real social skills – Real Social Skills

Response to a question

October 25, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

Hi. I was wondering if you could make a post regarding parents and specifically, strategies for coping with them. [Parents who don’t acknowledge autism/insert other as legitimate.]

Short answer: it depends. Families are really complicated, and it depends on what the relationships actually are. There isn’t much I can say that is generally true for all children and families.

That said, here are a couple of principles that work for some people:

Some people are never going to accept that you’re autistic, and are never going to understand what that means. For some people, that word is just too loaded, and too unacceptable.

Some of these same people will do what you need, if it’s framed the right way. Sometimes it helps to *not* talk about autism and *not* give any principled explanations, but rather to say things that are more like “I don’t understand. Send me an email and I’ll reply”. or “That restaurant is too loud for me.”

That can work better than things that are more like “I have trouble with loud noises because I am autistic and we often have trouble processing intense sensory input”. Because actually, they don’t *need* to understand or agree with your explanation of what’s going on in order to do right by you. They just have to do what you need in order to interact.

And I’d say also that – first and foremost, learn to say no and make it stick. Asserting boundaries makes a lot of things better, and the more you can establish that you are in control of your life, the better off you’ll be. In some circumstances, your ability to do this can be very limited because of danger – but in just about *all* situations, people will try to convince you that you have less power than you really do. Being mindful of your autonomy and preserving it helps.

Also – one thing that can happen is that people feel like they need permission of families/parents/whoever to think of themselves as autistic/whatever and to seek out help. And, while you might need their assistance for certain things, and while they might have the power to prevent you from doing certain things – you *don’t* need their permission to try to understand the world, understand how your mind and body work, get help, and make your life better. Don’t make their acceptance a prerequisite for doing these things.

Social skills: Considering communication an obligation

October 13, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Sometimes, when people learn methods of communication that sometimes work for people with disabilities, they use them only to get compliance. Or to make things more peaceful and calm. And they expect that things will become easier. And some things will, but…

If you’re doing it right –– if what you’re doing is real communication – you should be hearing NO a lot more than you used to. And some things should become more complicated than they were before.

And you should be understanding and respecting NO more than you used to. The communication should sometimes, probably even often, interfere with your plans and challenge your assumptions. If your interactions almost always make things more convenient for you, what you’re doing is probably not really communication.

Even if the person you’re talking to is a little child – even two-year-old kids who don’t have disabilities are allowed to say no and make it stick sometimes. Little kids who need help communicating, need help communicating things adults *don’t* want them to say, as well as things adults *do* want them to say. It’s important for them to learn how to *decide* what to say.

And, especially – if you’re treating an adult in a way that makes it impossible for them to communicate boundaries even a two-year-old child is allowed to have, somethings is going seriously wrong. And you should be fixing it, and you should expect that fixing it will be inconvenient and lead to you having to change what you do because the person you are communicating said no, or said something unexpected.

Learning to communicate is not just a matter of learning to talk to someone; it’s also a matter of learning how to listen.

And, in pretty much every culture there is, listening to people with communication disabilities is considered optional, and learning how is considered to be a special skill gained by special people who have extra special patience for Working With People Like That. (And, it’s not even routinely expected of people whose primary job is teaching or supporting people with disabilities. It’s considered something *exceptionally good* people in such roles might take on.)

But listening to and communicating with people with disabilities isn’t optional. It’s a basic social skill that everyone needs to acquire (unless they have a disability that prevents it).

And – considering communication optional makes it harder. Acknowledging that others have the right to communicate, and that listening effectively is basic decency and not a special favor you’re doing someone, makes it a lot easier to learn how to communicate properly.

Social skill: Something you should know about sarcasm

October 10, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

It’s widely believed that autistic folks have trouble detecting sarcasm and irony. This is in fact true for a lot of people.

However, something else is also true.

People lie about sarcasm and irony. Sometimes people say something they really did mean, and then after the fact claim not to have meant it.

Despite having meant it, they might say things like:

I was just joking
I was just being sarcastic
I was just being ironic
Of course I didn’t *mean* that

There are several reasons people might do this, including but not limited to:

After the fact, they regretted what they said and want to pretend they didn’t say it (sometimes for benign reasons – people do speak without thinking and then realize that what they said is something they don’t want to have said)
They realize that they don’t actually want to discuss that topic with you, and are trying to close the subject so they won’t have to
They are afraid of looking stupid, and they think you consider what they said stupid, so they want you to think they don’t mean it
They said a bigoted or otherwise messed-up thing and don’t want to take responsibility for having done so (so they pretend it was a joke in some way)
They are intentionally messing with you and want to confuse you

So, if you’re often told that you don’t understand sarcasm/irony/humor, it might be true. But it also might mean that you *do* understand what people are saying, and that they’re falsely claiming to be sarcastic/ironic/joking when they don’t like how you react to what they say.

Some things to consider:

Do you understand irony/humor/sarcasm some of the time, but not other times? Is there a pattern you can detect?
Do you understand humor/irony/sarcasm about some topics, but not others? Are the topics you don’t understand irony/sarcasm/humor topics that people say obviously intentionally hurtful things to you about? (If so, it’s likely that at least some of the sarcasm you’re failing to detect actually *is* meant literally).
Are there particular people whose irony/sarcasm/humor you consistently fail to detect, even though you understand it in others? If so, it’s worth watching carefully and examining the content to see if it’s actually irony/sarcasm/humor. It may be the case that you just find some people more confusing than others, but it’s also likely that you actually *do* understand what this person is saying and they just wish you didn’t.

Social skill: Making a building’s accessibility features useable

October 9, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

Many buildings are built such that they are possible to use in a wheelchair, and then mismanaged in ways that make them completely and needlessly inaccessible. Here’s some things you can do to avoid that problem:

If some of the entrances to your building are not flat, post signs that clearly state where the accessible entrances can be found.
If you need to control access to your building by locking some of the entrances, make sure to keep at least one accessible entrance open. Even if this means you don’t use the fancy entrance. Being accessible is more important than being fancy.
If some of your parking lots lead to accessible entrances, and others lead to inaccessible entrances post that information and directions to the correct parking lot *at the entrance to the parking lot*.
If some of your entrances look accessible at first but then lead to stairs, post signs that make this clear and that direct to an actually accessible entrance. Do not make people waste their time with decoy entrances.
Make sure the elevator is as easy to find as the stairs. (For instance: If the elevator is not next to the stairs, post signs by the stairs with directions to the elevator). Do not post signs telling people that taking the stairs is more virtuous than taking the elevator.
If the passenger elevator is broken but there is an alternative (freight elevator, service elevator, etc) post this information with the out-of-order sign, and provide a cell phone number or other way someone who needs an elevator can contact help getting to the alternative elevator.
If you have a website, accurately describe the accessibility of your building. If some areas aren’t accessible, or are only sort of accessible, be honest about it. That allows people to plan. Provide a phone number or email address people can use to ask accessibility questions, and make sure the person answering it knows what they are talking about and cares.
Make sure your building maps accurately describe your building from the perspective of someone on wheels. For instance, if the pedestrian bridge linking two parts of your mall has two steps at the entrance, your map needs to say this. Likewise, if there is a step to get into the food court from one direction but not the other, the map needs to say this. Misleading maps waste a lot of time.
Listen to what people with disabilities tell you about accessibility. If they tell you something is a problem, believe them and fix it.

Social skill: Noticing a consent problem

October 3, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

I’m not entirely sure how to describe this, but I know it’s a thing, and I know a *little* about how to deal with it:

Some people have been systemically taught that they are absolutely never allowed to say no to anything. That their boundaries don’t matter, and that they’re not really people.

For this reason, some things you’d normally do in order to establish consent and find out someone’s preferences don’t work *at all*.

For instance, asking “do you want to eat a sandwich?” is a totally useless question when you’re asking someone who’s been taught to interpret this as a command. Which a lot of people have been, because they’re in the power of people who don’t want to perceive themselves as having power over others. So they use lots of things that *look* like questions and polite requests, but aren’t.

And people get really, really good at correcting identifying orders and giving every outward appearance of consent. Because that dynamic punishes everything else.

So you have to do it differently. You have to make more guesses (not the right word, but don’t know a better one). And you also have to ask questions differently. You have to ask in a way that *doesn’t* suggest an answer. And you have to remind people that saying no is possible. For instance “Do you want to watch TV now, or do something else?” is better than “do you want to watch TV now?”, but still probably not good enough.

But you have to notice this. And take it into account when you interact with people. I know some of my followers on here know more about how to do this than I do – comments anyone?

How to react to an accent

October 2, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

People from different parts of the world speak differently, even when they are speaking the same language. Accents can also arise from some disabilities and subcultures, even within the same region.

Everyone has an accent, but some people perceive themselves as not having an accent. Some people have strong reactions to other people’s accents, and end up making asses of themselves. Here’s some advice on how to avoid doing that:

The first rule of politeness with regards accents is that you ought not to comment on them. An accent is part of someone’s body. It’s rude and invasive to make personal comments about someone else’s body, because bodies are private. For instance, if you’re in a situation where it would be rude to tell a woman that her hair makes her look hot, don’t tell her she has a cute accent.

Do not offer your unsolicited opinions about the place you perceive the person to be from. For instance, do not commiserate with a person you just met about Southern bigotry based on their accent. Do not tell someone with a British accent all about how much better you think their health care system is than yours. Do not initiate a conversation about their political views about a war their country is fighting. Talk about what the conversation is actually about; treat them like a person and not as their region embodied.

Do not express skepticism about where someone is from based on the way they speak. It’s disrespectful. They know where they came from; you, as a person who just met them, are not a greater authority on this. And you won’t be the first one to have expressed this skepticism. You might not even be the first one that day. It gets old fast.

Also, some people with disabilities pass as non-disabled in order to protect themselves, but speak somewhat oddly and are perceived as having foreign accents. Questioning someone in that situation at length about why they talk like that and where they’re really from can be frightening. People who pass do it *for reasons*, because being identifiably disabled can expose people to horrifying discrimination.

Some people with more obvious disabilities, and unmistakable disability accents, get ignored because other people assume that they are impossible to understand, or that they don’t have anything worthwhile to say. Do not do this. Make the effort to listen, and you’ll probably find that it’s not so hard once you’ve stopped thinking of it as optional (unless you have a significant receptive language disability, but most people who think of disability accents as incomprehensible don’t.) Do not treat this as a favor you are doing someone. Treat it as a matter of basic respect. It is not ok to decide that a whole category of people get ignored because you can’t be bothered to listen.

People often make it impossible for others to communicate by listening to their accents and ignoring their words. Do not be that guy. Listen to content, take people seriously, and don’t fetishize accents.

Social skill: Don’t be the Nice Guy

October 1, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

There’s a phenomenon that’s been discussed recently as niceguyism. Niceguyism narrowly defined is when a man wants to date a women, and pretends to be her friend, and then gets angry and disgusted when she thinks that they are friends and does not reciprocate his interest in dating.

It’s been summed up as “treating women like vending machines into which you insert friendship and get out sex”.

I think it is actually much broader than that. First of all, although it has a gendered variant, people of all genders do this, and it’s not always for sex. Here’s what I think niceguyism is, broadly defined:

When someone unilaterally decides that they have a particular kind of close relationship with someone, and then treats the other person as though they have an obligation to act like it is true.

All close relationships require the ongoing consent of both parties. You can’t unilaterally *create* a close relationship, you can only unilaterally *offer* to enter into a relationship.

This plays out in romantic and sexual terms, where one person might unilaterally decide that they want to date someone, give that person presents or assistance, and then get furious when that person dates someone else.

It also plays out in friendships – one person decides that someone else should be their best friend, unilaterally acts like they are best friends, and then gets angry and disgusted when that person spends more time with or exchanges more confidences with other people.

It also plays out in a particular way with people with disabilities – people decide they want to be someone’s helper, or open their life up, or empower them, or give them hope to overcome their disabilities – and then proceed to run roughshod over that person’s boundaries and heap abuse and derision on them when they object.

It is never ok to decide you would like a close relationship with someone, and then unilaterally act as though you already do without regard to their consent. Don’t be that guy.

Social skill: Communicating with strangers on the internet

September 30, 2012June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

On Tumblr, email lists, comment forums, and other types of social media, it’s really easy to get bogged down in destructive conversations. People can end up spending lots and lots of time talking to people who aren’t really worth talking to, and having conversations that are draining and don’t do anyone much good.

Here are some rules that I try to observe that I think mitigate that somewhat and help me to find better conversations. They probably aren’t the right rules for everyone, but they work well for me and I think there are good reasons for that:

1) If you don’t want to talk to someone, don’t. You don’t owe strangers on the internet your attention.

2) Don’t have extended conversations with people who aren’t interested in understanding your point. (Unless you’re responding to them publicly for the sake of communicating something to your followers who *are* interested in understanding what you’re saying.)

3) Seek out people who are worth talking to and who have decent values and say interesting things. Conversations with those people are a much better use of your time than extended conversations with willfully clueless jerks.

4) Don’t be a sadist, and don’t seek revenge. It’s not good to seek out people who are wrong and lash out at them with the primary purpose of hurting them. (It’s ok to post things that hurt things, there are vital things that can’t be said without hurting anyone. What’s not ok is posting things *in order to* hurt people.)

5) Don’t post replies in order to satisfy a feeling of anger (or automatic emotional responses generally); only post in ways that express anger if you’ve thought about it and decided it’s a good idea. Anger isn’t bad, but the fallout of angry posts that haven’t been thought through properly can be.

6) If you don’t want to talk to someone, block them. Err on the side of blocking people if you think you don’t want to talk to them. There are plenty of people to talk to. Blocking someone doesn’t mean that you think they’re a terrible person and should be banned from the internet forever. It just means you don’t want to talk to them and so aren’t answering their calls.

7) Don’t try to pick a fight with someone to make them go away and stop talking to you. It’s often not effective, and it’s not necessary – you can unilaterally end the conversation if you don’t want to continue it. Trying to make them go away suggests that you think you need their permission to end the conversation, and you don’t. It’s also draining, and wastes time and energy that could be spent having actually good conversations.