When I try to pass as NT in social situations, it is very exhausting and tiring. Please reply to this thread.
I have some questions:
1. Why is it so hard for us autistics to learn NT social skills?
2. Why is it exhausting and tiring for us autistics to try to pass as NT in social situations?
3. Why are our autistic brains not wired for social interaction?
4. Why is it difficult for us autistics to make any NT friends?
5. Why do we autistics engage in stimming and other repetitive behaviours?
6. Why are we autistics often bullied at school and at work?
Regards,
SRSAutistic
I'll try to answer, you're clearly looking deeper into autism and trying to understand, I feel you on that it's kind of become my new primary interest. This is what I understand from my own research, and self reflection of myself and observing my son.
I keep coming back to 'hyperfocus' and I may sound crazy here, I've been questioning myself, am I getting carried away with this? but I feel that's what Autism is, focus; I feel most parts if not all parts of the spectrum are relative to focus in some way.
1) Why is it hard for us to learn social skills? From my experience, I'm not overly interested in being social for the sake of being social, more to converse thoughts or ideas about interests, to further my understanding. I'm more interested in things than people themselves, General chit chat or small talk, I see no point to it if that's happening I'll usually be mute and observe, and when I have tried to focus on the conversations and reciprocate, I end up either oversharing personal details or changing the subject and info dumping. Resulting in me wishing I just stayed mute, stay in the 'grey area' if you like and not draw attention to myself.
2) Why is it exhausting? Well from my own experience being out in society and around people is definitely one of the times that 'hyperfocus' is active. To function well I have to absorb everything, analysing eveyone else to see what the 'norm' is, making it easier to mask certain traits and not draw too much attention to myself. On the other hand, we can then focus way to much on the words and misinterpret humour, figures of speech or sarcasm essentially why we can be very literal in our understanding.
I think this is also relative to the low duration of eyecontact we usually possess. My reasoning for not wanting to look people in the eye is not to be rude, but it's to keep my thoughts in a linear path so I can have a conversation. If I was to look someone in the eye it gives me an infomation overload, way to many random thoughts questioning what they percieve and is so distracting that I lose track of the conversation and it becomes awkward. I find I often stare into space when talking.
So to why it's exhausting, from my perspective its because we use so much mental power trying work out and decipher the social rules so we don't make a mistake and draw attention to ourselves, while also our focus on our interest never left our thoughts and are always ready to info dump if the opportunity arises. For NTs, I feel the whole social side just flows, its passive and they don't have to put the same kind of thought into being social to perform well. I also find that many autistic people claim to, Including myself, that we replay social interactions over and over in our heads, deciphering what happened, context and potential outcomes.
3) In my opinion were not specialised for socials, were specialised for specifics; and in society there is alot of 'reading between the lines' and things meaning not what they say necessarily. It's very broad and as we like specifics, for example if I ask my 7 year son how was school today? He really would struggle to answer that, the question is so broad what do I mean? Does he want to know what I had for lunch? Did I eat it? What I've learnt? Who I've been playing with? Did anything happen today? One question can cause an overload of infomation.
I have to be very specific and ask different questions separately, what did you have for lunch? Did you eat your lunch? Who did you play with at break time? What did you play at break time? Did you do maths today? Ect. Because he will give me very short specific answers and I do the same myself.
4) I think there is several points to that, it may come down to having similar interests with someone, knowing how to open a conversation, environmental things out of our control I'd say also plays a part to, upbringing and family. When I was young I was never put into any classes or teams outside of school, so when people talked about them in school I could never relate. I've put my son into classes/teams cause it was something I never had the chance to do, and it appears to have helped tremendously with both his social skills and confidence. Don't get me wrong if I let him engage in his primary interest of dinosaurs all day everyday, he would do just that. But I do feel its important to experience things that you're not initially interested in and learn to engage with others.
5) Why do we stim? I feel its a by-product of high focus, a coping mechanism. When do you stim and what caused it? For me I've noticed I stim alot in regards to time, by that I mean if something was to happen at 'X' and it then has not happened as predicted I end up pacing and watching the clock, minutes feel like hours. Stimming can also occur when feeling happy or angry.
6) I was lucky enough to not be bullied at school, part of that was down the environmental factors such growing up with my mums friends children, who also happened to be in the same school and was one of the popular kids. I was never popular or wanted any attention on me, but because I was friends with some of the popular kids no one really bothered me, I was sort of on the periphery of the group.
I've ended up writing way more than I thought so apologies for the wall of text, but this is where my focus was at so thought I'd give my opinion. Understandably not everyone would agree with this, and that's fine. So here's my last point, even writing this post I've spent ample time reading over it to make sure it kind of makes sense. Does anyone else find it easier to discuss something through text rather than speech? I find i can articulate myself better through text, speech is fast flowing, alot to take in and I can't read over it and analyse before pressing send, with speech it sort of spills out, unfiltered at times.
Edit: To add to number 6, my opinion on why they do is in my experience we can be quite gullible, or susceptible to manipulation. Even though we are largely analytical thinkers, sometimes things are not obvious to us at first, the workings of society for example.
