Being Misunderstood

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Does anyone else feel misunderstood a lot? I can name several examples:

1. When I was still attending high school, I did something or said something (I don't remember what), and got in trouble. I couldn't understand what I had done wrong, and when I asked to find out, I was snapped at, "Cut it out! You know what you did!" I did not, which is why I asked.

2. I recently started a new job, and when I was told I wasn't up to par yet, I started to shake and panic, and asked if I should just quit. The manager thought I was threatening him, and I felt hurt that he thought that.

3. When I apologize, I sound like I'm making excuses, and people think I'm just trying to get away with things. All I am doing is explaining where I'm coming from.

I don't understand it, and it hurts to be thought of like this. I'm crying as I write this post. Is it typical of autism? I just don't understand things, and why people think this stuff. All I wanted was answers, and I was snapped at every time.

My wife often asks me to explain the look on my face or the way I am sitting.
How the heck do I know what I look like?
She guesses wrong and fights with me over what she imagined that I was thinking.
I tell her she was wrong and she thinks I am lying. I'm not.
Now she is mad again when I was just sitting quietly.

My partner and I often argue because one of us says something and the other one completely misunderstands what they meant. We try hard to understand each other, but it's really hard work, asking for clarification after every other sentence. It isn't just words, also facial expressions and body language. It can be quite disconcerting when he has a facial expression like thunder and waves his arms about, but I'm slowly learning that although those would be signs of aggression in the average NT, for my partner, what he is thinking/feeling/intending and the expression on his face have little connection. Perhaps it's the same for you and the NT's who react negatively to you are responding to your expression/body language rather than the words you are saying.

i sort of like being misunderstood. i am seeing a psychologist recently about my health anxiety, and she has directed me to consider why i like being misunderstood.

i just like to elicit facial expressions of puzzlement. she says it shows that i consider people as objects or toys.
i do not care whether a person is closely aware of what my real thinking is. i just like to do or say things that cause their faces to change into expressions i want to see.
i like it when they scratch their heads in confusion and have a dopey expression on their face while they consider how to respond.

what is the use in someone else understanding exactly where i am coming from?
i will still come from there whether or not they like it, so it seems rather boring to just wait for an endorsement of what i really am thinking considering i have no interest in external endorsements.

it is much more interesting to lead people into thinking you are smart and then bamboozling them with a seemingly illogical or simplistic observation that belies their expectations of you. they want to be polite to maintain the status quo, but nevertheless they wear an expression that is the result of puzzlement, and that is what i like to achieve.

sometimes i like to talk, but often i just narrate the behind the scenes details associated with what i otherwise superficially say.

I am misunderstood a lot.

I usually sound like I am sarcastic or bored.

when i talk to myself i usually misinterpret the tone of my voice and become defiant and start to argue with what i am saying, but soon after, i realize i could not care less what i am saying and i go quiet, but then i become insulted at the fact that i do not consider what i am saying to myself to be worth responding to.
then i consider myself to be a snob due to the fact that i do not consider what i say to myself worth responding to, and when i bring that point up to myself, i similarly could not care to talk about it because i find it unimportant (which further enrages me).

i am a such a bastard ha ha.

Yes, most of the time.




We think that they should want to understand where we are coming from, but they don't. To them, their perspective is the only possible valid perspective, and so yours is automatically wrong and irrelevant.
They are controlled by the hive mind.

I get misunderstood all the time!

People think I'm a wolf when I'm really a sheepish lamb.

I think I've been misunderstood my whole life. In particular my parents have never understood me, which resulted in a lot of arguments, abuse, and tears that could have been avoided had they or I known what aspergers was and understood the traits associated with it.

Yes. Basically it's impossible for me to talk to most people.

Normies don't listen because they are used to other normies not saying what they mean. Then they try to guess what you are thinking based on past experience with other normies saying one thing and meaning another, sometimes by looking at what you are doing with your face and body (i.e. even less listening). The process is error-prone even with other normies, but when they try it on a non-normie, the probability of misunderstanding skyrockets. Then they don't believe you when you try to correct them because what they did worked with other normies and they tend to act like everyone thinks/behaves the same way; also, other normies lie so much they're quick to suspect you of lying as well.

It is absolutely typical of autism. In fact, it is so typical of autism that it is one of the diagnostic criteria:



What it all means is both failing to understand other people and failing to make yourself understood.

Despite all the gung-ho, social-model-of-disability talk about how there is really no deficit or impairment in people with ASD, this defining feature of ASD is quite real and a true deficit.

It's not the "hive mind" being obtuse and failing to understand autistic people, it's that autistic people have true deficits in their perception and error correction mechanisms for social communication.

What it means: being misunderstood, misconstrued, and serial failures of communication.

In my experience, the closer that you stay to exchanges of factual information, the less room there is for misunderstanding, the more social, emotional and political the content of the communication is, the higher the rate of misunderstanding and the more likely you are to be ineffective in your communications.

The lifelong challenge is trying to work around this deficit.

We can't help it if it is drummed into us that NTs all have this wonderful skill called empathy, where they are able to put themselves into other people's shoes and empathise, whether they've experienced another person's pain or not. No wonder we get so annoyed and upset when we do get misunderstood. That is the part I hate most about being an Aspie. Empathy always gets brought up if we don't understand something about a person. It's like a hypocrisy. It's like if an NT goes on and on and on about something what is upsetting them, and an Aspie listened and empathized strongly, but after a few weeks of hearing the same thing from this same NT person, the Aspie got a little bit bored and has run out of things to say, the Aspie will be scolded and called ''unempathetic'', just because he/she is an Aspie. But if it was the other way around, where an Aspie is going on and on and on to an NT about something that has upset them, and the NT will most probably get bored in a shorter length of time than the Aspie would because NTs don't seem to like anyone talking too much about the same thing, whatever it may be, the NT is still in the right and the Aspie is still the one that lacks empathy. It makes me want to educate people about this whole empathy s**t and change it in the DSMV or whatever it's called.

I feel misunderstood a lot and sadly most NT's seem like they think their prescriptive is the only correct one.

All the time.
When I was younger, I avoided it by keeping my mouth shut and learning the typical signs/noises of agreement even if I was completely lost. So long as I kept my mouth shut, I was generally ok. As soon as I open my mouth, depending on who I'm with, it can end badly, or I just get ignored... which happens more often than anything else.

This is pretty much the script for every fight in my marriage too.

My NT husband says I always 'assign motives', and I usually misunderstand why people say and do the things they do. But also, when I'm trying to say things to people, I repeat myself a lot so they understand exactly what I mean and this gets taken as me nagging or being crazy