Symbolism as a Communications Form

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Does anybody else here have any experience with using symbolism as a form of communications. I live near an Aspie whom I have been trying to get to know for over a year now. He is so avoidant that I have only managed to drive him farther away by trying to talk to him, although he seems to want to know me. Whenever I give up and turn the other way he seems to get upset and warms up to me enough to bring me back on board before reverting to his normal avoidant behavior once again. I tried a written note of friendship 4 months ago and that seemed to please him greatly but as expected he never did accept my open invitation to call or visit. I can understand this though because while I have a relatively long social tolerance threshold of an hour or two before I must seek solitude again, his threshold seems to be closer to about 5 seconds at best.

The thought occurred to me that if I cannot use words with him due to his very limited social tolerance, then perhaps I might be able to use symbols that he could see without placing myself in his path to create another human distraction for him to have to deal with. So I placed a telephone on my balcony railing and attached a door knocker to the post next to it where he could see it as a way of telling him that he is still welcome to call or visit whenever he wishes to do so. In addition from time to time I began matching a color usage scheme that seems to be (or used to be) part of his routine. I have mixed impressions but overall I think it got his attention in a beneficial way. Since then I have continued to put out the door knocker occasionally and just today I happened to see him looking up to where it had been before (perhaps to see if it was there today or not... who knows).

I happened to see an episode of Criminal Minds (episode S06E16 named Coda) a couple of weeks ago which highlighted the use of such symbolism by a profoundly autistic kid to communicate what was on his mind. This made me wonder if such use of symbolism that I was already using was indeed more common than I had realized. I have known for a long time that music is one of his special interests and recently saw him playing a concert string bass that I previously saw him hauling home one day about seven months ago. The thought occurred to me that I might be able to use that as yet another symbol to communicate with him. I am now planning on placing a bass clef musical symbol on my balcony post for him to see as a way of showing recognition, acceptance and understanding of what he does. The bass clef also represents that part of the musical scale where he does his playing. It is a symbol that not everyone recognizes so maybe it will also tell him that there is a musical background in my distant past. I'm sure it will never bring him knocking at my door, but hopefully this just might briefly bring a smile to his mind if not to his face. I am hoping that the symbolism from this one single graphic symbol may say a lot to him that I might be unable to say otherwise... and I keep thinking of still other possibilities.

Does anybody else here have any experience with the use of symbolism as a communications form? I would be very interested to hear other people's stories on this one.

If I noticed this symbolism I might think the other person was odd but in an interesting way. I'm not sure I would get that you were sending out messages but I don't know.

The first thing that comes t my mind that would get my attention would be for you to have given me a mixed C.D. of songs of who you are. I'd then consider giving you a mixed CD of songs of who I am.

I am this song. I am that song. This song is me.

(I've actually done this with a pen pal before. And that is how we got to know each other. emails first. It wouldn't have happened otherwise probably.)

I actually planned on doing that last summer (3 CDs heavy on Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler), then the psychologist I talk to from time to time simply told me, "but you don't know what kind of music he likes" (typical NT pessimism) so I gave up on that idea. These days he is probably too avoidant to get close enough to him to hand him a CD (he used to be more approachable last Spring and seemed to enjoy brief social contact). These days anytime a person gets within 50 feet of him, he takes off like a bolt of lightning in the other direction. It is probably a lost cause but my own Aspie persistence causes me to want to let him know in some small way that he is appreciated and understood. Symbolism seems to get his attention so I am trying that for now. If you get a chance do check out that Criminal Mind episode because what it shows, while simplistic seems to be rather revealing. I can't find anything else on this site about symbolism via a search so that TV show is the only thing I have found that illustrates what I learned by practice.

Why not try email?

Oh, well, I wasn't even exactly meaning making music he may like. The music is like saying what you are. Songs can really feel like they are me. Like my house I live in can feel like a song. When I heard a song on the radio while painting I said, this house is this song, and my pen pal who is my real life friend now started laughing because she thought it was so weird to say.

This is a song I would say is me. I had sent her these two songs too. Maybe this weird to say.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ9KYriPbU4[/youtube]

Eventually I told her this song is her.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKd06s1LNik[/youtube]

I wouldn't exactly call it symbolic for me (different than that somehow) but when I was younger and didn't know how to match thought to words (long story, the words sounded almost normal much of the time, but were just copies of things I'd heard from others), I used a lot of communication through the arrangement of objects.

It wasn't just the objects on their own, but the connections they formed to each other, that made the difference. I just don't know how to explain it easily. It was all in a very non-conceptual sort of frame of mind, so it doesn't translate to language well.

I did... when I gave him that written note of friendship so that he would not have to deal with realtime social interaction in hearing what I had to say, I gave him both my phone number and email address as well as an open invitation to visit if he ever wanted to chat. Since I have no idea of his email address I cannot try to contact him in that way and would not want to force myself on him anyhow. I wanted to be gentle, let him know I appreciate him, make it possible for him to reach out if he wants to do so, then let him take his time about it as he feels comfortable in doing. With his short social tolerance, he may never be able to do so, but I still want to continue to let him know he is appreciated and welcomed as a friend.

The music on those three CDs WAS about what I am about. It was the psychologist who added the qualifier of whether it would be music that he liked or not. At one point I was up to 5 CDs of music of all sorts but eventually had to limit it somehow.

About 2 hours ago the bass clef symbol went out on my balcony post and it very definitely DID get his attention. I thought it might take several tries. As he walked by he looked up at it for a solid three seconds, which for him is an eternity. This guy is very tall (about 6'3 to 6'4) with equally long legs and about a 3 foot stride when he really gets moving, so a gazelle would have a rough time keeping up with him. For him to give three seconds attention to anything outside of his special interests is very unusual for him. I took a peek after he passed by so that he would not have to deal with my presence and although he looked very tired today, he did hop up onto his entry steps with a bit of energy that he seemed to lack a minute earlier. So hopefully he understood that the symbol had some special underlying meaning for him and hopefully that made him feel a bit happier today. I will probably never know.

That sure does sound like symbolism to me. Symbols are really nothing but one thing that is used to represent another regardless or whether the symbol and/or the thing being represented are concrete physical objects or an idea or concept. In my case I am using a physical object (or graphic depiction) to represent an idea or concept (and I might add via an intermediate concept that the graphic directly represents). In your case you are using a concept (the ordering of objects) to represent whatever idea or object you were trying to communicate about. The more I think about this the more mind boggling it gets. Its really a pretty heavy concept when you stop to think about it.

It is also interesting to note that Aspies are well known for lining up and ordering objects. Perhaps this is the reason why. One of my favorite autism pictures shows a young kid asleep with a row of toy ducks lined up on his bed next to him. Talk about getting all your ducks in a row... that kid sure did know how to do it. Link below... it is the second photo down the right side of the page.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism

Personally, I line up things in my mind more than I do physically. When sitting in the bathroom, I will arrange wall and floor tiles into nice symmetric patterns and draw diagonals to connect them. When watching a TV movie with subtitles turned on I will rearrange the letters and words in the subtitles to form symmetric patterns and often completely miss the dialog because I am off on these mind games with the words and letters on the screen. I also do the same thing while driving down the road with lettering on road signs, license tag text and on passing tractor trailers. Sometimes I even get so distracted doing this that I must consciously force myself to stop for safety's sake.

The Criminal Minds episode was really kind of simplistic but it is one of the few descriptions I have seen of the use of symbolism in autism. I just took a quick look at that portion of the show and in it the autistic kid used three drawings to say something about a person who killed his parents. One was the tread print of a shoe, and another was a drawing of an anchor (there was a boat involved somehow). The third one looked like the letter 'L' but in the end was determined to represent a time (3:00 PM) via the position of the hands on a clock when he always went to some location where the murderer happened to be. That was the hidden symbolism that was being depicted. In reality that is rather simplistic compared to what you or I do, but it was enough to get my attention and show me that what I am doing just might be more common with Aspies than I had realized.

I think what you're doing is cool.
There's this older lady who I felt uncomfortable walking by because I didn't want any sort of contact and I felt like people thought I was a weirdo or something (at this place I had been called negative things before). But then she somehow changed and just says, "hi, (my real name)", and then keeps walking. She always does it now. And then I say hi back. This is a lady who once told me I am a pattern thinker because she asked for a phone number and I couldn't tell it to her unless I dialed. She then told me she said that to me because she think it's a good thing.

I actually like that she does now. I feel like she's ok with me. I can't actually have a conversation with her and don't really want to or know how with her. But I like that she always says hi to me and my name.

Hmm. I think it was a little different than that, but it's hard to describe how.

So... arranging objects was an action, not really an idea. And rather than having any object or even the arrangement, representing something in a direct symbolic way, it was more like... gah another language problem sets in. I'd say it's almost more of a suggestion, or pointing in a very vague direction, than anything direct and symbolic. But it was other things too. Something much more concrete than symbolism generally is.

But this kind of topic is hard to describe because it's intrinsically something outside words.

Having talked to a lot of autistic people, the lining up objects thing can mean different things to different people. In my case, the object-arranging I'm talking about wasn't so much about lining things up, but more about having things near me. Only one person ever figured out this had meaning, although I've now met other people who did similar things and would have figured it out much quicker than that person if they'd been around my life back then.

That's a lot of trouble you're going to. What's in it for you? I'm not knocking it, just curious.

I don't think I've experienced any symbolic communication, except maybe in the lyrics of music and poetry. But I'd like a badge with something like this on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Icon-Fist.png

Simple friendship in a situation where neither of us apparently have any friends at all. We both seem so similar that I have felt a very strong connection of sameness with this guy from the first time I met him that I have never felt in my life. He was always so nice to me last Spring, while still being avoidant within his 5 second limit that it made me feel worth something when everybody else just carried on with their NT lives and simply ignored me... or worse. You might say that he acted like a friend when others did not. It was also because of my efforts to try to understand and figure him out that I came to find out that I was autistic too.

Your badge looks just like the power to the people emblem from the 1960s.

They're good reasons, IMHO.


Yes I believe that's what it is.

Here is an update if anyone is interested. The day I put the bass clef symbol up on my balcony post for him to see he reacted with a big smile at first (and this guy seldom if ever smiles) but that smile turned to a look of distress as he realized what it was. Maybe he wondered how I knew of his interest in music or maybe he thought I might be rejecting him for it. This got his attention so much that the next day he was looking again as soon as he arrived, perhaps to see what might be there to see and once again he had a smile on his face. It was almost as if he now understood that I was accepting him for it and not rejecting him. That same day I put the door knocker up again to make sure he knew that it was acceptance. He looked for two seconds that day and when he finally looked away to walk on down his path the smile vanished from his face. Next week I plan to repeat the same thing with a different symbol of friendship again followed by the door knocker on the following day. Then on future weeks I will repeat it again first with the multicolored autism puzzle emblem and later with the blue puzzle piece emblem, hoping that he recognizes it and each time followed by the door knocker on the next day.

The whole series of messages will be something like the following:

I know about your musical interests and you are welcome to visit
I consider you to be a friend and you are welcome to visit
I know about your autism (and I am too) and you are welcome to visit
I know about your autism (and I am too) and you are welcome to visit

For what its worth, he seems to have a routine or color code for days when he is out performing somewhere (as I can tell when he departs in all black full formal dress like you might wear to a concert hall). On those days he seems to always wear all black clothing earlier in the day. Well, on the day after I put out the bass clef, he was wearing all black but did not go out in formal dress later on that day. It may all be a big coincidence but on the other hand maybe it was his reply and he was mirroring my display of the musical symbol by showing his pre-musical colors on the following day. It seems so far fetched, but this guy has often mirrored my own behavior a LOT in the past whenever he does see me... primarily shirt colors, which at one time he was mirroring my color from the previous day about 30 percent of the time. On the other hand he does like the colors black and red very much to begin with. Yesterday I was wearing a bright green shirt for St. Patrick's day (and I am half Irish). Today he is wearing a dark green shirt.

Amazing - I can't imagine anybody not being interested. It would probably make a good film. So much more fun than those standard mainstream "wooing games" they play.