Before my formal diagnosis, and probably for several decades now, I used to tell my wife that I can’t trust my emotions; and that was a significant part of what you’re saying.
And if I’m to remain on safe ground, I have to assume this from now on, now that I formally know that this is an issue. In fact, the diagnosis is, as I first mentioned above,
Someone had started a thread, maybe a year or so ago, about how he had hurt some woman 20 or 30 years ago, and was asking Dopers if he should track her down and apologize. At the time, that thread was really relevant to me. One of my greatest resentments about what autism has done to me, if not my greatest resentment, is that I have missed so, so many opportunities with the opposite sex, including almost trashing my own marriage.
I can easily think of numerous and specific advances and invitations (just to a relationship at all) that I completely misunderstood. And in non-romantic scenarios I tend to understand typical male teasing and “chucking the shit”, locker room stuff as attacks, rather than jocular banter, to the extent that I avoid team sports like the plague.
I also recognize that I have been extremely fortunate to have done as well as I have despite this. I was a naval officer for 30 years and though I stalled at a fairly low officer’s rank (many of my contemporaries are retiring as admirals and I retired as a naval lieutenant), I built up an interesting and very useful dossier of experiences that led me to a well paying civilian job, from which I’ll be retiring soon. So materially I can’t complain, though it’s difficult to look back without seeing 60 years of wasted opportunities.
And Spice_Weasel and others, you have provided tons of info that I’ll have to catch up on.
My ASD kid is actually pretty great at picking up on jokes and sarcasm and puns, but that’s because my husband has been intensely training our kids on those subjects since just about the minute she was born. However, when something is not a joke, she tends to take it pretty seriously. I can’t imagine she would do well with someone not communicating logically, literally, explicitly, and sincerely, but she mostly ignores most communication that isn’t explicitly information-gathering, so I don’t have a lot of data points here.
I’m terrible at picking up on jokes and puns (I received zero training on this from my parents). I also am pretty firmly ask rather than guess culture despite being brought up in a guess-culture family, which leads to family conflicts sometimes. I also tend to take people at their word and am very bad at picking up on things like people being insincere, or telling self-serving truths, or being self-deluding, unless someone else points it out to me (or later events make it crystal clear).
I see this in my kid, yeah, but both my kid and I have more of the opposite problem: when we talk, it’s hard for us to figure out what context our audience has, and so we generally jump abruptly to a subject without enough context to understand what we’re talking about (I think this is a theory of mind sort of thing). My husband basically had to train me not to do this when we met, because I’d just jump from subject to subject and the connection would be clear to me, but not to him because I hadn’t filled him in on how my mind had got from here to there. For me, this extends to technical subjects as well, but my kid is actually quite good at explaining math (and only math!) bearing in mind what context her audience has or needs (which is another factor which makes me think her version of Asperger’s is somehow supercharging her math abilities, including math communication, at the expense of her non-math abilities).
I’m pretty good at nuance, which I mostly chalk down to a) what I’ve already referred to about my childhood meaning I got an intensive course on figuring out subtle cues in my mom’s emotions, and b) reading a lot (a LOT) of fiction as a child, which helped a lot with figuring that out. My kid, on the other hand, stopped reading fiction a few years ago, so I have no idea if/when she’ll ever learn that stuff, although we do talk about these things sometimes explicitly.
Thank you for posting this – this was very educational for me.
Our experience didn’t involve regression. We knew from an early age that she was different, and by 18 months our caregiver was telling us that she seemed different and suggested autism. (I didn’t think she did, because the way she was acting was so similar to how I acted as a kid.) She was behind socially and emotionally at that point, but not in a way I thought was super concerning. And then she just… she would progress, but at a slow enough rate that she kept getting further behind, and also it became more clear that her deficits were more so than what mine had been as a kid. Her daycare noticed she never talked and had her evaluated for selective mutism (which she didn’t have). Then she went to a different school for transitional kindergarten and within a few months they were asking us to test for ASD and we took the ADOS-2. But we never had anything that I would characterize as regression, and I was watching because of what our caregiver had said.
I am absolutely with you there. Frankly, I think that stuff usually IS a thinly disguised attack, under a screen of ‘boys will be boys’ plausible deniability.
Last team sports I played were when I was forced to in PE class in secondary (high) school.
Yes, indeed. Drives my wife mad. I in turn find her much too suspicious of other people’s intentions, I can’t avoid that feeling, even though I know that she is more often right than not. But I am sometimes right in my judgements too. It is never easy and straight forward.
and I managed to avoid that with a medical certificate at the age of 14 or 15. I believe now with hindsight that my sports teacher understood and did not dig into that “certificate” (it was for “allergies”, where I only had mild hay fewer in spring). I think he saved me from a lot of unhappiness and bullying.
There is a funny meme about that. Damn, I can’t find it, but it’s something like:
Me playing with my autistic child before we were both diagnosed with autism:
“Hey, I know, let’s spin around in circles, won’t that be fun? Yes, let’s sort our blocks by size and color!”
I don’t think I have my son’s genius for color, but I do appreciate a nice sorting of objects. I admit I’m pretty complicit in his play style. It seems sensible to me.
I think the reason my son was missed and some people still miss it is that he’s highly verbal. For a long time I thought his language was just fine because he knew all his colors and dinosaurs and planets etc and I hadn’t really sat down and realized that the vast majority of his language was either repetition or rote memorization- very limited pragmatic speech, which is an easy subtlety to miss when your child is constantly talking.
And I think when people meet my son, they expect a nonverbal stereotype. They don’t expect this excited, warm personality vocalizing everything he sees. He is incredibly charismatic. It’s like having my own personal sunshine.
She doesn’t read that much in general, and when she does read she prefers to read nonfiction, which she does find pretty interesting. Probably because fiction is about people. (Even when she did read it, she was much more likely to read books about either animals – the Warriors series was a big hit – or plot-heavy fantasy, or both.) But she’s not totally against reading fiction or anything, and she does read it when assigned for school, it’s just that she consistently seems to prioritize other things in her free time.
It’s sad to me, as both my husband and I are huge fiction readers (in fact, one of the ways we bonded when we first started dating was over science fiction and fantasy books, and we still love that he introduced me to Lois McMaster Bujold’s books), but also she’s her own person and she can like different things. Ironically, my parents always hated that I read science fiction because they thought it wasn’t as useful and applicable as nonfiction!
Awwww, he sounds so great. My son also has a lot of charisma and sounds a lot like your second paragraph. (I call him my neurotypical child but I’m starting to have doubts about him… he’s definitely not nearly as pronounced as my daughter, though, even if he does turn out to be neuroatypical.)
My daughter is also highly verbal and not just repetition or rote memorization, but she has always thought about talking as a direct way to either give or receive factual information. All the other ways people generally use speech that involve more nuance or subtextual cues, like small talk and/or in-group bonding and/or sharing opinions and/or having fun together… these are completely lost on her.
This is what I think is meant by “pragmatic speech.” Stuff like what it would take to initiate or sustain a conversation. My son answers factual questions very well, and initiates speech when he wants something - or wants to know something, but I don’t think he realizes the purpose of speech beyond those things.
You’re a Bujold fan too? I’ve always looked forward to the day my son asks, “How did I get my name?” And I will say, “Read these fifteen books to find out.”
Oh, yes, of course you’re right. I got confused by the mention of repetition, I think. Anyway, yeah, that’s my kid too. She’s got to the point now, as a young teenager, where she now understands why she might want to talk to me about things that aren’t facts, but will rarely talk to other kids, and she definitely has not got to a place of understanding with why she might want to listen to someone else talk about something that’s not immediately interesting to her.
I’m a Bujold fan too, thanks to my husband! At the time we were living a couple of hours apart and he’d come visit on weekends, and he would bring me a Vorkosigan book every time he visited. I started with Shards of Honor which was fine, and I thought the first few were fine, and then by the time we were at Brothers in Arms or so, I was like, …can you start bringing two a week? Maybe three?
I suspect that you are right about this with the significant difference (from me and my ilk) is that most guys can “take it” and I basically can’t.
I was in the military until ten years ago and fitness, with a heavy emphasis on team sports, was encouraged. I think the last time I was in any sort of team sport was 20 years ago. Notwithstanding that, I still work hard a maintaining fitness, albeit through individual pursuits such as cycling, walking, and jogging. Now that I can, I will avoid team sports for the rest of my life and will probably drift towards some form of hermitage.
As I understand it, Autistics share something in common with people suffering from ADD/ADHD…senses dialed up to 11.
Not that sufferers can’t pay attention, but that they are inundated with sensory overload…and don’t have the choice which one stimulus to focus in on.
Imagine a student in class, trying to listen to how to diagram a sentence or calculate a square root…and the student experiences a glut of over-information.
The temperature of the seat they’re sitting on.
The buzzing of the flourescent lamps above their head.
The smell of cedar wood in the pencil they’re holding.
The whispers between other students in the back.
The color of the delivery van driving down the street, visible through the classroom window.
ALL of these stimuli EQUALLY SCREAMING OUT for your immediate attention.
There are medications like ritalin and adderall which help mitigate attention deficit symptoms.
Do any of these meds help Autistics?
Alcohol, yes. It’s very helpful for social anxiety, which is almost inevitable when you have objectively bad social skills. As a bonus, it to some extent excuses doing/saying stupid things. Also enabled me to enjoy going to clubs and parties that I would otherwise have missed out on or suffered through.
That sounds really good. My daughter hasn’t shown any sign of nerdy interests yet, but if she does end up having social problems I must find something like this to send her to. Whatever does interest her and might allow her to bond with people. I’m really worried about sending her to school because I had a bad experience and hated it so much, but I should try not to be. She isn’t me, and I think most people at least somewhat enjoy school?
I don’t know - sometimes I’ll say something and realise immediately that it came out wrong, other times… I realise someone is offended or has taken a dislike to me, and have no idea why. But the things I’d most like to change are awkward silences in 1-to-1 conversations, and knowing when to talk in groups (or perhaps you are meant to somehow signal you want to talk, because there never seems to be a gap!)
Making up phrases to use in response to common questions is something I do. Maybe I should do it more. I also plan what to say before telephone calls, if I absolutely can’t avoid them. For some reason my mind seems to go blank if I have to call a stranger.
I don’t think I have that. I do dislike cities, but it only starts to bother me after spending all day surrounded by crowds.
As for going blank, I apparently look quite miserable when I’m lost in thought or otherwise have a neutral expression, and people fairly often ask me what’s wrong. But it does mean I don’t get pestered in public, which is nice.
Depends on the person, I guess. I tend to assume people are sincere, and I’m more likely to pick up on joking from the context (can’t plausibly be serious) than manner. Also more likely to miss cues when I’m not paying attention, even if it should have been obvious. People I know well are easier to read, and I can often tell when they are lying from voice and body language - and not consciously interpreted, either.
I definitely miss a lot of social subtext: something that perennially surprises me is hearing people criticise and attack someone who they seem to get on well with, and are nice to to their face. It’s really uncomfortable to witness.
I also have the opposite problem @raspberry_hunter mentioned: I struggle to know where to start when talking about something or explaining a problem, and often omit important context (this has also likely been a problem on these boards, judging by how often people seem to misunderstand what I’m saying). I think my brain is bad at modeling or keeping track of what other people know/don’t know.
Never happened to me. I love learning, so had no trouble focusing and absorbing information during the times the teacher was actually teaching. Trying to get an essay written, or pay a bill, on the other hand… sometimes I find a To Do list I made years ago, and I still haven’t done the majority of the things on it.
To add to this, people with ADHD often have the inability to prioritize the way most people can. Their brain has essentially been emotionally hijacked by whatever feels the most urgent at the time. Where a NT person’s brain would be able to say, “I can set this aside and deal with it later” the ADHD brain remains fixated on the emotionally compelling thing.
ADHD isn’t an inability to pay attention. It’s an inability to regulate attention. Chances are the person with ADHD is going to be focusing really hard… On the wrong thing. Sometimes we can focus for hours and hours and hours on the wrong thing. Although the word “focusing” implies effort, which it at least not the case for me. I’m effortlessly carried away by whatever interests me.
There’s a very good book that explains the way emotions work in the ADHD brain, it’s called Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD.
It talks a lot about comorbid disorders and it’s the first time I ever heard a story like mine, being a relatively quiet, spacey girl who excelled in school only to have everything fall apart during college. We are frequently missed and we are a dime a dozen.
Oh, yeah! The key to this is a) questions! which I made a comment about above:
and b) already knowing something about the person, what Older Child’s therapist calls a “people file” on people (that you know, of course), and mining that for questions. This can be done ahead of time if you know you’re going to see the person, although often actually seeing them, or something they say, jogs my memory. So for example I saw a nice older couple today that I don’t see that often, so I asked them what they had been up to, how their kids and grandkids were doing, what they were doing for Christmas, how their new church was coming (as they’d told us on a previous visit that they’d changed churches), and then they mentioned their cat and I realized I’d forgotten to ask about their cat, which I then did. Which is a combination of more general questions and people-file questions.
There’s also the art of the followup question, which is something I’ve gotten better at over time (though I’m still not great), mostly through practice and through watching other people do it and taking notes on the sorts of followup questions they asked, so I’m not sure I have specific pieces of advice on that. So, like, when my friend’s kid mentioned the advanced math class she was taking, I asked her how she found the problems, how it compared to the previous class she’d taken (which is reputed to be quite difficult), what she was going to take next year, etc. This was a case where I had a lot of questions and followup questions ready – some of which I already knew the answer to (from previous talking to my friend), but it helped the conversation to play along that I didn’t in fact know. (That is a trick I learned from a college friend, btw – I can’t remember what we were talking about, but I was puzzled by something someone else had asked: “Doesn’t X know the answer to that?” and my college friend looked at me and said, “Probably, but you know how sometimes it helps the conversation if you don’t let on that you know…” and I was like, no, I didn’t know that… but I do now.)
A third thing is the art of having specific opinions, which I’m really not great at, but continue to practice. I’ve noticed that people who are good at social skills don’t always just agree with the other person, but will sometimes make points that add something to what the other person said. I’m not saying this very well, but the example I think of is friend A who is building a house and was showing friend B and I the plans (at different times while both of us were visiting). When friend A showed the plans to me, I was like, “Oh, that looks great!” which isn’t bad social skills, but I noticed friend B said things like “I like the way you’re dealing with the sloped ground in the back,” and “Hmm, do you think that the kitchen and dining room might be too far away from each other?” B wasn’t saying these things in a critical way or anything, but they furthered the conversation in a way that “That looks great!” doesn’t.
All of these are things (besides what my college friend told me) I’ve been able to figure out through watching how other people avoid awkward silences and using my pattern-recognition skills It has been kind of a trip now that my daughter is with her social skills therapist (we just started with her) and have the therapist counsel her to do all these things that I eventually figured out. (I’m not sure how much it’s helping, as kiddo doesn’t seem to want to do many of them, but at least she knows the theory earlier than I did…)
Hmm. I haven’t thought about this as much. I think it’s that whenever you have something to say you just kind of break in – which is hard sometimes because one is socialized as a child to not interrupt. There’s sort of a fine balance between interrupting the flow for something not related (which is what my kids do all the time) and coming in just at the tail end of another comment with another comment that’s related.
Same here. For some reason it’s much more difficult for me to do a phone call than speak to someone face to face. I think because there’s sort of an added pressure to get everything done and put in all the context within the space of the phone call (it’s even worse if I have to leave a message), whereas there’s a little more leeway and time face to face. But planning out what to say really helps me.
I’m kind of late on this as the thread was proceeding much faster than I had time to keep up for the last couple of months. However, this pruning thing is really interesting to me as my transition from “normal” to “different” coincided with my progression from public school grade 2 to grade 3, which also accompanied a family relocation and change of schools. Up to and including grade 2 I never felt socially different or dysfunctional. As soon as I switched schools I became permanently “on the outside looking in” and feeling as though I had to second (and third) guess everything.
One challenge for me, however, is that troubleshooting is compromised by the fact that I had a dysfunctional upbringing with varying levels of low to medium level toxicity and fear. So it’s always difficult to attribute these things to one specific, discrete cause.
Whereas I, a guy, feel like a have something of a woman’s brain, but that may be simply a function of my inability to fit in “with the guys” in team sports or other competitive scenarios because of my inability to properly interpret normal social things.
I, also a guy, absolutely hate that ‘boys will be boys’ crap. Though I don’t believe I misinterpret it: I think I read it quite correctly as dominance/aggression behaviour.
Wouldn’t say this implies any kind of woman’s brain though. I’m pretty sure a lot of women have a similar kind of social pecking order?
