Er... my response illustrates one of the communication styles I have that some people have a problem with.
KingdomOfRats wrote:
what sorts of issues do other WPers have with posts [if any] ,such as-with posting new posts or topics,with direct communication [meaning speaking to WPers directly-to them whether its in a thread or pm],with using 'self' words,
with not spacing out text so its all one big block,with dealing with new/non regular WPers etc [add own issues with posting if have any different]?
I have in the past struggled to use the 'I' pronoun in genuine communication. Sometimes when overloaded I still do. But it is not a common problem for me anymore. When it does happen, I just leave it out, rarely replace it with any other pronoun or anything. (When I was a kid, I apparently referred to myself by my own name a lot, too.)
I almost never post new topics. I have great difficulty doing something that is not in response to something else. (Somehow I manage on my own blog, but on forums and mailing lists I very rarely post my own topics. And even on my blog, I write in response to something, it's just I don't always show what it's in response
to.) Therefore, I mostly post responses to other people.
I can space text out so that it is not in one big block. I used to have trouble doing that in the past, though, because I did not understand how paragraphs were to be used.
I can only respond on certain topics, and only in response to certain things. There are many things I wish to respond to, but never actually do. And there are things I would rather not respond to, but the response is triggered and already in motion so I can't easily stop it.
Sometimes I can respond to one part of a post but not another, even if I want to.
I cannot easily control the length or level of detail in my responses. Sometimes I can only write short responses without elaborating. Sometimes I can only write long, intricately detailed posts.
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how have been treated by others on WP for any of these?
People sometimes think I am rejecting or ignoring them if I do not answer a PM.
If I write in a short manner, some people believe that I have no evidence to back up what I say.
If I write in a long manner, some people believe that I am repetitive (for writing the same thing in multiple ways that all focus on slightly different aspects of it that not everyone can discern from each other, or for being unable to read my own writing and therefore writing something multiple times because I don't know if I wrote it already or not), deliberately insulting (why, I don't know, but someone said she found my long-windedness personally insulting), patronizing (for not knowing whether other people already know something or not), or not letting others have their own opinions.
One person called my posts obsessive and repetitive. He tried to make it sound like I was... I don't know...
diseased in some way for writing in that manner. When anyone who knows anything about autism knows those are frequent autistic traits in writing and speaking.
Another person insisted that I was insulting her by writing things long. I tried as hard as I could to condense them, and when I realized I could not sustain that, I started asking for help to condense them, not from anyone specific, just from anyone who had a free moment to do so and found it easy. I would have done the same for someone else were it within my abilities and they had asked, and I do sometimes elaborate on people's views for them when they ask for someone who is better at saying them in more detail to do so. Usually I get thanked for it so I assumed maybe someone would help me do the opposite, although I was not pressuring anyone to do so. This person responded to my request by saying that I ought to do it myself, and that I could do it if I really tried. She also said there were no "servants" here, implying that the support staff I need in order to survive are equivalent in some way to rich people paying people to do things they ought to do themselves.
I found this deeply insulting (because I cannot help the way I write, and because I was trying so hard to do what she seemed to want of me) and said so, and she accused me of playing the victim. I finally asked what I
could do, and she said she found my long-windedness insulting. She also accused me several times of not really believing what I wrote, or not really having the experiences I described having, just because they differed from her own (whereas I did not tell her she did not have her own experiences, I merely said I had different experiences and therefore different beliefs). I think she also at one point described my writing style as bullying.
I do not know how to respond to things like that, because I truly write sincerely, I just often write in a longer and more detailed fashion than average. When I write like that, it completely exhausts me, yet it exhausts me even more to try to condense long descriptions of specific concrete experiences (or things derived directly from them) into a short abstract summary.
I do not want to hurt anyone and do my best not to, and to apologize when it has happened by mistake. But usually I could not change my writing style in that manner if my life depended on it. I do not write online about all of the consequences that happen to me if I attempt to write in a manner significantly different from my natural writing style, because I do not want to be seen even further as just whining. There is a lot about my offline life that people who know me only online, are totally unaware of. But the consequences are quite severe beyond what most people would imagine. This is one reason that I have to set aside days or weeks in order to write speeches that are condensed to a specific time limit, and have to increase my level of support during that time period. Even then, it's not as much that I write summaries, as that I cut out a lot of detail but leave in other detail.
I think that people without the specific cognitive and language problems I have would find that hard to imagine. And I am aware that many people on this board have fewer offline support needs than I do. Mostly I do not talk about that, because I do not want to contribute to the "who has it worse?" game some people play, nor do I want to totally dwell on or explain my weakest points over and over. But they are pretty extreme for a variety of reasons, only some of which are autism-related, but they all interact with each other. And when something cuts into the time and energy required for me to do such basic things as moving and eating, then I am not going to do it, or not for long. I do not blame people for causing that unawares, but I do think it is wrong for people to push the issue after I have already said I can't do something. It's more than my health is worth.
And I think it would be good if people could keep in mind that there are
many kinds of language problems. My writing is usually (when I allow myself to show it online) superficially fluent, but there are several extreme problems I do have with language even while writing this way, and many times I cannot even write this way. To write is cognitively exhausting already, regardless of the fluency of the finished product. To write in a way that puts me directly in front of my cognitive areas of weakness and demands that I use those methods I am weak in, can be overloading enough to trigger a worsening of my movement disorder, or other physical problems.
I am the only judge of whether something is too much for me, nobody else ought to be that judge. Simply not knowing is one thing, but after I say it's impossible for me, I really want that to be respected, rather than belittled, insulted, and treated like I'm just being frivolous or uncaring. I would also like if the level of support I need to survive were not treated as some kind of joke, some people on here need that level of support and some don't, and those who don't ought not to judge those of us who do.
I know other people whose language skills hang by a thread like that. Some of them have obviously non-standard language, others less obvious. Many of them run into people who cannot understand them some of the time. Sometimes those people are gracious about it and respect that the person with language trouble cannot just suddenly decide to stop having it. Sometimes they are nasty and treat the other person like crap.
On boards where people are gracious about it, I have seen things set up so that someone with the ability to do so, will translate for the person with language trouble. They will write their words in more standard ways, or more condensed, or less condensed, or whatever. This is done purely because people truly want to communicate with each other rather than just fling insults at each other for not sharing receptive or expressive communication styles.
(This is why I asked whether anyone could translate. Not because I expected that any particular person would, but because I thought someone might be both willing and able to do so, and I knew that I could not do it on my own, any more than some of my friends can write with standard grammar just by willpower.)
I have a higher expressive language than receptive language, so I totally understand not being able to read my writing. Many words I use are literally not at all in my receptive vocabulary, but I use them correctly and in context because I learn them as parts of phrases that go with certain situations. If I ran across someone who used words I did not understand, I would ask if they or someone else could explain them, but I would not demand that they
and nobody else explain them, and then belittle and mock them if they asked for help.
But I have seen this happen to other people. I have seen an online friend become fecally incontinent because of the cognitive strain of writing in a standard manner for the benefit of people who demanded that she could, that she just didn't
want to. She then went into about two week's worth of shutdown during which she could barely communicate at all to anyone. Another online friend ended up having more seizures than usual because of the stress involved with doing the exact same thing. These are not necessarily my own body's responses to that level of overload, but I totally understand why that was their response to it. I think that when someone on here says they can't do something, it should be respected by others, even if they have no personal experience of that level of difficulty. People should remember not everyone on here is the same when it comes to level of difficulty with various things, and that you can't necessarily tell by someone's writing how close they are to the snapping point when it comes to overload and shutdown.
I'm not saying this to single out the person who most recently complained about my writing style, I'm just saying in general have the courtesy to understand not to pressure someone to do something they've already said they can't do. And to accept when they attempt to find alternatives, such as asking for help with communication. I accept that not everyone can read my writing, and do not take it as a personal insult that they can't, I just want people to know I can't necessarily write for their reading style any more than they can read for my writing style. I can have trouble with both reading and writing so I find it easy to see both sides of the matter. But I have seen many a bitter and nasty argument online as to whether people who have trouble reading can "just get over it" and try harder and stuff, and as to whether people who have trouble writing can "just get over it" ... same thing from the other side. People make it personal and insult each other, when it ought not to be that way.
The above is a very good example of the writing style that some people complain about as being repetitive, obsessive, long-winded, and try to make sound like it is either a 'sickness' of some kind or a deliberate attempt to hurt people. It is neither one of those things, it is related directly to a number of autistic cognitive traits. It is not my only writing style, just the one people complain about the most. (Sometimes they also complain about other writing styles, too.)
Some people have also called me stupid for writing like this, or pseudo-intellectual, or a lot of other things I'm not, or hope I'm not anyway. I don't write like this to seem intellectual, I write like this because it is how I write. (In fact, intellectuals tend to have skills for writing that I do not have at all, that prevent them from being treated like this for their writing style.)
I view it as being like an ent, who were not made for language, but once taught to speak, they do it in a way where each word is a lengthy concrete description of the thing it refers to. This is a language rich in detail and nuance for people who are able to read it. I don't mind that some people can't read it. But keep in mind I can't always write in the way an ent would describe as 'hasty', and might need help to do so.
Aside from that entire matter I just talked about, I have noticed that even one piece of writing on my part can have two very opposite interpretations. Some people, for reasons I can't fathom, interpret my writing and hostile, angry, and pushy. Other people read the same writing more as it was intended to be -- calm and giving a lot of thought to things. I have tried many times over the years to figure out what was going on, but I have never been able to predict how people will take something I write. Sometimes I am certain they will think I'm being awful, and they don't. Sometimes I have no expectation at all that they will think that, yet they do.
I write in order to communicate, and I read in order to communicate. I often make the extreme mistake, of assuming that everyone else writes and reads in order to exchange information, experiences, and ideas. I have found that some people actually
do not do this. One of the biggest mistakes I ever make in communicating, is in expecting that communicating is what everyone in the interaction wants to do, or that even if people have trouble with understanding the point of communication, that the interaction is still in good faith at least. And despite intellectually knowing this, I still get totally blindsided all the time by people who have negative things in mind other than communication, and who can get extremely nasty about it.
I wrote once, about people who communicate in manipulative ways and expect everyone else to do the same (I was writing about offline communication, but it does occur online as well):
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I’m not sure what to do in situations where the purpose of someone talking to me is not to communicate, but to do something else.
I’m not talking about the relatively common phenomenon where someone with trouble understanding language might not use language for the standard way or the standard reasons. Autistic people often have that problem, I’ve had that problem, it’s different from what I’m about to discuss.
I’m talking about people who seem to have no trouble understanding words, but who introduce far too many levels of meaning and manipulation into what should be the process of communication.
I’m also not talking only about non-autistic people, nor universally about non-autistic people. I figured I had to add this because frequently when autistic people talk about something they don’t like in someone else’s communication, it becomes an “autistic vs. NT” thing whether they say it explicitly or someone else reads it in. This isn’t. I’ve seen autistic people do similar things, and the vast majority of non-autistic people don’t think like this.
I’m also not talking about people who do this only very occasionally when under a lot of stress, nor am I talking about situations in which it’s perfectly legitimate to assume that a lot of indirect communication is going on.
I’m talking about people where it’s their habitual communication style to… well, one person I know offline described the communication of someone else offline as having several “layers”, similar to the following (they described it a little differently, I’m adjusting it to a different person I’ve met recently):
* The literal meaning of what it is that they are saying.
* The implication of what it is that they are saying.
* What their actual thinking is (often different than either of those).
* What they want other people to read into what they are saying.
* What actions they want other people to go through after hearing what they are saying.
* What hierarchical status they want to maintain for themselves and the person they are speaking to.
And then, the person assumes that no matter who they are talking to, all of these different layers to communication exist for that person as well. They can’t seem to understand that most of the world doesn’t operate on this extreme a level of manipulation or hidden meanings. Yes, there are unspoken assumptions behind all communication just because of the nature of language, and the impossibility of speaking in Entish (I always thought Entish must be endlessly recursive). But most people don’t constantly try to deliberately twist the purpose of communication into a pretzel to get people to do what they want.
It’s difficult for me to come up with exact examples of conversations that have worked that way. I can remember many such conversations, but what I can’t seem to do is make up conversations based on them. The reason I can’t, is that I am horrible at reading those hidden layers of manipulation into innocent statements. So it’s difficult for me to come up with a plausible reading of those things.
That’s one of the reasons those conversations are so frustrating to me — I cannot anticipate what someone like this will think of my statements, nor can I adjust my statements to convey the right hidden meanings. I know someone else who doesn’t like conversations like this either, but she can at least match the other person’s passive-aggressive tone, and people like this often leave her alone — at least to her face — because she out-argues them in their own language.
It’s also difficult when it’s really necessary to talk to someone like this, or to ask them questions. For instance, if someone like this is doing it on the job, there’s often no way to get around having to interact with them.
There is no possible way to make a straightforward statement around someone like this. They will read into it several layers of implied meaning, most of them manipulative, many having to do with where you position yourself on a social hierarchy, and many of them to do with your wanting something out of them.
One conversation I had with someone who wasn’t always this way but was this way more often than was comfortable, went like this. I’ll call them Barbara (the person with the sometimes-unpleasant communication style) and Cindy (a mutual friend of ours). Beware: drama ahead.
Barbara was talking about how Cindy was a kind and generous person, and had helped her in a number of ways.
I completely agreed with Barbara, and said she’d helped me out a lot too. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing unusual about this statement. It complimented a mutual friend, it said what a generous person she was, and it agreed totally with Barbara. I couldn’t conceivably see any hidden meanings in it, and so I was stunned by what Barbara did in response.
She became visibly irritated. She acted as if what I had said was somehow related to how I thought Barbara must think of me. And she grudgingly told me that of course she liked me a lot too, not just Cindy. I can’t remember her exact wording, but she really seriously believed that my statement in that regard had somehow mysteriously been a commentary on me thinking that Barbara did not like me very much.
And in reality, Barbara didn’t like me very much. But I had no reason to comment on this at that or any other time — I rarely talked to Barbara at all, and didn’t mind that she didn’t like me, especially because she was the sort of person that made me automatically wary anyway. But she would never admit it to me — she would only tell friends of mine that she didn’t like me, in fact that at times she hated me.
So somehow, when we were talking about both of us liking a mutual friend, she interpreted my statements that were clearly and directly about our friend, and entirely complimentary, as having a hidden meaning about whether she herself liked me.
If I thought really hard, I could come up with at least a tenuous chain of circumstances connecting all this. Because Barbara had actually attempted to manipulate things to separate Cindy from me. It hadn’t worked, and had backfired into losing some amount of trust from both of us. So I guess in some really roundabout manner a person could read into my liking Cindy, that I somehow knew Barbara didn’t like me and wanted her approval of me. But I only figured that part out today, years after all these events had come and gone. Because that wasn’t even a part of my motivation, wasn’t even in my mind.
I suppose that’s a simple example because the conversation involved was very short, and did not get into the layers of complexity that conversations with people like this can reach if the conversations are drawn out over a long time. They also become more complex from my end because over time things can shift around, so that one moment I am picking up the tone and dropping the words, and another I am picking up the words and dropping the tone, and that all makes keeping up with even the literal content of conversations like that challenging.
More recently I had one of those conversations, offline, with someone. I was communicating solely in order to give and receive information to make sure something was going to happen that was supposed to happen. I had non-autistic witnesses who said that I was in no way what would ordinarily be construed as rude or hostile.
However, this person read deliberate hostility into my every comment and proceeded to engage in an impressive flurry of passive-aggressive nastiness. She managed to convey that there was no reason that I needed the information and no reason to even speak to someone who communicates as slowly as I do (I was having someone read my computer screen to her), to interrupt me frequently when she knew I was typing responses to her, to assert her dominance and superiority on a regular basis, and to treat me like a waste of time and space. She also told me at one point that a conversation I was trying to clarify (that I’d had with someone else) had happened right in front of her, so she knew everything there was to know about that conversation (even though if she did she’d have to have been listening in on my end) and had no need to discuss its content. And even attempting to discuss its content was an act of hostility as far as she was concerned. She also engaged in a whole lot of non sequiturs — saying things about other people that had nothing at all to do with the situation at hand, but that she was trying to use to manipulate us into dropping the conversation altogether.
The person who was there reading the computer screen was stunned and appalled at her way of communicating. But it turns out she’s like that to most people, at least most people she sees as beneath her most of the time.
It’s impossible to have an exchange of literal information with someone like this. I can say “I really mean exactly what I say, I’m not implying anything else, I’m just trying to exchange facts with each other so we’re clear on what to do about something, this is a purely practical conversation and I don’t mean anything good or bad about anyone in the course of it.” And I can say that more concisely, or more elaborately. But when I say it, people like this will even read into those statements something that wasn’t there, and will continue to refuse to just talk about the information.
Another amazing thing about conversations with people who do this, is that once they have decided that I have hidden and sinister meanings behind my words, then there is nothing I can say that won’t be put through that filter. If I pay someone like this a compliment, they seem not to even notice: They even assume there’s an insult hidden behind the compliment! If I agree with the person, then there must be an insult hidden within the agreement! It becomes absolutely impossible to convince someone I’m not insulting them right and left, because the insults are there to them whether they see it or not.
And I’ve noticed that when that particular pattern of “there must be a hidden layer of meaning to everything I say, and usually a bad one” occurs in someone who isn’t just wary because of prior bad social experiences… it’s usually someone who manipulates people all the time. It’s usually someone who’s incredibly passive-aggressive, and who mostly communicates in ways tailored to manipulating other people rather than to simply exchange information or reinforce social bonding. Sometimes it’s manipulating people into actions, other times it’s simply attempting to manipulate everyone they know into liking them. But it’s always that sort of communication on way too many layers and expecting everyone else to do the same.
I don’t communicate on that many layers, at least not layers of that kind. I haven’t the foggiest idea how to communicate with people who do. Whether they’re autistic or not, their communication style is impossible for me to predict or decipher, and I have absolutely no clue how to say things in ways that they’ll understand the meaning rather than making up five or six layers of complication into it. I can’t even figure out how to say things in ways where they’ll take the imaginary layers as positive rather than negative. It’s just a complete mystery to me.
And I wrote once, about my own naivete, including in dealing with such people:
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I tend to assume in some way that other people have good intentions, and that conversations are happening in good faith, rather than some other kind of motive being involved.
More specifically, I tend to assume that people are interested in exchanging information, and are interested in figuring out what is real and what is right or wrong ethically, beyond whether their pre-existing viewpoints happen to be right or wrong about it.
I tend to especially expect this of adults, possibly because my commitment to that sort of thing became conscious and strengthened when I moved out on my own as a young adult. (This sort of thing is nearly always a gradual process, but there’s a difference between being committed to it even if you screw up, and not caring at all.)
All of which is a somewhat ironic example, of course, of an area in which I’m not always taking in the real world as opposed to what I expect of it. I often even get the gut reaction (and from what I’ve been told, I’ve got a highly accurate gut) that someone is not trustworthy, and yet still continue to treat them as if they are, while trying to remain internally wary. I can’t tell at all if this is a sign of ethics or a sign of extreme foolishness and stupidity.
Anyway, I mentioned all this to my friend, and she told me that she’s noticed this about me for awhile, in a way that sounded like “That’s really obvious.” I just wonder what to do about it.
And... yeah, I have no clue what to do about the matter. It's not a choice, and I don't care if people don't read it, but I do care if people are complete jerks to me about it as if I could just magically snap my fingers and be non-autistic (or at least
more non-autistic, or some different sort of autistic) at will.
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"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams
14 Oct 2008, 9:16 am
I have the tendency to flame on stupid issues, which usually ends up being trolling.
Use it often, he says, and it will endear them to you. That's in his bestselling book from the 1950s called "How To Win Friends And Influence People" - but IMHO it was mostly about manipulating people. The whole book had a very narrow, elitist perspective, great for a certain type of middle-of-the-road North American (neurotypical of course), pretty damned useless for anybody else. His other books were about how to be a successful salesman - draw your own conclusions.
