Communication autistic to autistic

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When I was growing up there wasn't much tv to watch, so I got more of my info from books. This led to some unfortunate incidents involving literary tropes that bear little resemblance to reality
However, I think the extreme novel reading helped me a lot, both with understanding the world and with communication issues. And I got a bit of an education.

I *hate* being misunderstood. It's my biggest gripe in life. There is nothing that makes me want to scream quite like being misunderstood. I was diagnosed recently, and it was such an incredibly positive experience for me, because the person doing the assessment was someone who really understood what I was trying to say. It has never happened to me that I had such perfect communication with someone I'd only known for a few hours. Sometimes when I was unable to express myself they would simply say whatever I was trying to express at the time, for me. How could they do that? It has never happened before. People always get it wrong.

I had to look up more words and phrases than usual reading this tread.

But I'm a non native English speaker and overly dependent on the auto correct tool (which I don't always trust), so I'll blame it for that reason and apologize for any confusion left in the wake of my ramblings. So please bear with me and those alike and our limited knowledge of the language

I see a lot of poetic and creative wording here. It's fun and interesting to read, I might learn a thing or two. I'll just leave this comment so I can follow along for the ride as an observing passenger. I might have some questions later on.

Generally, in conversation context is very important. If someone said “Help, I’m under attack, argh”, and were on the floor with a dog licking their face and they were laughing, then the statement is a light-hearted joke. But if someone said this whilst in a castle while cannon balls are being launched at the walls, the tone becomes very different. Suddenly it’s a matter of urgency and panic.

I think the reason that I tend to do so badly on those tests where you listen to voice samples, and you have to say what the emotion is, well I think it’s partly due to the fact that the visual context is taken away. Some seemed easy like “Please help me”, but I chose less obvious choices in case the test was trying to trick me. Clearly this method didn’t work for me as my scores were pretty bad.

Also, by visual context I don’t necessarily mean facial expressions either (tend to score bad on those tests to, unless they’re really obvious) but more the physical situation (castle under attack vs the friendly dog) I’ve certainly improved on reading body language, since it was an interest of mine at one point so I read up on body language.

Not sure what you mean by sarcasm “of the literal variety”. Sometimes I can think someone is being sarcastic when they are not, but it’s generally the case that they are being sarcastic and I think they are being serious (such as insulting me jokingly) and they have to stop and explain “I don’t actually think you are that thing, I was joking”. So, in my case, it’s more I assume that people are nastier than they actually are.

You are right about contextual sarcasm, the example I gave in my previous post about flying pigs, it’s likely to make more sense if you know what that classmate is like in that situation. If someone said that to someone who asked (that didn’t know much about said classmate) then it’s possible they wouldn’t understand the joke about them slacking off since they are unaware of their classmate’s lazy tendencies. But, from context, phrasing and tone they might be able to work it out.



Ah, that makes sense. I thought that was the case with mad professor, but I wasn’t sure about little professor. It’s only really a term I see being used here. I don’t mind if there’s a lot of quotes, just as long as they are all in a logical order.



Echolalia… that’s when someone gets stuck on a particular phrase or word and repeats it, right? I’m still unsure what the term means exactly, but I’ve heard it used here.

That’s true, posts can happen like that. However, sometimes it happens with the original post and the second post, which is just beyond me really. I guess in that circumstance it’s just people having one sided conversations, and not really taking turns to discuss the original post.

I think I actually read voices pretty well - probably due to years of musical training. Body language is confusing, though, and the combination of voice and body language can lead to overload, where I'm not processing much in real time at all.

I might be deluding myself about the voices, though. Had an interesting conversation with husband today where he modeled the same phrase said in different ways, as in disbelieving, suspicious and surprised, and apart from the time he gave himself away with his voice, I couldn't identify what was what. Clearly I've spent most of my life believing I was much better at interpreting people than I really am.

That statement is very true

I mentor other autistic people for a living. I find it far easier to talk to other autistic people, we are on the same wavelength no matter where we are on the spectrum. I think that much of this is due to an increased sense of relaxation, we can just be ourselves and no one is going to judge us

Good point there. I find that autistic people can be incredibly tolerant. I'm pretty long-winded, both in speech and writing, and it's not really an issue here. You can always find someone who writes longer posts.

When I was trying to figure out whether I had add or autism or both, I visited an adhd forum and spent some time reading stuff there. It didn't feel like home the way WP does. I couldn't explain why, there is nothing scientific about it, but one factor is the long posts where people go deep into the nitty-gritty of things. I couldn't see those posts in the adhd forum. Although the add section was full of women who'd been told off for having flat affect, though.

I'll start by discussing the classical "we don't understand irony/sarcasm" statement. Here is what I think. I think this mainly applies during speech. I believe that at least a significant portion of autistic people could be as good if not better than NTs at identifying those things in written text. My thought is that when you can't identify the meaning by looking at body language or voice or whatever, you will naturally start to look at other means of identification. The tool I would try to use is to look for inconsistencies. If someone says something that contradicts earlier statements or actions, it seems more likely that they're either being ironic or lying than that they are not able to be coherent. Then the only thing that remains to determine is if it's their former or their latter statement that is bogus. If someone else has additional thoughts on the matter, I'd like to know.

As for the forums, I would probably not mind if someone that fail to understand a post I make ask for clarification. I guess I can always revise that policy if I ever get annoyed by it.