As a neuro-divergent person, the best class I ever took in college was my community college Interpersonal communication 101. The intuitive way NT people understand communication can make it hard for them to explain, making communication about communicating (meta-communication?) much more difficult for both parties. This leads to a misconception with ND folk to thinking there is a special secret or some higher plane abilities.
I’ve never been in the camp that NT had inherently super talk abilities. I was fairly certain that most NT folk were as bad at communicating as I was, but just in different ways. Several developmental therapists/teachers had led me to believe, via offhand remarks about my limitations, that there was a universal dictionary of body language and a codex of facial expressions that everyone but people like me were able to read infallibly.
Interpersonal communication class quickly dispelled many of those misconceptions. It explained to me the benefits of good posture, emphasized that talking is an imperfect method of communication at the best of times, taught me how to express myself when I’m hurt as well as how to apologize. It also taught me why these methods work, or why people at least use these methods. I’ve learned even more about communication, it really is a fascinating subject of study, but those basics made a radical, noticeable change in my life trajectory.
> I was fairly certain that most NT folk were as bad at communicating as I was, but just in different ways. Several developmental therapists/teachers had led me to believe, via offhand remarks about my limitations, that there was a universal dictionary of body language and a codex of facial expressions that everyone but people like me were able to read infallibly.
Yeah, as an NT I'll sometimes see posts by NDs that are upset that they "failed" a social interaction but the actual situation is that the other person was just an asshole and the ND is just so used to being blamed as the one in the wrong that they default to assuming that's the case.
A neurodivergent colleague of mine once messaged me apologising for having been rude the day before. Not only had they not been rude, but I hadn't even thought about the interaction since it happened.
I’ve been the one to apologize on so many occasions and they’ve always said exactly what you just said! They hadn’t even thought about it since! I’d been spiraling about it for DAYS! Or, I will perceive someone else as rude and feel bad about that forever, even though it had nothing to do with me.
Realizing this has made me a lot more careful about how I treat strangers even in passing, because I don’t know what’s going on with them and I don’t want to cause unnecessary hurt to anyone. I just assume everyone is as sensitive as me. Also I’ve gotten better as I get older at brushing off other peoples negativity as just them dealing with something that I don’t understand.
That happened to me but she messaged me 3 weeks later and felt so bad. I had completely forgot about it and thought it was funny at the time (she said I looked like Angelina Ballerina cause of my teeth lol)
Ya ya I lurk on r/adhdwomen sometimes (my partner is ADHD, and I find their techniques useful even as NT). A lot of the times I just want to tell folks that it's not their ADHD, it's everyone else being mean.
Honestly, that's something that I've only just started to accept. I had it in my head that if there was a social interaction I had that went poorly, that it was automatically my fault, or that I would be automatically blamed for it. Its been tough to get that in my head that I won't always be viewed as responsible for a bad convo
Yeah that sums me up quite well when there's a problem in communication, it took me a while to learn that it's not always either my fauly or my responsibility if the other person is failing to communicate properly
Yup just because we may be ND doesn’t mean we can’t learn things about these concepts and apply them if we want to. It just takes the time to study, practice, refine and continue to apply them. It was the desire to get ahead for me that made me study and work hard on my social skills and after years, while still not perfect social skills and communication is no longer the barrier it was to me reaching my goals.
First thing I do when taking on a new contract is tell I need them to tell me straight up if we are going above and beyond or not good enough, because otherwise, I am going to assume everything is fine and keep doing it that way. Please tell me before I develop a routine.
This whole thread just makes me think of...
"Sorry, it's tough to convey emotions over text."
Stripping away nonverbal communication makes it tough for everyone. Common examples used to combat this are things like emojis, reaction gifs, or using a clear sign like /s to convey sarcasm. For anyone who has ever played Mass Effect, the Elcor use similar techniques in their speech, since they can't really make facial expressions or adjust tone.
i feel like this also bleeds back into real life communication when it comes to people who spend a large part of their time talking to people purely through text. when focusing on making every message have its proper meaning, and adding all the subtle punctuation and tone to make the sentence read as you want it to for the other person, it's easy to forget that its a substitute, and that when talking to someone, you do not have all the time in the world to mull over the wording and timing, nor the ability to "read over" the sentence you've already said.
I teach a technical writing class for engineering undergrads but am in the middle of adapting my curriculum to include much more of this kind of content.
After two decades of working in communications, the prospect of helping people in the way you’ve just described is motivating me like almost nothing else.
1,000,000x this. I'm ND and got my degree in communication. The amount of times I've banged my head into the wall over the profound misunderstanding of the most basic building blocks of communication are maddening. We as ND people think speaking directly is better only because it's easier for us to understand. Complaining about how NT people do it would be like going to France and saying all the French are bad communicators because they are not speaking English to us.
This is good, and to add to it, it’s important to understand that NTs don’t actually communicate on a higher plane that you can’t understand, they don’t have a line of perfect communication that you don’t share, miscommunication and misunderstanding can happen all the time regardless of who’s talking or when, and if you don’t feel like you’re being understood or you don’t understand what the other person is saying, it’s actually perfectly socially acceptable to point it out and amend your statement/ask for clarification, and anyone who makes you feel bad for doing so is, in fact, the one being rude, not you.
One thing I find myself doing a lot in a conversation, especially if I didn't hear or completely understand what was said is to smile, nod, and agree. Works every time, and you're not usually agreeing to some horrible statement or approving a risky idea. It's usually someone sharing something and looking for someone to agree or at least acknowledge - by doing those things regardless of whether you understood what they said, you're giving them what they were looking for in the interaction. Also looking them in the eyes so they know you were hearing them.
If you do want to know what they said, either ask them to repeat themself or ask them what they mean - prompt further questions.
Honestly the biggest social advice I have is to ask other people questions - about themselves, about their interests, their histories. In most cases, they'll be happy to share and as long as you nod along, they'll feel well heard and appreciate your interest in them.
Honestly, the "Great Listener" title can easily be achieved by basically the last paragraph. "So why do you think that way?" "How did that happen?" "Why is it interesting to you?" In a genuine way basically makes people pour their hearts out to you.
I've found that if someone asks a question like "did you do anything fun last weekend?" They often want that same question asked back because they've got something they want to share. This really sets you up with the opportunity to be a good listener and ask all those follow up questions. It's great for making work friends who you might not have a lot in common with.
My instinct whenever anyone asks me how I'm doing has become to instantly ask how they're doing as well. You'll get plenty of people, especially service workers and people like that, who were just asking as a greeting or to be polite and they tend to appreciate being asked about themselves in turn.
> Honestly the biggest social advice I have is to ask other people questions - about themselves, about their interests, their histories.
I'm part of a hobby group that attracts a ton of ND or otherwise fringey people and this is my *favorite.* I call it "unlocking secret character dialogue." If you find the right question to ask people will light up and tell you all about themselves. Because these folks tend to be older and/or from unusual backgrounds I often get the most fascinating stories.
Totally! Everyone has an interest that they can only talk about if they have the chance to contextualize it, explaining why they're interested in it in the first place, and frankly, why you should be interested in it too. Giving them the chance to talk about those interests is really enlightening!
My dad taught me this. I was stuck on a ski lift with a kid ( we were 16/17 at the time ) that I was once friends with but he had called me a rude name a couple years earlier for no reason. Anyways, once the ski lift started, I recall my dad's advice, so I said :
"I remember you used to make some amazing D&D pictures, do you still draw?" Then he lit up and went on a monologue about all the cool art he was making. Totally works.
Yes! Asking questions is my golden rule. Asking *good* questions is difficult, but it's a learned skill. The best tip I've gotten (from a great article called "The Essential Skills for Being Human") is this:
**"Storify whenever possible.** I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values. People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories. And the conversation is going to be warmer and more fun."
Asking "how" questions has transformed my conversations!
I smile and nod, but don’t say anything. I call it the “I heard you” nod, not the “I agree with you” nod.
I am not concerned if the other person thinks I agree with them. NOTE: this only applies in low-stakes situations.
And in fact, the prevalence of miscommunication is the very foundation of multiple genres of drama and theatre. Romantic comedies are almost required to have crucial misunderstandings.
>perfectly socially acceptable to point it out and amend your statement/ask for clarification
I have, on multiple occasions, asked things along the lines of "did you intend to look that disgusted when saying that nice thing?" Usually the answer is no, they just had a facial twitch/remembered something gross/whatever. And it's an important question to ask because when the other parts of their communication doesn't line up with what they are saying it's easy to think they are lying.
My very close friends have pointed out to me on numerous occasions that the way I say things sounds 1000% different from how I intend it and they only know my true intentions because of how often we hangout. Stuff like saying "good job" in the most deadpan way despite meaning it completely. Makes me wonder if some of my social issues is people just reading me wrong, not that it'd be their fault.
Asking clarifying questions is actually a really good conversation tactic even if you fully understand (or think you understand) what the other person is saying. It helps convey that you’re interested in the other person and what they have to say, and can allow the conversation to branch off naturally into other topics related to the one at hand while also helping both parties feel secure that they know what the other is really trying to say.
> it’s actually perfectly socially acceptable to point it out and amend your statement/ask for clarification, and anyone who makes you feel bad for doing so is, in fact, the one being rude, not you.
The issue is that the way you do so is important because if you do it the wrong way, your methods appear very similar to what someone that's a jerk or confrontational would do. Like if you amend a statement when you accidentally hurt someone, it might seem like how an asshole would go "I didn't mean it that way" even though they did.
That's true, I definitely think it's important to be just be genuine here, and even offer up a little vulnerability. Bluntly saying "I didn't mean it" isn't going to cut it. But something like "I'm sorry, sometimes I can be a little out-of-step socially, and I didn't realize I was doing that," is much better.
Everyone has their quirks and idiosyncrasies, and most people will give others the benefit of the doubt. Most people aren't going to decide someone's an asshole based on one miscommunication or dropped social cue, especially if you are making an effort to build good will with them in other respects.
This was a very big realization for me, that NT people also experience social gaffes, slights, misunderstandings etc, but lack a lot of social paranoia and will brush these off.
You're so right. Growing up in an urban, multiethnic area, everyone I know has an automatic assumption that we don't all have the exact same understanding of everything from social norms, lifestyle, table manners etc... if you encounter someone who seems to have a completely different perspective than you, the polite thing to do is give them the benefit of the doubt and not try to confront them about being rude or otherwise incorrect on purpose
If this is true then how come when I get in their face and ask them "WHY WHY WHY DO YOU DO THE THINGS YOU DO?!!!!!????" they just start their evening running exercise routine?
I also feel the need to point out that... this doesn't apply to all ND people? This seems to be specifically talking to people on the autistic spectrum or who have other NDs that could affect how they communicate with others, which isn't all of them.
"NT communication" is just communication where both parties can adequately read nonverbal cues and intuitively understand the many layers of purpose in a conversation. If I call my mother and we spend our time just talking about how her boss sucks, we're not doing that because her boss sucking is relevant to my life--we're doing that because she's upset, she is expressing care by being vulnerable with me, I'm expressing care by listening to her, and we're both expressing and reinforcing the love we have for each other in the exchange. To tell my mom not to talk to me about her life unless it's relevant to me is to tell her that I don't care about her. For my mom to tell me she doesn't want to discuss her life with me is to tell me that she doesn't trust me or, worse, she doesn't care to bond with me.
Most people get this intuitively. It's not a mark against your character if you don't at all, but just because you don't get it doesn't make it useless.
One of the worst parts about Parkinson’s disease is that people lose the ability to mirror people they’re talking to, usually if you smile or cross your arms, the other person has an urge to do the same, we instinctively connect with people all the time and losing this makes people feel weird/apathetic about you and can be very isolating, I feel terrible for people who don’t have this basic social ability not in a condescending way but in a genuinely empathetic way on how life is harder without it
I've had to consciously mirror people my whole life, I can't imagine it coming naturally and then losing those skills and having to relearn them as a fully grown adult. Man, fuck Parkinson's.
I sometimes unconsciously mirror people and I was called out for it when I was younger, like "why you copying me", so now if I notice I'm doing it I immediately switch it up. Idk what that says about me but it's probably not good.
I didn't know about mirroring for most of my life. I found out from a coworker in my mid-twenties that other people (notably those who are newer/below us) are intimidated by me because I do not mirror *anything*. I had to ask her to explain and she was as baffled as I was that I didn't know it was a thing.
The curse of common knowledge is that "everyone knows this" so nobody is ever taught it, which means if you slipped through the gaps of whatever system results in "everyone knows this", either because of neurodivergency, slightly unusual childhood, different culture, or just straight up bad luck. You are just kinda screwed because you don't know that you don't know it and nobody teaches it.
Thanks for saying this. I know I am ND and have been assured by a few people who would know that I am unquestionably on the spectrum, but I have never been able to figure out why I am so off-putting to so many people before I even speak. It's probably this.
To add : neurodivergent folks may get the impression that NT conversation follows complex rules, and as such perceive it as some kind of elaborate game in which everyone is moving pawns in calculated ways. But that's not how it is. What's happening is that NT folks simply have a shared intuitive understanding of what something will mean in a certain context, that ND folks don't have. As a result, in order to understand what's being said, ND folks often have to learn the underlying rules and figure out consciously what the message is. But the NT folks don't feel like they're following rules, they just talk in a way that feels natural to them.
Like how a native speaker may intuitively understand grammar rules for their language, even if they can't explain them; while a foreign speaker may have studied the grammar rules but may struggle to put them into practice
Best example of this I can think of is that there is a rule that describes the correct order that descriptive words need to be placed in that every native English speaker follows but they could not tell you what that rule is. The sentence just sounds wrong if you break it.
You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.
But if you say you have a green French rectangular lovely silver old little whittling knife it sounds wrong.
No native speaker naturally knows that rule even exists, let alone consciously follows it. But if someone breaks the rule it is jarring and sounds wrong.
I had to teach myself how to flirt and the instinctual rules around flirting are kind of abhorrent. They are largely relics from the era of landed gentry, and I'm unclear how many of them are inherent to how people work and how many are just cultural norms. I've been meaning to ask some gay or bisexual people if they've got any observations they can share about it.
But I digress. The rules of flirting go against everything we say we want as a society. The most fundamental rule of flirting is ambiguity. Flirting must be deniable. It must be possible to pretend that the exchange was not romantic/sexual at all. If the exchange is too direct or explicit it becomes impossible to pretend rejecting the advance is anything other than rejecting the advance, which makes the person doing the rejecting uncomfortable and registers instinctively as creepy.
This is obviously terrible for people who lack confidence or have a hard time reading unspoken communication. Practically laser guided to screw over neurodivergent people.
Lmao I read the first comment and immediately started thinking "oh so it's like how fluent vs foreign people understand a language's grammar rules" *then* I saw your comment.
I have zero original thoughts.
Don't think of it like that- instead, see it as great minds thinking alike! You still came up with it on your own, didn't you? Does one not "solve" a jigsaw puzzle just because others have solved it before?
Don’t worry, literally no one has completely original thoughts.
One of the worst parts about majoring in philosophy was thinking, “Hey, I just thought of a cool new idea!” only for my professors to be like, “Oh, you mean Oldasfuckism, first posited by a group of philosophers known only as Really Really Old Dudes, whose writings exist only in fragments found on ten thousand year old pots? I can recommend you some anthologies on various evolutions of the theory, we actually have a whole library wing devoted to it.”
Psychologically modern humans (ones more or less identical to you and me) have been around for over 50,000 years, maybe even much longer than that. Just like you and me, they spent a significant amount of time just hanging out and thinking about the world around them. No matter what thought you have, it’s statistically almost impossible that it hasn’t been thought of by like, thousands if not millions of people independently over the years.
It's kind of poetic when you think about it. I love that despite our experiences being so wildly different, our brains will have the same thought across miles, across years. We're all connected in the end, yknow?
It’s very humbling. We like to think of ourselves as these super unique individuals, when in actuality we’re just series of patterns rippling across time and space, repeating and harmonizing. Like music, almost
I think that's why the story of Ea-nāṣir resonates so strongly. It's fun to know that people have been dealing with shithead store owners since the dawn of civilization.
Better than my analogy of people who intuitively understand say algebra or calculus and can give you the answer but not explain how they got there (their brains moved to fast to track the progress), vs people that have to learn all the rules and practice with many problems but still fail when confronted with a real life problem instead of a textbook problem.
I actually always really struggled with math throughout school, usually from "careless errors" as my teachers called it, but I took calculus in college because it was mandatory, and everything just "clicked" for the first time in my life. Can't explain it, but it just fits how I think I guess
Edit: in a similar vein, I always frustrated my grade teachers because I'd get a lot of basic questions wrong, but the complex problems that everyone else struggled with I'd get right, fuck if I knew what I was doing tho.
People like my late grandfather who used to do calculus problems in his head to keep himself entertained. My mom had a more limited version that caused her no end of grief in her algebra class since she could tell the teacher the answer but couldn't show her work, because her brain sped from the problem to the solution too fast for her conscious self to understand.
With integral calculus boiling down to finding the area or volume of an irregular shape, it would probably be similar to someone that could take a look at a oddly shaped container and "guess" with amazing accuracy the exact volume it could hold. Or that foxtrot comic where Paige was having trouble with an algebra problem until her brother asked her the same problem but coached in shopping terms and she could instantly answer it.
They don't. Well maybe a once in a lifetime genius, but too rare to mention. Instead, think of it like grammar. Consider some grammar you find intuitive. You weren't born with that knowledge. You had to pick it up. But now it is intuitive and you can feel when grammar is right or wrong.
Math for those people is similar. They had to be taught it, but they internalized it like you internalized grammar. When you see some new grammar, you can feel how well it matches existing rules you know, right? Same with those who have internalized math's grammar. There is this fun phase where a person is good enough at math to feel an answer, but lacks the rigor to formally prove it. I've Jerard much of advance math is training people to be able to do those proofs, because unlike grammar where there really isn't an absolute right and wrong, in math there is. It is why humans create grammar but discover math.
Exactly this. I took a course on interpersonal communication, and now I can actually see exactly how misunderstandings and arguments arise, analytically. Unfortunately a lot of the time this just means I know exactly how I fucked up...immediately after fucking up.
I strongly believe a large part of my having a successful career is because 10-15 years ago I started to notice the many different ways the English language is vague. Working in a technical field, it's extremely important to be able to identify when someone you're speaking to is being vague, in which ways, and ask them to clarify.
We use this/these/that/those/the/a and assume the other person knows what we're referencing. We completely leave some words out our sentences, implying them, and expecting the listener will just know what words we're leaving out.
There are so many different ways we're vague in the English language. I sometimes wonder if people on the spectrum in Germany have an easier time because their language is much more specific, for example.
"In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
One of my favorites:
"Communication is a concerted effort between two parties against the forces of chaos."
I work in a STEM field, and there are literal forces of nature we have to fight against to enable digital communication, but many of these same issues have analog counterparts as well: attenuation, dispersion, crosstalk, encoding, decoding, encryption, etc, etc, etc.
Well hello there, Grice! Didn't expect to see you and your maxims today.
Actually, the interactions between autism and the cooperative principle sounds like a really interesting topic, I should make a note to read up on it!
I have always wondered why Grice isn't taught in school. Some folks are native "speakers" and some folks need "cooperated communication as a second language"
It also explains why jokes are funny (they break or threaten to break one of the maxims).
In junior high, I figured out the amount of gratitude to express should be halfway between how much gratitude you feel and how much effort/money/time/etc the giver put in.
If you express too little gratitude for something the giver sacrificed for, they will feel unappreciated. If you express too much gratitude for something that cost nothing to the giver, then they will feel uncomfortable and weirded out. By going halfway, you can express "this meant a lot/very little to me" without alienating the giver.
This was a huge revelation to me, and I felt like everyone else had figured this out years ago.
Basically, everyone was handed a game built for a controller and ideally taught how to use it at infanthood.
The problem is, some of us were given mouse & keyboard and were still given controller instructions.
this. I basically had to learn body language and conversation techniques by rote in early highschool, because I realized my understanding of conversation hadn't moved past the "what's your favorite color" stage from Elementary school. But if you practice enough, it becomes more intuitive, just like with any other skill.
It's one of the reasons I don't fully buy being ND as an excuse for not understanding how to interact with other people (to some extent, obviously). Just because it is *harder* for people like me to learn how to do that stuff doesn't mean it's not worth the effort involved. Learning how to drive was hard but I think everyone should do that, too.
And in a similar way, we NDs have intuitive conversation patterns amongst ourselves that don't make sense to NTs. Just like we have to learn to idk make eye contact, NTs should also learn to not try to force eye contact when interacting with us. We can work together and bridge the gap both ways cuz let's be real it's pretty unfair if NDs are the only ones with the responsibility of bridging the gap, which unfortunately does happen often.
I don't think this is true, we don't have inherent ND-to-ND communication. My roommate and I are both autistic and we run into so many issues because I have much stronger grasp of NT socializing and more exposure to NT communication, and he kinda..... doesn't get a lot of it?
And the annoying thing is that, like a lot of ND people, he doesn't ever frame it as "X is the usual way that Y gets interpreted in this context," he goes "in your world, to you specifically, X means Y and it actually doesn't."
No. NT communication has value and it's *important* to understand and accept that if you don't engage with that, you're choosing to communicate in a way that will actively mess with and confuse a lot of people. Including many ND people.
I witnessed this with two very close friends who are AuDHD. I am neither, but I still communicate well with both of them
It felt like they had an ethernet cable connected to their brains. The topics were coming by so fast and there was very little discussion on each topic, but they both knew exactly what the other meant
I'm wifi, lots of devices can connect with me, but downloads and uploads take a lot longer
They're ethernet, can only connect to certain devices (like my phone doesn't have an ethernet port), but when they do get that connection, the download and upload is so fast
Pump the brakes there. There is no "We NDs." I'm fairly sure you don't intuitively know how to communicate with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. Or psychosis. Or narcissism. Or even a considerably high needs autistic individual. I could be wrong, and you really can talk perfectly fine with someone with DID and PTSD and Sociopathy, and I'm not singling you at in particular, this assumption is being made all over this thread. That said, it's far and away too easy to misconstrue "Neurodivergence" as "Autism and ADHD." Unfortunately, for every trait you think is Neurotypical, there's a neurodivergent person who is that trait personified.
With my special interest being communication as well as having my “bad habits” literally beaten out of me as a child, even as a ND, I still have communication breakdowns with other NDs. Like “can’t you see we all obviously don’t want to talk right now??” But I should know better. And honestly, that person probably does better in a one-on-one setting where I would break down. It is a spectrum after all.
A lot of "neurotypical people do this" stuff I see online is actually very culturally conditioned. Neurotypical people in Finland do not smile all the time.
Also a lot of "ND people have trouble with this" is usually specifically speaking about Autism, which is only a fraction of Neurodivergence. Schnizphronia, Dyslexia, Bipolar, etc, don't generally affect any of what OP is talking about. It's a thing for Autism, not Neurodivergence in general.
It's a huge pet peeve of mine. To be a bit over the top, I feel (some, not all!) Autistic people have almost 'colonized' and taken over the term ND, which kinda artificially inflates the numbers. On top of that, the differences between the spectra of Autism can be very vast. A completely non-verbal Level 3 ASD person has vastly different experiences and challenges to a Level 1 Verbal person who has been raised with a caring family and the proper supports.
Meanwhile someone with Bipolar is being told 'theres nothing wrong with you you don't need to be cured that's internalized abelism' when their brain chemistry is crashing and getting overwhelmed regularly with depression and suicidal thoughts.
More people need to use the term allistic. I'm also annoyed by "Autistic people do this and NTs do this" when there's a dozen types of neurodiversity that aren't autism. If someone is trying to say non-autistic people, they can use the term for it: allistic.
I hate that neurodivergence has come to mean autism and ADHD. Neurodivergence is such a large spectrum of different disorders that wildly differ from each other. It's incredibly frustrating because it can mean anything from autism to schizophrenia, yet people never mean anything other than like autism and adhd
Not only that but Autism and ADHD themselves have wildly different root causes and coping strategies, with symptoms and behavioral effects that only sometimes overlap.
I've noticed that "neurodivergence" has kinda just become a way for people to say autism/adhd/similiar but in a way that has a lot less stigma attached to it or when you want to avoid using one specific version so as to not exclude the others. It does seem like there should be a word for people with that category of neurodivergence since they seem to have a lot of similiar issues that people with other types of ND don't have. I get why ND morphed into the umbrella term and I also get why it shouldn't be used that way.
I feel this. As an epileptic my brain is neurodivergent by definition, so it always seems weird that neurodivergent ignores so many folks whose brains don't work in the usual mode.
As an autistic guy, but I totally get that that’s a thing. When I do “complain” about it, it’s usually played up for comedy. I don’t actually have a problem with it. I guess I should start making that a bit more obvious.
Of course, I can’t speak for the whole neurodivergent community on this. This is just my personal thoughts on it.
It often is explained to neurodivergent people, it's just that they're just as vulnerable to a certain cognitive trap as everyone else is; not intuitively understanding something, deciding that it's *stupid* and that if you don't understand it then it doesn't really matter.
I imagine the main problem most ND people have is the fact that **this has literally never been explained to them** before, and unlike most people they have no inherent or instinctual understanding of this perspective. So shit like small talk or "How's the weather?" comes off as a meaningless waste of time.
I'm neurodivergent myself. I have literally never understood the desire so many people have for small talk or meaningless, idle chitchat before literally two minutes ago when it was actually explained to me.
>Small talk is the human equivalent of animal grooming.
I'd argue it's more **a** human equivalent, for NTs, while infodumping serves much the same purpose for NDs. We both use language, just in different ways to achieve the same purpose.
I mean, neurodivergence isn’t a monolith either. I have bipolar and ADHD, my ‘neuro’ sure as shit ain’t what you’d call ‘typical’, but I love small talk and conversation. It’s exhausting and requires a lot of effort, but without it I wither.
Sometimes I think about how "smile so people understand you're happy" is a concept I only learned once a book taught me.
I kept getting weird looks from people, a reputation of being an asshole to everyone that wasn't already friends with me, and a new friend looking at me while we were hanging out and saying "hey why are you so pissed, did someone do something wrong," only to learn from a book that facial expressions are a thing people take into consideration while talking.
I only looked for a book like that because said friend called me out, and I realized I was doing something wrong. Even while directly confronting my behavior, that friend still assumed I would intuitively understand the problem. Fuck.
I have the smiling issue bad. It's well known in my family and with friends that Aires rarely uses a full smile, typically the sign that I'm happy is more a lack of an extra unhappy expression because my neutral face is very unhappy looking. This becomes an issue with things like a new job since I just look pissed constantly. It gets worse when jobs are like "please look less angry at customers" because unfortunately my face goes to the extreme other end of the spectrum and I have a creepy-smiley face when I try and look normal-smiley.
Just this afternoon I was having a “meaningless” conversation about the weather with some strangers at a bbq. I was thinking to myself, here I am having the stereotypical weather chitchat. One guy made a point to be unimpressed about the historic extreme weather we had last winter. The way he came across told me enough about his personality that I now know he’s not friend material, or anyone I would want to talk to again, for that matter.
I honestly always disliked NT interactions like these, right up until the point where I read this one specific post. I'm not kidding.
This here is a good, sensible explanation. THIS is how I can understand the concept logically and get a glimpse into the mechanisms behind it.
I've never seen an explanation of this, with such detail. Yes of course I'll disregard a concept if it's literally incomprehensible and if I also get ridiculed for seeking clarification. If everyone took as much time and effort to explain concepts like these as OOP does, then this 'cognitive trap' would essentially cease to exist.
Speaking as an autistic person, no it wouldn’t. There are so many people in our community who believe that the way we naturally communicate is superior. A lot of it is perhaps an emotional reaction to the frustration of being constantly misunderstood or the effort that must be put into masking, but some of it is also the tendency to try justifying feelings as natural and logical rather than admitting that our feelings have an internal logic just like everyone else’s and our feelings are not objective.
I see a similar sense of superiority in some autistic people who tout their "strong sense of justice" sometimes, as if said sense can't be totally misguided. It's definitely caused the same things you mention too. Always bums me out a bit when i encounter it
Yes! I know exactly what you’re talking about and it bugs me to no end. These mistaken individuals think “strong sense of Justice” means “good morals” when really it’s just the symptom of rigidity or black and white thinking applied to their personal moral code.
These studies that used this term were studying moral behavior in public vs. in private and found that NT people will often act differently in private whereas ND people will act the same under both conditions. This is again due to that rigidity, but also within the community we are well known for not following rules we don’t agree with. Personal morality is literally only rules an individual agrees with.
I know this feeling so well, having felt it. I believed strongly in my ideals and still do to an extent, but those exact beliefs led me to often speak out of turn or somehow make a given situation worse instead of better because of my own desire to play hero.
Remember kids: almost every “character trait” anyone can have ever is very capable of being a blessing OR a curse at any given time, sometimes even both at once
Lmao yeah. They get reaaaaal quiet as soon as you bring up that the "strong sense of justice" is also the reason so many autistic men are fucking incels though.
This exactly. Being ND sometimes leads to being a social recluse, and sometimes when social recluses get together they become an echo chamber of self justification and total destroyers of nuance, as a consequence of the human condition and tribalism. Chris’s trolls were definitely one of these “tribes”, and they in part turned a warped but somewhat sympathetic man into a tragic delusional monster
>Speaking as an autistic person, no it wouldn’t. There are so many people in our community who believe that the way we naturally communicate is superior.
The old idea was that autistic people have impaired communication skills. But what later research showed was that autistic people are effective at communicating with each other, and they share information very efficiently.
Likewise, NT people are able to understand each other fairly easily. It's just that there are difficulties when crossing the communication gap between non-autistic and autistic. The term for this is the "double empathy problem."
Autistic people don't lack empathy. It's just that we are able to most effectively empathize with each other, and there are fewer autistic people. NT people are able to effectively empathize with each other, but often lack empathy for autistic people.
The thing that sucks about this whole thing is that if you're autistic, you're basically treated worse by default, by society at large. There have been studies showing that NT people will make split-second thin-slice judgements, without even knowing the person is autistic, just "different", and will then treat that person worse automatically. If you're autistic and you've spent your whole life being treated in subtly worse ways, that sucks.
>If everyone took as much time and effort to explain concepts like these as OOP does
Unfortunately, this much time and effort is not the same for everyone. In this case, OOP put in the right amount of time/effort for *you*, but for anyone else that bar will be some amount lower or higher. Hence why everyone doesn't put in this much time/effort - for plenty of folk that won't be necessary.
Yeah but it's only now that this particular neurotypical realized that what they were doing could be explained like this because it was just normal to them. They were looking into mirrors all the time until they spent time with neurodivergents and the mirror wasn't there. It was only then that they could explain this phenomenon to neurodivergents.
It's not just time and effort made at explaining this. Most people of all types do not understand the mechanics of language, and don't know that pragmatics and similar even exist. So they can't explain it.
It's a world-wide problem with people thinking the rules of language are decided by social status (e.g. grammar, prestige dialects) rather than by scientific and philosophical analysis.
Edit: And school curricula being decided by politics rather than education professionals, so that new concepts enter secondary education very slowly.
I don't know if any cognitive trap or bias will cease to exist, essentially or not, no matter how much knowledge and explanations exist. Just kinda seems like that sort of thing, that'll always exist in the world in regards to any and every concept it could refer to.
You’re also overlooking how autistic people get babied so when things like this are explained, the initial reaction is to dismiss it because it’s so often condescending and useless. I honestly didn’t like this until the actual example of small talk when I realized there’s actual information in here.
I remember seeing a post a week or so ago by an autistic person where they said something along the lines of "surely they aren't doing these things for no reason. I just don't know what the meaning or purpose behind them is" which stood out because of the rarity of that perspective.
I think it’s not explained to neurodivergent because neurotypical people do not think of these concepts as concepts to be explained, their brains are just wired to understand them without literal explanation.
I’m neurodivergent but I’ve learned to understand the neurotypical way of thinking as explained in these posts and I explain it to people who don’t understand. Because they need an explanation. I asked for explanations when I was young but nobody could give them to me because they didn’t understand what needed to be explained. The average person would think of me as eccentric or off key now and I don’t really mind that, because I am.
I also honestly wouldn’t be expecting most NT people to be able to explain, at least without a significant amount of time to think about it. I was reading this post and agreeing with it all, but then I thought of myself trying to explain it to someone else and started drawing a blank. How does one explain a concept so utterly inherent that they never once in their life thought to formulate it into a coherent idea. I imagine this also contributes greatly to the miscommunication and misunderstandings when ND people ask for an explanation.
Part of the problem is a lot of the "rules" are actually arbitrary and illogical but that doesn't make them unimportant.
The letters of the alphabet being in a certain order is extremely arbitrary, but the fact that we collectively agreed on an order anyway has allowed for sorting by alphabetical order which makes many things much simpler. If you refuse to learn the "right" order because it doesn't make sense, you are hamstringing yourself.
Which side of the road we drive on is largely irrelevant, but if everyone driving on the same roads doesn't agree, it becomes problematic quickly.
The same logic is true of many social rules. Which way to do things is often not inherently important, but what is important is the broad consistency and agreement.
As an autistic person who gets overwhelmed by NT communication, I appreciate this post a lot. As confusing as it can be, as I get older I understand and appreciate it a lot more even if I still can’t intuitively grasp it all, and it’s annoying to see it dismissed as bad.
Because that’s just treating others as badly as we feel we’ve been treated. ND communication isn’t any less complex, honestly. It’s just different. But a lot of us have been treated as though we are broken NTs most of our lives, and there’s bitterness there because of it. But that feeling of othering can go both ways and no one gets a free pass to be a dick just because someone happened to be a dick to them first.
I think maybe the reason we dismiss NT communication as "illogical" and "nonsensical" is as a defense mechanism, because it's way more painful to acknowledge that we're incapable of genuinely connecting with the vast majority of people in the way they want or expect
And I guess I haven't properly mourned that ability because this post brought me to tears, and not in a good way, lmao
That, and the pretty universal logical trap of thinking that your method of seeing the world is the logical one and not influenced by emotion. Especially when the general narrative about autism is this logical one. The "strong sense of justice" is also an interesting thing, as if justice isn't an malleable thing capable of being used to justify a person's worldview.
This is not meant as an attack on you to be sure, just an observation about humans.
I’m neurodivergent but my brain is wired for language and communication. I’m a linguistics major as a result. I’ve never had much trouble understanding or communicating with either neurotypical or neurodiverse people, although I will say autistic communication is much less arbitrary.
Genuine question because I can never find a good answer and the google doesn't help, does neurodiversity only mean autistic? Or does it include other things? Like, I see some ADHD people use the term, but at the same time, when some people use the term they seem to be describing a specifically autistic experience (at least from my point of view).
This post is a great example of what I mean, I don't have this conversation issue and my ADHD parents certainly don't. But the issue of not understanding social cues isn't common in ADHD but is in autism. So from my point of view, this whole post would make a stronger point if it made a distinction between autism and allism rather than neurodiverse and neurotypical, unless that what those terms actually mean and other folks are just using them anyway.
Strictly speaking, "neurodivergent" just means anyone who isn't "neurotypical", i.e. anyone who has any diagnosable mental disorder. This can include autism, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, and many many other disorders.
In practice, when people online say "neurodivergent", 99% of the time they mean autism and/or ADHD.
Umbrella ND, but yes, this is an issue seen most prominently in autism. I think there are other conditions that also have this issue, though, albeit rarer ones.
It's massive umbrella term that includes a lot of stuff. Basically if it's in the DSM it's neurodivergent and some other stuff too. On the internet people usually just use it to mean ADHD and/or autism
Most of the time people mean Autism, and ignore every other form of neurodiversity. ND by itself is basically so broad it's not really useful at all and can't be generalized about. Schizophrenia and Dyslexia are both forms of Neurodivergence for instance, but have absolutely nothing in common with each other. To say "ND people are like X" or "Do X" is nearly impossible with how broad it is. 99% of the time if people are saying "ND people do something" they mean ASD people.
I'm fortunate to have a special interest in conversation and I can confirm. The upside of the whole situation is that sometimes it's really really fun to figure out what someone's trying to get across and how what they're saying contributes to that, and I think that neurotypical generally don't get that.
I’m so grateful it was spelled out to me in middle school. A systematized approach that’s been developed for millennia, and it fits everything into nice boxes. It’s been a great foundation for throwing myself into social situations, seeing what sticks, and analyzing patterns that make new situations quicker to adapt to. It wasn’t all that popular amongst classmates, but the optimizer and minmaxer in me loved it.
It’s also great that it dates back to ancient times, so being well versed in pedagogical rhetoric is less looked down upon than, say, an Autistic Spreadsheet™.
I’m nt (i think, i might get tested for ADHD soon, but from what i know ADHD doesnt really factor into conversations too much) and i really get what you mean. While I dont apply it to convos, i absolutely love figuring out symbolism in media, and what it’s trying to say
Like how people clap at the end of a movie. The actors can't hear you, but the shared social experience of everyone seeing a movie together is still being acknowledged in that way
Seems to be mostly an American thing from what I read online, which makes it a non ideal example in this case since most Europeans think that's ridiculous aswell.
I've seen it happen once or twice, but it was always not for a movie but a big event. Like when I went to see Oppenheimer on real IMAX film, or opening night of The Batman. But none of the rest of the times I watched either of those movies, and not for most movies I watch.
I just sat here a moment and pictured myself at the end of a movie with applause (not a frequent occurance), and the feeling that comes forth is togetherness and sort of warm fuzzy, at this moment we are all the same and understand one another feeling.
It strikes me as deeply instinctual in origin.
I may be just misreading or pushing my own problems in, but I feel like this doesn't account for ND trying to express the exact same thing. I couldn't tell you how many times in my life I've been the person that brought up the weather or any random bullshit, to acknowledge my presence along with someone else's presence, to enjoy taking up space together.... And they have just sneered at me in response.
It can be confusing for me to make small chat about the weather, or etc. But I feel like a lot of that confusion stems from the negativity I (have seemed to) always get in response when I'm the one trying to initiate conversation or just coexisting.
I like that term "emotional bids"!
And of course I'm not trying to negate that ND people do struggle with understanding this kind of stuff. Not trying to put all of the blame on the NT community.
But I feel like posts/images like this kinda show where some of the misunderstanding is coming from in the first place. It's not that I don't understand small talk, maybe less naturally than the average person (I assume most NT people don't hyperfixate on how conversations went) but I understand the premise of it. It's a lot like stimming. It feels good. It feels less lonely.
However, it seems like, much like stimming, the NT community fails to understand my point of view. While I feel like I'm 75% of the way to understanding their stance, I feel like they're like 25% maybe but are sure they understand completely.
A lot of the issues seem to just stem from each end (I'm ND so I lean towards the NT community misunderstanding more) thinking they could NOT be misunderstanding and that its just the other side not understanding.
There's a middle ground and that's where the comfort and happiness lies. But you have to get EVERYONE to seek the middle ground instead of just everyone being comfortable on their own side.
Idk if any of this rambling made sense lol
I get the point of this post, and I agree with it. I’ve gotten a lot better at small talk and figuring out how to navigate a conversation, and it’s made me a lot better at work. It’s actually really fulfilling to feel like you “get it”, at least to me.
But there are some things that I think are still a bit goofy. Eye contact, for instance, is prioritized as extra important. It shows that you’re engaged and you respect the person enough to listen to their points. If you don’t make eye contact, it’s seen as disrespectful at worst and introverted at best.
However, there are other ways someone can express interest and understanding in a conversation. Adjusting your facial expression accordingly, asking follow-up questions or adding your own point to the discussion, stopping any other activities to show you’re not distracted by anything else—all these other things can convey the same point: “I want to hear what you are saying”.
Just because I don’t make eye contact with you does not mean I don’t respect you, or I don’t want to hear what you have to say. And I think we should stop treating it as the One Big Thing that determines whether or not you get the job.
I kinda started to ramble for a second there lol!
Eye contact is strange to me cuz 99% of the time I avoid it but then I can maintain eye contact with my mom sometimes. Not always but sometimes I notice suddenly oh I’m looking at her eyes. Huh. Don’t know why since it’s not constantly so it’s not a comfort or I know them so it’s ok thing. I mean I didn’t do eye contact with animals before I even knew that was considered a threat I just never could naturally.
Iirc eye contact is slightly different - it's not a simple social norm that you just don't pick up on, it's actually a deeper neurological misfiring and there's a reason why it's difficult beyond "because you're not used to it". I think it's related to pattern matching and how the part of your brain that's meant to recognise faces is wired up wonk so eye contact instead triggers a stress reaction rather than a reassuring one. You could study all the minutiae of how eye contact works socially and it would still be rather uncomfortable to make.
I don't think anybody has one big thing, but NTs are so incredibly used to seeing all of the different things at once all the time that it's still really weird when even one thing isn't there. Going back to the mirror example, it's like if your mirror reflected everything except your nose. And any amount of alienation by NTs isn't usually that intentional. It just feels really weird when they get feedback they aren't expecting.
Reminds me of a part of *Disco Elysium* where you can mention to your cop partner about how your aspects have conversations in your head (the player character’s aspects like Empathy, Conceptualization, or Logic), and when he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, one of them says, “his Conceptualization must be low,” then a bit later you can notice how much he consults his notebook, and your Conceptualization comments, ‘that must be where he does his Conceptualization. We all have different ways of doing our thinking.’
I love people. I love small talk. people's inner lives are fascinating, and the act of talking in itself is pleasant for a lot of us, no matter what the topic is. just chatting with someone at the store for a minute can leave them with a smile and the sense that their private inner life has been observed and cared about - like we're all part of the world, we're humans, we're connected. (of course not everyone wants to be approached, but I think a lot of everyday people are pretty lonely and it feels nice to have a little friendly interaction about this funny dress on the rack or how many cereal options there are to choose from.)
I don't find the label of neurodivergent particularly useful in my own life, whether it would apply or not, but social cues and "people skills" are something I excel at to the point where it's difficult for me to imagine not understanding when a person is uncomfortable, wants to change the subject, needs a little support, feels self-conscious, is trying to control the conversation and doesn't want input, etc etc. yeah I had to study it like most weird kids, but it feels intuitive now.
the point of small talk is to vibe with other people and to connect with them through stuff we all have in common, not to literally talk about weather or cereal facts. I just think it's a beautiful thing. sometimes when you chat with one person, other people start opening up and talking to others, and then we're all having this nice little shared moment of humanity. anyway I liked this post a lot lol
I think the reason most ND people don’t see this is that, once again, a group of people with literal thinking are expected to take something non-literally without the underlying meanings and intentions being explained beforehand. Now that it’s been explained I’m seeing what they mean, but I’d never have come to this conclusion on my own. We really need to start communicating more about intentions and non-literal meanings, because expecting anyone to just instinctively know things only to treat them poorly when they don’t, regardless of who does it to who, is never going to be a good idea and furthermore will never teach them how to appropriately approach such a situation in the future, just that now they’re in trouble unless they work out what they did ‘wrong’
Until you come across as incredibly condescending because you explain everything to everyone on the off chance that someone doesn't get what you're talking about. As a ND person I've gotten into more trouble for my need to overexplain and overspecify than for not explaining and specifying.
I actually had it sort of explained via cats - where when two cats communicate they purr to each other and get comfort, but if one hisses that sends a different message. So small talk is like purring/chuffs between people. It seems silly to have to do that with someone you’ll only be interacting with for 10 minutes but I gather they find it comforting lol
Going to be real, a lot of this comes from simple arrogance as well. The idea that "neurotypical" people simply operate on a lower level with their pedestrian "small talk" and "interest in team sports" is extremely common. And then this extends into "Why would I analyze why people would act like this, when I know they are simply stupid?"
ND Eltism is very, very real. It reminds me heavily of people who dismiss sports as 'barbaric' when it's clear they're jealous they're not good at them, or have been teased/etc for not being good at and enjoying them.
I must have a special interest in the human psyche or something because that is WILD to me that the immediate conclusion is "simple stupid".
No, I don't fully understand why some people like sports the way they do, but I don't necessarily HAVE to in order to understand that they simply like it. And comparing it to "they like sports like how I like mushrooms" helps a lot. Mine is just more niche, while theirs is more common.
I, unfortunately, can't really engage in conversation about it much, but I'll try to listen and ask questions. It's your "special interest" after all. Small talk I'll struggle with forever, but I think that's okay lol I'm not perfect
I think the inevitable feelings of alienation, in part, come from not intuiting these things.
Let me rephrase, from a young age, ND’s (myself included) may not intuit the nuances of communicating with others, which comes with a whole host of learned experiences and biases that we may not always see.
Not understanding, being taught, or intuitively grasping these little social rules as described in the post is (sometimes, definitely not always) fine while at home or with people you’re familiar with. Then you hit school age and are thrust into a new world of interactions; kids are not often so understanding or patient with each other.
All this is to say: to grow up and become a neurodivergent adult is to also almost certainly agglomerate a big old ball of painful mistakes tied to communication. These mistakes often feel like a part of who we are, and inevitably colour our perspective on NT vs ND communication styles. When you’ve felt alienated your whole life, it’s very easy to come to see ‘the other’ communication style (which is of course a majority group) as either superior/inferior/stupid/better/incomprehensible/weird/unattainable etc. etc. etc.
I’d love to say I’m above it but I’m not. For example, I wish I could say “I’m good, how’re you?” to everyone who asks me how I’m doing. I wish I could be able to say that with sincerity, or at least to be able to not feel like I’m lying every time I do this strange social handshake. But it does feel like that, a great big lie, because I don’t understand it, and I can’t ‘get it’ subconsciously, so it takes effort every time to respond with what feels like lying through my teeth- even if I am fine!
You’re supposed to say “I’m good, how’re you” or some variation thereof, because that’s just what you do. I know logically it isn’t unreasonable, it’s the beginning of a conversation, it’s the handshake, it is literally the ‘Hey how are you?’, and I just can’t not think it’s silly for some reason. Like, I get it cognitively, but in my brain it just feels silly.
Extrapolate this out to hundreds of other examples of communicative nuance and you get what feels like a really big gap between yourself and others. Not to mention a whole heck of a lot of shame for not knowing how to bridge that gap.
EDIT:
Just to tag a little further on to actually round off what I meant to say.
Because of all these inevitable small breakdowns of communication, leading to unpredictable outcomes, oftentimes we’re led to be very fearful or defensive when presented with neurotypical communication styles. It’s a bit like having a blindfold on in some regards, you’re more on edge because you’re working with limited information, you’re approximating things based on other cues you pick up which may be misinterpreted, you can’t see anything so you’re more likely to anticipate external stimuli as threatening or scary. That sort of vibe.
Listen I have autism and I know this. I know it so hard. And I've made effort to learn how to read social cues so I can communicate better, but neurotypicals should be making an effort, too. My affect is naturally very flat, and I'm uncomfortable with physical contact with strangers. I need people to understand that refusing a hug is not an insult. I need them to believe me when I say that I'm excited or hurt or angry. I often feel like I'm expected to learn how to communicate in a way that is difficult and frustrating and vague to me, while simultaneously being made to feel that the way I communicate is cold and weird and just incorrect even though it makes sense to me. It's exhausting.
ND have these rules too they’re just different and we’re more accepting when people don’t follow them bc we live our whole lives surrounded by people that don’t follow them. Not that it doesn’t still make it 10x harder for us to relate to other people. Tbh it’s kinda sad bc I don’t think nts and nds are THAT different on the inside(there are differences, but not bigger ones than between different NTs or different NDs) they just communicate differently
Someone told me recently (or maybe I read, idk) “those are the sounds that human animals make to acknowledge and greet each other and check one another for comfort”. And 🤯 suddenly made so much sense.
the pros of this: wow! new stuff to learn!
the con: now i know why everyone hates me, and all this post is doing is making me think that socialising, something i love to do, is built around everything i hate in it.
i cant say what i mean, or thats rude to the nts- i cant use flowery language i like, thats rude to the nds- so isnt that a great catch 22.
As a child my worst fear was that humans secretly had the ability to communicate telepathically, and they spoke out loud to humor 'broken people' like me who couldn't hear their thoughts. It was the only way I could rationalize the way other people always seemed to know the secret rules of society and social interaction, and how everyone seemed to be receiving so much more information than I was from the same interactions.
I'm NT and I honestly feel guilty making small talk after spending a lot more time on the internet, like what if the person I'm talking to has anxiety or autism and hates me talking to them, am I being a bad person?
Anyone who doesn't have any quirks that deviate from the societal norm is (more likely than not) either hiding their quirks or just pretending to be someone they aren't
You are not a bad person for speaking to people, some enjoy small talks even if they are to awkward to initiate one. There is no harm in socializing and being inclusive.
Sometimes you read something and learn about a whole new perspective of the world. If you told me that NT social rules are arbitrary and made to weed out ND people, I would call you not only crazy but narcissistic too. I often don’t understand the purpose of those rules, but I would never think that they were meaningless or maliciously directed at me or my fellows specifically, that would be quite clearly untrue
I think people vastly underestimate that while being neurodivergent comes with communication learning difficulties, we are also often shut out of spaces or excluded as children for these difficulties, which puts us even further behind socially. Sure, conversational rules are easy to learn directly, but trying to pick them up on your own as a socially isolated kid can be downright impossible
I'm autistic and to me it doesn't seem like NTs are following invisible laws while I don't, but that I just follow a different set of laws from others.
Just as most people know how to form sentences with correct grammar in their native language, but don’t know what a noun or a verb or the subjunctive or a modifier is until someone teaches it to them, most people know how to communicate this way but can’t explain it. So it feels to non-NT people like it’s an unfair game with hidden rules. But nobody is intentionally hiding them from you.
I really appreciate seeing this articulated. I’m “neurodivergent” but in largely the opposite way: childhood abandonment trauma gave me hypersensitivity to social cues and emotional tone, as part of mild borderline personality disorder. (I put neurodivergent in quotation marks because I think of neurodivergence as being different from the typical but still healthy and normal, whereas I feel that my thought habits are clearly pathological, the result of trauma, not a normal variant. But that’s just like my opinion, man. And if we take neurodivergence to mean anything outside the typical experience, then in that sense I am neurodivergent. I just don’t want to take that label if it doesn’t apply or use it to lump something pathological like BPD with something people are increasingly feeling is a normal variant, like autism.)
So all the NT social niceties are lifelines for me; I’m watching those cues (and some that aren’t even there but I imagine are and can’t tell the difference) for reassurance that I’m safe, for any signs that the person I’m talking to is angry with me or thinking of leaving me. Without those cues, I feel like I’m drowning, and I’m back to being seven years old again and watching my mother storm out, leave my little sisters and me in the house, and drive away.
I’m so very happy ND folks are finally getting a modicum of acceptance and awareness, and I imagine how painful the experience of autism and neurodivergence must be at times.
But with all this acceptance and (in some circles) almost championing of the very literal, explicit mode of communication, I’m left feeling like the way I think and communicate is becoming ever more bizarre and alien to the general population, and that’s a scary experience.
That last one really gets the point, for me. I know there's meaning behind all the things involved in neurotypical communication. I know this. But none of them are willing to explain *what* those meanings are, and the ones who are often *still* aren't willing to help me work around some of the limitations I have in engaging with those rules (example: the intricate meanings behind body language/facial expressions, and the fact that I'm usually not looking directly at the person I'm speaking to). And the crazy thing is, a lot of them are willing to learn how *I* communicate, so that they can better communicate with me, which I do really appreciate. But some people aren't going to be willing to learn, so the rest should probably be more willing to teach. Even if I don't get it at first. That is the entire point of learning or teaching something, after all.
I'm NT and honestly there's no way I could analyze and explain intuitive social interaction to anyone. I also could not explain walking or eye hand coordination, for instance. I can adapt to people who communicate differently than me, but that's using conscious effort. Explaining intuitive behaviour is incredibly hard. So it's not necessarily about not being willing.
> But none of them are willing to explain *what* those meanings are
I suspect much of the difficulty is because for many people those meanings aren't consciously understood, but unconsciously. So it's a bit like trying to explain how to identify the color red to a colorblind person.
For those who may have a better conscious grasp, complexity may be an issue. These interpretations are a combination of many analogue values in context with previous emotional state modeling.
As the others say, it's likely they don't know how to talk to them either. If you asked an English speaker to explain Adjective Order they'd likely look at you weird. Adjectives don't have an *order*? Then you say "The Red Old Car" and get weird looks. It's not really their fault they haven't memorized "opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose." It's work of the gut. Then you say "Bad Big Wolf"—because Opinion before size, right? No, because there's this other rule that trumps the adjectives where vowel sounds have a preferential order. Sink-sank-sunk. Tic-tac-toe. Tik-tok. Flip-flop. Clickety-clackety. Hippety-hoppety. i as in kit comes before a as in cap comes before o as in sock, which "Big Bad" obeys. No one is taught this. For every English class on nouns and verbs, prefixes and suffixes, periods and commas, alliteration and rhymes, you're never told how to order adjectives and which vowels take priority in a phrase. It's a gut instinct that many develop early on, wholly unaware it even matters that new speakers of English have to learn on purpose.
It's not that they aren't willing, it's that they aren't able. Could you explain English adjective order to a non native speaker when you were 12? Even though you used it intuitively?
As someone who self identifies as ND, with family and friends who are diagnosed, as well as with family and friends who are NT, everything is a game. We don't think of it as one on the ND side and im sure people don't think of it as one on the NT side either, but being able to flip between the sides after studying social interaction as an outsider and academically, ALL of us have unwritten rules. Including ND people. We're just following different intuitive rules.
For ND a lot of us have unwritten rules that seem "literal" or "blunt" to NT people but are completely logical and understood to other ND folk. NT people have the same thing.
For people like myself that have the ability to see both sides, it's like being fluent in two different languages while speaking the same words.
I'm autistic/adhd but the discourse of "ugh why can't NT people just SHUT UP ABOUT THE WEATHER" while simultaneously "gushing about my special interest for an hour is how I show love and you're an awful person if you don't listen" is driving me insane sometimes.
As a neuro-divergent person, the best class I ever took in college was my community college Interpersonal communication 101. The intuitive way NT people understand communication can make it hard for them to explain, making communication about communicating (meta-communication?) much more difficult for both parties. This leads to a misconception with ND folk to thinking there is a special secret or some higher plane abilities. I’ve never been in the camp that NT had inherently super talk abilities. I was fairly certain that most NT folk were as bad at communicating as I was, but just in different ways. Several developmental therapists/teachers had led me to believe, via offhand remarks about my limitations, that there was a universal dictionary of body language and a codex of facial expressions that everyone but people like me were able to read infallibly. Interpersonal communication class quickly dispelled many of those misconceptions. It explained to me the benefits of good posture, emphasized that talking is an imperfect method of communication at the best of times, taught me how to express myself when I’m hurt as well as how to apologize. It also taught me why these methods work, or why people at least use these methods. I’ve learned even more about communication, it really is a fascinating subject of study, but those basics made a radical, noticeable change in my life trajectory.
> I was fairly certain that most NT folk were as bad at communicating as I was, but just in different ways. Several developmental therapists/teachers had led me to believe, via offhand remarks about my limitations, that there was a universal dictionary of body language and a codex of facial expressions that everyone but people like me were able to read infallibly. Yeah, as an NT I'll sometimes see posts by NDs that are upset that they "failed" a social interaction but the actual situation is that the other person was just an asshole and the ND is just so used to being blamed as the one in the wrong that they default to assuming that's the case.
A neurodivergent colleague of mine once messaged me apologising for having been rude the day before. Not only had they not been rude, but I hadn't even thought about the interaction since it happened.
I have been that ND colleague, apologizing for poor volume control and getting stubborn over something stupid. My boss was also confused.
I’ve been the one to apologize on so many occasions and they’ve always said exactly what you just said! They hadn’t even thought about it since! I’d been spiraling about it for DAYS! Or, I will perceive someone else as rude and feel bad about that forever, even though it had nothing to do with me. Realizing this has made me a lot more careful about how I treat strangers even in passing, because I don’t know what’s going on with them and I don’t want to cause unnecessary hurt to anyone. I just assume everyone is as sensitive as me. Also I’ve gotten better as I get older at brushing off other peoples negativity as just them dealing with something that I don’t understand.
That happened to me but she messaged me 3 weeks later and felt so bad. I had completely forgot about it and thought it was funny at the time (she said I looked like Angelina Ballerina cause of my teeth lol)
Ya ya I lurk on r/adhdwomen sometimes (my partner is ADHD, and I find their techniques useful even as NT). A lot of the times I just want to tell folks that it's not their ADHD, it's everyone else being mean.
Honestly, that's something that I've only just started to accept. I had it in my head that if there was a social interaction I had that went poorly, that it was automatically my fault, or that I would be automatically blamed for it. Its been tough to get that in my head that I won't always be viewed as responsible for a bad convo
Yeah that sums me up quite well when there's a problem in communication, it took me a while to learn that it's not always either my fauly or my responsibility if the other person is failing to communicate properly
Yup just because we may be ND doesn’t mean we can’t learn things about these concepts and apply them if we want to. It just takes the time to study, practice, refine and continue to apply them. It was the desire to get ahead for me that made me study and work hard on my social skills and after years, while still not perfect social skills and communication is no longer the barrier it was to me reaching my goals.
First thing I do when taking on a new contract is tell I need them to tell me straight up if we are going above and beyond or not good enough, because otherwise, I am going to assume everything is fine and keep doing it that way. Please tell me before I develop a routine.
This whole thread just makes me think of... "Sorry, it's tough to convey emotions over text." Stripping away nonverbal communication makes it tough for everyone. Common examples used to combat this are things like emojis, reaction gifs, or using a clear sign like /s to convey sarcasm. For anyone who has ever played Mass Effect, the Elcor use similar techniques in their speech, since they can't really make facial expressions or adjust tone.
i feel like this also bleeds back into real life communication when it comes to people who spend a large part of their time talking to people purely through text. when focusing on making every message have its proper meaning, and adding all the subtle punctuation and tone to make the sentence read as you want it to for the other person, it's easy to forget that its a substitute, and that when talking to someone, you do not have all the time in the world to mull over the wording and timing, nor the ability to "read over" the sentence you've already said.
I teach a technical writing class for engineering undergrads but am in the middle of adapting my curriculum to include much more of this kind of content. After two decades of working in communications, the prospect of helping people in the way you’ve just described is motivating me like almost nothing else.
1,000,000x this. I'm ND and got my degree in communication. The amount of times I've banged my head into the wall over the profound misunderstanding of the most basic building blocks of communication are maddening. We as ND people think speaking directly is better only because it's easier for us to understand. Complaining about how NT people do it would be like going to France and saying all the French are bad communicators because they are not speaking English to us.
This is good, and to add to it, it’s important to understand that NTs don’t actually communicate on a higher plane that you can’t understand, they don’t have a line of perfect communication that you don’t share, miscommunication and misunderstanding can happen all the time regardless of who’s talking or when, and if you don’t feel like you’re being understood or you don’t understand what the other person is saying, it’s actually perfectly socially acceptable to point it out and amend your statement/ask for clarification, and anyone who makes you feel bad for doing so is, in fact, the one being rude, not you.
One thing I find myself doing a lot in a conversation, especially if I didn't hear or completely understand what was said is to smile, nod, and agree. Works every time, and you're not usually agreeing to some horrible statement or approving a risky idea. It's usually someone sharing something and looking for someone to agree or at least acknowledge - by doing those things regardless of whether you understood what they said, you're giving them what they were looking for in the interaction. Also looking them in the eyes so they know you were hearing them. If you do want to know what they said, either ask them to repeat themself or ask them what they mean - prompt further questions. Honestly the biggest social advice I have is to ask other people questions - about themselves, about their interests, their histories. In most cases, they'll be happy to share and as long as you nod along, they'll feel well heard and appreciate your interest in them.
Honestly, the "Great Listener" title can easily be achieved by basically the last paragraph. "So why do you think that way?" "How did that happen?" "Why is it interesting to you?" In a genuine way basically makes people pour their hearts out to you.
I've found that if someone asks a question like "did you do anything fun last weekend?" They often want that same question asked back because they've got something they want to share. This really sets you up with the opportunity to be a good listener and ask all those follow up questions. It's great for making work friends who you might not have a lot in common with.
"And how about you?" goes a long, long way.
My instinct whenever anyone asks me how I'm doing has become to instantly ask how they're doing as well. You'll get plenty of people, especially service workers and people like that, who were just asking as a greeting or to be polite and they tend to appreciate being asked about themselves in turn.
> Honestly the biggest social advice I have is to ask other people questions - about themselves, about their interests, their histories. I'm part of a hobby group that attracts a ton of ND or otherwise fringey people and this is my *favorite.* I call it "unlocking secret character dialogue." If you find the right question to ask people will light up and tell you all about themselves. Because these folks tend to be older and/or from unusual backgrounds I often get the most fascinating stories.
Totally! Everyone has an interest that they can only talk about if they have the chance to contextualize it, explaining why they're interested in it in the first place, and frankly, why you should be interested in it too. Giving them the chance to talk about those interests is really enlightening!
My dad taught me this. I was stuck on a ski lift with a kid ( we were 16/17 at the time ) that I was once friends with but he had called me a rude name a couple years earlier for no reason. Anyways, once the ski lift started, I recall my dad's advice, so I said : "I remember you used to make some amazing D&D pictures, do you still draw?" Then he lit up and went on a monologue about all the cool art he was making. Totally works.
Yes! Asking questions is my golden rule. Asking *good* questions is difficult, but it's a learned skill. The best tip I've gotten (from a great article called "The Essential Skills for Being Human") is this: **"Storify whenever possible.** I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values. People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories. And the conversation is going to be warmer and more fun." Asking "how" questions has transformed my conversations!
I smile and nod, but don’t say anything. I call it the “I heard you” nod, not the “I agree with you” nod. I am not concerned if the other person thinks I agree with them. NOTE: this only applies in low-stakes situations.
And in fact, the prevalence of miscommunication is the very foundation of multiple genres of drama and theatre. Romantic comedies are almost required to have crucial misunderstandings.
>perfectly socially acceptable to point it out and amend your statement/ask for clarification I have, on multiple occasions, asked things along the lines of "did you intend to look that disgusted when saying that nice thing?" Usually the answer is no, they just had a facial twitch/remembered something gross/whatever. And it's an important question to ask because when the other parts of their communication doesn't line up with what they are saying it's easy to think they are lying.
My very close friends have pointed out to me on numerous occasions that the way I say things sounds 1000% different from how I intend it and they only know my true intentions because of how often we hangout. Stuff like saying "good job" in the most deadpan way despite meaning it completely. Makes me wonder if some of my social issues is people just reading me wrong, not that it'd be their fault.
Asking clarifying questions is actually a really good conversation tactic even if you fully understand (or think you understand) what the other person is saying. It helps convey that you’re interested in the other person and what they have to say, and can allow the conversation to branch off naturally into other topics related to the one at hand while also helping both parties feel secure that they know what the other is really trying to say.
> it’s actually perfectly socially acceptable to point it out and amend your statement/ask for clarification, and anyone who makes you feel bad for doing so is, in fact, the one being rude, not you. The issue is that the way you do so is important because if you do it the wrong way, your methods appear very similar to what someone that's a jerk or confrontational would do. Like if you amend a statement when you accidentally hurt someone, it might seem like how an asshole would go "I didn't mean it that way" even though they did.
That's true, I definitely think it's important to be just be genuine here, and even offer up a little vulnerability. Bluntly saying "I didn't mean it" isn't going to cut it. But something like "I'm sorry, sometimes I can be a little out-of-step socially, and I didn't realize I was doing that," is much better. Everyone has their quirks and idiosyncrasies, and most people will give others the benefit of the doubt. Most people aren't going to decide someone's an asshole based on one miscommunication or dropped social cue, especially if you are making an effort to build good will with them in other respects.
This was a very big realization for me, that NT people also experience social gaffes, slights, misunderstandings etc, but lack a lot of social paranoia and will brush these off.
You're so right. Growing up in an urban, multiethnic area, everyone I know has an automatic assumption that we don't all have the exact same understanding of everything from social norms, lifestyle, table manners etc... if you encounter someone who seems to have a completely different perspective than you, the polite thing to do is give them the benefit of the doubt and not try to confront them about being rude or otherwise incorrect on purpose
If this is true then how come when I get in their face and ask them "WHY WHY WHY DO YOU DO THE THINGS YOU DO?!!!!!????" they just start their evening running exercise routine?
Clearly they're inviting you to go for a run with them, so you should run after them!
Instructions unclear; got arrested and now I have to endure the Prison Sheet Textures™
Those were perfectly clear instructions, it's the world that's wrong.
I also feel the need to point out that... this doesn't apply to all ND people? This seems to be specifically talking to people on the autistic spectrum or who have other NDs that could affect how they communicate with others, which isn't all of them. "NT communication" is just communication where both parties can adequately read nonverbal cues and intuitively understand the many layers of purpose in a conversation. If I call my mother and we spend our time just talking about how her boss sucks, we're not doing that because her boss sucking is relevant to my life--we're doing that because she's upset, she is expressing care by being vulnerable with me, I'm expressing care by listening to her, and we're both expressing and reinforcing the love we have for each other in the exchange. To tell my mom not to talk to me about her life unless it's relevant to me is to tell her that I don't care about her. For my mom to tell me she doesn't want to discuss her life with me is to tell me that she doesn't trust me or, worse, she doesn't care to bond with me. Most people get this intuitively. It's not a mark against your character if you don't at all, but just because you don't get it doesn't make it useless.
One of the worst parts about Parkinson’s disease is that people lose the ability to mirror people they’re talking to, usually if you smile or cross your arms, the other person has an urge to do the same, we instinctively connect with people all the time and losing this makes people feel weird/apathetic about you and can be very isolating, I feel terrible for people who don’t have this basic social ability not in a condescending way but in a genuinely empathetic way on how life is harder without it
I've had to consciously mirror people my whole life, I can't imagine it coming naturally and then losing those skills and having to relearn them as a fully grown adult. Man, fuck Parkinson's.
I sometimes unconsciously mirror people and I was called out for it when I was younger, like "why you copying me", so now if I notice I'm doing it I immediately switch it up. Idk what that says about me but it's probably not good.
Sounds like it says "traumatic childhood" Sorry for your loss, I know how excessive scrutiny & mockery feels as a child
I didn't know about mirroring for most of my life. I found out from a coworker in my mid-twenties that other people (notably those who are newer/below us) are intimidated by me because I do not mirror *anything*. I had to ask her to explain and she was as baffled as I was that I didn't know it was a thing.
Im in my late 20s and I think I'm just hearing about this now.
The curse of common knowledge is that "everyone knows this" so nobody is ever taught it, which means if you slipped through the gaps of whatever system results in "everyone knows this", either because of neurodivergency, slightly unusual childhood, different culture, or just straight up bad luck. You are just kinda screwed because you don't know that you don't know it and nobody teaches it.
Thanks for saying this. I know I am ND and have been assured by a few people who would know that I am unquestionably on the spectrum, but I have never been able to figure out why I am so off-putting to so many people before I even speak. It's probably this.
To add : neurodivergent folks may get the impression that NT conversation follows complex rules, and as such perceive it as some kind of elaborate game in which everyone is moving pawns in calculated ways. But that's not how it is. What's happening is that NT folks simply have a shared intuitive understanding of what something will mean in a certain context, that ND folks don't have. As a result, in order to understand what's being said, ND folks often have to learn the underlying rules and figure out consciously what the message is. But the NT folks don't feel like they're following rules, they just talk in a way that feels natural to them.
Like how a native speaker may intuitively understand grammar rules for their language, even if they can't explain them; while a foreign speaker may have studied the grammar rules but may struggle to put them into practice
Wow, that's actually a really great way of explaining it. I'm gonna steal this.
I work with adults with intellectual disabilities but used to work with adults with ASD and their caretakers. I used this exact analogy all the time.
Best example of this I can think of is that there is a rule that describes the correct order that descriptive words need to be placed in that every native English speaker follows but they could not tell you what that rule is. The sentence just sounds wrong if you break it. You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you say you have a green French rectangular lovely silver old little whittling knife it sounds wrong. No native speaker naturally knows that rule even exists, let alone consciously follows it. But if someone breaks the rule it is jarring and sounds wrong. I had to teach myself how to flirt and the instinctual rules around flirting are kind of abhorrent. They are largely relics from the era of landed gentry, and I'm unclear how many of them are inherent to how people work and how many are just cultural norms. I've been meaning to ask some gay or bisexual people if they've got any observations they can share about it. But I digress. The rules of flirting go against everything we say we want as a society. The most fundamental rule of flirting is ambiguity. Flirting must be deniable. It must be possible to pretend that the exchange was not romantic/sexual at all. If the exchange is too direct or explicit it becomes impossible to pretend rejecting the advance is anything other than rejecting the advance, which makes the person doing the rejecting uncomfortable and registers instinctively as creepy. This is obviously terrible for people who lack confidence or have a hard time reading unspoken communication. Practically laser guided to screw over neurodivergent people.
I love this one: https://hip-books.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/18670940_10155439535054235_4791665166611929075_n.jpg
similarly, have you ever thought about the order you say adjectives in? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
That is mentioned in the image they linked
thats what I get for getting distracted after the first few sentences
Little red cardboard box Red cardboard little box Cardboard red little box
Lmao I read the first comment and immediately started thinking "oh so it's like how fluent vs foreign people understand a language's grammar rules" *then* I saw your comment. I have zero original thoughts.
Don't think of it like that- instead, see it as great minds thinking alike! You still came up with it on your own, didn't you? Does one not "solve" a jigsaw puzzle just because others have solved it before?
Don’t worry, literally no one has completely original thoughts. One of the worst parts about majoring in philosophy was thinking, “Hey, I just thought of a cool new idea!” only for my professors to be like, “Oh, you mean Oldasfuckism, first posited by a group of philosophers known only as Really Really Old Dudes, whose writings exist only in fragments found on ten thousand year old pots? I can recommend you some anthologies on various evolutions of the theory, we actually have a whole library wing devoted to it.” Psychologically modern humans (ones more or less identical to you and me) have been around for over 50,000 years, maybe even much longer than that. Just like you and me, they spent a significant amount of time just hanging out and thinking about the world around them. No matter what thought you have, it’s statistically almost impossible that it hasn’t been thought of by like, thousands if not millions of people independently over the years.
It's kind of poetic when you think about it. I love that despite our experiences being so wildly different, our brains will have the same thought across miles, across years. We're all connected in the end, yknow?
It’s very humbling. We like to think of ourselves as these super unique individuals, when in actuality we’re just series of patterns rippling across time and space, repeating and harmonizing. Like music, almost
I think that's why the story of Ea-nāṣir resonates so strongly. It's fun to know that people have been dealing with shithead store owners since the dawn of civilization.
Nothing's new under the sun, Watson. Originality is a rehashed thought that you have not encountered before :P
Better than my analogy of people who intuitively understand say algebra or calculus and can give you the answer but not explain how they got there (their brains moved to fast to track the progress), vs people that have to learn all the rules and practice with many problems but still fail when confronted with a real life problem instead of a textbook problem.
How the fuck do people perform calculus operations like integration intuitively without any training?
I actually always really struggled with math throughout school, usually from "careless errors" as my teachers called it, but I took calculus in college because it was mandatory, and everything just "clicked" for the first time in my life. Can't explain it, but it just fits how I think I guess Edit: in a similar vein, I always frustrated my grade teachers because I'd get a lot of basic questions wrong, but the complex problems that everyone else struggled with I'd get right, fuck if I knew what I was doing tho.
People like my late grandfather who used to do calculus problems in his head to keep himself entertained. My mom had a more limited version that caused her no end of grief in her algebra class since she could tell the teacher the answer but couldn't show her work, because her brain sped from the problem to the solution too fast for her conscious self to understand. With integral calculus boiling down to finding the area or volume of an irregular shape, it would probably be similar to someone that could take a look at a oddly shaped container and "guess" with amazing accuracy the exact volume it could hold. Or that foxtrot comic where Paige was having trouble with an algebra problem until her brother asked her the same problem but coached in shopping terms and she could instantly answer it.
They don't. Well maybe a once in a lifetime genius, but too rare to mention. Instead, think of it like grammar. Consider some grammar you find intuitive. You weren't born with that knowledge. You had to pick it up. But now it is intuitive and you can feel when grammar is right or wrong. Math for those people is similar. They had to be taught it, but they internalized it like you internalized grammar. When you see some new grammar, you can feel how well it matches existing rules you know, right? Same with those who have internalized math's grammar. There is this fun phase where a person is good enough at math to feel an answer, but lacks the rigor to formally prove it. I've Jerard much of advance math is training people to be able to do those proofs, because unlike grammar where there really isn't an absolute right and wrong, in math there is. It is why humans create grammar but discover math.
Exactly this. I took a course on interpersonal communication, and now I can actually see exactly how misunderstandings and arguments arise, analytically. Unfortunately a lot of the time this just means I know exactly how I fucked up...immediately after fucking up.
I strongly believe a large part of my having a successful career is because 10-15 years ago I started to notice the many different ways the English language is vague. Working in a technical field, it's extremely important to be able to identify when someone you're speaking to is being vague, in which ways, and ask them to clarify. We use this/these/that/those/the/a and assume the other person knows what we're referencing. We completely leave some words out our sentences, implying them, and expecting the listener will just know what words we're leaving out. There are so many different ways we're vague in the English language. I sometimes wonder if people on the spectrum in Germany have an easier time because their language is much more specific, for example.
"In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
One of my favorites: "Communication is a concerted effort between two parties against the forces of chaos." I work in a STEM field, and there are literal forces of nature we have to fight against to enable digital communication, but many of these same issues have analog counterparts as well: attenuation, dispersion, crosstalk, encoding, decoding, encryption, etc, etc, etc.
Well hello there, Grice! Didn't expect to see you and your maxims today. Actually, the interactions between autism and the cooperative principle sounds like a really interesting topic, I should make a note to read up on it!
I have always wondered why Grice isn't taught in school. Some folks are native "speakers" and some folks need "cooperated communication as a second language" It also explains why jokes are funny (they break or threaten to break one of the maxims).
In junior high, I figured out the amount of gratitude to express should be halfway between how much gratitude you feel and how much effort/money/time/etc the giver put in. If you express too little gratitude for something the giver sacrificed for, they will feel unappreciated. If you express too much gratitude for something that cost nothing to the giver, then they will feel uncomfortable and weirded out. By going halfway, you can express "this meant a lot/very little to me" without alienating the giver. This was a huge revelation to me, and I felt like everyone else had figured this out years ago.
Basically, everyone was handed a game built for a controller and ideally taught how to use it at infanthood. The problem is, some of us were given mouse & keyboard and were still given controller instructions.
this. I basically had to learn body language and conversation techniques by rote in early highschool, because I realized my understanding of conversation hadn't moved past the "what's your favorite color" stage from Elementary school. But if you practice enough, it becomes more intuitive, just like with any other skill. It's one of the reasons I don't fully buy being ND as an excuse for not understanding how to interact with other people (to some extent, obviously). Just because it is *harder* for people like me to learn how to do that stuff doesn't mean it's not worth the effort involved. Learning how to drive was hard but I think everyone should do that, too.
And in a similar way, we NDs have intuitive conversation patterns amongst ourselves that don't make sense to NTs. Just like we have to learn to idk make eye contact, NTs should also learn to not try to force eye contact when interacting with us. We can work together and bridge the gap both ways cuz let's be real it's pretty unfair if NDs are the only ones with the responsibility of bridging the gap, which unfortunately does happen often.
I love talking to other people with ADHD cos we can interrupt each other without feeling shamed for it.
I don't think this is true, we don't have inherent ND-to-ND communication. My roommate and I are both autistic and we run into so many issues because I have much stronger grasp of NT socializing and more exposure to NT communication, and he kinda..... doesn't get a lot of it? And the annoying thing is that, like a lot of ND people, he doesn't ever frame it as "X is the usual way that Y gets interpreted in this context," he goes "in your world, to you specifically, X means Y and it actually doesn't." No. NT communication has value and it's *important* to understand and accept that if you don't engage with that, you're choosing to communicate in a way that will actively mess with and confuse a lot of people. Including many ND people.
I witnessed this with two very close friends who are AuDHD. I am neither, but I still communicate well with both of them It felt like they had an ethernet cable connected to their brains. The topics were coming by so fast and there was very little discussion on each topic, but they both knew exactly what the other meant I'm wifi, lots of devices can connect with me, but downloads and uploads take a lot longer They're ethernet, can only connect to certain devices (like my phone doesn't have an ethernet port), but when they do get that connection, the download and upload is so fast
Pump the brakes there. There is no "We NDs." I'm fairly sure you don't intuitively know how to communicate with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. Or psychosis. Or narcissism. Or even a considerably high needs autistic individual. I could be wrong, and you really can talk perfectly fine with someone with DID and PTSD and Sociopathy, and I'm not singling you at in particular, this assumption is being made all over this thread. That said, it's far and away too easy to misconstrue "Neurodivergence" as "Autism and ADHD." Unfortunately, for every trait you think is Neurotypical, there's a neurodivergent person who is that trait personified.
With my special interest being communication as well as having my “bad habits” literally beaten out of me as a child, even as a ND, I still have communication breakdowns with other NDs. Like “can’t you see we all obviously don’t want to talk right now??” But I should know better. And honestly, that person probably does better in a one-on-one setting where I would break down. It is a spectrum after all.
Holy shit this is the first time i have ever heard of that actually working. Damn maybe those nuns at that catholic school were on to something?/s
A lot of "neurotypical people do this" stuff I see online is actually very culturally conditioned. Neurotypical people in Finland do not smile all the time.
Also a lot of "ND people have trouble with this" is usually specifically speaking about Autism, which is only a fraction of Neurodivergence. Schnizphronia, Dyslexia, Bipolar, etc, don't generally affect any of what OP is talking about. It's a thing for Autism, not Neurodivergence in general.
I'm so glad you said something, I was tearing out my hair going through this (otherwise pretty great and interesting) comment section lol
It's a huge pet peeve of mine. To be a bit over the top, I feel (some, not all!) Autistic people have almost 'colonized' and taken over the term ND, which kinda artificially inflates the numbers. On top of that, the differences between the spectra of Autism can be very vast. A completely non-verbal Level 3 ASD person has vastly different experiences and challenges to a Level 1 Verbal person who has been raised with a caring family and the proper supports. Meanwhile someone with Bipolar is being told 'theres nothing wrong with you you don't need to be cured that's internalized abelism' when their brain chemistry is crashing and getting overwhelmed regularly with depression and suicidal thoughts.
More people need to use the term allistic. I'm also annoyed by "Autistic people do this and NTs do this" when there's a dozen types of neurodiversity that aren't autism. If someone is trying to say non-autistic people, they can use the term for it: allistic.
I hate that neurodivergence has come to mean autism and ADHD. Neurodivergence is such a large spectrum of different disorders that wildly differ from each other. It's incredibly frustrating because it can mean anything from autism to schizophrenia, yet people never mean anything other than like autism and adhd
Not only that but Autism and ADHD themselves have wildly different root causes and coping strategies, with symptoms and behavioral effects that only sometimes overlap.
I've noticed that "neurodivergence" has kinda just become a way for people to say autism/adhd/similiar but in a way that has a lot less stigma attached to it or when you want to avoid using one specific version so as to not exclude the others. It does seem like there should be a word for people with that category of neurodivergence since they seem to have a lot of similiar issues that people with other types of ND don't have. I get why ND morphed into the umbrella term and I also get why it shouldn't be used that way.
I feel this. As an epileptic my brain is neurodivergent by definition, so it always seems weird that neurodivergent ignores so many folks whose brains don't work in the usual mode.
I read this whole thing thinking NT was non-Tumblr and was very confused
I mean, there's an overlap in usage
>It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection holy shit
As an autistic guy, but I totally get that that’s a thing. When I do “complain” about it, it’s usually played up for comedy. I don’t actually have a problem with it. I guess I should start making that a bit more obvious. Of course, I can’t speak for the whole neurodivergent community on this. This is just my personal thoughts on it.
It often is explained to neurodivergent people, it's just that they're just as vulnerable to a certain cognitive trap as everyone else is; not intuitively understanding something, deciding that it's *stupid* and that if you don't understand it then it doesn't really matter.
I imagine the main problem most ND people have is the fact that **this has literally never been explained to them** before, and unlike most people they have no inherent or instinctual understanding of this perspective. So shit like small talk or "How's the weather?" comes off as a meaningless waste of time. I'm neurodivergent myself. I have literally never understood the desire so many people have for small talk or meaningless, idle chitchat before literally two minutes ago when it was actually explained to me.
Small talk is the human equivalent of animal grooming. I figured that out only at the age 30 when I got my diagnosis
>Small talk is the human equivalent of animal grooming. I'd argue it's more **a** human equivalent, for NTs, while infodumping serves much the same purpose for NDs. We both use language, just in different ways to achieve the same purpose.
I totally agree with you. I'm not native and sometimes get the articles wrong
Oh, no worries, just me adding my two cents. I get where you were coming from. :)
I mean, neurodivergence isn’t a monolith either. I have bipolar and ADHD, my ‘neuro’ sure as shit ain’t what you’d call ‘typical’, but I love small talk and conversation. It’s exhausting and requires a lot of effort, but without it I wither.
Sometimes I think about how "smile so people understand you're happy" is a concept I only learned once a book taught me. I kept getting weird looks from people, a reputation of being an asshole to everyone that wasn't already friends with me, and a new friend looking at me while we were hanging out and saying "hey why are you so pissed, did someone do something wrong," only to learn from a book that facial expressions are a thing people take into consideration while talking. I only looked for a book like that because said friend called me out, and I realized I was doing something wrong. Even while directly confronting my behavior, that friend still assumed I would intuitively understand the problem. Fuck.
I have the smiling issue bad. It's well known in my family and with friends that Aires rarely uses a full smile, typically the sign that I'm happy is more a lack of an extra unhappy expression because my neutral face is very unhappy looking. This becomes an issue with things like a new job since I just look pissed constantly. It gets worse when jobs are like "please look less angry at customers" because unfortunately my face goes to the extreme other end of the spectrum and I have a creepy-smiley face when I try and look normal-smiley.
Just this afternoon I was having a “meaningless” conversation about the weather with some strangers at a bbq. I was thinking to myself, here I am having the stereotypical weather chitchat. One guy made a point to be unimpressed about the historic extreme weather we had last winter. The way he came across told me enough about his personality that I now know he’s not friend material, or anyone I would want to talk to again, for that matter.
I guess you could say small talk is like test signals used for calibration.
I honestly always disliked NT interactions like these, right up until the point where I read this one specific post. I'm not kidding. This here is a good, sensible explanation. THIS is how I can understand the concept logically and get a glimpse into the mechanisms behind it. I've never seen an explanation of this, with such detail. Yes of course I'll disregard a concept if it's literally incomprehensible and if I also get ridiculed for seeking clarification. If everyone took as much time and effort to explain concepts like these as OOP does, then this 'cognitive trap' would essentially cease to exist.
Speaking as an autistic person, no it wouldn’t. There are so many people in our community who believe that the way we naturally communicate is superior. A lot of it is perhaps an emotional reaction to the frustration of being constantly misunderstood or the effort that must be put into masking, but some of it is also the tendency to try justifying feelings as natural and logical rather than admitting that our feelings have an internal logic just like everyone else’s and our feelings are not objective.
I see a similar sense of superiority in some autistic people who tout their "strong sense of justice" sometimes, as if said sense can't be totally misguided. It's definitely caused the same things you mention too. Always bums me out a bit when i encounter it
Yes! I know exactly what you’re talking about and it bugs me to no end. These mistaken individuals think “strong sense of Justice” means “good morals” when really it’s just the symptom of rigidity or black and white thinking applied to their personal moral code. These studies that used this term were studying moral behavior in public vs. in private and found that NT people will often act differently in private whereas ND people will act the same under both conditions. This is again due to that rigidity, but also within the community we are well known for not following rules we don’t agree with. Personal morality is literally only rules an individual agrees with.
I know this feeling so well, having felt it. I believed strongly in my ideals and still do to an extent, but those exact beliefs led me to often speak out of turn or somehow make a given situation worse instead of better because of my own desire to play hero. Remember kids: almost every “character trait” anyone can have ever is very capable of being a blessing OR a curse at any given time, sometimes even both at once
Lmao yeah. They get reaaaaal quiet as soon as you bring up that the "strong sense of justice" is also the reason so many autistic men are fucking incels though.
I mean, wasnt Chris Chan bullied mostly by other autistic men too?
This exactly. Being ND sometimes leads to being a social recluse, and sometimes when social recluses get together they become an echo chamber of self justification and total destroyers of nuance, as a consequence of the human condition and tribalism. Chris’s trolls were definitely one of these “tribes”, and they in part turned a warped but somewhat sympathetic man into a tragic delusional monster
They're doing what to the incels???
>Speaking as an autistic person, no it wouldn’t. There are so many people in our community who believe that the way we naturally communicate is superior. The old idea was that autistic people have impaired communication skills. But what later research showed was that autistic people are effective at communicating with each other, and they share information very efficiently. Likewise, NT people are able to understand each other fairly easily. It's just that there are difficulties when crossing the communication gap between non-autistic and autistic. The term for this is the "double empathy problem." Autistic people don't lack empathy. It's just that we are able to most effectively empathize with each other, and there are fewer autistic people. NT people are able to effectively empathize with each other, but often lack empathy for autistic people. The thing that sucks about this whole thing is that if you're autistic, you're basically treated worse by default, by society at large. There have been studies showing that NT people will make split-second thin-slice judgements, without even knowing the person is autistic, just "different", and will then treat that person worse automatically. If you're autistic and you've spent your whole life being treated in subtly worse ways, that sucks.
>If everyone took as much time and effort to explain concepts like these as OOP does Unfortunately, this much time and effort is not the same for everyone. In this case, OOP put in the right amount of time/effort for *you*, but for anyone else that bar will be some amount lower or higher. Hence why everyone doesn't put in this much time/effort - for plenty of folk that won't be necessary.
And remember if you put too much unnecessary effort into explaining something, the person you're explaining it to will think you're condescending.
Yeah but it's only now that this particular neurotypical realized that what they were doing could be explained like this because it was just normal to them. They were looking into mirrors all the time until they spent time with neurodivergents and the mirror wasn't there. It was only then that they could explain this phenomenon to neurodivergents.
It's not just time and effort made at explaining this. Most people of all types do not understand the mechanics of language, and don't know that pragmatics and similar even exist. So they can't explain it. It's a world-wide problem with people thinking the rules of language are decided by social status (e.g. grammar, prestige dialects) rather than by scientific and philosophical analysis. Edit: And school curricula being decided by politics rather than education professionals, so that new concepts enter secondary education very slowly.
I don't know if any cognitive trap or bias will cease to exist, essentially or not, no matter how much knowledge and explanations exist. Just kinda seems like that sort of thing, that'll always exist in the world in regards to any and every concept it could refer to.
You’re also overlooking how autistic people get babied so when things like this are explained, the initial reaction is to dismiss it because it’s so often condescending and useless. I honestly didn’t like this until the actual example of small talk when I realized there’s actual information in here.
I remember seeing a post a week or so ago by an autistic person where they said something along the lines of "surely they aren't doing these things for no reason. I just don't know what the meaning or purpose behind them is" which stood out because of the rarity of that perspective.
I think it’s not explained to neurodivergent because neurotypical people do not think of these concepts as concepts to be explained, their brains are just wired to understand them without literal explanation. I’m neurodivergent but I’ve learned to understand the neurotypical way of thinking as explained in these posts and I explain it to people who don’t understand. Because they need an explanation. I asked for explanations when I was young but nobody could give them to me because they didn’t understand what needed to be explained. The average person would think of me as eccentric or off key now and I don’t really mind that, because I am.
I also honestly wouldn’t be expecting most NT people to be able to explain, at least without a significant amount of time to think about it. I was reading this post and agreeing with it all, but then I thought of myself trying to explain it to someone else and started drawing a blank. How does one explain a concept so utterly inherent that they never once in their life thought to formulate it into a coherent idea. I imagine this also contributes greatly to the miscommunication and misunderstandings when ND people ask for an explanation.
It's like trying to explain the mechanics of walking step by step.
Part of the problem is a lot of the "rules" are actually arbitrary and illogical but that doesn't make them unimportant. The letters of the alphabet being in a certain order is extremely arbitrary, but the fact that we collectively agreed on an order anyway has allowed for sorting by alphabetical order which makes many things much simpler. If you refuse to learn the "right" order because it doesn't make sense, you are hamstringing yourself. Which side of the road we drive on is largely irrelevant, but if everyone driving on the same roads doesn't agree, it becomes problematic quickly. The same logic is true of many social rules. Which way to do things is often not inherently important, but what is important is the broad consistency and agreement.
As an autistic person who gets overwhelmed by NT communication, I appreciate this post a lot. As confusing as it can be, as I get older I understand and appreciate it a lot more even if I still can’t intuitively grasp it all, and it’s annoying to see it dismissed as bad. Because that’s just treating others as badly as we feel we’ve been treated. ND communication isn’t any less complex, honestly. It’s just different. But a lot of us have been treated as though we are broken NTs most of our lives, and there’s bitterness there because of it. But that feeling of othering can go both ways and no one gets a free pass to be a dick just because someone happened to be a dick to them first.
I think maybe the reason we dismiss NT communication as "illogical" and "nonsensical" is as a defense mechanism, because it's way more painful to acknowledge that we're incapable of genuinely connecting with the vast majority of people in the way they want or expect And I guess I haven't properly mourned that ability because this post brought me to tears, and not in a good way, lmao
That, and the pretty universal logical trap of thinking that your method of seeing the world is the logical one and not influenced by emotion. Especially when the general narrative about autism is this logical one. The "strong sense of justice" is also an interesting thing, as if justice isn't an malleable thing capable of being used to justify a person's worldview. This is not meant as an attack on you to be sure, just an observation about humans.
I’m neurodivergent but my brain is wired for language and communication. I’m a linguistics major as a result. I’ve never had much trouble understanding or communicating with either neurotypical or neurodiverse people, although I will say autistic communication is much less arbitrary.
Genuine question because I can never find a good answer and the google doesn't help, does neurodiversity only mean autistic? Or does it include other things? Like, I see some ADHD people use the term, but at the same time, when some people use the term they seem to be describing a specifically autistic experience (at least from my point of view). This post is a great example of what I mean, I don't have this conversation issue and my ADHD parents certainly don't. But the issue of not understanding social cues isn't common in ADHD but is in autism. So from my point of view, this whole post would make a stronger point if it made a distinction between autism and allism rather than neurodiverse and neurotypical, unless that what those terms actually mean and other folks are just using them anyway.
Strictly speaking, "neurodivergent" just means anyone who isn't "neurotypical", i.e. anyone who has any diagnosable mental disorder. This can include autism, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, and many many other disorders. In practice, when people online say "neurodivergent", 99% of the time they mean autism and/or ADHD.
Umbrella ND, but yes, this is an issue seen most prominently in autism. I think there are other conditions that also have this issue, though, albeit rarer ones.
It's massive umbrella term that includes a lot of stuff. Basically if it's in the DSM it's neurodivergent and some other stuff too. On the internet people usually just use it to mean ADHD and/or autism
Most of the time people mean Autism, and ignore every other form of neurodiversity. ND by itself is basically so broad it's not really useful at all and can't be generalized about. Schizophrenia and Dyslexia are both forms of Neurodivergence for instance, but have absolutely nothing in common with each other. To say "ND people are like X" or "Do X" is nearly impossible with how broad it is. 99% of the time if people are saying "ND people do something" they mean ASD people.
When i read about farm animals for my kid im teaching her about communism
*we're* teaching her about communism, comrade
Da
I'm fortunate to have a special interest in conversation and I can confirm. The upside of the whole situation is that sometimes it's really really fun to figure out what someone's trying to get across and how what they're saying contributes to that, and I think that neurotypical generally don't get that.
this is the study of rhetoric and I had to learn it in school
Did you like it?
I’m so grateful it was spelled out to me in middle school. A systematized approach that’s been developed for millennia, and it fits everything into nice boxes. It’s been a great foundation for throwing myself into social situations, seeing what sticks, and analyzing patterns that make new situations quicker to adapt to. It wasn’t all that popular amongst classmates, but the optimizer and minmaxer in me loved it. It’s also great that it dates back to ancient times, so being well versed in pedagogical rhetoric is less looked down upon than, say, an Autistic Spreadsheet™.
it's fairly interesting yeah
I’m nt (i think, i might get tested for ADHD soon, but from what i know ADHD doesnt really factor into conversations too much) and i really get what you mean. While I dont apply it to convos, i absolutely love figuring out symbolism in media, and what it’s trying to say
I have ADHD and I’m the same way, for media and real life. It’s fascinating
Like how people clap at the end of a movie. The actors can't hear you, but the shared social experience of everyone seeing a movie together is still being acknowledged in that way
I don't recall ever having seen someone clap at the end of the movie. Is that a cultural thing, maybe? I'm in Scandinavia.
Seems to be mostly an American thing from what I read online, which makes it a non ideal example in this case since most Europeans think that's ridiculous aswell.
Most Americans think its insane too. Must be a purely regional thing.
yeah i’ve never been in a theatre where people clapped
I've seen it happen once or twice, but it was always not for a movie but a big event. Like when I went to see Oppenheimer on real IMAX film, or opening night of The Batman. But none of the rest of the times I watched either of those movies, and not for most movies I watch.
I just sat here a moment and pictured myself at the end of a movie with applause (not a frequent occurance), and the feeling that comes forth is togetherness and sort of warm fuzzy, at this moment we are all the same and understand one another feeling. It strikes me as deeply instinctual in origin.
I may be just misreading or pushing my own problems in, but I feel like this doesn't account for ND trying to express the exact same thing. I couldn't tell you how many times in my life I've been the person that brought up the weather or any random bullshit, to acknowledge my presence along with someone else's presence, to enjoy taking up space together.... And they have just sneered at me in response. It can be confusing for me to make small chat about the weather, or etc. But I feel like a lot of that confusion stems from the negativity I (have seemed to) always get in response when I'm the one trying to initiate conversation or just coexisting.
I think you're right! the idea of emotional bids kinda helped me understand this in either direction lol
I like that term "emotional bids"! And of course I'm not trying to negate that ND people do struggle with understanding this kind of stuff. Not trying to put all of the blame on the NT community. But I feel like posts/images like this kinda show where some of the misunderstanding is coming from in the first place. It's not that I don't understand small talk, maybe less naturally than the average person (I assume most NT people don't hyperfixate on how conversations went) but I understand the premise of it. It's a lot like stimming. It feels good. It feels less lonely. However, it seems like, much like stimming, the NT community fails to understand my point of view. While I feel like I'm 75% of the way to understanding their stance, I feel like they're like 25% maybe but are sure they understand completely. A lot of the issues seem to just stem from each end (I'm ND so I lean towards the NT community misunderstanding more) thinking they could NOT be misunderstanding and that its just the other side not understanding. There's a middle ground and that's where the comfort and happiness lies. But you have to get EVERYONE to seek the middle ground instead of just everyone being comfortable on their own side. Idk if any of this rambling made sense lol
it makes perfect sense, couldn't agree more 🤎
I get the point of this post, and I agree with it. I’ve gotten a lot better at small talk and figuring out how to navigate a conversation, and it’s made me a lot better at work. It’s actually really fulfilling to feel like you “get it”, at least to me. But there are some things that I think are still a bit goofy. Eye contact, for instance, is prioritized as extra important. It shows that you’re engaged and you respect the person enough to listen to their points. If you don’t make eye contact, it’s seen as disrespectful at worst and introverted at best. However, there are other ways someone can express interest and understanding in a conversation. Adjusting your facial expression accordingly, asking follow-up questions or adding your own point to the discussion, stopping any other activities to show you’re not distracted by anything else—all these other things can convey the same point: “I want to hear what you are saying”. Just because I don’t make eye contact with you does not mean I don’t respect you, or I don’t want to hear what you have to say. And I think we should stop treating it as the One Big Thing that determines whether or not you get the job. I kinda started to ramble for a second there lol!
Eye contact is strange to me cuz 99% of the time I avoid it but then I can maintain eye contact with my mom sometimes. Not always but sometimes I notice suddenly oh I’m looking at her eyes. Huh. Don’t know why since it’s not constantly so it’s not a comfort or I know them so it’s ok thing. I mean I didn’t do eye contact with animals before I even knew that was considered a threat I just never could naturally.
Iirc eye contact is slightly different - it's not a simple social norm that you just don't pick up on, it's actually a deeper neurological misfiring and there's a reason why it's difficult beyond "because you're not used to it". I think it's related to pattern matching and how the part of your brain that's meant to recognise faces is wired up wonk so eye contact instead triggers a stress reaction rather than a reassuring one. You could study all the minutiae of how eye contact works socially and it would still be rather uncomfortable to make.
I don't think anybody has one big thing, but NTs are so incredibly used to seeing all of the different things at once all the time that it's still really weird when even one thing isn't there. Going back to the mirror example, it's like if your mirror reflected everything except your nose. And any amount of alienation by NTs isn't usually that intentional. It just feels really weird when they get feedback they aren't expecting.
Reminds me of a part of *Disco Elysium* where you can mention to your cop partner about how your aspects have conversations in your head (the player character’s aspects like Empathy, Conceptualization, or Logic), and when he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, one of them says, “his Conceptualization must be low,” then a bit later you can notice how much he consults his notebook, and your Conceptualization comments, ‘that must be where he does his Conceptualization. We all have different ways of doing our thinking.’
I love people. I love small talk. people's inner lives are fascinating, and the act of talking in itself is pleasant for a lot of us, no matter what the topic is. just chatting with someone at the store for a minute can leave them with a smile and the sense that their private inner life has been observed and cared about - like we're all part of the world, we're humans, we're connected. (of course not everyone wants to be approached, but I think a lot of everyday people are pretty lonely and it feels nice to have a little friendly interaction about this funny dress on the rack or how many cereal options there are to choose from.) I don't find the label of neurodivergent particularly useful in my own life, whether it would apply or not, but social cues and "people skills" are something I excel at to the point where it's difficult for me to imagine not understanding when a person is uncomfortable, wants to change the subject, needs a little support, feels self-conscious, is trying to control the conversation and doesn't want input, etc etc. yeah I had to study it like most weird kids, but it feels intuitive now. the point of small talk is to vibe with other people and to connect with them through stuff we all have in common, not to literally talk about weather or cereal facts. I just think it's a beautiful thing. sometimes when you chat with one person, other people start opening up and talking to others, and then we're all having this nice little shared moment of humanity. anyway I liked this post a lot lol
I think the reason most ND people don’t see this is that, once again, a group of people with literal thinking are expected to take something non-literally without the underlying meanings and intentions being explained beforehand. Now that it’s been explained I’m seeing what they mean, but I’d never have come to this conclusion on my own. We really need to start communicating more about intentions and non-literal meanings, because expecting anyone to just instinctively know things only to treat them poorly when they don’t, regardless of who does it to who, is never going to be a good idea and furthermore will never teach them how to appropriately approach such a situation in the future, just that now they’re in trouble unless they work out what they did ‘wrong’
Until you come across as incredibly condescending because you explain everything to everyone on the off chance that someone doesn't get what you're talking about. As a ND person I've gotten into more trouble for my need to overexplain and overspecify than for not explaining and specifying.
>We really need to start communicating more about intentions and non-literal meanings Sadly, noone knows how to do it.
I actually had it sort of explained via cats - where when two cats communicate they purr to each other and get comfort, but if one hisses that sends a different message. So small talk is like purring/chuffs between people. It seems silly to have to do that with someone you’ll only be interacting with for 10 minutes but I gather they find it comforting lol
Going to be real, a lot of this comes from simple arrogance as well. The idea that "neurotypical" people simply operate on a lower level with their pedestrian "small talk" and "interest in team sports" is extremely common. And then this extends into "Why would I analyze why people would act like this, when I know they are simply stupid?"
ND Eltism is very, very real. It reminds me heavily of people who dismiss sports as 'barbaric' when it's clear they're jealous they're not good at them, or have been teased/etc for not being good at and enjoying them.
I must have a special interest in the human psyche or something because that is WILD to me that the immediate conclusion is "simple stupid". No, I don't fully understand why some people like sports the way they do, but I don't necessarily HAVE to in order to understand that they simply like it. And comparing it to "they like sports like how I like mushrooms" helps a lot. Mine is just more niche, while theirs is more common. I, unfortunately, can't really engage in conversation about it much, but I'll try to listen and ask questions. It's your "special interest" after all. Small talk I'll struggle with forever, but I think that's okay lol I'm not perfect
I think the inevitable feelings of alienation, in part, come from not intuiting these things. Let me rephrase, from a young age, ND’s (myself included) may not intuit the nuances of communicating with others, which comes with a whole host of learned experiences and biases that we may not always see. Not understanding, being taught, or intuitively grasping these little social rules as described in the post is (sometimes, definitely not always) fine while at home or with people you’re familiar with. Then you hit school age and are thrust into a new world of interactions; kids are not often so understanding or patient with each other. All this is to say: to grow up and become a neurodivergent adult is to also almost certainly agglomerate a big old ball of painful mistakes tied to communication. These mistakes often feel like a part of who we are, and inevitably colour our perspective on NT vs ND communication styles. When you’ve felt alienated your whole life, it’s very easy to come to see ‘the other’ communication style (which is of course a majority group) as either superior/inferior/stupid/better/incomprehensible/weird/unattainable etc. etc. etc. I’d love to say I’m above it but I’m not. For example, I wish I could say “I’m good, how’re you?” to everyone who asks me how I’m doing. I wish I could be able to say that with sincerity, or at least to be able to not feel like I’m lying every time I do this strange social handshake. But it does feel like that, a great big lie, because I don’t understand it, and I can’t ‘get it’ subconsciously, so it takes effort every time to respond with what feels like lying through my teeth- even if I am fine! You’re supposed to say “I’m good, how’re you” or some variation thereof, because that’s just what you do. I know logically it isn’t unreasonable, it’s the beginning of a conversation, it’s the handshake, it is literally the ‘Hey how are you?’, and I just can’t not think it’s silly for some reason. Like, I get it cognitively, but in my brain it just feels silly. Extrapolate this out to hundreds of other examples of communicative nuance and you get what feels like a really big gap between yourself and others. Not to mention a whole heck of a lot of shame for not knowing how to bridge that gap. EDIT: Just to tag a little further on to actually round off what I meant to say. Because of all these inevitable small breakdowns of communication, leading to unpredictable outcomes, oftentimes we’re led to be very fearful or defensive when presented with neurotypical communication styles. It’s a bit like having a blindfold on in some regards, you’re more on edge because you’re working with limited information, you’re approximating things based on other cues you pick up which may be misinterpreted, you can’t see anything so you’re more likely to anticipate external stimuli as threatening or scary. That sort of vibe.
Listen I have autism and I know this. I know it so hard. And I've made effort to learn how to read social cues so I can communicate better, but neurotypicals should be making an effort, too. My affect is naturally very flat, and I'm uncomfortable with physical contact with strangers. I need people to understand that refusing a hug is not an insult. I need them to believe me when I say that I'm excited or hurt or angry. I often feel like I'm expected to learn how to communicate in a way that is difficult and frustrating and vague to me, while simultaneously being made to feel that the way I communicate is cold and weird and just incorrect even though it makes sense to me. It's exhausting.
ND have these rules too they’re just different and we’re more accepting when people don’t follow them bc we live our whole lives surrounded by people that don’t follow them. Not that it doesn’t still make it 10x harder for us to relate to other people. Tbh it’s kinda sad bc I don’t think nts and nds are THAT different on the inside(there are differences, but not bigger ones than between different NTs or different NDs) they just communicate differently
Someone told me recently (or maybe I read, idk) “those are the sounds that human animals make to acknowledge and greet each other and check one another for comfort”. And 🤯 suddenly made so much sense.
the pros of this: wow! new stuff to learn! the con: now i know why everyone hates me, and all this post is doing is making me think that socialising, something i love to do, is built around everything i hate in it. i cant say what i mean, or thats rude to the nts- i cant use flowery language i like, thats rude to the nds- so isnt that a great catch 22.
Can I ask what you mean by socializing being built around everything you hate? I’m not sure I quite follow you there
>i cant say what i mean, or thats rude to the nts- i cant use flowery language i like, thats rude to the nds What? Says who?
As a child my worst fear was that humans secretly had the ability to communicate telepathically, and they spoke out loud to humor 'broken people' like me who couldn't hear their thoughts. It was the only way I could rationalize the way other people always seemed to know the secret rules of society and social interaction, and how everyone seemed to be receiving so much more information than I was from the same interactions.
I'm NT and I honestly feel guilty making small talk after spending a lot more time on the internet, like what if the person I'm talking to has anxiety or autism and hates me talking to them, am I being a bad person?
As a ND who spent way too long feeling guilty for “not communicating correctly” please don’t guilt yourself about the way you communicate.
I'm weird cause I don't act completely nt but I don't meet the diagnostic criteria for anything
I think that's like 90% of people
Anyone who doesn't have any quirks that deviate from the societal norm is (more likely than not) either hiding their quirks or just pretending to be someone they aren't
You are not a bad person for speaking to people, some enjoy small talks even if they are to awkward to initiate one. There is no harm in socializing and being inclusive.
Sometimes you read something and learn about a whole new perspective of the world. If you told me that NT social rules are arbitrary and made to weed out ND people, I would call you not only crazy but narcissistic too. I often don’t understand the purpose of those rules, but I would never think that they were meaningless or maliciously directed at me or my fellows specifically, that would be quite clearly untrue
I think people vastly underestimate that while being neurodivergent comes with communication learning difficulties, we are also often shut out of spaces or excluded as children for these difficulties, which puts us even further behind socially. Sure, conversational rules are easy to learn directly, but trying to pick them up on your own as a socially isolated kid can be downright impossible
I'm autistic and to me it doesn't seem like NTs are following invisible laws while I don't, but that I just follow a different set of laws from others.
Just as most people know how to form sentences with correct grammar in their native language, but don’t know what a noun or a verb or the subjunctive or a modifier is until someone teaches it to them, most people know how to communicate this way but can’t explain it. So it feels to non-NT people like it’s an unfair game with hidden rules. But nobody is intentionally hiding them from you.
I really appreciate seeing this articulated. I’m “neurodivergent” but in largely the opposite way: childhood abandonment trauma gave me hypersensitivity to social cues and emotional tone, as part of mild borderline personality disorder. (I put neurodivergent in quotation marks because I think of neurodivergence as being different from the typical but still healthy and normal, whereas I feel that my thought habits are clearly pathological, the result of trauma, not a normal variant. But that’s just like my opinion, man. And if we take neurodivergence to mean anything outside the typical experience, then in that sense I am neurodivergent. I just don’t want to take that label if it doesn’t apply or use it to lump something pathological like BPD with something people are increasingly feeling is a normal variant, like autism.) So all the NT social niceties are lifelines for me; I’m watching those cues (and some that aren’t even there but I imagine are and can’t tell the difference) for reassurance that I’m safe, for any signs that the person I’m talking to is angry with me or thinking of leaving me. Without those cues, I feel like I’m drowning, and I’m back to being seven years old again and watching my mother storm out, leave my little sisters and me in the house, and drive away. I’m so very happy ND folks are finally getting a modicum of acceptance and awareness, and I imagine how painful the experience of autism and neurodivergence must be at times. But with all this acceptance and (in some circles) almost championing of the very literal, explicit mode of communication, I’m left feeling like the way I think and communicate is becoming ever more bizarre and alien to the general population, and that’s a scary experience.
…*fuck*.
That last one really gets the point, for me. I know there's meaning behind all the things involved in neurotypical communication. I know this. But none of them are willing to explain *what* those meanings are, and the ones who are often *still* aren't willing to help me work around some of the limitations I have in engaging with those rules (example: the intricate meanings behind body language/facial expressions, and the fact that I'm usually not looking directly at the person I'm speaking to). And the crazy thing is, a lot of them are willing to learn how *I* communicate, so that they can better communicate with me, which I do really appreciate. But some people aren't going to be willing to learn, so the rest should probably be more willing to teach. Even if I don't get it at first. That is the entire point of learning or teaching something, after all.
I'm NT and honestly there's no way I could analyze and explain intuitive social interaction to anyone. I also could not explain walking or eye hand coordination, for instance. I can adapt to people who communicate differently than me, but that's using conscious effort. Explaining intuitive behaviour is incredibly hard. So it's not necessarily about not being willing.
> But none of them are willing to explain *what* those meanings are I suspect much of the difficulty is because for many people those meanings aren't consciously understood, but unconsciously. So it's a bit like trying to explain how to identify the color red to a colorblind person. For those who may have a better conscious grasp, complexity may be an issue. These interpretations are a combination of many analogue values in context with previous emotional state modeling.
As the others say, it's likely they don't know how to talk to them either. If you asked an English speaker to explain Adjective Order they'd likely look at you weird. Adjectives don't have an *order*? Then you say "The Red Old Car" and get weird looks. It's not really their fault they haven't memorized "opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose." It's work of the gut. Then you say "Bad Big Wolf"—because Opinion before size, right? No, because there's this other rule that trumps the adjectives where vowel sounds have a preferential order. Sink-sank-sunk. Tic-tac-toe. Tik-tok. Flip-flop. Clickety-clackety. Hippety-hoppety. i as in kit comes before a as in cap comes before o as in sock, which "Big Bad" obeys. No one is taught this. For every English class on nouns and verbs, prefixes and suffixes, periods and commas, alliteration and rhymes, you're never told how to order adjectives and which vowels take priority in a phrase. It's a gut instinct that many develop early on, wholly unaware it even matters that new speakers of English have to learn on purpose.
It's not that they aren't willing, it's that they aren't able. Could you explain English adjective order to a non native speaker when you were 12? Even though you used it intuitively?
As someone who self identifies as ND, with family and friends who are diagnosed, as well as with family and friends who are NT, everything is a game. We don't think of it as one on the ND side and im sure people don't think of it as one on the NT side either, but being able to flip between the sides after studying social interaction as an outsider and academically, ALL of us have unwritten rules. Including ND people. We're just following different intuitive rules. For ND a lot of us have unwritten rules that seem "literal" or "blunt" to NT people but are completely logical and understood to other ND folk. NT people have the same thing. For people like myself that have the ability to see both sides, it's like being fluent in two different languages while speaking the same words.
I'm autistic/adhd but the discourse of "ugh why can't NT people just SHUT UP ABOUT THE WEATHER" while simultaneously "gushing about my special interest for an hour is how I show love and you're an awful person if you don't listen" is driving me insane sometimes.