Attaching meaning that is not there...

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I encounter this frequently online and off. I don't think they're highly paranoid, because paranoia is actually a kind of delusion. Reading into what people say isn't a delusion, it just doesn't work very well on autistic people.



I hate this. For years I'd get extremely uncomfortable when I'd describe an experience for the sake of expanding upon an explanation or offering information, or saying, "Yes, I can identify with this experience you've had because I have had a similar experience" and people would start offering "e-hugs" and sympathies, and all I wanted to do is pass along information.



Yes. I never understood why there's something wrong with saying, "I don't like this gift." But it got me into trouble more than a few times.



Wait until someone comes into this thread and says you're demonizing NTs.

Perhaps paranoid is a bit of a strong word, but they will often seem absolutely convinced that your intentions are something different to what they actually are and no amount of trying to explain things to them or using reason will help!



I get exactly the same thing and I find it frustrating and uncomfortable.



When it comes to gifts for birthdays and Christmas presents I usually get around that by telling people either what I would like or asking them to give me cash or vouchers. However, I have not found a way around other things in regards to people offering me things yet (such as food I do not like etc). I also find I get a similar problem with advice. Whilst I appreciate they are trying to help me, in some instances, for whatever reason, I may not find their advice to be useful to me so will say thank you but decline to take it. They then get very annoyed with me.

One example would be with socialising. People will often say "Relax and it will come to you, just read their body language!" Ummmmm that does not help me, although I appreciate they were trying to do so.

The same goes for advice I did not ask for...

However, if I consider it to be useful to me I will take it, but pointing out that something does not work for you when someone gives you advice seems to upset them and sets off a chain reaction that results in chaos, all because I said something would not work for me. I do not mean to be offensive by declining their advice, I am merely looking for the most effective solution for myself. Their advice may be perfectly valid to someone else or in different context or situation, but it is often based on things that I have tried many times before and as they did not work the first 150 times I am not convinced they will work on the 151st. Either that or much of the advice I receive is based on this miscommunication of meaning and is often not suited to my particular situation (such as socialising above). A misunderstanding has occurred.

If someone said that to me that my advice was not useful to them, I would sit down and try and figure out what does work for them instead of getting upset because my first suggestion was not taken. After all my aim is to help them find a solution so that is what I would do.

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LOL I am sure NTs have their good points but that does not always stop me from feeling frustrated with the communication problems I seem to have.

LOL I am sure NTs have their good points but that does not always stop me from feeling frustrated with the communication problems I seem to have.[/quote]


Still don't really understand when they get angry from things like this.... In our opinion they could do/be something, and in theirs they could be/do something completely different so why do they care?

Think I will never truly understand people different to me...

Even if I ask for specific things for presents, I still can't stand opening them. People always get mad at my reactions because they aren't "excited enough". How much more am I supposed to say other than "thanks, this is what I wanted". Am I supposed to jump up and down and scream with excitement like the people who game shows because I got the shirt I asked for?

My therapist drives me crazy with attaching meaning to simple statements and questions. Also I am frequently described as being cooperatively belligerent. What on earth does that mean?!

They (the NT's) attach meaning because data about emotional state (how am I feeling / how are you feeling) is important to them and necessary when you are immersed in a social world 24/7. It is not being done to be difficult or a PITA. How someone feels is much greater importance to them than mere facts. People with autism feel very strongly about the truth, right and wrong (not in a moral sense) and accuracy but for the majority these concepts are vague and malleable.

I find this behaviour as strange and frustrating as the rest of you, but I'm all to well aware that my own self absorption and lack of interest in the emotional state of others is to blame.

I am concerned about peoples emotional states but really they do work themselves up over nothing, meaning they are inducing their own emotional states based on an incorrect assumption they have made. I am then blamed for their mistake which is frustrating. If they bothered to check their facts before reacting they would have saved everybody a whole load of unnecessary hassel!

It sounds harsh but it is somewhat true.

I have done it myself sometimes but I know what I am doing is wasting precious energy. More tends to get done if I don't go making assumptions and getting myself wound up over nothing. It is much more productive and effective to look at the facts first and take it from there.

If someone is upset because something awful has happened that is perfectly understandable and at those times they may need emotional support. But people get wound up over the smallest of things, which at the end of the day, are not worth getting wound up over. Emotions are important but they should not dominate your entire life. Being overly logical is also not good, there needs to be a balance between the two. But letting emotions dominate everything you do is counter productive as is faulty logic.

Let us look at the logic of someone getting upset because you said you did not like cheese cake when they offered you a piece of cheese cake that they baked.

The person who baked the cheese cake will often get offended and take the rejection of the cheesecake personally. They will read it as though it is a rejection of their baking and then ultimately as a rejection of them when in actual fact it is neither of those things.

All the person said was that they did not like cheesecake. They did not say they did not like the persons baking, they did not say they did not like the person. This is about cheese cake, not someone's baking skills or personality. Yet the person who offered the cake will jump to those kinds of conclusions.

How in the hell do they get from someone not liking cheese cake to someone not liking them and call that logical thinking? Since when did not liking cheese cake become all about not liking a person?

It is faulty logic which people then emotionally react to. I fail to see the problem if someone does not like cheese cake and even if they did not like my baking, I actually don't really care lol. I don't profess to be a good cook as long as I can stand my own cooking enough to eat it that works for me. People don't have to eat food I cook for them, I can always get them something else if they don't like it. Cooking is one skill amongst many that people can either have or not (or all shades of grey in between), it does not define a persons worth or whole sense of self on it's own. So what if my cooking is not good and people don't want to eat it? I am probably good at something else instead. Next time I'd take them Macdonalds or a resturant or get them to do the cooking themselves, but I wouldn't be offended if someone didn't like my baking as my baking ability is only small part of my skill set and not a complete definition of who I am.

My self esteem is not wounded by someone rejecting my cheese cake.

A person not accepting a slice of cheese cake because they do not like cheese cake is not a rejection of the person who made cheese cake, not in reality, yet in social world it clearly seems to be. Which is rather a strange.

PN this is a hypothetical example as I do in fact like cheese cake and probably would not turn it down unless the baking was particularly bad. This does not, however, mean that person who baked the cheese cake is bad or a failure or anything of the kind. It just means that on that particular occasion I do not like the cheese cake they have baked. This does not mean that they could never bake a cheese cake that I like or that someone else might like. After all, whether or not I like their cheese cake is really down to personal taste. So my not liking the cheese cake does not even mean the cheese cake is bad. It just means 'I' (emphasis on I) don't like the cheese cake. Someone else might love it, to them it might be a great cheese cake. It might be the best cheese cake in the world.

I do sometimes feel that peoples self esteem is so fragile that they need the positive feed back in order to like themselves as their self esteem is based on what others think of them and what they can do rather than being internally generated.

My self esteem is internally generated rather than externally generated and is based more on the fact that I am a living being with feelings and all living creatures have value and worth (they do in my world philosophy anyway). We are not all good at the same things and we all have different ways of being, doing and thinking but that does not make us any less human or worthless or valueless or anything of the kind. It is ok not to be good at something, it is ok not to be perfect, it is ok if someone does not like your cheese cake....really it is! The universe will not collapse because someone didn't like your baking. Provided its not contaminated with salmonella or similar, every one will survive the cheese cake experience unscathed!

Last edited by bumble on 19 Dec 2011, 11:25 am, edited 3 times in total.

You are thinking too much about it bumble; of course it is illogical, but it it the world in which they operate and one which we can never fully experience, which is why we are here discussing it.

Maybe I'm being ignorant here but this can be very frustrating for a potential partner. If you are dating an NT and you don't express emotions the same way, How is someone to know why you are dating them? What your intentions are? Without the expression of caring, it could very easily feel like you are with them solely for sexual purposes. And I am sure this is sometimes a fact. But when do you let the other person go? When do you tell them the feelings are just not shared? If the NT person understands that you have trouble expressing emotions, they look for signs that you care and may misunderstand that common courtesy such as holding hands or even a smile or a song might mean more than it was intended.

It is a guessing game for the NT.

I have problems with people misinterpreting things romantically. Twice in a row now two men have convinced themselves we were in a relationship because I called them sweetheart and gave them a hug etc (or in one case a friendly kiss) even though I had told them straight in words that I did not feel that way about them. What I actually said was that I was fond of them as a friend but that my feelings were purely platonic and I did not feel romantically towards them.

Both times they seemed to think we were in a relationship and I had a hell of a time trying to convince them we were not.

They did not want to remain friends once I did manage to get the message across to them.

I had the opposite problem also with a friend whom I was very fond of. When I told him I was fond of him he panicked and assumed I wanted a relationship with him. I am aware he does not want a relationship with me and was not trying to pin him down, I merely said I was fond of him (as a friend). Yes I would have a relationship with that one if he wanted one with me but alas he does not and I accept that. That does not mean that I cannot be fond of him as a human being though!

This one is now avoiding me like the plague lol. I should keep my feelings to myself I think as, on the rare occasions that I do make friends, I keep losing them left right and centre for one reason or another.

One day I will figure this stuff out...

I have tricked my ex's unintentionally that I wanted sex all because I loved to be rubbed. It feels good and I had no idea it means you want sex. My last ex had to learn that I do not want sex when I liked to be rubbed. But the first one couldn't figure it out because he thought every time I wanted sex and I was never aware of that until after we had broken up. I always gave him blue balls because of it.

Then there was my husband. He thought we were in a relationship when we first met. I saw one of his old posts on another forum from July 2007 and he said he had a girlfriend. I told him about that and he said we were dating. I asked him what's the difference between friends going out and a couple? he said that i took him to Spokane, we stayed in the same room. I asked him how do friends go to Sokane together and how would they stay in a hotel room? Would they use seprate rooms or have two beds? Honestly, my husband did not know how friends would go on a weekend trip together and how they both stay in a hotel together. Either I did something wrong or he read me wrong and I didn't do anything wrong.




Has anyone ever gotten accused of playing games or misleading people? Things people are doing to us, we have no idea what they are doing because we are not reading into what they are saying. Like we may be dating someone and they start rubbing our heads and backs and it feels so good we keep asking them to do it. In their heads they are thinking we want sex and then they get pissed at us for not giving it to them and then we have no idea why they got so upset. Then we are thinking WTF when they tell us we played head games with them. We would act like we wanted sex and then never give it to them. Another example be we be online chatting and then all of a sudden we are asked what are we wearing and what do we have on underneath. We answer those questions thinking they are just curious questions and then we ask them the same questions back. Then all of a sudden they start telling us to do sexual things and then we freak out about it and then they accuse us of playing games with them and we think they are trying to manipulate us to doing what they want us to do. I think these sort of misunderstandings can be so common in us and it can happen in other things too than about sexual stuff.


It just makes it harder for us to communicate because we don't know what others are thinking and what their agendas are. We have to worry about what they are on about and if we are going to accidentally mislead people. But fortunately lot of people don't tell us what they think of us and those who do are the ones that like to call people out. But when we do get called out, we get all paranoid because if one person had the nerve to tell us what they thought of us, how do we know other people aren't thinking that of us too?

It would be better for Aspies. It would not be possible for NTs.

What everybody here is describing is a Theory Of Mind malfunction on the part of NTs. Unlike autistic people, NT people do not put a premium on fact exchange divorced from motive and emotional context (except in specialized settings like legal proceedings). Nemorosa described this. Facts are so co-mingled with motive and emotional context that separating them requires a highly stylized setting like a courtroom and even there it breaks down. So what NTs are doing when this happens is atempting to use Theory of Mind to figure out motivation and emotional context and coming up with wrong conclusions. It takes a laborious effort on the part of NTs to separate out fact from the other things and so it would be incredibly harder for NT people to start speaking like this. NT people only attempt to do this when there is intense motivation to do so, like legal proceedings or a close relationship with an autistic person. And even then, we fail more often than not.

I still don't understand the need for it... NTs talk in a way that they hide what they mean whilst expecting people to know that they meant. It just seems in every way possible to be a waste of time and effort.
And I'm fairly closed minded, I just don't understand how hard it would be for NTs to just say what they mean instead of hiding it in a code.

I also just don't know when the NTs became like this, in what part of evolution did they suddenly say "You know what? Why not make things mean something they don't"


Hmph guess now matter how hard I try I will always be close minded to an extent...

Edit: Actually after reading that a couple times now I think I am starting to understand. So basically it's just like general small talk for them, meaningless but they all still do it.
However I still haven't worked out why NTs seem so wasteful... (IE wasting the energy on small talk...)

This is one of the fundamental differences between us (I am NT). For NTs, there is no effort to speak this way. Nor is there effort to extract the meaning. It all happens subconsciously. Things are precisely the opposite for Aspies. Intense effort is required to extract the meaning (which to NTs is not hidden). No effort at all is required to speak in a "facts only" manner. Since we are complete opposites in what requires effort and what is done effortlessly, miscommunication is inevitable.




For NTs, it isn't hidden. This is where the miscommunication happens. It is also why Aspies are met with such incredulity when these miscommunications happen. The NT says "how could you not know?" while the Aspie says "how could I know when it wasn't said?" When something isn't hidden to an NT, we have a hard time believing it also isn't hidden to an Aspie. (Theory of Mind fail. )



I am sure there have been books written on this- possibly by Steven Pinker- but I haven't read them.




It isn't close-minded. It's a neurology gap. I can't truly understand you and you can't truly understand me and the best we can hope for is trying to get along despite being baffled by each other.

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I also don't understand how it can be hard like I can just flat out tell my husband "Turn the bathroom light off" than telling him "You left the bathroom light on." How can an NT not have the ability to just say to an aspie "Turn off that bathroom light?"

I used to be this direct and my cooking teacher noticed how demanding I was to my husband and bossing him around being a control freak. I said to her one day "what is the point in sugar coating things if you know what they mean so why not just say it?"
She explained to me about if I would rather have someone talk to me and be gentle about it than being all mean about it like making me feel bad. I don't remember what example she used but it made sense. Ever heard of "It's not what you say, it's how you say it?"

So I decided I will be indirect and if the person doesn't listen, I will assume they didn't understand and then I will dummy it up by being direct. I would do the same with an aspie too because I would be offended if someone was talking to me and dummying up everything they say to me by saying every single thing to me as if I am too dumb to figure out what they are saying or too dumb to use my common sense. So I would rather have them talk to me the way they talk to everyone else and if I didn't get it, then they can try and be more clear. But do not get mad at me if I didn't understand. Just make yourself more clear is all. Just tell me what you wanted is all.

Last edited by League_Girl on 19 Dec 2011, 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Autistics have sensory hypersensitivities, so earplugs. NTs have hypersensitivities too, so gentleness.

I have this exact same problem with my mother. Although I don't have the luxury to find it amusing. I know the craps about to hit the fan by time I miss the first yes.