Behavior is Communication: Meeting Autistic People Where They Are

We recently moved into a new house after I retired. We inherited two pieces of furniture that we neither need or want or can use. We have wrought iron four-poster bed frame that won’t fit any of our mattresses, and a chest freezer that I usually associate with hunting because you can store your excessive amounts of meat in them more easily. We’d talked about making the donation or weeks. Everytime it comes up — I don’t bring it up, Ma Belle Femme does — I agree that it’s a great idea We don’t need either item. And, there it stops.

Finally, today she asked me to call the thrift store to make the arrangements. She was a bit exasperated with me, I could tell, though, bless her, she did her best not to show it. She had thought that since I’m retired and having NOTHING to do all day, I could easily call and make the arrangements. I had thought we would make a definite plan, meaning roles would be explicitly assigned, a date decided upon by which we wanted it out of the house. That kind of thing. We’re been married going on thirty years You’re think we’d’ve picked up on each others’ communication styles, habits, and needs. But, we haven’t.

Communications Breakdown

For the neuroconvergent that’s a communication break down that happens occasionally. For the neurodivergent, that’s a day that ends in Y as in “Why does this keep happening to me?” It’s like that Barbie song from the Oughts, “I’m a neurodivergent girl in a neuroconvergent world! Life as an autistic, It’s craptstic!” That’s were the lyrics, right?

Autism is a disorder that is characterized by a failure to communicate, but communicate on whose terms? The answer is as obvious as saying Ken and Black Ken because we all know Ken is white unless otherwise stated, right? I mean, we default to the majority view as the terms on which we communicate because majority rules unless it was the majority for two hundred years and then with only a mere fifty year or so warning suddenly and unexpectedly flipped to being majority-minority cuz that ain’t right,

The Autistic is at Fault

Both Ma Belle Femme and I were communicating using our best communication tools. We knew what we meant. We knew we were clear. That’s because communication actually has two parts. The message the sender intends to communicate and the message the receiver understands. We all know they rarely are exactly the same but when neuroconvergent and neurodivergent talk, they rarely are ever even close. And, whose fault is it? That’s right, who ever is perceived as being in the minority. In this case, it is up to the neurodivergent to make whatever changes necessary.

The Vicious Defense of the Status Quo

There is a nastiness to the majority when they are enforcing their ways. There was an expectation that everyone not in the in-group will conform or suffer the consequences, but it’s not our fault, y’all. We evolved that way. Early human beings lived in groups between twenty-five and seventy-five with larger communities of groups including about one hundred fifty individuals. #ScienceFact, y’all: the maximum number of social relationships any individual can maintain is about one hundred fifty. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Working in groups gave us our best shot at survival. Maintaining group cohesiveness meant that non-conformist could not be tolerated. It turns out that one squeaky apple ruins the grease. We developed really vicious ways of protecting the group from descent. Everything from dehumanization to shame and abuse. They are effective ways of forcing preference falsification or ostracizing someone from the group. We do it as naturally as we breathe. So, of course, every neuroconvergent person expects every neurodivergent person to get with the program and clock it, as the kids are saying nowadays (Seriously, I have that on good authority, y’all).

The Real Culprits: Social Communication and Cognitive Load

The problem is that the social communication, the non-verbal cues, the subtle shifts in tone of voice, the meaning of inflection, and other clues, neuroconvergent people do instinctively, it takes cognitive effort for the neurodivergent to do. It’s a pretty involved process when you think about it. In the furniture donation anecdote, I would’ve had to set my instinctive reaction of when it’s time to make the donation, we’ll discuss who should make the call, which store we should contact, when we should do it all. All of the things needed to make it happen, and then remember that Ma Belle Femme preferred not saying something like, so when do you think would be a good time to do this? And, ask it myself even though it is not something I’d usually ask. Or, I’d have to think to bring it up later and ask those questions.

But, what’s wrong with that, the average neuroconvergent person is thinking. Why is it a big deal to expect a neurodivergent person to expend the cognitive effort of parsing the social situation when they can’t do it intuitively? Because our brains use 20% of our energy, grossly out of proportion to the 2% of our body mass that they make up. Thinking can literally exhaust you. The level of concentration and use of working memory — limited to 7 +/- 2 unites of memory — takes a ton more effort for a neurodivergent person who is already expending so much more cognitive energy dealing with the hyper kinetic loud chaotic environments that we make for ourselves. Who is already coping with information overload and being stretched in multiple ways trying to keep up with the bombardment of sensory input and rapidly shifting social environments. Just like the sighted can’t understand what it means to be blind, the white cannot understand the experience of the Black, the neuroconvergent cannot appreciated the efforts of the neurodivergent.

You just have to trust us. And, that is hard for the majority to do.

Non-Sympothetic Sympathy

It is much easier to give into the cognitive shortcut of Fundamental Attribution Error and assume that whatever shortcomings a person is experiencing or performing is because of a deeply flawed personality or character. Think of every time you’re been teased or you’ve teased someone for lunch stains on their shirts or common typos in their emails. It’d funny until it’s not.

FAE is often betrayed by the condescending nature of the neuroconvergent person’s response. The infantilization of the neurodivergent through voice tone and talking down to them. The yes that drips with cynicism when asked if this what is meant. The exasperation inherent in the phrase, “If I have to spell it out…”

We’re willing to give lip service to appreciating mental health issues, but that lip service stops at the boundary of our comfort zone. That is what autism does. It challenges the communication comfort zone of the neuroconvergent because autistic people communicate their thoughts, emotions, and desires in ways that are not easily articulated verbally. Often it is through their particular topics of deep interest or repetitive sounds and movements, which can make people damn uncomfortable. The way neurodivergent folks communicate doesn’t make intuitive sense to the neuroconvergent, so it is treated as unimportant and incomprehensible.

The Intuitive Divide

The intuitive nature of social communication forms the divide between the neurodivergent and neuroconvergent. Because social communication is intuitive, it is done without thought or understanding. It is assumed that everyone can do it just as easily as everyone else. The neuroconvergent don’t appreciate what cognitive social communication requires from the neurodivergent. When I observe two or more people interacting, I can nail the non-verbal communication, the emotions being expressed, all of the subtext. When I am directly interacting with a person, all of that flies out of the window. I can’t perform my end of the interaction and keep up with the non-verbal social communication. It’s too much.

Catching the Anxiety Spike Early

When things are going on around me that I don’t understand, I often will begin to feel anxious and uneasy. It is experienced as a desire to leave. I might not be able to tell you that I’m anxious, but I know I want to get out of there. Or, I know that something is happening around me that I don’t quite get, and I am desperate to figure it out.

Sorting that out is cognitive overload. There are just too many things happening in the environment and internally to keep track of, organize, and interpret. If there were just someway to help me clue into what to pay attention to. Recently, I read about some research that used physiological data that is gathered by wearable devices like a Fitbit to help predict aggressive outbursts by severely impaired autistic people. They got their success rate up to about 84%. They were able to expand their predictive repertoire to self-insure and meltdowns. They could give one to three minutes warnings that a specific behavior would happen, which is enough tme for caregivers to intervene and perhaps avert a bad situation. No one benefits from a meltdown.

It got me to thinking that if I could have a wearable device that warned me of spiking anxiety — many autistic people are unaware of the somatic markers of emotional state changes — I could then begin to look for causes in my environment. I’m sure that every time Ma Belle Femme brought up donating the furniture, I had a slight uptick in anxiety because I knew from our long history together that she expected something of me. I just wasn’t consciously aware of that expectation or what it was. But, had I known, I could’ve reflected upon it and possibly caught on to what she was telling me before we reached her point of exasperation. It would’ve saved us both some emotional and cognitive wear and tear.

That phrase, behavior is communication, should become much more widely used and known. It could save us a lot of trouble. It could help smooth over many communication problems that more than just neurodivergent people encounter. It could help us all relate more compassionately to each other and ourselves.

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Image Attribution

The image was taken from Pixnio and has a Creative Commons license.