Yeah I am married to an autistic person and they think that they are being explicit and clear but are absolutely not. It harms their relationships all over the place and they are constantly thinking less of other people over it.
When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.
SO: my head hurts
Me: (pick any1) Where in the head? Any reason why? Did you hit something? Anything that might have caused it so we can buy some medicine or I can cook you something or whatever?
SO: idk, it just hurts, imma lie down.SO: I'm cold, I'm gonna take a hot shower.
Me: have you tried wearing bulkier clothes? A blanket?
SO: no. takes the third shower of the day $$
Me (later that day or in another day): force them to wear more clothes and throw a blanket at them in their chair
SO: oh, this is nice uses the blanket every day nowMe: How was your day?
SO: Bad.
Me: Anything out of the ordinary that you want to share to share the pain?
SO: No, its just bad.
Me: Do you want to watch anything, eat anything special?
SO: imma lie down.Sorry but no, i know that they aren't vague intentionally but they are not clear at all when expressing their needs.
This is why I learned to use metaphors. People love hearing about something if it was similar to something else. And not some dumb simile shit, like actual comparative metaphors.
"Why yes, the Internet IS a series of tubes. And the water pressure is bandwidth, the ability to move a volume of data in a set time. And each sprinkler is a user who may have individual restrictions but ultimately gets the same water as everyone else. That's what the Internet is Grandpa."
This is why learning how to write/speak for your audience is so helpful. People literally perceive what they expect rather than what exists. If the ideas aren't presented in the way they expect or are beyond the sort of ideas they're used to dealing with, they'll apply their preconceived notions of what they think you would say.
Even if you do make sense to someone with the right expertise or experience, people will apply their worldview to everything. Neurotypical people intuitively pick up on cultural ways of thinking and communicating, while autistic people have to consciously think about it more.
The most useful fixation of mine has been understanding how people think so I can speak to be understood. I'm probably better than average at talking to people with different worldviews as a result.
Damn that's a lot of people declaring that THEY'RE the ones who speak clearly and THE OTHERS only think they're speaking clearly.
Brains are fairly unique to the individual. When you have an idea, this represents a unique neural activation pattern no one else has.
Being a social species, we often need to communicate these ideas to other people. This means we need to get that unique neural activation pattern into the other person's brain. That's where language comes in.
Language is a massive part of the brain that we work on our entire lives. The entire purpose of language is too make that part of our brain as close to identical as everyone else's. This way we take our idea, convert it into a neural pattern in our language center, transfer that pattern using words and non-verbal communication, then the other person receives it hopefully without massive transmission loss. They're now able to recreate the unique idea you have.
One of the defining features of autism is that the language part of the brain develops very differently in autistic people than neurotypicals. This means that neurotypicals can communicate well together. Autistic people can communicate well together. But communication between autists and NTs will be poor because of that difference.
Many people are arguing about who should change their communication to adapt to others. I don't think this is a useful question because the answer is unique to the individual and is based entirely on need. If you're an NT who needs to communicate to many people with autism, or have someone very close to you with autism, you will likely make an effort to build an autistic language map in your brain. If you're autistic and need to communicate with NTs, you'll likely build an NT language map in your brain. I can see these mapping strategies like using metaphors etc... in this very thread.
Unfortunately since autism is in the minority, there are more people in the latter group than the former. This means the pressure is felt by autistic people more than NTs. This is a natural consequence of the need to communicate in society, not an ethical dilemma. One natural consequence is that autistic people will prefer to have autistic friends to ease their communication burden.
Everyone accepts that there are people that they can't communicate well with. People who speak a different language, people with a different culture, people who have a very different life experience, people whose brassica develop differently. All these groups will have a different language sector of the brain and communication will suffer. It's not efficient for everyone to try to be able to communicate perfectly with everyone else. The goal is to be able to communicate very well with your friends and partners, communicate work concepts with colleagues, communicate basic concepts with most strangers, and avoid unintentionally making enemies with everyone else as best as you can. The onus is on each person to achieve theses goals for themselves.
There isn't really a right or wrong in this situation.
I find it interesting that with ASD, there is (apparently, from this discussion), a tendency to be concise to the point of meaning being potentially lost but explains as quickly as possible, while with ADHD (which I have), there is a tendency to over-explain and be too verbose. With ADHD, we tend to worry that our thoughts aren't clear enough for others and go to great lengths to make sure our meaning is understood, which has its own problems (like people getting exhausted with us for our long windedness).
Or maybe people have varying degrees of how they take interest in something and semantics are just semantics according to interest.
For example: I have three relatives who are obsessed with the things they are interested in. One is into hoses..like really into hoses. and they have a computer and a car they use but they don’t like these two things nearly as much as they like their hoses. The other, while they use hoses and computers are really into cars. And a third who is super into computers while they have a hose and a car, they just don’t find the same interest in these other two things as they do with their computer.
None of them like each other.
Guess why.
Cuz like Fine. Go be a ‘fanboy’ about your one thing but people aren’t just dumb because they aren’t as obsessed as you are about your one thing. And they aren’t the problem here when you feel you’ve expressed your obsession language to their ordinary language about it. Cuz They get it. You like the thing. They just aren’t wanting to go deep like you do about it. But it gets annoying and old real fast if you’re so obsessed you’re pushing it on them. Their time and energy is worthwhile too.
And it's like they try to get mad at you :(
I would laugh if it wasn't so painfully true.
being autistic is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result???
God I feel this, especially felt it when I was a kid, where I would say the most innocent things and it was somehow interpreted as the most horrific insult. I was considered a "Demon Child" and I never understand why
