Uncategorized – Page 25 – Real Social Skills

Nonviolent Communication can hurt people

July 13, 2014June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

People who struggle interpersonally, who seem unhappy, or who get into a lot of conflicts are often advised to adopt the approach of Nonviolent Communication.

This is often not a good idea. Nonviolent Communication is an approach based on refraining from seeming to judge others, and instead expressing everything in terms of your own feelings. For instance, instead of “Don’t be such an inconsiderate jerk about leaving your clothes around”, you’d say “When you leave your clothing around, I feel disrespected.”. That approach is useful in situations in which people basically want to treat each other well but have trouble doing so because they don’t understand one another’s needs and feelings. In every other type of situation, the ideology and methodology of Nonviolent Communication can make things much worse.

Nonviolent Communication can be particularly harmful to marginalized people or abuse survivors. It can also teach powerful people to abuse their power more than they had previously, and to feel good about doing so. Non-Violent Communication has strategies that can be helpful in some situations, but it also teaches a lot of anti-skills that can undermine the ability to survive and fight injustice and abuse.

For marginalized or abused people, being judgmental is a necessary survival skill. Sometimes it’s not enough to say “when you call me slurs, I feel humiliated” – particularly if the other person doesn’t care about hurting you or actually wants to hurt you. Sometimes you have to say “The word you called me is a slur. It’s not ok to call me slurs. Stop.” Or “If you call me that again, I’m leaving.” Sometimes you have to say to yourself “I’m ok, they’re mean.” All of those things are judgments, and it’s important to be judgmental in those ways.

You can’t protect yourself from people who mean you harm without judging them. Nonviolent Communication works when people are hurting each other by accident; it only works when everyone means well. It doesn’t have responses that work when people are hurting others on purpose or without caring about damage they do. Which, if you’re marginalized or abused, happens several times a day. NVC does not have a framework for acknowledging this or responding to it.

In order to protect yourself from people who mean you harm, you have to see yourself as having the right to judge that someone is hurting you. You also have to be able to unilaterally set boundaries, even when your boundaries are upsetting to other people. Nonviolent Communication culture can teach you that whenever others are upset with you, you’re doing something wrong and should change what you do in order to meet the needs of others better. That’s a major anti-skill. People need to be able to decide things for themselves even when others are upset.

Further, NVC places a dangerous degree of emphasis on using a very specific kind of language and tone. NVC culture often judges people less on the content of what they’re saying than how they are saying it. Abusers and cluelessly powerful people are usually much better at using NVC language than people who are actively being hurt. When you’re just messing with someone’s head or protecting your own right to mess with their head, it’s easy to phrase things correctly. When someone is abusing you and you’re trying to explain what’s wrong, and you’re actively terrified, it’s much, much harder to phrase things in I-statements that take an acceptable tone.

Further, there is *always* a way to take issue with the way someone phrased something. It’s really easy to make something that’s really about shutting someone up look like a concern about the way they’re using language, or advice on how to communicate better. Every group I’ve seen that valued this type of language highly ended up nitpicking the language of the least popular person in the group as a way of shutting them up.

Short version: Be careful with Nonviolent Communication. I-statements have their uses in some contexts, but NVC is not the complete solution to conflict or communication that it presents itself as. NVC can be particularly dangerous for people with communication disabilities, and for people who have trouble setting boundaries.

Restraint is violent

July 8, 2014June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Content warning: This post is about violent physical restraint of kids. Proceed with caution.

Anonymous said:

In what cases is it okay to restrain a kid? Is it okay to pin a kid on the floor if they try to hit you or throw something at you?

realsocialskills said:

I’m guessing that you are not a police officer or emergency responder, and that you’re asking this in the context of either parenting, childcare, or education.

In those settings, it is never ok. (Edited to add: it’s never ok in the context of mental health treatment either.) Sometimes it’s the least bad response when things go very badly wrong, but it’s never ok, and it can’t be part of someone’s plan.

I asked a friend who has more experience than I do caring for disabled children (I’m assuming the kids in this scenario are disabled because people generally assume as a matter of course that it’s not ok to treat nondisabled children this way), and she said this:

Sometimes mistakes are made and situations escalate to a point where a restraint is the least harmful option. That doesn’t mean it’s not harmful. That doesn’t mean it’s okay. When that happens, it is really important to acknowledge the harm that has transpired and to go back over the incident and events leading up to it and figure out what went wrong and how we can prevent it happening again. (quote ends here)

In the same way that, if a kid pinned another kid to the floor, you’d consider that unacceptable and plan to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s even more serious when an adult does that.

It is never ok to put restraint into someone’s care plan. It is never ok to see it as a solution. Restraint is a failure, not a solution.

Restraining someone is an act of physical violence. Pinning someone to the floor is a particularly invasive kind of physical violence. It’s a brutal and physically dangerous act.

Violence against kids counts as violence. Violence against people who can’t talk counts as violence. Violence against people who are physically aggressive counts as violence.

It is never ok to restrain someone as a punishment. Or a consequence. Or to teach them a lesson. Or to prevent them from getting away with something. Or to send the message that their actions are unacceptable. Or to make them calm down. Or anything remotely like that.

If you’re coming here looking for absolution, I’m not giving it to you. If you’ve pinned someone to the floor and you’re wondering if it was ok, no, it wasn’t, and you need to figure out a way to solve the problem so that you don’t do that again. It doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person or incapable of supporting the children in your care, but it does mean there’s a problem and you need to find a better solution.

If you’re a teenager or a kid, and an adult responsible for taking care of you pinned you to the floor and you’re trying to figure out if it was ok, no, it wasn’t. I’m sorry that happened to you. It shouldn’t have. No one should do that to you. No matter what you did, that wasn’t ok. If you’re violent and you hurt other kids or adults, that’s a problem you need to work on solving, but it doesn’t mean it’s ok for adults to pin you to the floor. They should be finding better ways to help you.

For more information, check out Stop Hurting Kids: Join the campaign to end restraint and seclusion abuse in schools. In particular, this fact sheet about restraint and seclusion is a good place to start.

You don’t owe anyone a platform

July 7, 2014June 11, 2021 Real Social Skills

Two basic facts about the internet:

Unmoderated comment forums are terrible. They get overrun with trolls, low quality content, and off topic remarks.
If you moderate a comment forum, angry people will argue with you and accuse you of censorship

Moderating isn’t censorship. Moderating is deciding what kind of community or forum or page you want to build, and making sure things that are posted that are consistent with your objectives.

Everyone has the right to say whatever they want – but they don’t have the right to make you say whatever they want, or a right to make you publish whatever they say.

You have to right to decide what to publish, and what kind of speech to allow in a forum you’re moderating. That’s not censorship. That’s building a high-quality platform.

People who want to participate in a site that works differently are free to go elsewhere, or to build their own platform. They’re not entitled to yours.

Moderation is necessary to building a good platform, and you can’t do it without making some people angry. People being angry doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It just means they’re angry.

Stop romanticizing neurotypicality

July 2, 2014June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

When I hear people, autistic or otherwise, talk about autistic social difficulties, they often say things along the lines of:

“You and I just know all of these rules intuitively, but people with autism find them mysterious and have to learn them explicitly”
“All of these rules that you neurotypicals pick up naturally are very very difficult for those of us on the spectrum”

There is a myth people who aren’t autistic just automatically know social rules, and that it’s only autistic people who need to put serious effort into learning them.

It’s not true. Neurotypical people have to learn all kinds of things on purpose. For instance:

In business:

When people are applying to schools, or first learning how to apply to jobs, they are advised to do practice interviews. This is not special advice for the disabled; it’s standard advice for everyone
Colleges have career centers aimed at teaching students how to get jobs
Ask A Manager is a popular column about social skills for the workplace, for every role including management, employees, and job seekers. It’s not aimed specifically at people with disabilities, most of the articles are written assuming a neurotypical audience and most of the questions are asked by people without disabilities
Fuck you, pay me is a popular talk about gaining the social skills to insist that your freelancing clients pay you for your work
Everyone, not just autistic people, needs to learn a lot of skills which may or may not come naturally, in order to succeed in businesses

In personal relationships:

Captain Awkward is a popular advice blog focused on personal relationships and boundaries. Many subscribers are autistic, but many are not, and it is not a disability-focused blog.
Miss Manners is a long-running column about manners. She has been printed in newspapers for decades and has written several books. She is popular because a lot of neurotypical people feel like they don’t know the rules and want someone to tell them the rules
Scarleteen, a popular sex ed site, has a lot of information on things like dating and relationships and how to talk about safer sex, because no one is born knowing those things

In the area of disability:

A good percentage of people, autistic or otherwise, lack basic social skills needed to respectfully interact with people with disabilities
For instance, they don’t know how to notice when repetition is communication, or how to listen to folks whose speech is unusual
Or that it’s rude to take chairs away from wheelchair and mobility scooter users
Or it it’s seriously invasive to touch mobility equipment without permission
Or how to be honest with disabled children in therapy
Or even more generally, how to notice and respond appropriately to the experiences of disabled peers

It’s true that there are many specific social difficulties that autistic people often have that people who lack autism generally do not have. For instance:

Receptive body language and tones of voice:

Some autistic people have trouble understanding body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice
This makes it hard to interact with people who assume as a matter of course that everyone understands what their body language and tones are saying, and that if you’re not responding, it’s because you’re choosing to ignore it
Autistic people who have this problem have to learn strategies for compensating for it
There are different approaches that some of us take (some people can explicitly learn how body language works by studying it, some people can learn to pick up on different cues, some people can learn how to guess based on context what someone might mean and ask explicitly, some people can move most of their interactions to text where it doesn’t matter, etc etc)

Language

Some autistic people have trouble with receptive language, and have trouble understanding what people say
Some of us have trouble with expressive language, and can’t say the socially expected thing in the socially expected way even if we know what it is
Some autistic people are unable to produce tones of voice or modulate volume in socially expected ways (some autistic people can learn this through practice/therapy; some can’t.)
Language difficulties also can interfere with social skills acquisition because people learn these skills and expected modes of behavior through practice, and people whose receptive and expressive language is atypical tend to be excluded from contexts in which most people practice and learn these things
Similarly to reading body language, different autistic people learn different ways of dealing with this.

Movement

Some autistic people have trouble with voluntary motion, and may not be able to do some expected social gestures or movement even if they understand the rules perfectly
Some autistic people get stuck in situations in which it is considered socially important to keep moving (eg: in line, in a movie theater, at the end of a ride)
Some autistic people need to move in ways that are socially stigmatized in order to function
Some autistic people do not have the motor control (or cognitive ability, there are several reasons this can happen) necessary to produce speech, and communicate using AAC devices, RPM, books of picture symbols, or FC. (Most neurotypical people (and probably most autistic people as well) lack the social skills necessary to interact respectfully with people who communicate this way. This creates a social difficulty that gets blamed on lack of speech, but which is actually caused by lack of respect.)

Sensory issues:

Many autistic people are unable to tolerate the noises, sounds, smells, lights, or crowds in places that most people like to socialize
Some autistic people can’t tolerate being outdoors for long periods of time
This complicates socializing or business networking in a world that expects social interactions to take place in those kinds of settings

There are any number of other examples of ways that autistic people have to learn skills that neurotypical people usually do not have to learn. But that doesn’t mean that we are uniquely deficient, or that “having to learn social rules” is an autistic thing.

No one is born knowing the rules. Everyone has to learn the rules, and everyone has to learn some of the rules explicitly. Everyone learns how to interact with others over a period of years, and no one is good at it without practice. For neurotypical people, the need to learn social skills is treated as normal, expected, and honorable.

For autistic people, our need to learn social skills is treated as disgusting, defective, and in need of normalizing therapy.

People teach us that we autistic people, specifically, are bad at people and interaction and that this needs to be corrected. It’s not true. We are not uniquely bad at social interaction. We have specific needs to learn specific things.

Some of the social skills we have to learn are coping mechanisms for being heavily stigmatized. We have to learn these skills because something is wrong with society, not because something is wrong with us.

There are skills we have to learn differently because of physical differences between autistic and neurotypical people, but that is not something we are missing either. They treat us like we are neurotypical with missing pieces that need to be filled in, but this is not true. We are a different shape, and that’s ok.

(And there are also social skills that come more easily to autistic people than neurotypical people. Autism is not solely composed of difficulties.)

Everyone needs to learn how to interact with others, and it is a lifelong process. The ways neurotypical people learn social interactions are respected. The ways autistic and other neurodivergent people learn to interact with others should also be respected. The fact that autistic social learning is stigmatized is a problem with society, not autistic people.

Keeping perspective in a world that tries to take it away

June 18, 2014June 11, 2021 Real Social Skills

When you’re marginalized:

No matter how nice you are, people will call you mean
No matter how justified your anger is, people will tell you that you’re overreacting and making a big deal out of nothing
No matter how polite you are, people will call you rude
No matter how well you explain yourself, people will accuse you of speaking without thinking
No matter how closely you stick to the facts, people will accuse you of letting your emotions make you irrational

This post is not about that, exactly. It’s about one consequence of living in a world where people treat you this way. You have to grow a fairly thick skin, and learn to disregard a lot of mean-spirited and unwarranted attacks on you.

The need to protect yourself this way comes at a price. The thick skin you have to develop to function at all can make it hard to tell when you actually *are* doing something wrong. And sometimes you will be. Because everyone is mean sometimes, Everyone overreacts some of the time. Everyone is rude sometimes, Everyone sometimes believes things based on what they emotionally desire to be true rather than the facts of the situation. Everyone gets outraged at things that don’t warrant it. Everyone is cruel sometimes.

And when everyone tells you that you’re doing awful things whether or not it’s true, it’s really hard to tell when you actually are doing wrong.

It’s important to cultivate friendships with people you can trust to care whether or not you are doing the right thing. Who share your values and won’t use false accusations of being cruel to shut you up, and won’t try to undermine your struggles against marginalization. Who will genuinely care about both the success of your work, and whether or not you are treating yourself and others well.

And to have friends who can trust you to do the same. It doesn’t mean that you always have to agree, or that you can’t ever do something your friend thinks is wrong. But it does mean that you listen, and take into account what one another thinks.

One of the awful things oppressors do to us is to make examining our actions difficult by flooding us with a lot of mean-spirited false criticism. It’s important that we find a way to counter that.

When you don’t hide

June 14, 2014June 11, 2021 Real Social Skills

Some people are bullies.

Many bullies target people who have apparent stigmatized characteristics.

If you choose to stop hiding a stigmatized part of who you are, some people will be actively mean to you who weren’t mean before.

For example:

If you are gay, coming out will make some homophobic bullies more interested in hurting you
If you are autistic, stimming in public will make some ableist bullies more interested in hurting you
If you wear clothing associated with a stigmatized religion, some bigoted bullies will be more interested in hurting you

This is not your fault, but some people will blame you. Some people will tell you that you brought it on yourself by being visible. You didn’t. Bullying happens because mean people choose to hurt others.

You were already getting hurt by bullies, because hiding hurts too. The way bullies hurt you when you are more visible is a different kind of hurt. Both are equally real.

Some people in some situation find hiding more bearable. Some people in some situations find being visible more bearable. Both are valid. It’s a personal choice. And the consequences are never your fault.