A somewhat convoluted question about socialization...

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I am an occupational therapist and I took a class on autism for the therapist. It stated that if I child was overwelmed or did not want to be there, to see if he was under or over stimulated and then lower the lights, put away toys (too many choice, turn on music (depending on the need). Then to slowly get the child to participate with one toy he was interested in. Then to transition to a toy similiar (in a theme) to extend the time focused without distraction, redirecting if started to get distracted, and extend the time engaged for longer and longer times. I was wondering if this is a good technique or just one that would be looked on as being forced on?

When I was in my late teens, I was in a few different behavior-mod type programs about socializing. One of them used rewards if I would do one social thing per day, the other one penalized me various ways if I stayed in my room (even though one of the biggest reasons I was staying in my room was that I was so overmedicated that I couldn't stay awake -- I remember them forcing me out of my room onto a couch one day at a residential facility, and I literally was sitting there in the morning and blinked and the sun was down and there was this huge pile of drool all over me).

Anyway, the two programs had a huge effect on me. They basically trained me systematically to ignore my own body. My body normally gave off signals of overload and exhaustion, and while my passivity (stemming from inability to initiate or stop/change actions easily) meant that I could not always respond to those signals, I did often respond to them. Before the behavior-mod, that is.

After the behavior-mod, when I got signals of overload or exhaustion, I (without realizing that's what I was doing) would not only ignore them, but do the opposite of what I needed to do. I would go out and socialize the moment I felt one of those signals because I had grown to associate "overloaded" or "tired" with "someone is going to force me to socialize if I don't do it myself".

Which meant that I would go out and get myself more exhausted and more overloaded. Which would lead to those inevitable body signals. Which would lead to more getting out and socializing which meant more overload and exhaustion, etc. etc. etc.

This was not useful to me. No, this was singularly worse than useless to me. I had to be just as systematically trained to respond to overload by going into a dark room and lying down. While all the way these little alarms were ringing in my head going "No, you must socialize NOW!" and I had to learn to ignore them and eventually to silence them.

If an autistic person is going to be taught about how and when to socialize, then we also have to be taught how to manage things like overload. When an autistic person is as overloaded as I was at the times I was enduring forced socialization, they will get nothing out of the interaction and will give nothing useful to the interaction either. But it has to be possible to teach an autistic person how to recognize and manage overload and how to socialize. But teaching autistic people to ignore overload in favor of socialization is not good for us at all.

(Overload isn't just a sensory thing. It's a cognitive thing -- processing too much information at once, too many thoughts, too many social signals, whatever. Social situations are great for producing overload, and therefore pretty much always shouldn't be entered into when a person is already seriously overloaded. There are of course exceptions.)

So anyway, being taught to go out and socialize the way I was taught, contributed to a decrease in my ability to do just about anything. Because my ability to do just about anything is dependent on my ability to manage overload. If someone was going to teach me social things, it would have been better to do it as part of an overall way of teaching me many different things about the world. For instance:

1. How to recognize overload (and other forms of exhaustion).
2. How to manage overload (and other forms of exhaustion).
3. Exposure to natural social situations.

#3 would have to be handled very delicately, as well. I don't do well when taught things in ways that are deliberate and obvious (this includes trying to teach myself). Anything requiring rote memorization of little bits of interaction and then remembering which social situations to apply them to, will not work on me (or on any autistic person configured much like me). It might appear to work in the short term, but it will not "stick" in my brain.

The only way for me to learn about social situations for real is for me to be involved in real social situations that are not over-formal or planned out to be "easy". At first all is chaos (and the "at first" part can last a really long time), but my brain starts sorting through the information and I start learning from the situation in a more unconscious but useful manner.

And teaching an autistic person who experiences any kind of overload (i.e. too much information to process at once, regardless of whether it appears "sensory" or not) to override #1 and #2 is simply setting them up to be incapable of doing much of anything until they learn #1 and #2 again. Because overriding those things simply results in a worse buildup of overload until Bad Things happen.

When I hear discussions like this, I often think of some kind of exchange of information that once happened between Temple Grandin and... someone. Temple Grandin talked about how useful it was to have someone grab her by the chin and turn her head to redirect her from getting lost in... okay I'm going to go look for the quote now (from Thinking in Pictures):

Temple Grandin wrote:

When my speech therapist held my chin and directed me to look at her, it jerked me out of my private world, but for others forcing eye contact can cause the opposite reaction -- brain overload and shutdown. For instance Donna Williams, the author of Nobody Nowhere, explained that she could use only one sensory channel at a time. If a teacher had grabbed her chin and forced eye contact, she would have turned off her ears. Her descriptions of sensory jumbling provide an important bridge to understanding the difference between high-functioning and low-functioning autism, which I would describe as a sensory processing continuum. At one end of the continuum is a person with Asperger's or Kanner's autism who has mild sensory oversensitivity problems, and at the other end of the spectrum is the low-functioning person who receives jumbled, inaccurate information, both visually and aurally.

[...]

Almost half of all very young children with autism respond very well to gently intrusive programs in which they are constantly encouraged to look at the teacher and interact. Brightly colored wall decorations made learning fun for me, but they may be too distracting for a child with sensory jumbling. The popular Lovaas program, developed at UCLA, is being used successfully there to mainstream nearly half of young autistic children into a normal kindergarten or first grade. The Lovaas method pairs words with objects and the children are rewarded with praise and food when they correctly match a word with an object. While this program is wonderful for some kids, it is certain to be confusing and possibly painful for children with severe sensory jumbling and mixing problems.

As usual, disclaimer that I don't agree with her ways of classifying people as LF/HF/etc. But she does have a seriously important point when she talks about the different effects of these very direct and intense "pulling autistic people into the nonautistic social world" methods on different kinds of autistic people. My brain is pretty far into the "there's a lot more going on sensory-wise than a few hypersensitivies" zone and you have to be really careful what you're trying on me.

On the one hand, I need natural situations where you're not showing any deliberate sign of teaching me anything, because those are the only situations that work for getting things into my long-term abilities. On the other hand, such situations can easily get out of hand sensory-wise.

Right now, I do two main things socially.

I go to an art program for people with developmental disabilities. I barely interact with anyone, but it's at least around people. Every time I do this, it almost completely saps my social energy until the next one.

Then, I sometimes allow people to come in and see me. This allows me to actually interact (to one degree or another) in an environment where I'm familiar with my surroundings and able to go into word-mode to interact with people. (At the art place I only have to paint, so I can tolerate a little more overload there because I don't have to be using words.)

And that's besides the fact that I have to interact with staff people -- several a day.

None of that might sound like a lot to most people but it's pushing my limits already. I did used to be better at getting out of the house (and at going to social situations that would completely overload me in an instant these days), but my suspicion is that it's the reverse of what a person might suspect. It's not so much that staying in has caused me to lose my ability to do stuff, it's that doing too much stuff has caused me to lose my ability to go out as much. Obviously there's probably a little of both, but the way it worked in my life seemed to be more the "doing too much and crashing" approach rather than the "hiding and losing abilities" approach.

So perhaps the best way for me to learn about socialization would be to combine a non-overloading approach with a not-directly-teaching approach. Not directly teaching meaning, that trying to directly teach me anything fails in the long run, but that putting me in a situation where stuff is happening causes me to absorb it unconsciously and let my brain riffle through the information at its own pace. And non-overloading means that it certainly wouldn't involve teaching me to ignore my danger signals when it comes to overload. But in more subtle terms, non-overloading would mean probably meeting people in a place that was either highly familiar to me. Or if not highly familiar, then a dark, quiet, visually non-busy location with a person or people who had soft deeper voices that don't hit the wrong harmonics, move in a way that doesn't set off my fight/flight response, etc.

Of course reality is rarely that ideal so I do what I can with what I've got, but if I had to be in a situation where I was supposed to be learning social stuff and someone was actually setting it up, that's how it would probably be best. But the moment it loses the character of a natural interaction is the moment that it loses my ability to learn from it, so it's really hard for someone to do on purpose, especially with the attitude that many people have when trying to teach disabled people various skills. It really takes a certain kind of person to pull such a thing off, and most people are not that kind of person.

I've been falling asleep randomly throughout writing this so if it looks incomplete or confused, that's why. It's been difficult to, say, not respond to interactions that happened in dreams instead of on the screen.

[I find small talk boring. But it is done to pass the time, break the ice until something meaningful can be said. When I met my AS husband, he noted I did a lot of small talk. I did it because I was nervous and I was taught that uncomfortable silences should be avoided. I still do it, I cannot help it. He can do small talk but prefers serious talk. Serious talk makes me anxious and hurts my brain. I just don't want to talk at the end of a long day.

quote="draelynn"]For me, I need to force myself to be social. I do so in very small increments - like at the grocery store. I don't have friends. I don't invite people over. The idea of going out and socializing at an event or just at a bar holds little interest and just a bit of dread. I could probably muddle through those things but I end up bored, resentful and exhausted. Small talk is the most annoying thing in the world. Do people actually find that crap interesting? Things like mandatory workplace functions simply make my skin crawl.

As a teenager, I socialized all the time but most of that was centered around alcohol or an interest; role playing, comics, concerts. Things like school dances and such i went with my friends and pretty much hardly acknowledged the other people there. I'm not sure how I can be highly self conscious but not care what other people think at the same time, but that's how I'd explain it. Crowds of strangers don't bother me because i can pretty much forget they exist - but I am highly paranoid of what my friends think of me. Once everyone starting growing up and moving on, I lost interest in socializing at all. Trying to make friends with someone without my interests proved impossible. I'm lonely but apparently not lonely enough to change it.

My daughter is 8 and she loves socializing but if often sad because other kids don't really want to socialize with her. She is friendly, funny, outgoing, approachable - she has social skills classes and we make as many opportuinites for her as we can. I'm finding that other kids parents are the biased ones, more so than their kids. Once a parent realizes my daughter is 'a little off' the calls for playdates go unanswered over and over again. Having me as her social role model is terrifying.

So - yes - I do resent being forced into social situations as an adult. As a kid, I made the social connections I wanted without pressure or oversight (I probably should have had more oversight... I made some questionabel choices...) My daughter wants to be social so she is not being pressured - we are focusing on trying to help her make her efforts more effective.[/quote]

No one ever forced me to be social when I was a kid. After the age of 10, I lived with my older cousin and he didn't care what I did. After high school when I left all those people behind, I started forcing myself to socialize because I felt like I should be doing what I saw everyone else doing and because I was tired of being a pariah. At that point I acquired a few friends (mostly because of proximity) and they would pressure me into socializing. That I really did resent, and because of this we eventually parted ways. After this, I did not seek out friends, because I felt like friends would always be overly demanding and smothering. Later on I did find a couple friends who were not like that, but not because I sought them out. And now I mostly don't socialize at all.

I don't know if that helps in any way...

I tend to agree with the OP. When I was in school, I was "encouraged" to participate in many activities, particularly academic groups/competitions, and I still have memories of how sick I would feel before, during, and after the activities due to nerves. No good memories, only uncomfortable ones. And after all of that, I no longer speak regularly with anyone I went to school with, so I don't think any of it helped me at all.

I don't know what to say. I have no idea. I was never really forced to do anything I really didn't want to do, and I'm a lot less social now than when I was when I was younger (although there are other reasons). But I don't think joining any clubs or sports or anything like that would have helped any. I always thought just going to school and being around others was good enough.

My parents often encouraged me to do social things, but they almost never forced me into anything. I don't know if that approach helped me or not, but that's the one I'd recommend.

I've now learned to do social things myself sometimes. The biggest example of which is that for several semesters I took a class at my university's rec center.

At the moment, I have several acquaintances, but I have zero friends outside of my family. I haven't been "out with friends" for many years. My current lack of friends and social experiences is by choice though. I feel like when I need to do something social, I'm able to. I just choose to avoid social situations and things that may lead to social situations.

Overall, I'm a pretty happy person and I have a very good relationship with my family. I believe that if my parents had forced me to do social things, I would still be very asocial, but I would also be very unhappy and my relationship with my family would not be as strong as it is today.

I was lucky as none of my teachers forced me intoany social situation, expect my 7th and 8th grade music teacher. She forced me (well, gave me an ultimatum that if I didn't be a part of this, I'd fail) to participate in two school concerts, one Christmas and one spring. I'd be forced to sing along with my other classmates for our Christmas concert and spring concert. I absolutely *HATED* every minute of it. I actually went to the Christmas concert in 7th grade, but never went to any subsequent concerts, only the practices which occured during school.

But, these social situations that I hated have helped give me more social skills. Despite hating social situations, they have helped me immensely with my social skills. My ex girlfriend forced me to interact with the father of her son, who I was very anxious around, but the forced interaction had made it easier and I'm mote comfortable around him. My work, being customer service oriented, has forced me to be in situations that I hate, but do help my social skills, and have improved them quite a bit from when I was in my old job. Forced social situations do help, but it's hard to get started, and hard to resist the temptation to turn around and run away. My co-worker forced me to go to a bar which I'd never go to on my own, now I'm a regular and made lots of friends, including the owner. Initially the social interaction causes great anxiety, but as time goes on the anxiety reduces a bit and gets easier, and even develops into a routine, like how I'm a regular at the bar.

Initially, that tends to be the case for me, when forced to socialize against my desires. However, I have often found a somewhat counterintuitive result. In some situations, I ended up enjoying the experience I was initially reluctant to participate in. However, when I got to be alone again, I do withdraw into my shell, and rationalize that things weren't all they were cracked up to be. I realize that such thoughts and behaviors are directly a result of the co-morbidity of depression, a condition I have now lived with a long time, and whose inner voice wins the right to rule my mind more often than not.

I don't think forced social interactions really work for people with autism.

For me things improved in High School. Instead of forcing me to do activities that my parents wanted often with terrible results, I got to pick and choose. I think that ANY and ALL social activities have to be driven by the person on the spectrum and interest focused.

Example:
Instead of going to a family outing, go to something the person on the spectrum enjoys, for example a museum group activity.

DWmom has the right attitude with regards to these things, she thinks that the interests should drive things and in this respect I think she has the right idea. It is probably why she has had alot of success because of this attitude. She is also sensative that things can change on a dime and willingness to cancel plans is key.

There is a reason I began to socially develop more in High School. I was able to follow my interests more so. Any social exposure I got was almost entirely interest related. This really helped me out. In college I ended up going to interest related groups. It lead me to find ways to connect to people on a level I could handle.

I think this is one of the biggest mistakes that is often made, is that autism is socialization is approached from a NT perspective. That there needs to be general social exposure and that will improve things, when in reality that can make things worse. They often don't listen to the "I don't want too" on face value. Again, this is where autism is almost counter-intutive. Throwing an aspie in a general "social exposure" setting with other kids is a disaster waiting to happen, even with other aspies. Taking a kid to something that is related to thier interests may be a way for them to connect on a subject they are interested in.

I am actually probably a little better because I was able to connect on interest related activities in HS. I went from somebody who was probably medium severity, basically social isolation, to somebody with friends. Largely because ON MY OWN I began doing after school interest based social groups. I will say arts groups are pretty accepting of strange people.

The key here is that socialization cannot really be something that is forced. But it can be encouraged, but it has to be encouraged in a way that is sensative to the person who is on the spectrum and how thier brain works. Basically, learning for an aspie, including social learning often comes through interest based activities. This probably explains why musicians who are aspies do fairly well. If music is one of your interests you can connect to a music community which you can focus on discussing music, but it also develops your social skills where you can talk about other things. I think there are similiar effects for other people who have arts based interests. While such interest based socialization does not completely eliminate the issues with social communication, it does make social communication more managible and maybe even something that is desired at times.

Just on a slight side note:

I remember from my childhood feeling "forced" into doing a lot of things I really had no interest in. Looking back, I now know that a lot of what was really happening was that people were simply trying to "encourage" me. The thing is, I've also come to realize that I was, and my kids are, very easily influenced, even when we didn't [don't] want to be.

I remember as a kid always thinking I HAD to cooperate with "encouragement." I see the same tendency in at least two of my kids. The third, actually the middle son, well just go ahead and TRY talking him into ANYTHING he isn't motivated to do. Yeah, good luck with that! At least we know HE has no problem at all with self esteem. He doesn't care what anyone thinks of him, and is perfectly happy with who he is.

The other two though, show the same resentments when they feel they are forced into anything. They'll even come right out and SAY, "YOU MADE ME DO IT!" when all we really did was encourage and try to convince them to decide to do it themselves.

In a sense, at least this is how I recall feeling about my own situations, I think they feel disrespected when this kind of thing happens. They sure do act like they feel that way.

Hey, will you look at that?!

I'm monologing!

Never thought about it being possible on a forum.

Thanks for all the responses, and any more that come. This has really forced me to think pretty hard about all this. Which I actually WANTED to do, so it's okay!