NT's should explain themselves. (A challenge to NT's)

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A curious thing has occurred to me recently. It appears that the relationship between NT's and those with AS/HFA is inverted.

What I mean by that is, have you ever noticed that it's always those of us with AS/HFA who are required to explain ourselves to NT's, rather than the other way around, when it is the NT's who should theoretically have the innate ability to understand others (including us) while we are inherently devoid of this and must derive our understanding based on some system of logic.

And frequently, the things we must explain are things that require a level of internal reflection, self awarness and analytical skills that NT's are never required to achieve.

What they ask of us when we must explain why we are the way we are is like asking a cat why cats are all the way cats are, why dogs are all the way dogs are, why birds are all the way birds are....

It is like asking a person "Why do you hold the spoon just so? Why not another way?"
"Why do you lift it in that manner you do?"
"Why is your personality such that it is?
"Why are you such that you are?"

I used to be placed in front of psychiatrists and psychologists on a fairly regular basis while they pummeled me with questions which were not fair to ask, and who's answers required a level of self awareness and insight that even the greatest Guru in all India, even the Dalai Lama himself did not have, let alone an 8 year old child. And all I could do of course was stare at the floor and shrug.

And yet NT's with all of their in born insight are free from this obligation?

Why should we do all the explaining? I think it they should explain themselves to us.

I'd like to know...

1. Why do you not have special interests?
2. What are these non-verbal cues you are perceiving? Explain them in detail for each social situation.
3. Why do you spend so much time socializing?

4. How do you know when people want to be your close friend if they do not explicitly say so?

5. Why do you move your hands when you speak? Do you not feel your words and tone are sufficient?

6. Why do you feel the need to empathize with fictional characters? Are not only the facts of the story and concepts it attempts to convey important? The characters are not real people and do not require your empathy.

7. Why do you feel the need to "fit in" to a group?

8. Why do you all become so insecure in highschool such that you will do things you do not really want to do and say you like things that you do not really like?

9. Why do you not write down your unspoken social rules for others? What makes you assume that others know them?

10. How do you know if someone really wishes to socialize with you or be your friend since many of you will act as a friend when friendship is not desired?


I welcome others to add to the list of questions NT's should answer.

about time someone create a poll on this i wish i would of thought of it.

[img][img]http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j151/BlueLife46/ITsAboutTime_f_HiRes.jpg[/img][/img]

NTs don't explain themselves because most of the time, there's no need for them to do it. 90% of the time when they interact with somebody, they're interacting with another NT. Whereas, you're only interacting with another autistic about 1% of the time. (The numbers may be higher on both ends because people tend to seek out similar individuals; but the principle is about the same either way.)

Anyhow: They spend only 10% of their interactions talking to people who are different from themselves. You spend about 99% of yours talking to people who are different from yourself, and about 90% of that talking to NTs. Who has the most practice? That's right--the autistic person. We will always be better at understanding them than they are at understanding us (except for isolated incidences in which an NT spends a great deal more time with autistics than with other NTs).

(I'm assuming here a population with 90% NT, 10% neurodiverse, and 10% of the neurodiverse being autistic. If you use a broader definition of neurodiverse, you may end up with a number as high as 30%.)

Im clearly not an NT, but move my hand A LOT when I speak and tend to empathize with fictional characters (while I put more merit on the facts).

i think i can answer most of those thing. tho i am on the spectrum, i have spent most of my life dedicated to understanding most of these things and think i have alot of it down.

1. NTs do have special interests, they're called hobbies, they just don't border on obsessional when it comes to participating or discussing them. they are also able to adapt in conversations so they do not need to only talk about their own interests, so they're not seen as so "special".

2.non verbal cues are easy. the expressions on peoples face and the movement of their body show the subtext of what they are saying/feeling. picking up on these cues is usually a memory excersise for aspies, which is easy cause alot of aspies can remember alot of things on a particular subject.

3. people like people. when people are not around other people they get lonely. this is not an NT thing. aspies are in no way immune to lonliness. to insinuate that they are is almost calling us inhuman, which we certainly are not. aspies that do not want any human contact ever are the same as NTs who do not want any human contact ever.

4. i have found the best way for me as an aspie to judge how much time a person wants to spend with me or how close they want to be with me is to go by how often they attempt to be in contact with me. if they are trying to contact me reguarly, they must want to be around me. then i look at what they want from me when they initiate contact, do they want to hang out? do an activity? or something negative like ask me for money? if the motive seems to be positive then i feel i am safe to assume i have a friend. furthermore, if, after becoming friends, the person starts to divulge certain types of personal information it lets me know they consider me a close friend because they must have a certain amount of trust to share such things. unless they have mental problems and just like to tell everyone everything all the time about their personal life. i personally, do not enjoy the company of this type of person.

5. hand gestures are not always a consious choice or decision made by people. they usually relate to the 'energy' of a conversation. and like lonliness, this is not something that aspies do not do. because they do, likely not as much i guess.

6. NTs do not 'feel on requirment', and either do I actually. empathy for fictional characters (like hand gestures) are an automatic human response. aspies do this too. you can see it in the threads about 'Aspie Movies', people saying how they feel about the charatcers in the film and how they felt for them in certain parts of the film. Alot of these movies and characters are fictional but because the subject hits close to home they inspire emotion.

7. people group together. over many things, common interests etc...just like this forum. why does it exits? so aspie people can group together? is that not why you are here? your presence at this forum should answer your own question.

8. you'd have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed that the teenage years in life, espeically in the highschol setting, are all about establishing who you are and your position. it is all very animal kingdom in my opinion. it is natural to want to have a higher/dominant position, sometimes to aquire this position you may do things you do not want to. did you never get the 'peer pressuer' chats at school?

9. Social rules and etiquette are written down in many publications, though maybe not in the way you are desiring. And the reason the document you want does not exist is because all the things you do not understand are actually safe to assume that people know 99% of the time. in life we learn to go with the flow! we learn the language of the country in which we live, we don't learn german or chinese in case we one day meet a chinese person do we? same with human interaction/social cues.

10. see my answer to question 4.

and that is how i've learned things go and it works ok for me most of the time.

The challenge is for the NT to answer them, WITHOUT reading a self help book or consulting Deepak Chopra or someone equivalent (and equally overpriced).

Im curious : Do you think this thread has any redeeming qualities ; I mean , isn't the topic a bit loaded?

And why would you challenge someone here, being there are n/t's here ?

Or is it just a rant?

how many NT's are even on this site? Or are they just too scared to take THE TEST

:facepalm:

I personally do not have special interests because I get bored doing/researching just one thing all my life so I move amongst many things. What interested me last year is probably not what's going to interest me this year. However, an awful lot of NTs do have special interests. In some people they are hobbies. In some people they are obsessions. They are often shared with so many other people that they don't seem all that special. When most of the world's population is interested in soccer/football and watches the World Cup, it isn't all that special, although for many it is an obsession.


Explaining in detail for each social situation is an undertaking much too large for a single post or even a single thread. It takes an entire book and even the many books that have been written about it are woefully incomplete because they are all culture-specific.



Because it's fun.



As fuzzbot said, by how often they request my company and what sort of things they'd like to do. From these things I make the inference.



My hands move themselves. I only sometimes make a conscious decision to move them. The conscious decision to move them comes from when words and tone are not sufficient and I use my hands as part of a description. In other cases, my hands move themselves and it would require a conscious decision not to move them while talking. I can't recall being in a situation where I was supposed to be speaking but not supposed to be moving my hands, so it hasn't come up. There have been times when I've been talking to blind or very visually impaired people and then I make a conscious decision to not let hand gestures replace desriptive words. But even then, I'm using the hand gesture alongside the words, just not as a replacement.



It is not "feel a need". It just happens. Given how many people here empathize with Sheldon on "Big Bang Theory", it doesn't just happen to NTs.



It is very lonely to be alone. To be with a group is to not be lonely.



Adolescence is a time of forging one's own identity apart from parents. It's a time of experimentation with different identities. Part of experimentation is stepping outside a comfort zone. In the case of adolescence, it's stepping outside the comfort zone that has been shared by parents and children since birth. When you step outside your comfort zone and experiment with different identities, you will necessarily wind up doing things you aren't sure if you want to do and trying to like things you are not sure if you actually like because those things are part of the group identity you are experimenting with.



I make the assumption that they know because all my life with only a few exceptions, they do know them. I don't know when I started making this assumption that bore itself out to be true. Toddlerhood? Kindergarten? Unspoken social rules are a shared thing- which is why they stay unspoken. To grow up (NT) in a particular society means to grow up knowing the these rules as surely as I know what my own face looks like in the mirror even as it changes slightly from day to day. The few exceptions have mostly been cross-cultural. There has been no reason for me to write them down because those few exceptions can be transmitted verbally. And when I've visited other cultures, others have told me what was expected as a local social rule.

For the infrequently used social rules, there are books on manners (what to say at a funeral is something that hopefully comes up infrequently, for example). For cross-cultural social rules, they are often written down in travel guides, at least some of the more important ones.



As with 4, I infer it from what they want to do with me and how often.




For the record, much of this is covered at length in the stickied thread NT/AS HOTLINE started last year by the greatly missed Greentea.

I think I have to agree with Callista. Asking the majority of the population to explain themselves to us is a bit like going to a foreign country and expecting the locals to have to explain why they're not like Americans (or whatever your own nationality is).

I do think there are situations in which NTs have a duty to explain themselves to us, like the example the OP gave about going to a therapist and being expected to explain ourselves when we don't know what the norm is so we don't know what parts of ourselves need to be explained and what parts are obvious because they are the same as everyone else.

Janissy, I respect your posts including this one and don't mean any offense whatsoever, but your response comes off as a bit dismissive.. When you say that socializing is "fun" for instance, that reminds me of when I was a kid at school and I asked why I had to participate in sports, which I found to be like torture, and I was told that it was "fun." Well, I thought, it isn't fun for me at all, so that means I can be excused from having to do it? Of course, I was not excused from sports. What I mean is, saying it's "fun" is not really an answer and comes off as dismissive of the question.

Another example: being in a group is not the antidote to being lonely. Loneliness comes form not having someone who is close to you, and groups do not serve that function. There is something much more sinister about wanting to belong to a group. It has to do with having a posse that shuts other people out, I don't care if it's a high school clique or ladies who lunch. This is the kind of thing that we Aspies have to figure out from scratch after having attempted in vain to join a group thinking it was about friendship and found ourselves the pariah within it and then outside of it once we were ejected. This is what I mean about giving answers that come off as bit glib and not really informative to those of us who have had to learn some of these things the hard way.

I move my hands A LOT when I speak. More like a cartoon character though, really exaggerated and whatnot.

The problem there is not the matter of whether *anyone* is able to answer, but that any sense of obligation exists at all. The ignorance of another is not my concern unless/until s/he wishes to become informed.

Great post, Chronos! Today I refuse to be held to any given standard or perceived "normalcy" simply because it happens to be that of some majority.

I have nothing better to do so I'll give it a try. It should be noted that your questions are way too general and I doubt that equally general answers will be helpful to you or anyone, but here you go anyway.

By definition.

If everyone had an abnormally intensive preoccupation, then it would not be abnormal.


I don't have time for that, consideing the astronomical number of all posible social situations.


For the same reason as you spend so much time socializing (on this forum)


I for one don't know and don't know why I would want to know that.


I use many gestures for many different reasons. Again, lack of time prevents me from elaborating.


I for one don't feel that need.


For the same reason as you feel the need to "fit in" to a group (such as this one, wrongplanet.net's community)


This generalisation is false.


What makes me assume that others know them is the fact that others do know them. Exeptions are too few to be bothered with.


By observing them.and noticing their patterns of behavior.

i will play your game =)

1. Why do you not have special interests?
i DO. i like many things, but my predominant interest is mmorpgs. i have played nearly all of them at one time or another, starting in 1997 with the first graphical online rpg, meridian 59. currently, i play WoW, i am leveling up a mage and a druid. i love video games and will play them all day every day. unfortunately, i cannot obsess that much about them as i work full time and have a family to take care of, so those take priority over my own interests most of the time.

why do you assume i have no special interests simply because i am not autistic?

2. What are these non-verbal cues you are perceiving? Explain them in detail for each social situation.
i honestly dont know. i dont think about non-verbal cues. usually its just trying to read peoples faces and figure out their emotions from that. dont expect that we all analyze every situation, we just live through it. its not like we all have a miss manners book we study. or if we do, they forgot to give me one.

3. Why do you spend so much time socializing?
i dont. i dont socialize hardly at all. unless you count going grocery shopping or taking my kids to the pool socializing. i engage in social situations maybe a couple times a year. one annual office christmas party, and i go out with my sister a couple times a year for dinner or drinks. ive done two bbqs for my tenants this summer but thats work required, not social. altho my current friendless state does make me lonely occasionally, i do not like to socialize, so i dont do it.

this is getting weird, why do you automatically think we all are social butterflies? some aspies are social, some not, non-autistics arent so different.

4. How do you know when people want to be your close friend if they do not explicitly say so?
well, the obvious things. if they talk to you, share things, ask you to do things, call you. if they show interest in spending time with you, then they want to be your friend usually. why else would they do those things?

5. Why do you move your hands when you speak? Do you not feel your words and tone are sufficient?
it just happens. its like your eyebrows arching or your brow furrowing, its part of conversation. sometimes i will do it intentionally while in a business conversation to emphasize a point, but in social conversation its just naturally occuring. i am not a very "animated" talker, actually. my aspie SO is much more animated than i am, in fact i hate talking to him while he drives as he takes both hands off the wheel and i dont like that.

alright, now the generalizations are starting to annoy me. the aspies i know do this more than i do.

6. Why do you feel the need to empathize with fictional characters? Are not only the facts of the story and concepts it attempts to convey important? The characters are not real people and do not require your empathy.
i dont "feel the need", it just happens sometimes in a good story. im pretty sure thats one of the goals of the writer, to make people really get into the story and feel it. maybe you should talk to fiction writers instead and harp on them about why they always try to make characters that the reader can empathize with.

7. Why do you feel the need to "fit in" to a group?
i dont. im me, always have been. its nice to find people you click with, its easier to share interests that way. but i dont feel any need to fit in to any group.

seriously, the generalizations are getting ridiculous now. like this is only a non-autistic thing? the irony is that this is happening on wrong planet, where so many aspies come to "fit in". heck, go look at that other thread talking about kicking the NTs out of this aspie club.

8. Why do you all become so insecure in highschool such that you will do things you do not really want to do and say you like things that you do not really like?
i didnt. i never did things i didnt really want to do, or say i liked things i didnt. i dont think i am so unique in that regard, as i filled my life with other people who were like me. we werent the most popular, but there were plenty of us doing our own thing and being who we were and not what others expected us to be.

what is with this "you all" thing?? im starting to think you arent talking to me because so many of these things "you" does dont apply to me.

9. Why do you not write down your unspoken social rules for others? What makes you assume that others know them?
i dont write them down because i dont know of any. i have pretty simple rules for myself, such as be nice to others, be socially responsible (put away your shopping cart, dont litter, etc). i do assume others try to live by the same simple rules, altho experience tells me thats not always true. really, do you honestly need me to write down for you that you should be nice to others? well, i bet if you check amazon, you can find books on unspoken social rules. amazon has books on everything, even on the zombie apocalypse (i recommend "The Zombie Survival Guide" by Max Brooks, its a classic).

10. How do you know if someone really wishes to socialize with you or be your friend since many of you will act as a friend when friendship is not desired?
like #4, if they try to spend time with you i guess. i dont think ive ever encountered anyone acting as a friend who didnt want to be friends, unless you are counting someone just being nice as acting as a friend. honestly, im not the best person to ask since i literally have no friends. what, just because im not autistic i am suppose to have friends?

alright, these generalizations have reached the level of ridonculous. im definitely not one of the "you"s you are talking about. people arent cookies cut by the same shape that you can neatly sort into boxes based solely on shape. just because nature didnt use the autism cookie cutter on me doesnt mean i cant share traits with autistics and MUST have all these other non-autistic traits you are talking about.

i guess im not one of these NTs people mention. and im not autistic, altho i do have some of the traits. looks like i wasted my time answering all these silly generalized questions for you when they clearly arent meant for me. hmmmm i wonder what i am then.

maybe, just human? like you?

@ azurecrayon

I agree the list makes too many generalizations. I think I have a quite a bit in common with introverted NTs.

It's extroverted NTs who I have a hard time understanding and always feel the need to "explain myself" around. It's hard to ever be fully engaged when I feel so different from them.