@skystonedclouds - Tumblr Blog

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Vega, The Star At The Centre Of Everything

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John 1:4 (NLT) - The Word gave life to everything that was created, and His life brought Light to everyone.

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Emily Dickinson, from a letter to C.H. Clark written c. May 1883

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skystonedclouds

Autism & cutting off in conversations.

I seen a lot of people here and there reblog posts like “If you see someone being interrupted don’t let it happen just put the person in their place”. This kind of scares me and other people I know who have autism. We literally have a hard time reading the context and telling when someone is finished speaking or just paused. This is especially a problem in group settings where we accidentally cut people off a lot thinking they were finished.

Of course we stop once we realize they weren’t finished. Often we go to the extremes where by the end of the conversation we ended up never getting a chance to speak in fear of cutting someone off or we accidentally cut someone off because of a misread pause. This is a great source of anxiety because either we leave never having said a word never sure if we could speak or we are seen as rude for accidentally misreading the situation.

So if a person with autism cuts someone off… just maybe try to help them out instead of lecturing them on their terrible social skills. Give signs to show when you are willing to “pass the microphone” per say (even just for comments/relating about the story). That or at least don’t lecture them or give them a mean look to make them feel like a bad person for misreading the situation. You can say like “Oh I wasn’t done I’ll open up the floor for comments with a nod” or something lol. It sounds silly but literally can’t even tell the difference between a pause and an end.

sleezykryptonite

My psychologist told me that allistic brains subconsciously pick up on when someone is about to finish speaking and subconsciously prepare to begin speaking then while autistic brains do not

autisticjoy

…really??

[id: a screenshot from a show of two men facing the camera and a third man shown from the behind. the caption reads: “That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about allistic brains to dispute it.” end id]

demiiboy

According to my linguistics professor, the tone at which someone is speaking drops when they are almost done speaking. Allistic ppl can pick up on this tone shift, most autistic people can’t.

annethecatdetective

However, this goes in reverse– allistic people CANNOT tell when autistic people are about to be done speaking. Because we don’t always give off the same tonal indicators and often have a slower rate of speaking or leave a gap without making filler noises to indicate we are not done, autistic people often find themselves getting talked over and being unable to rejoin the conversation.

Which, of course, is a vicious cycle thing, because to us, it seems like allistic people interrupt ALL THE DAMN TIME, but suddenly when we do it it’s rude.

zigraves

There was a study done on this!

They paired people into Allistic-Allistic, Autistic-Autistic, and Autistic-Allistic pairs and had them work on a communication task in those pairs. It was a blind test, as no participants were informed of the neurotype of the person they paired with.

It found that same-neurotype pairs communicated more accurately and reported greater mutual rapport than mixed-neurotype pairs - demonstrating that it’s NOT Autistic people having “bad social skills”, it’s a MUTUAL communication gap because they can’t understand us either. So we may not have good allistic-speaking skills, but they have equally terrible autistic-speaking skills.

This is a very easily replicable study, and bears out patterns I’ve noticed IRL.

(and like… if you’re not Autistic but a ton of your friends are and you vibe so much more easily with them than your Allistic friends? Maybe double check that ‘not Autistic’ thing just in case. You can still be a ‘bilingual’ Allistic, of course! And Autistic masking is a thing, where you put a lot of background brain effort into decoding and mimicking Allistic patterns so you pass for one of them but then end up very very tired because you’re putting a LOT more work into the conversation than they are.)

some-stars

also to go back to the kind of message the OP was probably seeing–if the person interrupting is, let’s say, a white man, and yet they seem never to interrupt other white men, or at least not the ones who have power over them, THAT’S the situation you’re supposed to speak up about, because those kind of people love to hide behind “oh i just have poor social skills” and throw actually autistic people under the bus. so yeah it’s not a hard and fast rule, which tumblr hates, but there IS something valuable there. you just have to pay attention to context and not yell at people who genuinely don’t mean any harm and are having miscommunication issues.

(white women do it too, ofc, and rich people and bosses and parents and so forth, i’m just going with the most likely example)

beatrice-otter

It’s not just tone of voice. It’s also about eye contact! See, for most neurotypicals in Western cultures, when someone is speaking you look at their mouth, and when you want to speak you signal that by looking at their eyes. (It’s more complicated than that, there’s actually a complicated dance, but that’s the basic gist of it.) So if you’re looking at the wrong part of their face they will subconsciously think you’re trying to interrupt them when you’re not.

alexseanchai

…and then they complain that we don’t make eye contact when we’re listening to people??

beatrice-otter

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.

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