Misinterpreting Adults' Cliches as a Child

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Aspie1
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24 Dec 2012, 1:31 am

When I was little, I used to misinterpret the cliche expressions my parents used on me. I knew what they meant, but I totally misinterpreted the intent behind them. So if a cliche was supposed to get me to behave to control my actions, it would get me excited instead.

Example 1: "Crazy cat lady"
I kept begging my parents to get me a pet. A dog was, completely, truly, 100%, absolutely out of the question. So I started asking for a cat. My parents brushed off my request with a "crazy cat lady" example. This is what transpired, and not like they expected it.
Aspie1: Can I get a cat? I will love it very much, and care for it, and feed it, and wash it.
Parents: No! If we get you a cat, you'll love it so much, you'll want another. And another. Next thing you know, you'll end up like a crazy cat lady.
Aspie1: What's a "crazy cat lady?"
Parents: It's an old woman who has no friends and keeps lots cats in her house. They run around all over the place.
Aspie1: <eyes light up, happy voice> How many cats?
Parents: Maybe three if she still thinks normally. Or ten, or more, if she's completely crazy.
Aspie1: Wow! It's sounds so much fun. I would love to have ten cats. I want a gray tabby, a calico, and a... <gets interrupted>
Parents: You're talking nonsense! Go to your room!

Example 2: "Living in a pigsty"
This happened after the first example. So I learned not to verbally agree with anything my parents tell me that sounds too good to be true. My parents hated how messy my room looked, and hoped to scare me straight with a pigsty analogy. It backfired, lol.
Parents: Your room is a mess! Your got papers all over your desk, toys on the floor, open board games on the table, clothes on chairs, everything's a mess! If it gets any worse, you might as well move to a pigsty.
Aspie1: What's a pigsty? Is it something with pigs?
Parents: Right. It's like a dairy barn, but with pigs. They roll around in mud, they eat trash from the ground, they walk everywhere they want, and they never stop oinking. (Background info: I saw a dairy barn of a field trip to a farm once, and my parents knew it.)
Aspie1: <eyes light up, trying to do flat voice> So? They don't bite, and they don't eat animals.
Parents: But they're dirty. You don't wan't want to be like them.
Aspie1: <happily visualizing myself playing around with friendly pigs and oinking back at them> OK.

In both of these examples, clearly, my parents wanted to, pretty much, scare me straight. The role of cats and pigs was supposed to be unpleasant and unsettling. But for an aspie child who really liked animals, those scenarios sounded anything but.

So this brings me to my question. Anyone else here misinterpret their parents' (and other adults') cliches like that, when they were little? Of course, now it's easy to tell that this used to happen because of AS. And parents, in turn, used the cliches because they work very well on NT kids.



Webalina
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26 Dec 2012, 2:05 am

I can relate exactly!

When I was a child, I had either done something or COULD have done something that would warrant punishment. My dad said "I'm going to fix your little red wagon." Rather than taking this comment as a threat, I recall saying something like "Oh Daddy, that would be nice. My wagon has been broken for a long time."

My mother used to threaten me with punishment by banning me from TV or the telephone. Once again, I didn't grasp that she was referring to punishments. If she said "You didn't wash the dishes like I asked. No telephone for you today." I would say "That's OK. Becky is out of town today, and Tammy's phone is broken."If she said "You didn't clean your bathroom. No TV for you tonight." I would say "That's OK. There's nothing on tonight I want to watch anyway." To this day she believes that I was being that way just to be a smartass. But I think I was just acknowledging her comments with some of my own.



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26 Dec 2012, 4:15 am

I wouldn't stop teasing my mother on the way home one day because she kept telling me to stop that teasing. So I did a different one every time. So finally she has had enough and she pulled over and told me to get out and I am walking home. I decided I would hitch hike home so I wave bye to her as she drives off and then she stops up ahead, gets out and tells me to get back in the car. Confused, I get back in.


Years later I learn she did that so I would feel bad and it was a scare tactic but it backfired because I had a plan that I would just hitch hike home. So she got angry about it that I wasn't crying and stuff and that I didn't care that she was dropping me on the side of the road.


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whirlingmind
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26 Dec 2012, 5:52 am

My youngest does this. If she keeps having tantrums I tell her that I'll get her out of the car and leave her, and she then starts begging me to do it!


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Aspie1
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26 Dec 2012, 7:53 am

League_Girl wrote:
I wouldn't stop teasing my mother on the way home one day because she kept telling me to stop that teasing. So I did a different one every time. So finally she has had enough and she pulled over and told me to get out and I am walking home. I decided I would hitch hike home so I wave bye to her as she drives off and then she stops up ahead, gets out and tells me to get back in the car. Confused, I get back in.

Years later I learn she did that so I would feel bad and it was a scare tactic but it backfired because I had a plan that I would just hitch hike home. So she got angry about it that I wasn't crying and stuff and that I didn't care that she was dropping me on the side of the road.

My parents did that to me too. Except my reaction was smarter. I turned around and started walking along the roadside against the direction of traffic, so it'd be more difficult for them to catch me and tell me to get back in. I got to the next major street, then walked along it for about a mile, cut across the city park, went through a residential area, and actually walked home. When I got there, my parents were already home. They told me to go to my room, but didn't give me any further punishment, not even a talking-to. But to be safe, I ate dinner in my room that night.

I was 9 at the time, so my situation is probably different than yours. Maybe my parents thought that I walked to a police station or something.

It's good that your parents tried to scare you and it backfired. One less manipulation tactic in their arsenal to use against you. For as long I've known of its existence, the whole "get out, you're walking home" trick disgusted me to no end. :evil:



League_Girl
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26 Dec 2012, 1:26 pm

Aspie1 wrote:
League_Girl wrote:
I wouldn't stop teasing my mother on the way home one day because she kept telling me to stop that teasing. So I did a different one every time. So finally she has had enough and she pulled over and told me to get out and I am walking home. I decided I would hitch hike home so I wave bye to her as she drives off and then she stops up ahead, gets out and tells me to get back in the car. Confused, I get back in.

Years later I learn she did that so I would feel bad and it was a scare tactic but it backfired because I had a plan that I would just hitch hike home. So she got angry about it that I wasn't crying and stuff and that I didn't care that she was dropping me on the side of the road.

My parents did that to me too. Except my reaction was smarter. I turned around and started walking along the roadside against the direction of traffic, so it'd be more difficult for them to catch me and tell me to get back in. I got to the next major street, then walked along it for about a mile, cut across the city park, went through a residential area, and actually walked home. When I got there, my parents were already home. They told me to go to my room, but didn't give me any further punishment, not even a talking-to. But to be safe, I ate dinner in my room that night.

I was 9 at the time, so my situation is probably different than yours. Maybe my parents thought that I walked to a police station or something.

It's good that your parents tried to scare you and it backfired. One less manipulation tactic in their arsenal to use against you. For as long I've known of its existence, the whole "get out, you're walking home" trick disgusted me to no end. :evil:




My mother just thought I was being a brat then until the diagnoses. Then she realized she really did tell me to stop that teasing. That scare tactic worked in the past because I didn't want to be left in the middle of no where and do all that walking and she would actually pull over telling my brothers and I to get out and we would start screaming no. She would give us another chance and bam we were good. But this time I just thought I would hitch hike home I never thought of in the past and I didn't know about it then either until I was ten. Plus we were three or four hours away from home while you were in town when it happened.

She also told me that day if she just left me on the side of the road, she would get in trouble for it by the law because it's illegal to abandon your children. I come home and tell my brothers about that and her scare tactic no longer worked when she tell us she drop us on the side of the road and we would have to walk home. My brothers would tell her "Yeah right mom, then you would get in trouble with the police for abandoning us." So mom couldn't even use that scare tactic anymore. And she was the only one who use that scare tactic, not my dad.


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hblu1992
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26 Dec 2012, 2:04 pm

I got "in school suspension"(they put you in a seprate room with a teacher/guard for a day)While they were describing the punishment I told the principle and 2nd grade teacher that I was "OK" with me as long as they gave me something to do.This seemed to piss them off alot so they they started lecturing me on how wasn't "OK".My second grade teacher even started to tell me how disappointed she would have been if one of her kids had gotten suspended.At this point I didnt understand empathy so the guilt trip thing didnt work.(I think she was trying to make feel bad for my mother). :?



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26 Dec 2012, 2:43 pm

This thread reminds me of a scene in the film "a simple twist of fate."

If you've ever seen it, you'll know what I mean. The father decides to punish the naughty daughter by making her sit in the corner all day. Next day, he asks her: "now, today you are being good, so what fun thing do you want to do today?" and she happily runs back to sit in the chair in the corner. :lol:

Unlike the fictional child in the film, I don't think I've ever enjoyed any of my punishments. The approval of my parents was so important to me that even if the punishment itself was not hard to endure, or was even enjoyable, I would be crying and overcome with anxiety because I would always think that my parents didn't love me any more because I had been bad.

The punishment they chose was irrelevant. The mere fact that they were punishing me meant that perhaps they didn't love me any more, and I had failed at being a good daughter. That always made me panic.



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26 Dec 2012, 9:50 pm

Does this count as a cliche?


I remember when I was a kid, my mom would be sweeping and she would tell my brothers and I someone's toy was being thrown away. So we would rush out of our spots and run for the pile and pick up one of our Happy Meal toys. Mom made this threat a few times about our toys lying around we were not playing with by saying "Looks like some toys are going to be thrown away because they are not picked up." So we would rush out of our spots and clean them up.

Then when I turned nine, I started to throw things away for real because they were left in the wrong spot so I was trying to train my family to pick up after themselves. My parents would always get mad at me about it but I would keep on doing it and it lasted for years until my teens. I can remember my parents yelling at me telling me I am out of control but I kept on doing it.

I was in my teens when I finally figured out mom didn't mean it when she said our toys were going to be thrown out. She just wanted us to clean them up so she used a scare tactic and would pretend she was going to do it. All it did was backfired because I started to do it for real and couldn't understand why she was getting to mad about it. I took it all literal then.

I remember another time mom threatened she would pack all my toys away and I would have nothing to play with. Now if I didn't care about my toys and I never played with them, then I wouldn't care about her packing them away. So it would have backfired as well and then I would have wondered why they are still in my room. Most kids seem to know what threats are just empty. My brothers and I didn't seem to know it because our mother always acted like she was going to follow through such as pulling over to the side of the road and telling us to get out or closing the sliding van door in front of me and telling me I am staying at the mall and walking home. If I didn't care about walking, then that would have back fired too. What I don't understand is why parents even bother with scare tactics if they are not actually going to do them and their kids know they don't mean it? How is that supposed to work? Then they wonder why their kids never listen to them.


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Chloe33
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12 Jan 2013, 9:40 am

There have been numerous times i've taken my mothers words seriously and she was being sarcastic and i had got in big trouble for it.
Or i would make a literal innocent comment, in one case i thought "my uncle was a teenager with a hair loss problem" and i got smacked for that. I didn't mean any harm at all, i was being literal, they just didn't understand me...



TheTrade
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12 Jan 2013, 6:23 pm

When I was a teenager, I would frequently misinterpret my friends' figures of speech. Examples:

Friend: Kristy is totally going to say yes when I ask her
Me: why do you say that?
Friend: because she knows that I got money
Me: uh...everyone has money

Clearly he meant that he was rich, but it took me a YEAR to figure that out (on my own).

Friend: They say that South Park is using computer animation now
Me: Who's saying that?
Friend: uh...the people
Me: What people

I used to take what others said literally instead of looking at the contextual meaning. It makes me somewhat uncomfortable now thinking about how socially oblivious I was.



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13 Jan 2013, 12:26 am

When I was young, I was watching Aladdin with my parents. I became confused during the song A Whole New World because it said "Let your heart decide." I told my parents that the heart is a muscle used to pump blood throughout the body and therefore was incapable of thought, let alone deciding when provided with different options.



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13 Jan 2013, 12:41 am

Reminds me of this skit of an autistic reporter talking to a prisoner about prison life. :lol:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D04wb7P_v-4[/youtube]



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13 Jan 2013, 10:11 am

The crazy cat lady example sounds like something any kid would be confused by. The problem with crazy cat ladies isn't the number of cats they have, but that they lack the ability to care for that many. (I know a lady with around 12 cats because she's basically an unofficial cat rescue organization. But she takes care of them well, so she's not a crazy cat lady.) Most kids would have absolutely no clue how much work caring for a cat is, and therefore not realize that too many cats means they're being neglected. In fact, it would be really unusual for a kid to get that issue without being directly told.

Now, most kids probably would get that living in a pigsty is a bad thing.

(By the way, your parents' reasons for not getting you a cat are absolutely ridiculous. If you don't want your kid to be a crazy cat lady, just set a limit at one or two cats and refuse to get any more. Just because you get a kid one cat doesn't mean you have to get them more if they want more.)



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13 Jan 2013, 12:02 pm

Ettina wrote:
The crazy cat lady example sounds like something any kid would be confused by. The problem with crazy cat ladies isn't the number of cats they have, but that they lack the ability to care for that many. (I know a lady with around 12 cats because she's basically an unofficial cat rescue organization. But she takes care of them well, so she's not a crazy cat lady.) Most kids would have absolutely no clue how much work caring for a cat is, and therefore not realize that too many cats means they're being neglected. In fact, it would be really unusual for a kid to get that issue without being directly told.

Now, most kids probably would get that living in a pigsty is a bad thing.

(By the way, your parents' reasons for not getting you a cat are absolutely ridiculous. If you don't want your kid to be a crazy cat lady, just set a limit at one or two cats and refuse to get any more. Just because you get a kid one cat doesn't mean you have to get them more if they want more.)

The crazy cat lady remark was a cop-out, and a lame one too. My parents are one of the most anti-pet people I know; they weren't going to get me a pet no matter what. So using a crazy cat lady as an example of why they wouldn't get me a cat was just a botched attempt at humor. Instead of scaring me straight, albeit mildly, it made me jealous of crazy cat ladies and animal hoarders in general. (I, of course, wasn't fully aware of the animals' poor health and lack of care.) Having lots and lots of dogs, cats, and other pets running all over my house sounded like a dream come true. But then I learned that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The pigsty example was similar. (By the way, I think the word "pigsty" is slightly archaic, existing only as a metaphor for a messy room; the modern term for where pigs live on the farm is probably "pig pen" or "pig barn".) It seemed like a fun, exciting change of scenery from the hyper-disciplined Museum of Cleanliness I was living in. Anything left not where it was supposed to be, like a drawing or a trinket, was quickly destroyed and disposed. Living in a barn full of friendly pigs that I can oink back at and play-wrestle with sounded so much fun, with no rules to follow, sounded so much fun! But again I learned that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Now, I get it. The lesson "if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is" is a great one to learn at any age past early childhood. But why promise the child a pot of gold at the end of their rainbow, when the gold is just yellow paint? (i.e. just empty words)