Threads Of Autism

Post Reply New Topic

Then, on WP, you are going to need to learn how.
The solution to not triggering others into experiencing negative emotions is as ASPartOfMe has explained - be more careful with your wording.

Don't attempt to make this the responsibility of the person being triggered - this is no different to the patronising "if only you would try harder" approach; the problems with that were also explained earlier.

Autistic people are saying on an autism forum that other autistic people need to be able to predict how other people will emotionally respond to the non-literal nuances of their words and choose optimal wording to avoid certain negative emotions in other people?

It seems like it would be difficult for many autistic people to communicate their thoughts on WP, if they need to do all these things.

Is this going to become a forum rule for posting? If not, then I suggest that people say what they want to directly communicate their thoughts.

Hi Cornflake. Are you saying I should not have written this bolded part?



What I was saying is that I did something from a lack of understanding, probably because of being autistic myself, but was not sure it was appropriate for me to use that as an excuse. Then this one comment was taken out of context of the general idea I was trying to communicate and kind of over-emphasized which imo sidelined and deflected the conversation into a very narrow direction and not at all where I was trying to go with that idea.

You seem to be saying I should NOT have written this. That would be censorship of ideas, and because you are a moderator it is hard for me not to take it as a threat, though I am not sure you actually mean it in this way. Do you?

Then I wrote this in response to Ann's question, See whole message here, and I recommend people reread it, as there are imo some interesting and important ideas about autism and speech:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5971818.html#5971818

Ann wrote
...and I responded:

You seem to be saying I should learn to NOT communicate in this way. For whatever it is worth, I am a 70+ year old person who spent the last fifty years of my life deliberately learning to communicate like this, and imo it has nothing to do with my autism though I may have persevered at trying to learn it because of being autistic, and also my brain damage and or autism may be keeping from perfecting this way of communication. I saw some other people doing it when I was around twenty and tried to develop this ability in myself, and it is one of my aims to help as many people as possible learn how to do so by setting an example myself, as many people are not able to communicate and process data from more than one angle, so get kind of just stuck and blindsided in one spot.

This is in no way to deny that brevity has its virtues!

Either style can be good or not so good depending upon various contexts.

I have not yet responded to the main point of your message about the triggering of negative emotions, because it is so important I want to wait until more people have a chance to process what is written already.

I must note that all of us including myself can probably learn to communicate more effectively, and I am interested in learning to communicate in different ways and better understand others peoples styles of communication.

Well, I re-read the bolded part in littlebee's above post and it still bothers me. Bee, it's not that I don't want you to express your views. I just disagree - I don't think everyone has autism. And the statement makes me feel mitigated (with regard to my autism.)
I don't think you should alter your method of communication. If it works for you, go for it. But I can't say I always understand what you are saying. I don't know if that's down to your writing style or my comprehension, but either way it doesn't matter. If everyone agreed on forums they would be quite boring.

I asked you to be more careful with what you say, to avoid triggering others into experiencing negative emotions.
ASPartOfMe has already explained specifically what was wrong with your earlier statement and Ann2011 agreed with him.

I most certainly can excuse and understand autistic people not understanding what are triggers for other people. That people in certain contexts are being patronizing when they say "everybody is autistic" is not something I knew about because like you took the words literally. I learned that information and also that those words and similar expressions are a trigger for autistics even in a non patronizing context from reading numerous posts here and from blogs elsewhere.

While ago I have started a thread about that I am in not able to predict peoples reactions at all, but it got moved from "general autism discussion" to "random discussion", which I did not understand, because I feel it related to autism, but in "general autism discussion" it didn't got many answers and I started to think that other autistic persons have no issues with predicting reactions of other people.

Hi Cornflake. I get the point that people should not be using language in such a way so as to be triggering other people into negative emotions, and fully concur with this as a general aim in communication, and I also acknowledge that I need to work on this further and will continue to try to do so. However--and this is not intended as an argument or to even dispute the point you just made with which I fully agree with--it is a rather broad area of speech you are attempting to define, and in this particular instance of what I said when talking about human brain function --that everybody is kind of autistic in a certain respect, it does not quite fit because it is taking a generalized comment in a particular context out of its general context and making it simply black and white and said with the presumed intended gist of discounting the incredible suffering and struggles of being a person with autism in a way in which this comment was not at all intended to do, and also, imo, putting an emphasis from that particular angle.. What Ann and AsPartOfMe said does make sense, though, and I already acknowledged this, and, the more I think about it, the more valuable I am finding the feedback, but this discussion about subtleties and nuances of language is getting kind of mind-boggling for me and perhaps is at the level of Autism 501, if there even is such a level, and I have not yet completed Autism 301 and don't even know if I will ever be able to complete that class, as the material is kind of dense.

Again, nobody should be saying stuff that will trigger other people into negative emotions, and especially in Islamic fundamentalist and sometimes even terrorist regimes, which can even extend even into the United States. I say this about Islam extending into the United States because of something very fascinating to me which I would like to mention. Several years ago I bought a copy of the Koran in a stationary store, and when I read the preface it said the author, who lived in Chicago at the time, was killed by some fundamentalist Muslims because he wrote in the introduction to this book that the Koran was based on the number ninety-one. So he had a good--or bad idea--- which he now cannot expound upon any further because he is dead.

What is this thread actually about?

Thanks for asking this. I explained in the beginning, but a recent message about what is or is not politically correct speech imo took this thread kind of off topic, but not exactly, as it also kind of fits in in some way, though not directly.

The idea of censorship and and also of not hurting peoples feelings or hurting people's feelings or being afraid to speak because something one says, though one may not understand quite why, may hurt someones feelings does kind of fit into this topic, though I was not really going in this direction with the enquiry in the beginning.

But more square on the topic, as previously mentioned, if a person writes a long or short message or messages on certain topics, this can affect people in different ways and will attract different kinds of people or cause many people not to read a message if the subject is not their cup of tea, or if it is too long or if there are too many short messages to be able follow, certain people also may not read it, and this will affect the broader organization of this system, My intent is to investigate into this kind of thing as we go along. I was thinking this thread has gotten off topic, but I also think the topic of this thread can be approached and examined from many different angles, plus I learned so much from the seeming deflection that I cannot really really look at it as a deflection. I had a major insight into my own brain function because of the recent conversation, and I would like to write about that, maybe.

(Janissey, I still intend to answer your question.)

Cause it can break the attention into too many directions to focus on each other in a general way that is more inclusive, which generality (of course including diversity) is a factor in the formation of community, so this affects the quality of attention, something like multitasking....a person can only do it to a degree or else they don't get any task done, or not done at well, at least. As far as saying it keeps community from forming, that was way over-generalized on my part and really kind of stupid, so thanks for pointing this out. I applied my own value and definition of community in a generalized comment and just assumed everyone would understand what I was meaning, so a theory of mind thing.

Also, having many threads could possibly facilitate the formation of community, I suppose. I think some kind of community does obviously form, but maybe not as consciously focused on becoming a community....and this implies that it is better to consciously focus on forming community then for it to just happen. It does happen, obviously, but I think it could happen better if people focus on making it happen. The intent of this thread is not really to do that, though I encourage people to do it anywhere, but rather to look at how this kind of dynamic works as mentioned in the intro..it does get more complex then touched on in this message, though, as different people tend to organize according to their various interests and other factors....I really do not have much of a fixed idea on any of this....

Hi. I think it is important to enquire into the organization of WP both literally and as a metaphor for autistic brain function, and also in the sense that thought can be an action in that deep thinking affects brain function and reorganize the mind (whereas mechanical reactive thinking reinforces old conditioning). In this sense deep thinking is mind affecting brain, which is a movement, so, on a subtle level, an action....

.....and the way material is organized in a given situation can either facilitate this tendency or impede it. (The original word I first wrote instead of impede, I then realized on this forum might be perceived as politically incorrect, so I used my precious time and went on Google and found a synonym for this word, sad (or happy) to say.

According to the intelligent suggestion of one [i]Wind[,/i] here is a shortISH message which will hopefully appeal to people on both sides of the fence, so thanks,...but I want us to have to really think about the material, so not just know what we already think/feel we know, or what would be the point? Also, there needs to be contrast, so pleasant, but not too pleasant, depending upon the context, as in a general situation if it is overly pleasant, then too much slip and not enough grip....

If anyone can think of a way this message could have been shorter, please feel free to let me know....

Hi. To me the subject of how the organization of a system can affect people's feelings and interactions is very important. Just as society frames and conditions how people think about each other, and many wrong ideas an d negativities can play into it (which it is understandable people who are being misunderstood because of certain 'evolving' stereotypes of and myths about autism,would be very concerned about), so can our own thinking about each other here affect our perception of ourselves and how we are perceived by the world. A recent thread started by Norny has gone into posting styles, which brings me back to this thread here where this subject has been discussed in some, so I would like to delve deeper into that, plus begin to look at community organization.

I think in relationship to posting styles is also posting intent and the actualization of that intent. I notice a lot of people come here trying to help themselves. That is a good intent, and people do receive help and understanding from participating here. IK know I have. Some others seem to be posting more with the intent to help their brother, and by this they are gaining genuine satisfaction and helping themselves, also, but how much is it possible to help others on a system such as WP where there are so many diverse personalities, and can the organization of the system itself contribute to this being more or less possible? We already know that the organization here is making it possible to help people, but imo, and according to others, also, there is a lot disharmony and also quite a bit of aimless chatter, so I suggest to look deeply and try to discover if it is possible to amplify the affect of us wanting to help each other in such a way that we much more successfully succeed in doing so.

I really have not much of an idea of how to do this on this particular system. It is in the nature of enquiry for me.