Communicating with Autists
Communicating with Autists
One of the most difficult challenges between autists and allists is communication. I remember a couple of years ago, I was explaining to a long-time friend of mine about my diagnosis, and that I was frequently frustrated by the reality that so much communication is done with body language instead of words.
“We invented words so that we didn’t have to point and grunt,” I said. “Words are far superior. So why don’t people use them.”
He rolled his eyes. “Because body language is more efficient,” he said.
It was an extremely helpful response.
But I still find myself frustrated because I, of course, do not understand body language in the “intuitive” way that everyone else seems to assume. There are no classes (short of joining the FBI’s criminal profiling unit) that explain body language in ways that I find helpful. Yes, of course, I know that autistic children are often taught the basics. What a smile means, what a shrug means, how to tell if someone isn’t interested anymore (they are turned away from you).
Still, I must say that as an adult, these kinds of basics are of little use to me. For one thing, men and women have very different body language. In a group of all women, for instance, women’s body language tends to be more vibrant, even wild. Men tend to be more muted in body language, at least in my experience, when it would always be in mixed company.
Then we come to the problems of hints. I don’t understand hints very well at all. Again, I’ve learned some of the basic ones that autistic children are taught. “I wish I could see better,” means would you please move out of the way of my view of the movie screen. Likewise, “Those cookies look delicious” means will you please get one for me the next time you go back for a plate of snacks. But it still takes me an extra couple of seconds to figure it out and even with the most obvious hints, I may still miss one here and there, especially if I’m distracted by loud noise, a lot of faces and names to try to remember, and the general nervousness I always feel when I’m in a social situation and feel like I’m sure to make a grievous mistake unintentionally and make myself persona non grata to everyone there.
The problem is that neurotypical people speak so often in hints that even if you try to tell them not to do it, they don’t understand how often it happens. I remember when I was in elementary school, I raised my hand after I was finished with my math and asked my teacher, “Can I read my book now?”
“It’s math time now,” she said.
Which didn’t actually answer my question. My question was a simple yes/no question.
I asked again, “Can I read my book now?” I figured either she misunderstood my question or didn’t realize I wanted a yes/no answer.
She repeated, “It’s math time now.”
Which still didn’t answer my question. I was so confused. I could tell she was getting mad at me for asking over and over, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she wouldn’t just say yes or no to my question. So I asked a third time. And that was when she gave me a bad mark on the board and told me that I wasn’t allowed to ask any more questions that day.
But I was entirely baffled. I had no idea why it was my fault that she wouldn’t answer my question.
I see now that she thought she had answered my question repeatedly. She had no idea that she was speaking in a roundabout way. She thought she was saying, “No, because it is math time now and other students will think it isn’t math time if you start reading your book.” But since she didn’t say any of that, my eight-year-old brain could not understand what was going on.
These are the kinds of common misunderstandings that happen all the time with autists and allists. It often leads to the allists imagining that the autists are deliberately being obtuse, causing problems, or other malicious intentions. Trust me when I say that autists don’t have malicious intentions. We are just clueless. We don’t understand social situations well enough to manipulate them in the way many allists imagine we do. We’re not playing an autistic card. We just want an answer to a simple question that you for some reason won’t give us.
Another example comes from when I was older, a sophomore in high school and my mother told me to vacuum the living room.
I wrote in my journal,
“Today was cleaning day and I tried my best and got yelled at. Mom told me to vacuum under the furniture in the living room. I did — including the bookcase. Mom told me I was without common sense. Then she came in my room and told me I wasn’t thorough enough about sweeping under my bed.”
The last time I’d vacuumed, Mom had been angry that I hadn’t vacuumed under the couch. At home, it was impossible to vacuum under the couch because it didn’t have legs, but her couch did have legs. If only Mom had said, “vacuum under the couch,” all would have been clear. But she made this global assertion that I had to vacuum under all the furniture. So I shrugged and moved all the furniture, the TV stand, the bookcase, everything in the room. And then she was mad at me.
This is another case where she thought I was being deliberately obtuse because how could any normal thinking human imagine she meant to move a bookcase full of books. I didn’t understand why she wanted me to do it, either, but she had said to move ALL THE FURNITURE. So I did. And then she got mad at me that I’d done what she said, exactly as she said it. And told me I had no common sense. How did common sense matter when it came to me doing what she told me to do?
I became so frustrated by this, and imagine many autistic people feel like giving up trying to communicate with allists for this very reason. No matter how hard we try, it seems it is always our fault that we didn’t understand, because we took the words literally and didn’t understand some facial expression, body language, or some hidden metaphor or other non-spoken “obvious” meaning.
As an adult, I sometimes still despair about the possibility of communication between autists and allists. But I suppose the best advice I can give is to put all the explanation into words and then not to make assumptions about motivation if something goes wrong. Autists aren’t trying to “punk” anyone. Just try again and don’t get angry. As for us autists, we will try not to feel like it’s time to give up because there’s no hope and people will always yell at us no matter what we do. The lack of trust that comes from a lifetime of these kinds of situations is a real problem. It’s one I’m trying to combat daily.