw my statements using the word "expect".



You are correct that NTs have communication problems as well... but I don't think that has anything to do with what we are discussing. They are not comparable to our communication issues by an order of magnitude. It's like saying that because most people don't hear 100% of what's going around them, the cause of their inability to communicate with deaf people isn't because the person is deaf.



Okay, yes, this is all true. But I fail to see what it has to do with anything.




Generally, yes. I've removed "stupid" from several statements I've made in this thread because it didn't really apply. But I think, in the case cited, stupid applies.



And I'm trying to say that there isn't. The problem affects both sides, yes, but by its nature it resides in the brain of the autistic. To suggest that the NT is lacking in some skill as well is counterproductive, and just a little bit foolish.



We ARE deficient!! !! !! Bad, no, but deficient, YES. It's not "poilte", it's not pretty, but it happens to be the state of reality. So much of this thread has been spent trying to place half the burden on the NTs, who don't know, don't care, and don't have the problem. If you are using the wrong key to open a lock, the problem doesn't reside with the lock. If you are using the wrong screwdriver for a particular screw, the problem doesn't reside with the screw. Just because they are not accomodating us, doesn't mean the problem is with them.




Again, the deficiency is real. A person who is missing one leg is "different", yes, but they're still suffering from a leg deficit. I'm sorry if it hurts your feelings, but that's just how it is.

But as for not doing real damage-- the notion that the problem is also with the NT is very damaging. Because it gives the Aspie an unrealistic picture of the situation, and can create either an expectation of action from the NT or a resentment of the NT for "not doing their part."

Thank you for this post.

Is that suppoust to be an insult?

No, I was just poking fun at the idea that you said he was 10 times smarter than you!