The catch is that it has to be the right kind of eye contact, i.e. eye contact which fits all the socio-cultural rules of the person/people you’re trying to have a conversation with. And the other catch is that nobody processes these things on a conscious level. These are all things that your brain learns to do without conscious input. Neurotypical people don’t notice consciously when their conversation partner stops looking at their mouth and starts looking at their eyes, they just “know” the person wants to speak. When they’re conversing with an autistic or some other neurodivergent person, or someone from another cultture, they will not consciously know what the disconnect is, but they will subconsciously know that the other person is not giving off the cues/signals they expect, and that something is “wrong.” Which, usually, they interpret as the other person being untrustworthy or something like that.
The thing is, because they don’t consciously know what the cues are that their gut is expecting, they usually can’t figure out why their gut thinks something is wrong. And they definitely can’t teach anybody to use the cues “correctly”, because they have no idea what the cues are because none of this is on a conscious level. (And even if you could teach someone all the appropriate cues, they’re very complex and culturally specific and pretty much impossible to do consciously while also doing things like “listening” and “saying coherent things.”)
Anthropologists and communications specialists have done a lot of studies about this kind of thing, btw, but they don’t talk with autism researchers, and autism researchers don’t go looking for this stuff in other fields.
So your ordinary allistic parent/teacher/therapist will know there’s something “not right” with an autistic’s nonverbal communication. If the autistic doesn’t look a person in the face, it is very obvious that they are not making eye contact, so hey, voila! That must be the problem! So the allistic (who doesn’t know how the fuck their own nonverbal cues work, but knows they’re right and the autistic is wrong) tells the autistic to “make eye contact” as if staring into someone’s eyeballs is the only thing that matters. The autistic person will comply with the command given, and make eye contact. But because it’s not the right kind of eye contact, the allistic will get uncomfortable and/or mad and accuse them of being defiant or aggressive or mocking or something like that, leaving the autistic very frustrated because they did what they were told and now they’re being attacked for it by the very person who told them to do it.
gracieabrams
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
