Hubby and I went to a little get together at his friend Jim’s house, which included Jim’s girlfriend and his friend.

The anticipation of a social activity still makes me anxious, but I did it!  Yes, I made five or more faux pas (that I know of), but I just ignored it.  In certain situations, hubby helped me out with an explanation of what the person was talking about, and he did it in a way that wouldn’t seem odd.

I suppose I can come across as odd, but I don’t care as much anymore.  A part of it is because I’m in my forties, so I am not as self-conscious as a twenty-something.  The other part is learning social skills by rote, which hubby, my mum and my kids have taught me.

I also learn by observing.  For example, I noticed that in a non-personal, know-the-person-well social situation, only say things that last at the most 15 seconds.  A minute means talking with a person individually if they bring up the topic first.  Even then, say something for 15 seconds then wait for them to say something.

I also learned to follow the leader.  No one brought up work, so I didn’t even thought my small business is something I enjoy talking about.  But, I will save that for talking with other business owners, which I am learning also, but that’s another blog post.

Related Article:  My Autism, Social Training, and Twinkling Lights

Yes, I am hearing the Beatles tune in my head, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”  This is what popped into my head while my daughter and I were at the Verizon store–a place that always creeps me out.

Creepy #1  I am warmly greeted at the store with major eye contact and a handshake.

Creepy #2  The sales rep calls my name then warmly shakes my hand with full eye contact.

I do like the warmly, but shaking hands is way too intimate for me.  Inside I am screaming, “Don’t touch me!”  I want to look at phones and tablets, rather than eyeballs, which are also too intimate and discomfiting.

Minutes after arriving in the store, I am off kilter and anxious from making my way past these touchy people.  Then my auditory processing gets challenged with a barrage of questions from the sales rep, which stressed me because I’m still processing the first question when he is on the third.

Then help arrives!

As has happened so many times over the years, my 22-year-old daughter (much to my relief) took over the hand-shaking and conversing for me.  I compare it to an American-born  child of parents who don’t speak English.  The child translates.

My daughter knows when I start to feel frustrated and threatened, which can turn into curt responses and clipped questions, which can seem rude, even though it’s not my intention.  I just want them to stop, so I can buy a phone!

Even though it’s my daughter who is upgrading her phone, I am the account holder so he directed questions to me then my daughter would step in and answer.  Even I could recognize his growing confusion.  I am guessing that this is outside of the social script so he felt a little lost, but that is ascribing autism traits to him.  I’ll ask my daughter.

Dear daughter’s explanation:

She says he is confused because when a parents brings in the child, the parent directs.  The parent will ask the child, but the parent does the talking because it’s their account, and the parent okays it.

I think both explanations could be true, along with many possibilities.  It comes down to any person not truly knowing what is going on another person’s mind.

We didn’t buy a phone.  At home, we bought a refurbished one online from Verizon and it cost $6.  And even though Verizon’s website is difficult at best for finding the true price, it didn’t talk.  Whew!

Joe the camera guy from WCCO

WCCO-TV folks were here last week interviewing me for a story about Cozy Calm and my weighted blankets, which ended up turning to autism also.

I have learned how to media interviews.  When I was in public radio, I was on the asking questions end of the microphone, so it didn’t require much interaction.  But, being on the answering questions end of the microphone, I had to learn.

It started in radio through voice classes primarily for clarity, vocal variety, and pauses.  I still use those skills in daily life even though I can still slip into monotone with my family and friends, but they don’t require vocal variety from me.

Over the years, I taught continuing education courses, so I learned how to teach, which involved speaking and how often to make eye contact.  Then I learned public speaking, which involved all I had learned before, with new skills such as scanning the room and using hand gestures to name a couple.

These are all scripts I have learned that have helped me get along in the world.  For those who haven’t had to learn social skills in a literal way, it can be compared to learning math.  There is a way to do it, so you learn the rules.  Ditto for social skills.

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Photo by Arissa Thompson

The kids in this photo are doing parallel play, which is a normal stage of development starting at two or three years old.  As they get older, they will be going into other stages of more interactive play.

Apparently, with my autism, I’m still a kid at heart.

Through my teen years, I saw no reason to interact.  Fortunately, I have a sister, so I was forced into it, and must admit, I liked it sometimes.

At one point in our childhood we lived beside a lake.  Normally, I would wade in the shallows watching and trying to catch minnows by myself.  My mother had a metal washtub outside, which we normally didn’t notice, but it was going to see its demise that day.

My sister, being the instigator she is, had an exciting idea!  We would use our pink sand pails to put water in the washtub and fill it with blood suckers (leeches).  This went on for hours.  What fun!

Mum yelled, “Lunchtime!”  Then it was nap time then play then have supper.  The blood suckers hadn’t entered my mind.

The next day, we heard suddenly heard a yell.  “You two get out here right now,” Mum said.  We walked to where she was standing, hands on hips.  She said, “You ruined my washtub!”

The washtub was in the hot sun, dry with blood suckers crusted to the sides and bottom.  Fascinating.

My sister looked up at me, and I felt something I had not before: a feeling of complicity.  We had gotten in trouble together–a feeling of togetherness.  Mum quickly interrupted that feeling by telling us to clean it.  The blood suckers weren’t so cute anymore.

I felt that feeling of complicity and togetherness the rest of my life even though I still primarily played by myself.

As an autistic adult, I feel a strong feeling of togetherness with my hubby.  I’m content and secure if he’s in the house or yard.  I don’t need to see or say anything to him for hours.  Yet, when he goes out of town, I feel horribly lonely.

Similarly, toddlers are happy when a parent is around even if they are not interacting, and they are scared if they can’t find their parent.

So, if you have a child or spouse with autism, you are interacting and being loved just by your presence.

I am so glad to talk with you again. Writing to you is a source of inspiration. And, I don’t know what works for you, but for me, writing to someone is therapy. Others may pick up the phone and call a friend, or likely visit with a friend in person.

In my autistic world, talking with people is a learned skill–learned by rote. My first step was to learn to talk to people, which I learned in baby steps, yes, to learn the skill and to gain the confidence as I went along.

Goodness, there are times when I talk incessantly about a topic of current fascination that I have researched extensively. (Don’t get me started!)  Talking about something is not the same as talking to someone. It’s a mental shift. I had to learn awareness of other peoples’ minds, and I learned the hard way.

My feelings would hurt when people would interrupt my diatribes or stop me, so I thought nobody cared to hear what I had to say. I took it as a personal rejection, so I spoke less. I didn’t have the social skills to carry on a two-way conversation, and it never occurred to me that other people would want that. The compulsion to chatter with people wasn’t in my mental makeup.

Do you know how your mind works? I didn’t/don’t. It took years before I realized that other peoples’ minds were different from mine. That awareness, that shift gave me the ability to talk to a person, not just about a concept, because I became aware that the other person was in there. It was a revelation at the time. It came about in university when I learned about theory of mind–fascinating.

I am still learning to talk about my private feelings and thoughts with my closest people. That brings us back to the whole concept of talking with a person, which is a confounding thing to learn. I’m working on it!

Thank you for listening, and I know you are because you are reading this.

Take care,
Eileen.

At Granny’s I spent a lot of time just wandering off being myself and being confused as to why people were doing as they did–like talking so much about the obvious or for no reason I could gather.  I would go in the living room and play the organ or watch “Hockey Night in Canada” with Papa.

I wrote this essay snippet years ago before I was diagnosed:

All my life we went out to Granny’s [farm].  I’d lag behind as they toured every flower and checked the worms on the apple trees.  I’d wander off by myself and play in the rain barrel or squirt my mouth with the reddest raspberries.  Mostly, I swung and twirled on the swing and watched and listened.

Granny wore hot pink sweatpants, [my sister] wore her powder-black sweatpants, and Mum always wore bluebell blue.  There they’d be, picking weeds with their bums in the air like brightly colored laughing talking flowers.

I knew I wasn’t like them, and I felt bad whenever I was told to join in.  People would ask questions, which I now realize as trying to elicit conversation instead of the blunt information I would return.  I felt like an outsider because I didn’t belong.

How do you “join in”?  Please define it.  Please tell me the purpose of it?  Why can’t I do something interesting instead like reading, studying things, doing art, or going up on the sand hill to pick wild strawberries?  As a child, I didn’t understand that others wanted to be social even though it had no purpose, and they were uncomfortable around me because I didn’t.

For parents with autistic children, I am going to think about this on how balance encourage teaching socializing, with feeding the child’s passions and personality, and making the child feel special instead of different.

The same type of parenting applies to neurotypical children, but the method of teaching it to autistic children is more literal with an explanation as to why.

“When you hear a sound, your brain responds.  When the child with autism hears a sound, their brain responds too, but a little bit later.  What we’re seeing is a…split-second delay in recognizing that sound,”  Tim Roberts says.

Ms. Chetry asks, “How does that play out in how children with autism learn and communicate?”

“What happens is that as speech becomes more complicated, we have more and more sounds building up, and these delays cascade on each other leading to a difficulty in perceiving or recognizing the word.”

Can you imagine how long it took me to transcribe the above sentences from the video?  I had to see, hear, understand, translate into a visual of the word in my head, type what I saw, while still hearing more, and more, and more! going in.

I was lost after three to five words each time I tried, so I played the video in a different window so I could just listen and type without seeing the heads moving, but the delay in my mind was just too much, and it all became garbled in my brain.  I didn’t understand the sentence and didn’t “see” the words in my head.  I had no clue what they were saying.  I was so quickly lost.

My typing speed is not the issue.  My preferred form of communication is email, and I write every day, so my typing speed is incredibly fast.  So, I tried another approach based on my experience.

One Source of Input

Only so much input at once, is my rule.  So, say the bare bones of what you have to say, then stop–unless you are communicating with facial expressions, tones of voice, and hand gestures.  Then you will have to state those unvoiced messages because I didn’t receive them.  They are visual distortion of the message.

This is why I tried transcribing without looking at the video to rid myself of the moving heads.  The moving distraction was enough that I lost understanding of the message very quickly.

The Next Try

Playing the video without watching while trying to type didn’t work either.  Without the visual, the delay wasn’t as slow, but I was quickly tripped up and way behind what was hearing.  It all turned into a mess in my head and my agitation increased in a millisecond.  I raced to the mouse to get to the video window so I could click “pause.”  I breathed out.  I had freaked out inside.

But, I have a Great Visual Memory

This time, I watched the video to understand a complete thought and paused the video.  Then I clicked to this window I am typing in and wrote the thought word for word without error.  I waited to let it integrate and to anticipate what they would say next, then I switched back to the video and repeated until the transcription was done.

I “saw” what they were saying.  I literally see the words in my head as they are talking.  The words have time to form into a visual then when I stop the recording, I see the whole sentences.  I worked at my usual fast typing speed because I was literally copying what I saw.

Advice for Teachers, Bosses, Parents, and Spouses

1. Public speakers use dramatic pauses to let a point “settle in.”  All people need pauses, not just the ASD people, so they can catch up with what is being said and integrate what they have heard.  Do the same for your loved one, pupil or employee with Asperger’s or autism.
2. One of my children summed it up best when this child said, “Okay, okay.  I get it, now stop talking.  You don’t have to keep explaining!  Stop talking!”  This child’s frustration level escalated rapidly if I didn’t “talk, stop, talk, stop,” so that day it resulted in a door slamming.  I understand the frustration completely, yet I forgot to start with a short summary then stop completely.
3. If you notice a person on the autism spectrum watching your lips when you are talking, it is a sign that you are talking too quickly and not pausing or not letting any silence hang.  Related article…
4. If you like to make a lot of facial expressions, body and hand movements, to make your point or “drive home” your point or “communicate what you are saying,”  don’t; it will muddle the message.
5. It is the easiest for me to understand speech in the morning, so my meetings and phone calls are generally in the morning.  In an afternoon meeting, I often have to get people to repeat points they are saying.  So, afternoons, I usually focus on a task with little environmental distraction.
6. Teachers, your autistic students may have more trouble writing in the afternoon because they are thinking of “what to say.”  Subjects such as math, graphic design, art, physical education, cooking, reading, or computer programming are relaxing in the afternoon.

Did You Notice how I Wrote This?

Some sentences, which make them more difficult to understand, have thoughts split.  Some sentences run on explaining point after point and linking thoughts thereby diluting the one necessary thought.  Some sentences are concise.  Choose the latter, then stop.  Believe me, it will be much appreciated.

If you are not on the autism spectrum maybe I can help you understand your loved one’s visual detail that brings such delight, but others may not understand. It’s this detail that can bring a difficulty with understanding context, like in social situations.

I have a fascination with twinkling light that draws me and pulls me into my mind so I notice little else.  I walk to them when I see them, I stare, and I watch over and over.

Try this exercise:

With the speakers off, play the above commercial, while focusing really hard on each twinkling light.  Focus only on every detail of each light, so the objects and the background disappear.  Notice as many lights as you can.  Then play it over and over focusing ever more on each light as it unfolds.  Observe the light growing and disappearing.  As each light moves, notice the trail of light it leaves behind.

With each playing of the commercial, you will notice that you start to have less recall of the shapes and the background but your mind will fill up the lines of light as the twinkling unfolds.  It may be difficult at first, since neurotypical people think in context.  Your mind may at first jump to the objects and the entire picture.  Try your hardest to focus on the lights so you can understand your loved one’s mind a little better.

My visual thinking enables me to see every detail of light automatically.  If you are not on the spectrum, you may have to work at it over a longer period of time to learn how to achieve it.  Or, you could train your brain to learn certain techniques, but without ever learning to do it automatically or properly.

Such Detail in Social Situations

Now, when I try to behave like a neurotypical person in social situations, I have to really work at it.  Over the years, I have learned one social rule at a time.  I rarely learn by “figuring it out” because that would require that my mind can understand social situations in context, much like seeing the bird, flower, tree, and background in the twinkling bird commercial before noticing every little light.

The concept of “making a first impression” mystifies me.  When I meet someone, I know nothing about them so if 30 seconds later, someone asks me what I think of the person, I would have to say, “I don’t know.”  I would also not understand the purpose of asking what I think of the person.

Evidently, neurotypical people get an “impression” of a person in the first 30 seconds.  They have summed up the person into a whole impression that they can talk about.  They have also made decisions about their continued interaction with this person.  They have decided if this person is safe or not.  I don’t know what this person is “like,” whatever that means.

Me?  I usually don’t remember faces and haven’t picked up on the non-verbal facial cues.  I’ll notice and remember details of jewelry (especially if they are twinkly!), clothing, physical size, etc.  Based on these details, I don’t know how I’m supposed to interact with this person.  I don’t know what to say or not to say.  I don’t know if I should walk away or continue to talk.  Also, in how many seconds or minutes am I supposed to walk away?  How long am I supposed to interact?

My brain is running through every social rule I know trying to figure out what to do.  If I don’t know what to do, I talk incessantly or say nothing and walk away.

I am still going through what I call “Social Training University” and learning the rules that create social interactions.  I’ve learned so many I can apply almost consistently.  Hey, I’m not necessarily using the rule in the right situation with the right people, but at least I have learned the rule.

The Science Behind It

This blog was sparked by the paragraphs below from this article in Science Daily.

“Autistic people usually can’t grasp the full meaning, or context, of a situation,” she said. “This often leads to difficulties in social settings, as making inferences from what someone else says or thinks is extremely difficult for an autistic person.”

“Our studies strongly suggest that autistic people need more emphasis on and explanation about the context of different situations,” said Hillier, who leads a social skills support group for people with milder forms of autism. “We can teach them how to interpret different situations.”