Allistic people don’t have a conversational stack
For those of you with acquaintances and family members living with allism, you might be familiar with, and getting tired of, such things as:
Being met with confusion upon restarting a conversation topic that had been interrupted earlier, and being told that “this conversation’s been over for a while”
Having a lapse in memory for one reason or another, and asking “Wait, what were we talking about? No, I mean, before that”, and having your acquaintance with allism express confusion at any distress about not being able to remember that
Being reminded of something by the current conversation, bringing it up, and being met with allistic signs of distress and complaints about “changing the topic”
As it turns out, this is because of the oft-overlooked cognitive symptoms of allism! You see, the average non-allistic person will have a sort of “mental stack” to keep track of conversational things like, most obviously, the topic of the current conversation. What this means is that, essentially, you “pile up” new topics on top of the previous ones, and once you’re done talking about one, you “take it out” of the stack and you can then resume the previous conversation.
People with allism won’t do that. Of course, anyone can get memory issues hindering the proper function of that mental stack, but allism leads to a complete lack of that stack altogether. Once they start talking about something else, the previous conversation is over. Completely. This can be somewhat debilitating in day-to-day life, so here are some tips to accomodate that when talking to someone with allism:
Talk about one thing at a time, and one thing only
Avoid shifting topics, unless they do it themselves or it’s clear that they don’t want to talk about the previous one anymore (look for extended periods of silence!)
If you do want to bring something up, instead of interrupting the current conversation, try to make a note of it to bring up later!
If anyone in your life has allism, I hope this will help you communicate more efficiently with them. Take care!
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