Tag: actuallyautistic

Red flags vs fear of new things

Real Social Skills

I don’t know a solution to this, but this is a problem I think it’s worth discussing: It can be hard to identify red flags when you have a general fear of change and trying new things.

For some of us, anticipating change always or usually feels bad, regardless of whether there’s anything actually wrong. For instance, I hate all new TV shows until I’ve watched them with someone else at least three times. To use more weighty examples: for a lot of people, moving to a new apartment, taking a new job, starting school, getting close to another person, exploring a new hobby, eating new foods, or anything that involves change, will at first invoke an unreasonable sense of dread whether or not anything is actually wrong.

For most people who have routine fear of new things, it can sometimes be important to override that dread and do some new things anyway. Because sometimes change is necessary, or an improvement. But overriding and ignoring dread all the time causes a serious problem.

The problem is – sometimes the feelings of dread are because you’re noticing red flags. Sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re generally averse to change; sometimes the problem is that you’re noticing something that’s actually wrong.

I’m not sure what the solution is. Most people get told that the best way to avoid walking into trouble is to always trust your gut. That’s not necessarily viable for people whose guts tend to dread all change. Trusting all of those instincts would mean never trying anything new, and also never walking away from bad situations (since that would have to involve change). But disregarding your gut all the time doesn’t work well either, because sometimes it’s the only thing alerting you to trouble.

I think the best approach might be: listen to your gut, but don’t necessarily obey it. I think it’s a good idea to think, in as concrete terms as possible, what your gut feeling might be about. Some examples of questions that some people find helpful in that regard (not exhaustive, and not all the questions on this list are helpful for everyone with this problem):

  • Is the dread you are feeling the same way you always feel when you’re doing something new, or does this feel different?
  • (If it feels like a different feeling, it’s very likely something you should be taking seriously)
  • Are you afraid of a particular person?
  • Do you know why you’re afraid of them? Is it that they’re unfamiliar, or something in particular about them?
  • Are you afraid of a particular risk?
  • Does something seem physically unsafe?
  • Are there other available options that would be safer?
  • Do people seem to be treating you respectfully?
  • Is someone being mean to you, or to other people, in a way that’s making the new thing seem inadvisable?
  • Are people assuming that you can do things that you can’t?
  • Is anyone treating you like a child?
  • Is someone taking your private decisions weirdly personally?
  • Are you being pressured into spending money you can’t afford to spend?

I don’t think that there is a general answer to this. I think that deciding whether to go with your gut feeling, or whether to assume that you’re just fearing change, is something that you have to decide on a case by case basis. Either option involves risks; it’s ok to decide which risk you’d rather take in a certain situation. Sometimes that will mean you do the new thing (and risk ignoring a red flag); sometimes it will mean you don’t do the new thing (and risk avoiding a necessary or beneficial change for irrational reasons). Sometimes that will mean doing the new thing, but cautiously. Sometimes that will mean modifying the new thing. All are legitimate approaches; you’re the only one who can decide.

It’s ok to decide that something real is going on and that you’re not going to do the thing (even though it’s possible that you’re afraid for no good reason). It’s ok to decide that you’re going to risk doing the thing (even though it’s possible that you’re ignoring a red flag.) Both have risks. There’s no generalized answer to every situation; it’s a decision you have to make for each situation.

Short version: If you’re generally averse to change, it can be really hard to tell whether your apprehension about a new situation is irrational fear of change, or a red flag you’re picking up on. It can help to evaluate in concrete terms what you think you might be noticing. 

On stimming in class

Real Social Skills
alwaysatrombonist asked:

Do you know of any quiet or discrete fidget/stim toys? I find that I need to fidget in my school discussion group to keep from getting super anxious, but if I play with a hairband under the table or doodle then people notice. Most of the fidget toys I find online are colourful, which I don’t want because people will see. I will try a stress ball, but I think that my fingers need to be doing things. Thank you 🙂

realsocialskills said:

A couple of thoughts:

There probably aren’t many ways to stim that are completely undetectable. Some things I can think of that might be harder to detect than some others:

  • Rocking back and forth subtly
  • Chewing gum
  • Using typing as a stim (eg: typing out scripts or words you like over and over)
  • Using fidget jewelry .

Also, knitting and crocheting are not discreet at all, but they are often socially accepted in classes or group conversations. Depending on your particular group, that might be an option.

Another thought: maybe it’s ok if people notice:

  • Stimming isn’t necessarily as dangerous as it feels
  • Sometimes it’s okay to stim openly. Sometimes nothing awful happens
  • And sometimes people react badly, but in ways that are easier to put up with than the stress of suppressing stims
  • Stimming openly and conspicuously is not the right choice for everyone
  • But it’s probably the right choice for more people than realize it
  • So it might be worth reconsidering whether hiding your stims is the right choice
  • Or it might not be. You’re the best judge of this, and you have no obligation to stim visibly.

Things to do on Halloween besides parties

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:

I’m in college and too old to trick-or-treat, but I’m autistic and even if I went to a party I’d be miserable. Since I moved out, I live in a building where I won’t get trick-or-treaters. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do for Halloween this year, do you have any advice?

realsocialskills said:

There are several things you can do on/for Halloween that don’t involve parties or trick or treating. I don’t know what kind of stuff you like, so here are some things:

Pumpkin carving:

  • You can carve pumpkins (most grocery stores in the US sell pumpkins suitable for jack-o-lanterns this time of year)
  • You can use them as decorations, even if there are no trick-or-treaters
  • You can also enter a pumpkin carving contest
  • (There may be some that adults are allowed to enter in your area; there are also some that take place online such as this one.)

Fandom:

  • You can read Halloween fanfic. AO3 has a Halloween tag.
  • You can also write Halloween-related fic or make art.
  • That can be a good way to be part of a community doing Halloween (and can be fun even if it’s not a community thing for you)

Arts and crafts:

  • If you like to make things, you might make some Halloween things
  • Craft stores have a lot of Halloween-related supplies, projects, and suggestions this time of year
  • If you want some ideas, browsing a craft store might help
  • You can also just make orange things, or orange and black things
  • Or things involving ghosts or black cats
  • You can also post pictures of what you make on Tumblr/Pintrest/other places

Sensory activities:

  • If you google “sensory activities” or “sensory play”, you get a lot of instructions for making fun things to stim with
  • Most of them are created by parents or therapists for kids
  • There are a *lot* of holiday-themed sensory activities/play
  • Here is a page with some Halloween suggestions

Food:

  • If you like to cook, there are a lot of Halloween recipes. Here’s the allrecipes.com Halloween page.
  • You can also make pumpkin pie (or other pumpkin things)
  • If you don’t want to or can’t cook, stores have a lot of Halloween-themed food
  • You can get Halloween candy, or cookies, or cakes, or any number of other things.

Watching movies or TV shows:

  • A lot of shows have Halloween episodes
  • One classic Halloween episode is “It’s the great pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
  • Halloween episodes aside, some people enjoy watching horror movies on Halloween.
  • There are also some Halloween movies that aren’t horror movies. One excellent one is The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Reading scary/ghost stories:

  • Some people like to read scary stories or ghost stories on Halloween
  • If you like that sort of thing, Project Gutenberg has a ton of stories by Edgar Allen Poe, almost all of which are scary or creepy.
  • (There are also non-scary ghost stories, but I don’t know where to find them offhand).

Hosting a gathering that you’d enjoy:

  • Even if you don’t like parties, you still might like to be around a few other people.
  • Maybe having dinner together
  • Or baking cookies together
  • Or watching a movie

Sometimes treating people with disabilities well means accepting that they are uncomfortable

Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

I run a club for transgender students at my university. One of the newer members disclosed to us that she has asperger’s. Her sensory threshold seems to be extremely low and she seems to get overwhelmed in meetings often. After a meeting, I tried to pull her aside to ask her if there’s any way I could accommodate her better, but she got flustered. I don’t think she knew quite how to phrase what she needed to say in the moment, but I want to make the club more accessible for her. I’ve already spoken with the faculty adviser so we could move to a bigger room with more space. I also want to make sure this member of our club is getting her needs met, but I don’t want to force her out of her shell or put her on the spot while I try to meet her halfway. I’m having a hard time. Do you have any advice for me?

realsocialskills said:

I think the most important thing is not to put pressure on her to talk to you about her disability or access needs.

Sometimes people with disabilities choose to do things that are hard for us. Sometimes being overloaded is the price we pay for participation. It can actually be harder when people get upset about this and see overload as a problem they need to solve. Sometimes that’s just the way things are. Sometimes there’s no immediate solution, and sometimes it’s not the problem we want to work on.

Disability is personal. Coping mechanisms and disability-related choices are deeply personal. Some people with disabilities are fairly open about their specific issues and choices; for others, that’s a topic reserved for close friends. It’s ok if she doesn’t want to have that conversation with you even though she’s often physically uncomfortable or overloaded in the group. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing something wrong or that she’s doing something wrong. Sometimes it just means that some things are hard but worth doing anyway.

I’d say back off trying to get her to disclose more things about her needs, and follow her lead.

The one unilateral access thing I’d advise is that I think it’s important to make sure that she (and other group members) have the option of contacting you by email. If she’s getting too overwhelmed in the moment to tell you things she wants you to know, being able to email you might be really helpful. Don’t make a big deal about it, though, and don’t pressure her to email you about things. Just make email available as an option.

Good luck to both of you.

Short version: When you’re running a group and people with disabilities seem to be overwhelmed, don’t pressure them to talk about their disability or their access needs. Offer, but don’t pressure. Do make your email address available to group members. This makes it easier for them to tell you things that are hard to say in the moment.

Life is not made of compelling philosophy

Real Social Skills

You don’t always have to have a coherent philosophical explanation for everything you do and care about.

Life is not made of philosophy. Philosophy can be a good thing, but it’s not a prerequisite.

You don’t have to have a coherent explanation of how God works for it to be ok to practice a religion or identify with a community. You don’t have to have a compelling explanation of where the universe came from in order to be an atheist or decide not to practice a religion.

You don’t have to have a deep and compelling theory about the nature of gender to know what your gender is. You don’t have to have a deep and compelling theory on where sexual orientation comes from and what it means in order to know which words you use to describe yourself, and who you are or aren’t interested in dating.

You don’t have to have a rigorous philosophical understanding of the mind and neurology to understand that you are disabled and that your cognitive experiences are different from most other people’s.

Or anything else. Your life is yours, and you get to have your own ideas about who you are and what you want.

You don’t have to have a compelling philosophy that convinces other people in order for it to be ok to know who you are and how you see the world. You don’t even have to have a coherent philosophy that convinces *you*.

Many philosophical questions that might be relevant to your life are unanswered, and unlikely to be answered in your lifetime. It’s ok if you want to work on solving them, but it’s also ok if you don’t. It is not a prerequisite, even if other people who use big abstract ideas want you to change.

Life is bigger than theories, and having a compelling theory is not a prerequisite for living, choosing, or caring about things. 

Stimming is not just a coping mechanism

Real Social Skills

I see this defense of stimming a lot:

  • It’s wrong to train autistic people not to stim
  • They use it to compensate for overload
  • Or to focus
  • Or to compensate for other problems
  • Or to express distress

All of this is true. But it also misses the point. Stimming isn’t just a coping mechanism. It’s much more than that. Stimming is a positive part of autistic experience, not an unfortunate-but-functionally-important thing we have to do.

Imagine if facial expressions and tones of voice were considered wrong, and someone defended them this way:

  • It is wrong to teach children to adopt a flat affect
  • Children need to be able to frown
  • Children need to be able to indicate through the tone of their voice that something is wrong
  • Children need to be able to cry. That’s a way of coping with pain and overload

All of those things are true. But if that’s all defenders of tone and facial expression said, it would be horribly misleading. Body language and tones are more than that, and they are good.

Stimming is like that too.

  • Stimming is not just necessary. It is also natural, and good
  • Flapping in response to a nice texture is not fundamentally different from smiling in response to the smell of a flower
  • Rocking in response to someone saying something offensive is not fundamentally different from frowning in response to a slur
  • It is ok for autistic people to have autistic body language

Telling your story without being a self-narrating zoo exhibit

Real Social Skills
When you are an unusual person, especially if you are disabled, people will often tell you that they “want to hear your story”.
Often, it’s not really your story that they want to hear. Often they have a story in mind that they want, and they want it to come out of your mouth in order to validate their theories about people like you.
Often, what they really want is for you to be a self-narrating zoo exhibit, and satisfy their curiosity without inserting your opinions or having boundaries.
Maybe they want to hear from institution residents who don’t want to leave, so they can decide that institutions really are the best place for people with disabilities. Maybe they want to hear a story that allows them to feel pity for you and bask in their lack of disability. Or any number of other things.
These are ways people use their versions of our stories to take away our power; we can use our real stories to get our power back.
Telling your story doesn’t have to mean telling creepy people what they want to hear. It can mean telling the truth, even when others want to lie.
Telling your story can mean bearing witness. It can mean saying “No, it doesn’t work that way. I was there. I saw.” It can mean saying “I’ve seen people do these things that you say we can never do.” Or “I’ve been there. It was wrong. And it’s also wrong when people do it to you.”
It can mean saying: “I remember watching someone die because others decided to withhold medical treatment, food, and water. I wish I’d been able to save him.”
Or: “Don’t think that my life is pitiable or inspiring. I do meaningful things. We all do. And do you know how amazing it is when the light hits a rock just the right way?”
We don’t have to tell the stories they want us to tell. We can tell the truth. And there is power in the truth, and there is power in the truth backed up by stories about things you have witnessed or been part of personally.
It takes practice to learn to tell the truth in the face of pressure to be an inspiring self-narrating zoo exhibit. It can be terrifying. It can also be very, very hard to resist prompts to say the things other people clearly want you to say.
It takes practice, and in practicing you will probably not entirely succeed right away. Even with practice, you might still inadvertently tell the story others want you to tell rather than the story you believe some of the time. That’s ok. None of us are perfect, and it gets easier over time.
Short version: Sometimes when people say “tell us your story”, what they really mean is “tell us what we want to hear.” But telling your real story can be a powerful way to tell the truth.

“Don’t let people get to you”

Real Social Skills

I don’t know about you, but I’ve experienced this a lot:

  • I’ll talk about someone being mean or bigoted towards me.
  • And someone will say something like “Don’t let them get to you”, or
  • “Don’t ever let people get under your skin like that, they’re not worth it”

And in my experience, that always makes me feel worse. This is what I eventually figured out about it:

Things hurt.

It’s not your fault that it hurts when people are awful to you.

It’s not your fault you care what people think of you sometimes. (Everyone does.)

Having connections to others matters. And when people we’re connected to are mean, it hurts.

Self esteem talk can end up being yet another stick to beat you with, and that’s not right either.

Being hurt by mean people doesn’t mean you’re failing. It’s not possible to be completely invulnerable at all times. When someone’s shooting arrows at you, it’s not your fault for failing to make armor fast enough to stop them.

You’re ok. They’re mean.

People might not understand your body language

Real Social Skills

Body language that comes naturally to some autistic people can be completely invisible to most neurotypical people.

For example, many autistic people respond to questions by nodding their head very slightly. It can feel like a bigger movement than it actually is, and sometimes people don’t notice it. If you’re nodding and people are ignoring you, it might just be that they don’t understand your body language.

Similarly, neurotypical people don’t usually understand the range of things that flapping and various forms of stimming can mean. They tend to read it as distress or as annoying behavior. They don’t usually understand it as body language. Since they lack the skill to understand body language correctly, it can be worth telling them things explicitly.

For instance, if someone doesn’t understand the kind of flapping that means hello, it might be worth saying hello with your voice when you want to greet them.

Sometimes neurotypical people intentionally ignore autistic body language, but sometimes they just don’t understand it.

The basic problem with social skills education

Real Social Skills

Human interaction is really, really complicated.

No one understands it all the way.

Almost every rule has major exceptions. Anything stated in a clear way is going to be oversimplified in some way.

There aren’t rules so much as cultures and traditions that everyone finds their own way to work with.

The most anyone can really say most of the time is “this is sort of how it works a lot of the time” or, “this is probably going to be the case for almost everyone, if not absolutely everyone”. It’s hard to be honest about that, especially when you’re talking about an extremely important area of interaction like physical boundaries.

In addition, people will tell you all kinds of things they wish were true. One example is how people will teach kids “tell an adult” even in situations in which adults are unlikely to care about bullying. Or “tell them it hurts your feelings” because they want that to work.

Writing this blog, I understand more and more why people do things like that. It’s hard not to. But, it’s important. Everything is more complicated than I’m describing; even when I’m mostly right. (And sometimes I’m not.)

I’m saying things that I think are true, as well as I can describe them. But, don’t just believe me. And, particularly, if you think it’s more complicated than I think it is, don’t assume that I’m right and you’re wrong.

Short version: Social skills are skills, and they’re complicated and to a large extent different for everyone. All descriptions, and especially all rules, are approximations are best.