Because of my diagnosis of autism in September 2023, I was in a full eight-session course of Dialectical Behavior Therapy group this winter. I've been thinking about it a lot, so I have some comments to share. Feel free to skip this if it's not interesting, but I know a fair amount of fellow autistic or BPD people are on Tumblr and might end up considering emotion regulation therapy.
Some stuff from DBT was distress management, which was useful. For me it was worth it for that alone. So from the start, I do recommend it if you are offered it. But:
Some of DBT was the therapist failing to explain basic masking to a group of autistics and people with BPD. This was because whoever developed the course she was rushing through did not examine the reason WHY these people haven't learned masking skills already. It was usually because those that hadn't, had never had explained to them the difference between expected social diplomacy and lying.
See, I'm going to explain this now, from the POV of a Level 1 late-diagnosed autist with pretty decent masking skills. So this is going to seem super obvious to those of you that are neurotypical.
Many people with autism feel inherently that concealing your feelings or opinions is the same as lying, and that you are doing someone specific harm by not telling them when you know they're wrong. We can't read tone or expression well a lot of the time, so it's not clear to us when someone is saying something just to be polite, or otherwise saying other than what they mean. And we hate not knowing what people mean. So we tend to just SAY what we mean. The natural result is that the autistic person sounds like a rude asshole to everyone except other autists. It's not unusual for people with BPD to have a similar problem, as I learned from my fellow patients!
Neurotypical people generally agree that lying is wrong in a broad sense, but they also preserve an internal distinction between lying that is wrong and stating a non-fact for social reasons that are obvious to the listener. No one tells the autistic person about this, because you're supposed to just know it.
An example of this that we discussed in class is that a coworker in a lunch discussion says the world is flat. Now, you, the autist, know that's not true. But the important fact is that everyone around you does, too. So when you gently deflect the person by politely saying, "Wow, Dave, that's interesting. I've never heard that before," everyone around you is NOT assuming you believe Dave. They assume that you are being polite. You're not actually lying or deceiving anyone, because everyone actually knows what you mean ("I'm not comfortable with this, let's change the subject"). It's possible even Dave will get the message and not bring it up again, depending on how good Dave is at reading the room himself.
This is a much better use of your time and social presentation than point-blank telling Dave he is nutter butters and starting an argument that ruins everyone's lunch break. Because at that point it's not Dave everyone blames, it's YOU. Everyone knows Dave is wacky about the flat earth, why can't you just skim over it as fast as possible so we can all get him off the topic?
The important skill to learn here is when not to engage on something. If you don't agree from day 1 that sometimes there's a Dave and we don't have to point out they're wrong, you simply can't function or mask for longer than it takes for someone in a conversation to say something you don't agree with. This is a very common autistic problem.
Because the fact is that there will definitely be times where you are sure someone is wrong, even Dave and the flat earth level wrong, but it's NOT obvious to everyone. If you can also learn not to try to correct everyone when that happens, you can be a lot less annoying to other people socially. (And I do mean socially here; obviously if you work at a nuclear plant or something and see someone doing something unsafe, you have to speak up, and I'm saying that because I know a lot of us are also very literal.) But you definitely don't have to tell Madison, your boss who can fire you, that there is no evidence essential oils have other than a placebo effect on any health condition. You can say that's very interesting, Madison, and hey did you watch the game? For "the game" you can swap out something else you know Madison likes. It doesn't really matter what it is, it matters that you got her off the thing you disagree with onto something you don't care about, and then you shut up and let her talk about it, so she still has a positive feeling about the conversation.
This is the most basic thing on earth, and if any neurotypicals are reading this you probably can't fathom how anyone doesn't know this. This makes a lot more sense if you are coming at it from the point of view of never, your entire life, knowing what people mean by a certain tone, or what the thing they're doing with their face exactly means. It's very possible to learn these things (not easy, but possible), but you have to first realize there's something there TO learn, and that learning it is not BAD or EVIL, and that's a hurdle my DBT course failed to clear immediately for most of my classmates.
