Real Social Skills

Making excuses

February 15, 2015June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

Can you explain the concept of excuses? People often get mad at me for “making excuses” when I mess up, but I’m just trying to explain the situation, and maybe diffuse their anger over my mistakes. I’m not trying to transfer the blame to someone else. I don’t understand the problem. Please help.

realsocialskills said:

Short version: You might get better results if you stop thinking of diffusing their anger as a goal.

Longer version:

Making excuses basically means doing something wrong, and attempting to prevent other people from taking it seriously. That can be in many forms:

Claiming that it wasn’t your fault the thing happened (even though it was)
Telling people that you’re not the kind of person who does that kind of thing (data they have is that you just did the thing. They get to decide what they think about that.)
Claiming that the thing wasn’t really a big deal (even though it was)
Stating or implying, through words or actions, that you expect there to be no consequences once you have explained (even consequences like people being annoyed with you)

eg:

Sue: Your dog just destroyed all of my mail. He ripped up my paycheck. This can’t happen again.
Brenda: Oh, I’m sorry, I’m really a responsible pet owner, I never do this kind of thing, it’s just my back was turned for a minute and my dog got out.

This is a bad response because:

Brenda’s dog just destroyed Sue’s mail.
Brenda is trying to make this a conversation about why Sue shouldn’t judge her
Sue has every right to be angry, and every right to have this affect her perception of Brenda

This would be a better approach:

Sue: Your dog just destroyed all of my mail. He ripped up my paycheck. This can’t happen again.
Brenda: I’m so sorry about that. I didn’t realize that the fence had termites, and my dog just ran right through it. We’re replacing the fence, and keeping the dog in while it’s being replaced. Is there a way I can help you fix things with the mail?

Sometimes you will be accused of making excuses when it’s not actually your fault. Eg:

Debra: Why is the logo a dinosaur? I wanted a potato.
Lucy: We discussed this, and you decided to go with the dinosaur. The contract says dinosaur logo.
Debra: You’re just making excuses. Make the logo right.

Or:

Jason: Why did you just call me a pistachio? Is that some sort of weird slur?
Fred: I was offering you a pistachio.
Jason: Don’t make excuses. It’s not ok to insult me like that.

I don’t know of any effective response in that situation. I wish I did.

If you’re talking to people who are basically reasonable, and you actually have made a mistake, this can be a good way to explain without sounding like you’re making excuses:

I’m sorry about this
This is how it happened
Here are the steps I’ll take to make it not happen again
Offering to fix what is fixable

eg:

I’m sorry that my dog ate your homework.
I didn’t know that dogs really did that, so I didn’t take precautions.
From now on, I will keep up the baby gate so he can’t get in to the room you do homework in.
I’m sorry about this – are you going to get in trouble at school? Can I help you recreate it, or would it help if I wrote a note?

An important component of taking responsibility for a mistake is accepting that people are going to have feelings about it, and that an apology isn’t always going to make them go away.

Let people feel the way they do about what you did. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean no one is allowed to still be upset with you, or that they are obligated to believe that you will do better in the future. It means that you’re acknowledging that you made a mistake and that the mistake is important and has consequences. Sometimes people are going to be upset about mistakes you make, and it’s important to learn how to handle that. If you try to use apologies as a cheat code to make them stop being upset, it’s likely to make them more upset.

Why I oppose ABA as a method of instruction

February 12, 2015June 10, 2021 Real Social Skills

Content warning: This is a post about ABA.

The primary reason I think ABA is irredeemable: ABA uses behavior modification as a primary method of instruction. I think that is inherently demeaning, counterproductive and dangerous.

ABA therapy relies on continuous extrinsic motivation, which means conditioning the person it’s being done to to comply with a lot of things that they’re actively unwilling to do for several hours a week over and over. It means making them do things that make no sense to them, over and over for many hours a week. That’s dangerous. It’s especially dangerous for people with disabilities who have complex communication needs.

It’s dangerous to make a kid do things that make no sense to them over and over and over while relying on extrinsic reinforcement. That teaches them that people in positions of power can do whatever they want to them, and that they have no right to protest or understand or influence things. ABA leaves people subject to it very, very vulnerable to abuse. Extreme conditioned obedience is dangerous, and it’s the most persistently reinforced behavior in ABA therapy. It’s generalized to other environments, and does not go away once therapy ends.

There’s also a few secondary problems with ABA, which are deeply embedded in the culture of the BACB:

The goals of therapy are often bad in themselves. Eg:

Teaching a kid not to stim
getting them to say a few words by rote
insisting on eye contact
making a kid spend hours and hours on facial expression flash cards at the expense of age appropriate academics

(For some good discussion of the issue of bad goals, see “Would You Accept this Behavior Towards a Non-Autistic Child?“ by an SLP specializing in AAC.)

The reinforcers are often unethical even when the goals have merit.

ABA depends on extrinsic motivation in order to make people subject to it cooperate.
This used to routinely involve pain and food deprivation, and sometimes still does.
(Neither is actually prohibited by the ethical guidelines of the BACB, although they do mildly discourage it).

Aversives have fallen somewhat out of favor in recent years, partly due to public outcry over them. That does not solve the problem, and a lot of common reinforcers are not much of an improvement.

ABA therapists talk about using things like bubbles, tickles and praise – but those things are not, in the long term, reliably sufficient to get anyone to comply with many hours a week of boring therapy.

What does work is taking everything a child (or adult) cares about, and making their access to it contingent on compliance in therapy. That’s an awful thing to do to someone, and it can seriously impair their ability to care about anything or communicate about anything. If you know that showing interest in something means it will be taken away, it’s going to be hard to show interest.

I think that’s inherent to this kind of therapy – ultimately, you have to either get intrinsic motivation or use really invasive extrinsic motivation. But even if that problem was solvable, I’d still be opposed to ABA as an educational method, because of the primary problem that behavior motivation is not defensible as a primary educational approach. Educational approaches should be about teaching, not about behavior modification.

Making reading assignments clear to students who use electronic formats

February 11, 2015June 10, 2021 Real Social Skills

When reading assignments are assigned in the form “Read pages 75-100 in the Book of Subject Relevance”, it creates a problem for students who use electronic formats such as Kindle or Bookshare. Those formats often do not include page numbers, and it can be difficult-to-impossible to know what to read just by seeing page numbers.

There’s a simple solution that allows students to do the assignment:

If you’re assigning a whole chapter, tell students which chapter you mean.
eg: “Read Chapter 3 in the Book of Subject Relevance (pages 75-100).
If you’re not assigning whole chapters, include the first and last sentence in the assignment.
This allows students to use the search function to find the place you’re talking about.
eg: “Read pages 75-100 in the Book of Subject Relevance. (From “I have a slightly plausible theory.” through “In conclusion, I have shown that I am definitely right.”)

It’s good to also include the page numbers, because that’s better for students who use the print edition, and it gives all students a sense of how much reading there is.

Short version: Giving reading assignments in page numbers causes a problem for students who aren’t reading the print edition. There’s a simple solution to this. Scroll up for details.

Conflicting access needs

February 10, 2015June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

I communicate best by writing (email, text, etc) and have a hard time with methods of communication that are voice-heavy (Skype calls, phone calls) because I have auditory-processing problems. Several long distance friends do better with auditory communication and worse with writing. But they speak really fast/garbled/quietly, so I can’t understand them sometimes. I end up avoiding them because it’s too frustrating for me to ask them to repeat every sentence, but I don’t want to. Please help?

realsocialskills said:

A couple of options:

Ask them what they think

Is their need to use voice methods of communication on the same level as yours?
Would they be able to use text for you sometimes?

Use typing for repeating:

It might be less frustrating to use Skype than the phone if you make good use of the typing feature
Would it work to use text to ask them to repeat things, and have them repeat it in text rather than voice?
That might make communication easier for both of you

Use something higher quality

If sound quality is making them hard to understand, it might be a problem you can solve
Different video chat services do things differently
It might make sense to try several and see if some are more comprehensible than others
If you can upgrade your internet, it might be worth doing
Getting better headphones might also help
It also might help if they get a better microphone instead of relying on their computer’s internal speakers
If you have access to a landline, sometimes the audio quality is better than on a cell phone

Use an interpreter.

You might be able to use something like Sprint Ip Relay to make TTY calls over the internet.
There’s also a thing called ClearCaptions that’s a captioned phone service that live captions calls. You have to be willing to swear that you’re Deaf, hear of hearing, or otherwise phone disabled. (I think that having auditory processing problems that cause you to avoid using the phone ought to count, but I don’t know if they think that, and I don’t know how much they investigate.)
There are probably other options along these lines that I don’t know about. If anyone knows of good options, please comment or send an ask.

Use emailed videos

Maybe they could email you videos instead of emailing you emails?
Then you could watch them more slowly and repeat stuff
Like video email more than video chat
And then you could maybe respond in the way that’s easiest for you, which might be text

Short version: Keeping in touch with friends can be hard when you have competing access needs for forms of communication over long distances. There are some options. Scroll up for details.

Anyone else want to weigh in? What have you found works for long distance communication between people who find speaking easier and people who find speech difficult to understand?

Not everyone is mean

February 9, 2015June 10, 2021 Real Social Skills

Mean people take up a lot of space.

Mean people often make their voices heard the loudest.

If you are around a loud mean person, it can be hard to remember that kind people exist.

It can feel like the world is all mean people, and that they’re all yelling at you.

But, not everyone is mean. A lot of people are kind and caring.

When you notice the kind people, and make an effort to listen to them, it’s much harder for the mean people to drown out their voices.

Disability doesn’t make it ok to be creepy

February 5, 2015June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Content warning: This post is about sexual creepiness, sexual assault, and using disability as an excuse to violate boundaries. Proceed with caution.

A reader asked:

How do you call out a disabled person who is saying they should get to do creepy or mean things because of their disability, without being ableist yourself? I know a guy in a wheelchair who will grope and touch women when they sit down next to him, and he has done this to me. And he’ll say things like, “Come on, I’m in a wheelchair.” if you try to move or act uncomfortable. And he says because most women aren’t nice to him, he should get to know a female’s touch.

realsocialskills said:

This guy is using other people’s desire to be good people as a weapon to get away with groping women. That is not something you need to have any tolerance for whatsoever. He’s doing something awful and he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s violating people and then manipulating them into feeling like bad people for objecting. That’s a horrible thing to do.

And it seems like it’s working, given that you’re concerned that you might be wrong to tell him to stop, or that you might have to be very careful about how you do it.

This dude is groping people and telling them off for objecting. There are absolutely no circumstances under which that is an ok thing to do, and you don’t owe him a pass on it just because he’s marginalized by ableism. That’s the most important thing about this situation. It’s absolutely ok and important to insist that he knock it off.

It’s not ok to grope people. Being lonely doesn’t make it ok to grope people. Being marginalized and desexualized doesn’t make it ok to grope people. People with disabilities are often seen as non-adult and therefore nonsexual, and that’s a horrible thing to experience. That doesn’t mean that others owe them sex, and it doesn’t give them the right to grope people. The only thing that makes it ok to touch another person in a sexual way is consent.

It’s ok to insist that this dude stop groping people even if you have some ableist attitudes towards him (You probably do. Most people, including people with disabilities, have some ableist attitudes, and most people are more ableist towards people they have good reason to dislike.) You don’t have to wait to be perfectly free of all bigotry before you’re allowed to decide who you do and don’t want touching you in a sexual way.

If you want to tell this dude to stop groping people, I think the best way is to just completely refuse to engage with any of the excuses he’s making. The overriding issue here is that he’s violating people in a sexual way. It’s not ok for him to do that, and it’s not ok for him to tell people they’re wronging him by objecting. It’s better not to let him change the subject to ableism when you’re telling him to stop groping people.

I’m sorry you’re having to face this situation. He shouldn’t be acting this way.

Pride in disabled accomplishments vs inspiration porn

January 31, 2015June 10, 2021 Real Social Skills

I think sometimes people with disabilities get caught between a rock and a hard place regarding pride and inspiration porn.

When people without disabilities choose to do hard things, they usually feel proud of accomplishing them. And they usually have people in their lives who notice the hard things, and who respect them for doing them. Doing hard things is something that people generally respect.

People with disabilities are often totally excluded from that kind of respect, when the thing that’s hard is hard for reasons related to disability.

Sometimes the difficulty of being disabled is acknowledged, or at least referred to, but in a way that’s utterly devoid of respect. That can take the form of condescending and degrading praise, eg:

“Wow, you are a person with a disability in public! You’re not even in your house! You are doing a thing! That is so inspiring!”, or:
“Hello, fellow parents at the conference. This is my son. I never gave up on him, so he’s going to play the guitar badly for us. See what our special kids can accomplish if we believe in them?!”, or:
“Wow, you sure are good at driving that wheelchair that you have been using every day for the past ten years.“
“Wow, really, you’re autistic? I never would have known! I don’t see you that way at all. You even talk to people and everything.”

And then there’s the other side, where everyone just completely ignores difficult things that people with disabilities accomplish when the difficulty was disability-related, eg:

Learning, through considerable focused effort, to speak in a way that others can understand (nondisabled people are allowed to be proud of their communication skills)
Preferring to walk and putting in a lot of effort to retain the ability (nondisabled people are allowed to be proud of their ability to run)
Bearing hate and breaking into a profession that’s hostile to people with disabilities
Learning to read even though it’s cognitively difficult (nondisabled people are allowed to be proud of learning to understand something difficult)
Learning how to recognize facial expressions
Figuring out a way to do calligraphy even though your motor skills are awful (nondisabled people are allowed to be proud of mastering a difficult artistic skill)
Explaining your reality to someone who you need to understand it

When people don’t acknowledge this kind of thing, it’s degrading in a different way:

Doing things that are easy for most people can, genuinely, be a major accomplishment for us
Our struggles aren’t acknowledged very much, and almost never in respectful terms
And our disability-related accomplishments aren’t often celebrated, except when they’re being used as a way to shame nondisabled people into being less lazy or something
Having the difficult things we do go completely unacknowledged is also degrading
Disability-related accomplishments matter just as much as accomplishments not related to disability

Or, in short, these things are very different:

Being exhibited by someone else as you play the guitar badly, while that person implies the the audience that this is the height of what you will ever accomplish
Having messed up hands, deciding to try to learn to play guitar anyway, getting to the point where you can coordinate well enough to play a few songs badly, and being proud that you’ve come so far

It’s ok to be proud of doing things that are hard for you, even if they’re easy for most people. It’s not a failure of acceptance. It’s not the same as pushing yourself to be normal at all costs. Your accomplishments deserve respect.

“You’re just looking for a quick fix”

January 30, 2015June 10, 2021 Real Social Skills

If you use medication to make your life easier or better in any way, some people might object, and say “you’re just looking for a quick fix!”.

This is a mean and unhelpful thing to say.

Medication isn’t the right answer for everyone who has cognitive or mental health problems or pain or other reasons people take medication, but it can be game changing for some people. If you try medication and find that it makes your life easier, that’s a good thing, and it’s ok to be happy about it.

It’s ok to want your life to be easier. It’s ok if it turns out that there’s something that works quickly that makes things better. Using an effective strategy to make your life better isn’t being lazy; it’s being efficient.

Abuse doesn’t always go in cycles

January 28, 2015June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Content note: This post contains graphic descriptions of emotional abuse and mentions physical abuse. Proceed with caution.

Often people describe abuse as occurring primarily in cycles (including specifically with the pronouns this way):

He is effusively loving
Then, he resents her being a separate person from him
Tension builds up
He explodes and hits her
Then he’s all ~remorseful~ and swears he’ll never do it again
Then he is effusively loving again
and the cycle continues

That’s definitely a real thing. But it’s not the only pattern (and even when it is, it happens in gender configurations other than male abusers and female victims, and it’s not always between romantic partners.) There are many, many patterns of abuse and they’re not all discussed very much.

Here’s another pattern (not the only other pattern):

The abusive person will be demeaning and effusively loving at the same time
They will do something degrading and something genuinely positive simultaneously
There won’t be a discernible cyclical pattern because both parts happen at the same time
This can be very, very disorienting to the victim, who might be tricked into seeing their abuser as loving, considerate, and insightful, and themself as not living up to their abuser’s love

eg:

Daniel: I love you so much. I brought you your favorite flowers. Not everyone would be so understanding of your irrational need for flowers.
Daniel hugs Debra
Debra hugs back
Debra feels awful about herself, and feels good about Daniel

or:

Susan: Hey, the fair’s in town. Let’s go!
Susan: I made you a jacket to wear.
Bill: That’s beautiful! Thank you!
They drive to the fair, and it’s warm out, so Bill decides to leave the jacket in the car
Susan: Where’s your jacket? Don’t you know that it hurts my feelings when you reject my gifts? I just wanted to have a nice time with you.
Susan: I guess it’s not your fault. I know you’ve never been in a successful relationship before. We all have stuff to work on.
Bill then tearfully apologizes and promises to work on it.

Short version: If someone is hurting you and it doesn’t seem to be happening in cycles, you are not alone. Abuse doesn’t always happen in a cycle of overt abuse and effusive love. Sometimes abuse is more mixed and constant. Scroll up for one example of a different pattern.