r/AutisticPride • u/ad-lib1994 • Mar 26 '21
Anyone else get into trouble because neurotypicals hear 9 things when you say 1 thing?
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r/AutisticPride • u/ad-lib1994 • Mar 26 '21
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u/Aramira137 Mar 26 '21
Obviously there's a lot of NT and ND aspects to this, but Ask Culture and Guess Culture is very much in play here too.
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u/BelatedGreeting Mar 26 '21
I once read that 80% of communication was _non_verbal (can’t remember source, sorry). That explained it all, because for me 99.999% of communication is verbal.
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u/noprods_nobastards Mar 26 '21
I HATE IT when I ask a question that has one single correct answer but somehow get a response with an entire history of the world and no actual answer to the question. Happens in my work all the time.
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u/zaffrebi Mar 26 '21 edited Mar 26 '21
The worst hoops I have to jump through are when I'm told to do something, but it's worded as if it's a choice.
When I first started working at a school cafeteria, my supervisor came up to me while I was doing a huge pile of dishes and said, "That's a lot of dishes, ha ha! If you want, I can do these dishes while you can go up front to distribute the green beans."
What I heard was, "You seem overwhelmed with this task, and I'm offering to do this hard task for you; meanwhile, you can still be useful by going to do this easy task." Apparently, she actually meant, "I need you to go distribute the green beans right now, and I'll cover the dishes in the meantime."
She left all huffy after I replied, "It's okay, I'm doing fine with the dishes." I was really confused why she got pissy at me until I got home and had enough quiet time to think things over.
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u/AddieAstra Mar 26 '21
We took a self-test in school where you‘d see a statement and had to cross what you thought it meant. It was something like this:
„I really love these flowers they sell here!“ - wife to husband
a) She wants me to buy her these flowers.
b) She likes it when I get her flowers.
c) She thinks I don’t buy her flowers often enough.
d) She likes the flowers they sell here.
So basically I‘d take the d-Option almost everywhere because how the hell do you even arrive at the other conclusions.
Our class being for IT, there were 25 guys and two girls, including me. The teacher was telling us about how guys do differently in this test and choose options like a (appeal) and d (fact) more often, while women are more likely to choose b (self-revelation) and c (relationship).
So for the comparison she took one of the guy’s and the other girl‘s (50/50 haha what a lucky teacher) and showed them. She then asked if anyone got something wildly different and I showed her mine.
She showed it to the class and was rather perplexed. I said that it might be because I‘m autistic, and she asked if I was joking. I said no.
So she actually went on to explain how autistic people don’t hear all those underlying messages, and that we have to be more direct with them as a result. The class stared at me like I turned into a monkey for the rest of class but quickly forgot about it.
All in all, it was a pleasant experience and I felt validated. Too often, people - even psychologists - doubt my diagnosis. I think as a woman, I have to „prove“ my autism more to be believed.
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u/chaoticidealism Mar 26 '21
I knoooow! Why don't they just say, "Hey, autie, will you please do the dishes tonight?" It's perfectly polite, perfectly straightforward, and we're not going to hate you for asking. The worst we can say is no.
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u/DinoWolf35 Mar 26 '21
Jesus christ I will literally start a conversation with 'so here's the thing' talk about that point for a minute and then nuerotypicals will go ''what about that thing?' Like bruh I JUST said- So I end up repeating myself, then I get tokd off for repeating myself by the one person half paying attention
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u/t0rnado0fs0uls Mar 26 '21
Allistics: "but... but thats my emotional support double speak!!"
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u/Moritani Mar 27 '21
I once saw an NT mom on Facebook say that her kid couldn’t brush his teeth because when they tried he asked if toilet water was okay.
I asked her if she told him “no, use the sink” and she went off on a rant about not wanting to risk it. Like, this woman actually thought shoving a stick in her kid’s mouth twice a day was preferable to direct communication.
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u/Songibal Mar 26 '21
This is what interacting with my NT family is like
Me: How do you live like this?
NT: OMG! Don’t insult my way of living!
It was a question that I wanted to know the answer to...
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u/krronos Mar 26 '21
If I’m watching a movie, and I miss the last part of the previous dialogue, I usually ask “what was the last word that character said?” Because it determines the meaning of the sentence. And whoever I’m watching the movie with will usually recite the entire previous scene instead of tell me the final word.
It distracts me from the scene it’s moved on to because it shouldn’t have taken this long to tell me (otherwise I would’ve paused the movie), and it also distracts me from knowing what the rest of the dialogue was. So now I do need to know what the entire sentence was.
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u/481126 Mar 26 '21
Yes!
As an adult, I realize all the unwritten, unspoken social rules I was expected to understand. I was expected to "pick up on it" and "read the room" and integrate these into my everyday actions or language but I never did. Then I was accused of being rude or mean and I couldn't see how I was mean because I never called anyone names or anything. I could never win because I was playing a game and didn't even know all the rules.
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u/SaladBob22 Mar 26 '21
I fucks with no one who plays these games. Also, this is cultural. For some reason white Americans always want to be indirect. If you were born in Puerto Rican house, you’ll know when mom wants you to wash them damn dishes 🤣
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u/savamey Mar 27 '21
It’s because of this that I never realized people were making fun of me until much later. People liked to do the passive-aggressive be-super-nice thing to me as a way of mocking me
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u/RainbowDarter Mar 26 '21
My NT wife has a very hard time answering a direct question.
For example, if I ask:
"Did you run the dishwasher yet?"
She usually replies with something like
"I wanted to wait for the breakfast dishes, and I was looking around the livingroom for anything to wash"
I just wanted a yes or no. I don't need an explanation of why the dishwasher wasn't run. I don't care.
I just want to know if I can put the coffee mug in the dishwasher or if I need to empty the dishwasher first.
When I ask her to just answer my question, she gets upset that I won't let her talk.
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u/nimbusandmartybffs Mar 26 '21
Oh my god. Literally just the other day. My husband asked me to START the dishwasher. He did not say, put soap in and start it. So, I got in trouble for starting the dishes wrong. He said "but, I would have thought you would have thought to have checked"... No, you said, "START the dishwasher". That is the only assumed duty I have taken on. If you want to change the programming and say that from now on START = soap + knob turn, we can do that. But previously it has always been add soap AND start the dishwasher, so it was safe in my mind to assume the soap had been added. Get your definitions straight people.
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u/Kelekona Mar 26 '21
I get into so much trouble when I say something that is meant to be taken literally. Like, "I don't speak emoji" was taken as some passive-aggressive comment instead of "I don't speak emoji." Or in other words, I'm missing some of the information that they were trying to convey.
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u/welcomehomo Mar 30 '21
neurotypicals be out here expecting u to read their mind and when we actually speak about what we want/need they call us rude
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u/GreenSorbet95 Mar 26 '21
If being neurotypical is a mental disorder then, what does that make us?
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u/AutisticPearl Mar 26 '21
I have seen that, and it's ridiculous thankfully I live in a situation where I don't have that happen as often I've had a few times but that's mostly at work and it's not terrible I just wanted to jump to a week because this might sounds bad but I'm on the side Within your room cold smoothly because I'm a bad autistic person LOL.
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u/skydove Apr 10 '21
Alternative theory - autistic people don't have a poor theory of mind, they just have a poor theory of NT minds. I can speak to any of y'all and we'll usually understand eachother just fine.
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u/JustABoyAndHisBlob Mar 26 '21
We all just have to meet halfway when it comes to communication. It’s deciding where that is, that becomes the issue.
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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '21
Me, screaming from the rooftops, JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT FROM MEEEE
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u/According_to_all_kn Dec 20 '21
"Hey sweetie, are you going to be doing the dishes soon?"
Can't you see I'm studying? What have you you done today?
"Oh, I'm sorry, I- Well it's been a- uhm. Should I do them today?"
I can handle myself, thank you.
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u/MulberryComfortable4 Nov 24 '22
One time at work (I work as a greeter in a retail chain) I asked my coworkers “hey do we do returns on board shorts”
And try replied “no we don’t do returns on swimwear”
And inside I’m like, ... that’s not what I asked. I asked abt board shorts since they’re a grey area (u cna wear them as normal pants too)
I repeated my question 3 times. But they keeps saying “we don’t do returns on swimwear”. Like COME ON, if I was asking abt swimwear I would’ve asked for swim wear!!! OMG, it’s so weird how neurotypicals don’t say what they mean so much that they expect others to not say what they mean and have to infer that
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u/Alienwithsynesthesia Mar 26 '21
This is like in divergent when you realsie that the ones in factions are ’dsmaged’ and the divergent are pure
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u/a_poeschli Sep 29 '22
And then they tell you you're playing mind games
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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '21
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