Category: Uncategorized

Listening to folks whose speech is unusual

Real Social Skills

This happens a lot, especially for autistic folks with a particular cognitive configuration:

  • An autistic person says something in the most straightforward way they can think of
  • But it’s far from the way most people say it
  • And it doesn’t occur to other people that they’re being direct
  • It’s seen as either the autistic person not understanding something, being presumptuous, or being hilarious

For instance:

  • Alice and Nancy walk into a cafeteria, which is overflowing with different food options
  • Alice (wanting a particular kind of food and not knowing how to find it): Where’s the food?
  • Nancy: Umm, everywhere?

In this example, Nancy thought Alice was just being annoying or funny and didn’t understand what she was trying to communicate. This would have been better:

  • Alice: Where’s the food?
  • Nancy: Which food do you mean?
  • Alice: Food!
  • Nancy: Are you looking for something in particular?
  • Alice: Food!
  • Nancy: Your favorite food?
  • Alice: My favorite food! Chocolate pie! Burger?
  • Nancy: They have both of those things. We will see them when we go through the line.

Or:

  • Nathan is discussing politics with his son, Arthur
  • Nathan: What does the president do?
  • Arthur: Important stuff. Not like you do.
  • Nathan: You don’t think what I do is important?!
  • (Nathan, telling the story later, uses it as an example of how kids have no filter)
  • What Arthur actually meant was along the lines of “The president is a public figure with a lot of power, and everyone pays a lot of attention to what he says; that’s really different from how other people’s jobs work”.

This would have been better:

  • Arthur: Important stuff. Not like you do.
  • Nathan: What kind of important stuff?
  • Arthur: My fellow Americans…
  • Nathan: Important like speeches?
  • Arthur: Yes. Speeches on TV.
  • Nathan: I don’t make speeches on TV.
  • Arthur: You go to the office.
  • etc etc

Short version: When autistic people communicate things, sometimes it sounds strange or unusual in ways that are often misinterpreted. Be careful about assuming that they’re being dismissive, being cute, or joking; be careful to listen. Scroll up for some concrete examples.

Perspective

Real Social Skills

You don’t have to love yourself to be worthy of love.

You don’t have to love yourself to be capable of loving others.

You don’t have to think you’re beautiful to be worthy of respect.

You don’t have to have perfect self esteem to do worthwhile things.

If you don’t feel good about yourself, it’s worth working on that. (Including, sometimes, by changing some things you feel bad about). But don’t make self esteem or body positivity into yet another stick to beat yourself with.

You matter, no matter how bad you feel about yourself.

Getting people to explain things

Real Social Skills

If you don’t understand something, it helps to say so explicitly. 

One phrase that helps is “I don’t understand; can you try using different words?”

That helps because you’re saying that:

  • You don’t understand
  • You want to understand
  • The things you’re saying are not arguments or responses, they are requests for clarification
  • If they explain in different words, you might understand

Even if all of that is obvious to you, it’s not necessarily obvious to the person you’re talking to. Often, people do not consider the possibility that what they are saying might be confusing, even when they are entirely willing to explain differently when you ask.

People with disabilities learn and think

Real Social Skills

People with disabilities are capable of learning things on purpose, because they’re interested in what they’re learning. That’s true of people with all kinds and degrees of disability. Everyone cares about things, everyone thinks, any everyone learns.

And yet, education for people with disabilities often starts from the assumption that disabled folks have no intrinsic motivation to learn. That, before you can start to teach anything, you have to identify a reinforcer for the target behavior. And that it should be the same across subjects, and that it needn’t have any relation to what you’re trying to teach.

So, instead of starting by teaching reading, you might start by identifying an effective reinforcer, and using it to reinforce reading behavior. For example, stickers. Or giving a jellybean each time someone reads a page. Or high fives. 

In a technical sense, finding a book that someone enjoys is also, according to behaviorist theory, finding an effective reinforcer for reading behavior. But it’s not at all the same as using an unrelated reinforcer to teach reading.

Finding a book that interests a person you’re teaching to read communicates why reading is worthwhile. Using an unrelated reinforcer to get them to cooperate with reading lessons may work, but it doesn’t communicate the value of reading. In fact, it actively demonstrates that you’re assuming that they will not value reading and that it’s not worth trying to convince them that reading is worthwhile. 

The same is true of communication lessons. Identifying a reinforcer and using it to reinforce speaking behavior can get someone to cooperate with rote speech lessons, but it can’t teach them what symbolic communication is. Figuring out what someone wants to say, and giving them a reliable way to say it, can. So can making sure that you listen to communication someone already has, and making it clear that you respect them. (If you refuse to learn their language, you’re teaching them that their communication doesn’t matter. Which is the opposite of helpful.) Behaviorist approaches something accomplish that, but only as a side effect. You can teach communication better if you teach it directly, rather than as a side effect of reinforcing speaking or pointing behavior. 

People with disabilities care about things, and want to learn. The assumption that we don’t is deeply degrading. 

On clear assignments

Real Social Skills

So, this happens a lot:

  • A teacher assigns a paper in very vague terms
  • And then when students ask for clarification, they refuse to give it
  • And think of this as providing students with freedom
  • But actually have something in mind and are upset when students don’t do it

For instance:

  • Student: How long should the paper be?
  • Teacher: As long as it needs to be.
  • This isn’t a helpful answer, because length is an important parameter.
  • A better answer would be something like “On the order of 3-5 pages, but it’s ok if it’s a bit longer or shorter”.

Or: 

  • Student: What should I write about?
  • Teacher: Something that interests you about the topic
  • This is an unhelpful answer because a student who says something like that is asking for help. 
  • You probably have a range in mind of what is and is not on topic, and it might not be as obvious to your students as it is to you
  • A better answer would be: It’s a fairly open assignment. I’m always surprised by the ideas students come up with that I hadn’t thought of, so I don’t like to be too prescriptive about topics. Would you like help figuring out a topic that will work for you?

Or:

  • Teacher (in response to students asking for clarification): There are no right or wrong answers
  • This is unhelpful, because there probably *is* a range of what you will consider correct.
  • Even if it doesn’t involve taking a particular position, there are attributes a correct answer will have, and it’s helpful to be explicit about them
  • If you’ve not given this kind of exam before, it might be hard for you to know in advance what a correct answer will look like
  • But it’s something you should be paying attention to as you get more experience at grading
  • If you want students to explicitly reference assigned material, say so. If you want them to bring in more outside material, say so. If you want them to consider specific positions, say say.
  • This may be obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to all of your students (including students who are entirely capable of doing the assignment the way you want if you tell them what it is)

Short version: When students ask for clarification of an assignment, help them to understand what it is you’re assigning. Scroll up for some specific examples.

The last word isn’t valuable

Real Social Skills

So, I’ve seen this play out in a lot of blogs:

  • Someone says something controversial
  • Someone gets angry, and trashes their post
  • This goes back and forth for a long time
  • Neither side actually wants to talk to the other
  • (And they may both repeatedly tell one another to stop replying)
  • But both sides keep replying, because they want to get the last word
  • And they feel like if they let something go without a response, they’ve lost somehow

Thing is, the last word isn’t actually valuable. It doesn’t matter who replies last. It matters what’s true. If you’re right, you’re right whether or not you respond to what people say to you. If you’re wrong, replying one more time won’t make you any less wrong.

Chasing the last word just fills up your blog with views you don’t want on it, and fills up your attention with people you don’t actually want to talk to.

You can have much better conversations on your blog if you focus on talking to people you want to talk to. When you talk to people you respect who respect you, and when you listen to one another seriously, you can have amazing conversations.

This doesn’t mean form an echo chamber. This doesn’t mean only reblog people who think exactly like you. You can have very worthwhile interactions with people who disagree with you, even on really important things. That’s only possible if you’re both listening to one another and considering the points seriously, though. 

Instead of chasing the last word, chase content.

Optimism in the dark places

Real Social Skills

Sometimes, people who want to see themselves as optimistic say things like this to suffering people they encounter:

  • “Look on the bright side!”
  • “Cheer up!”
  • “It can’t be that bad!”
  • “It’s ok.”
  • “Smile, you’ll feel better!”
  • “You have so much to be grateful for.”

Sometimes people who say this kind of thing mean well, but it’s still degrading. It’s degrading because:

  • Sometimes things really are that bad
  • Refusing to acknowledge that doesn’t help anything
  • And when you try to insist to someone who is going through something awful that it can’t be as bad as they think, what you’re really doing is refusing to listen to them
  • Telling someone to shut up is neither kind nor optimistic

This is particularly the case if you’re talking to someone in a bad situation that is unlikely to get better, or which is at least unlikely to get better in the near future eg:

  • Someone who has a terminal illness
  • People who are facing systemic oppression of a kind that isn’t going to go away in their lifetime
  • Someone who is trapped in an abusive relationship they see no way out of

I think that there’s another kind of optimism that is much more helpful:

  • Acknowledge that things really are that bad
  • Don’t try to smooth them over
  • Identify things that make life worth living
  • Work on building and recognizing love (including, love people enough to acknowledge how bad things are without pressuring them to sanitize them for you)

Once the relief wears off

Real Social Skills

In Frozen, the main character accidentally injures her sister with her magic ice powers as a young child. In reaction, her parents teach her that she has to suppress and hide her powers at all costs in order to protect others. In a dramatic moment, she accidentally releases her powers in front of everyone. She gives up on concealing her powers, and makes dramatic and demonstrative use of of them. And, since it is a Disney movie, there is a song.

There’s a particular part of the song that I think is an important description of what it’s like to come to terms with difference:

It’s funny how some distance makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me can’t get to me at all.
Up here in the cold thin air I finally can breathe.
I know I left a life behind but I’m too relieved to grieve. (quote ends here)

When you first start coming to terms with a stigmatized difference and talking about it in public and accepting yourself, as first it’s mostly a relief.

At first, you’re too relieved to grieve or to notice the price you’re paying for living in the world as an openly disabled (or whatever else) person. The price for trying to be normal was so, so high, and when you give up on that, the relief of not paying that price anymore is huge. 

But the relief wears off. Gradually, you start to notice the price you pay for standing your ground. You’ve realize that you’ve left a life behind in order to stand your ground and be who you are unapologetically. And that some aspects of that life were good, and that you can’t get them back.

You’ve lost a lot, and that can be hard to take once it sets in and the relief wears off. Some of the losses are direct, concrete things, like people who won’t trust you around children, hire you, or talk to you anymore. Others are more ephemeral – like, giving up the hope that you’d ever have the kind of respect that those who live without stigma enjoy. There are a lot of things, and what they are exactly differs for everyone. But there are a lot of them, and coming to terms with that kind of loss hurts.

It is ok to grieve the things you left behind in order to accept yourself, hold ground, and be who you are openly. Grieving over this loss doesn’t mean that you’re backsliding in self acceptance. It just the price you pay for holding your ground often sucks, and sometimes that can loom very large. This is not your fault. 

Honor your grief. You shouldn’t have had to lose the things you’ve lost. It should have been yours by right. You should have been able to be who you are openly without losing all of that. It’s horrible that you have to make this choice. You don’t have to have a sunny attitude all the time; you can have grief and regret and sadness and still be ok and on the right path.

The price is high, and you never really stop paying it, but it’s worth it. You’re worth it. We’re worth it. We can stand together and hold ground and support one another. Know that others have been through the stage where the relief wears off and the grief sets in, and found that the pain is bearable and that we can support one another through it.

Laura Hershey’s book of ADAPT poetry “In The Way” helps.

You can only speak for yourself

Real Social Skills

You are not your child’s voice. You are not the voice of the voiceless. You are not anyone’s voice, except your own.

You can advocate for others, but you can only speak for yourself.

You can translate. You can guess. You can do lots of things. You can advocate.

But you are you. You are not your child. Or your student. Or your sister. No matter how well you understand them. No matter how much you love them. You are not them. You are you.

They have a perspective of their own, and it is not the same as yours. Whether or not they can articulate it, whether or not anyone knows what it is, they have a perspective that is wholly their own.

When you speak, you are speaking from your own perspective; that is the only perspective you *can* speak from. You can never get inside another person’s head; you can never share their perspective; you can never be their voice.

Make sure that you keep in mind that the person you care about exists as a person separate from you, and that they disagree with you about some things; probably even some really important things. (No one 100% agrees with another person about everything.). Do not speak as though you and they are essentially the same person, or as though they automatically agree with everything you think. They are real, and their perspective matters.

A post for men about creepy men

Real Social Skills

I wrote a post a while back about how some people are very good at getting away with doing intentionally creepy things by passing themselves off as just ~awkward~.

Recently, I noticed a particular pattern that plays out. While creeps can be any gender, there’s a gendered pattern by which creepy men get other men to help them be creepy:

  • A guy runs over the boundaries of women constantly
  • He makes them very uncomfortable and creeped out
  • But he doesn’t do that to guys, and
  • He doesn’t talk to guys about it in an unambiguous way, and
  • When he does it in front of guys, he finds a way to make it look deniable
  • And then some women complain to a man, maybe even a man in charge who is supposed to be responsible for preventing abuse in a space
  • and he has no idea what they are talking about, since he’s never the target or witness
  • And he’s had a lot of pleasant interactions with that guy
  • So he sympathizes with him, and thinks he must mean well but be have trouble with social skills
  • And then takes no action to get him to stop or to protect women
  • And so the group stays a place that is safe for predatory men, but not for the women they target

For example:

  • Mary, Jill, and Susan: Bill, Bob’s been making all of us really uncomfortable. He’s been sitting way too close, making innuendo after everything we say, and making excuses to touch us.
  • Bill: Wow, I’m surprised to hear that. Bob’s a nice guy, but he’s a little awkward. I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything by it. I’m not comfortable accusing him of something so serious from my position of authority.

What went wrong here?

  • Bill assumed that, if Bob was actually doing something wrong, he would have noticed.
  • Bill didn’t think he needed to listen to the women who were telling him about Bob’s creepy actions. He didn’t take seriously the possibility that they were right.
  • Bill assumed that women who were uncomfortable with Bob must be at fault; that they must be judging him too harshly or not understanding his awkwardness
  • Bill told women that he didn’t think that several women complaining about a guy was sufficient reason to think something was wrong
  • Bill assumed that innocently awkward men should not be confronted about inadvertantly creepy things they do, but rather women should shut up and let them be creepy

A rule of thumb for men:

  • If several women come to you saying that a man is being creepy towards them, assume that they are seeing something you aren’t
  • Listen to them about what they tell you
  • If you like the guy and have no idea what they’re talking about, that means that what he is doing is *not* innocent awkwardness.
  • If it was innocent awkwardness, he wouldn’t know how to hide it from other men
  • Men who are actually just awkward and bad at understanding boundaries also make *other men* uncomfortable
  • If a man is only making women uncomfortable but not men, that probably means he’s doing it on purpose
  • Take that possibility seriously, and listen to what women tell you about men

Short version: If you are a man, other men in your circle who are nice to you are creepy towards women. Don’t assume that if something was wrong that you would have noticed; creepy men are good at finding the lines of what other men will tolerate. Listen to women. They know better than you do whether a man is being creepy and threatening towards women; if they think something is wrong, listen and find out why. Don’t give predatory dudes who are nice to you cover to keep hurting women.