How do I work out my social functioning?

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I've been learning things piecemeal by watching for and analyzing situations to work out whether I am doing what I think I am doing, or if I am off the mark.

I know that I miss a lot of body language - When people hold things out to me I often don't realize until they tell me it's for me. I've missed pretty blatant signals that my sister wanted a hug, I have to stop and work out what a shrug means. I also miss emotional cues, such as connecting "My stepfather has cancer" to "my mother is crying" to "I should say/do something comforting."

When I try to talk about situations where I misunderstood the purpose/intent and acted contrary to it, only to be told I had missed the point with my therapist, she tells me that I'm doing fine. Now, my interactions with my therapist are one on one, in a dark, quiet room, where I am talking about something that is one of my major interests and something I have needed to talk to someone about for the past year (trying to process my past and make sense of it). I also, when talking to her, barely look at her - I do look at her ears, the bridge of her nose, her mouth, or past her head sometimes, but I think I am really inconsistent about this.

What I am trying to do is go over with her my social deficits, but she seems to think I don't have them or they aren't that noticeable. But considering the conditions under which I talk to her, they're tailor made for me to be able to communicate. Further, she's also noticed that during some sessions I barely talk at all (although I felt like I had talked a lot, so I guess my idea of "a lot" is a bit odd).

I also generally spend my entire appointment stimming (I stim a lot and everywhere), and she doesn't seem to notice or realize it means anything.

Now, she's not denying that I am autistic, and in fact told me just how autistic she thinks I am early on, but I am finding it difficult to get her to work with me. She seems to think if I bring up problems or deficits that I have that I am focusing on the negative, feel bad about it, and want reassurance. Every time I've tried to focus on this and work out what's going on, even telling her what I am trying to do, she starts talking about how I need to talk about positive things more. Which I don't get. Why should I have to fill a positivity quota in order to try to process where my actual deficits are and how profound or mild they might be? Talking about positive things isn't something I'm against - I like to talk about my successes, after all - but rather the idea that I should feel obligated to talk about these things feels alien to me, and it seems to me that doing so is more about reassuring my therapist than it is about me.

It also seems that when she tells me I am doing well in some way that she is doing it to be reassuring, which is something else I do not understand the point of. If I am trying to determine the factual basis of my ability to understand social situations, I do not need reassurance. I just need to establish what my issues are.

I do know that something that was included with my SSI application (filed with assistance) said something - it was filed before I talked to any professional about autism and before my first therapy appointment, and the rejection said that I had "limited social function," and I think I should try to find the paperwork that says that to learn what it says.

Anyway, I find this pretty frustrating because it is difficult for me to objectively observe my deficits. I never fully realized I had deficits, so how I function socially feels normal to me, and things are only obvious to me now because I know I am autistic and know some of the things to look for.

Do I sound like your therapist as I say; it sounds to me that, working out your social functioning is exactly what you are indeed doing?

The chrystal clarity you apply to the problem you're trying to solve is remarkable. Given that therapists spend most of their professional time working with clients who are evading and denying issues; it's not surprising that yours thinks you're doing great.

And given the level of difficulty of learning consciously, what most folks learned unconsciously; your frustration with the pace of your improvement is understandable.

Perhaps your therapist genuinely believes that you are doing remarkably well in your aqusition of better social functioning.

I'm guessing that as you stick with the hard process you have embarked, eventually even you, yourself will feel more rewarded than frustrated.

I have felt similar frustrations with near failing pace and a seemingly overly praising therapist in therapy, myself. Eventually I was greatly rewarded.

No, actually. It sounds like, when she responds to me, that she is telling me I don't have problems, whereas you acknowledged that I have problems and that I am trying to solve them. I do think she has indicated something similar to what you said about not evading and denying issues, however, on several occasions. One thing she's made a point to mention (and I appreciate this, because I was unaware of it) is that I have apparently managed to develop a host of effective coping mechanisms, to the point that she has said that I apparently have applied cognitive behavioral therapy to myself without actually knowing what CBT was.



She may believe this, although I do not believe it is so. One of the things about bringing these things up is that I am able to analyze situations after the fact and determine that I may have missed something or responded incorrectly or misread what someone was saying, but while I am in a social situation I don't really have that ability, or rather I am not applying it in that particular way. So I make the same mistakes because sometimes I have issues with recalling or using information out of its original context. I might not realize that I am making the same mistake while talking to my sister that I did while talking to a friend because I am not talking to my friend. This isn't 100% the case, though.

As a more blatant example of that, I once learned to drive a tractor with a manual transmission, but I effectively had to learn to drive a car with a manual transmission from nothing because I could not recall I had ever learned to drive before while I was learning to drive a car (and I never actually learned how to drive, and based on my experiences while learning, I am sure I do not want to).

Thanks for your reply, though. It's made me think.

This beeaotch would get "full-on-Karla". That would be the unfiltered version for anyone wondering what that means.

I would start the session off like this (btw: I did something very similar to this with my first guy who said, "You are being VERY autistic right now." LOL)

Sit down across from her. Lean forward and look her dead in the eye and do not flinch. Tell her the following, "Okay so I have an agenda for our session so you sit back and listen and I talk." Pause here to make sure they are cool with this (this is where my first therapist told me how autistic I was btw) Once she agrees... continue...

"Here is the deal. I am autistic. That means I have social deficits. This is documented in every journal including your precious DSM. My ask today is that we identify these deficits and come up with an action plan to address them. Okay, now you may speak."

Thanks for your cogent reply. I can't help but believe that seeing mis-cues in retrospect will eventually help you connect with those same cues in other contexts; but I can't swear that's a fact. Does it hurt to keep at it?

My experience with therapy is that it's kinda like the workings of the autistic brain.

I went to therapy for depression and the therapist kept hammering away about victim syndrom which drove me crazy. Within 2 years I had majorly shed my (heretofore, unacknowledged) victim syndrom and felt great relief from the depression.

Years later, I went to therapy to get help dealing with my grief over the death of my boyfriend. That therapist wanted to work with me on anger!? I took me 2 years to stop crying about my boyfriend, but I also experienced a great lifting of my (also previously unacknowleded) well of anger. Such a relief.

In my experience, therapy is surpantine. Who knows, perhaps processing and making sense of your past will somehow open better pathways to social functioning, whereas, attacking the problem cognatively was fruitless. Stay the course?

That seems like a reasonable plan. I've actually done similar before with another topic (not autism, but past trauma to determine whether I really have PTSD. I don't) and it went over well, and after discussing the topic, she then spent the last 15 minutes of the session discussing what she'd observed about me that did seem autistic to her.

I didn't do the eye contact thing or the "Now you may speak" thing, but I did say that I wanted to spend the session talking about that specific topic because I did not agree that I had PTSD and she had not yet developed an opinion either way.

Thank you.

Whenever someone holds something out to you, always assume they want you to take it. You can also ask "for me?"

I can usually tell when people want a hug because they start to hold their arms out when they are standing right in front of me.

Shrugs hard to say because they can mean different things. Like if I ask them a question and they shrug, it's because they don't know the answer. If someone is looking for something and they shrug, they are probably thinking "Oh well." If you tell them something and they shrug, they probably don't care or don't know what to say.


Also if you keep focusing on the negative, it will make you more depressed and down so being positive helps so you don't feel bad about yourself because of the positive. My speech therapist and my shrink also used to teach me positive thinking and to focus on the positive than on the negative.

Yes, it does help make the connection. I'm not sure what you mean by hurting to keep at it.



Could you elaborate on this?



It sounds like your therapists were pretty insightful, although I am afraid I do not know what victim syndrome is? My attempts to google it came up with Stockholm Syndrome and idiosyncratic explanations of "victim syndrome" that primarily involve the writers complaining about people worse off than they are.



I am trying to process and make sense of my past and my therapist keeps interrupting that process. The cognitive element happens mostly outside therapy, although I talk about it in therapy. This was my primary vent when I posted this thread, although I probably didn't express it as clearly as I wanted to.



Oh, I intellectually know all of these things and I am able to draw upon that information in some social situations but not all. That I do not understand these on the same level as the people around me was a surprise to me, even though I finally knew I was autistic.

I should probably slow down a bit in social situations and work through these things more thoroughly.



Oh, true, but I am not focusing on the negative. Focusing on the negative is when I tell her that I don't know how to live independently and then we discuss possible solutions or actions to take on that.

I am not interested in spending all my time in therapy saying I have it so terribly bad and there's nothing to be done. That was the primary cause of my depression - I couldn't make sense of things that had gone wrong in my past and I felt as if I had sabotaged myself. Since I couldn't explain it, I ended up just blaming myself and descending ever deeper into a pit of depression. It was really only after learning about my atypical neurology that my depression took a break, and has been gone for six and a half months now. I don't know when or if it will come back, but right now one of the things that is helping is understanding what happened.

I meant; I don't know whether the retrospection is very painful for you or wasteful of your energy. If so, and if it has proven fruitless (appearantly not); that might be the harm (hurt).

Oh, no, I find retrospection pretty useful. The more I remember in the context of being autistic, the more I know. I see you appear to have meant emotionally painful, and I was thinking "How could it cause me physical pain?"

And I appreciate your comments here - they did help.

Could you elaborate on this?

Yes; I find that my successful theraputic processes have been like walking a maze. I start with an objective and get seemingly sidelined by the therapists into areas which I think are irrelavant. I try to get the process back on track, only to eventually revisit some of the "sidelines" in greater depth and with some acknowledgement that these may be relavent areas. Finally, all of my progress in acheiving my original objectives has been thanks to the work done in "the sidelines".

I used the analogy of the autistic brain based on my understanding that autistic brain impulses travel more circuits in processing stimulation than neurotypical brains. Lindsay Oberman explains this in this interview on Autism Talk TV. I am refering to her explanation starting at @ 4:50 minute mark to @7 minute mark.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article395.html

I have experienced this disconnect as well. I think that it is another communication gap between autistic and non-autistic people. When I say something negative about myself, I am just trying to be objective about my deficits, so I can come up with a plan to fix them as well as I can, or more likely, to compensate for them, because most of them are not fixable without a brain transplant. You seem to be doing this as well. The problem is that therapists will usually misinterpret any negative self-referencing statements as signs of low self-esteem or depression. We are only being objective. We can talk about our strengths this way too, and when we do, we are misinterpreted as arrogant or narcissistic. They still make these judgments even after they know that we are autistic. It is an involuntary subconscious response for them and even more ingrained in them because they spend their careers dealing with people for whom their interpretations are accurate.

I like the approach of kfisherx. Maybe go into lecturing mode with a list of your deficits, what you think might be a useful strategy for each, and what they think about your deficit and strategy. Maybe you'll have to state outright what your behavior means again and again, telling the therapist directly that for you, talking about your deficits does not mean that you are depressed. Rinse and repeat until they get it? Maybe you have already done this. I had to do this quite a bit. My therapist has worked with AS adults and children, but she still didn't get it right away. Sometimes, I would say "I suck at XYZ" while being totally objective. I do suck at XYZ. But the therapist would immediately reassure me to build up my self-esteem, when in fact my self-esteem did not need to be built up, but I did need her to recognize that I had specific deficits that could be managed using specific strategies, and did she think that these strategies were good or not? Even when I referred to AS as a "disorder", the therapist would correct me to say that it was a "difference". I really don't care which word is used. In my mind, there are no negative connotations or stigma attached to "disorder" or "disability", so I didn't need reassurance that I am only "different". It's like everything we say and do has to be translated for them, "When I say this, I mean this, not what you think I mean, because you mean that when you say the same thing, but my brain works differently, so I really really really mean this instead!"

Yes, this makes sense.

I actually worked out my cognition is circuitous independently, and then saw the explanation on Autism Talk. It was interesting to see concepts I had worked out in metaphorical terms (as it's hard to describe them directly or concretely) about my own thought processes be described in a scientific, concrete (if also metaphorical) fashion.

Thanks again.

Last edited by Verdandi on 22 May 2011, 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, this is what I was trying to talk about. Right here. When I describe my deficits I'm not being negative or self-deprecating or demeaning myself, I am simply trying to describe myself correctly.

I have torn myself down with negative self-comments, although those are usually not true. I was depressed at the time, so there was a reason for that. This happened over the past several years, and not in therapy.



Thank you, yes. I tried to send her an e-mail that explained a lot of this a couple of months ago, but I do not think she understood it or read it completely.

I bolded that sentence because I keep running into people not understanding it. And your final sentence, I've had to do some of that already. I have already had to deal with her trying to interpret my words and repeat what she thinks they mean back to me, or how she thinks I feel about something, or what she interprets my mood to be. During my first visit, I was relieved and I will admit somewhat excited about finally having the chance to talk through my years of problems that have gone unaddressed, and she thought I was experiencing severe anxiety.

I actually like her, and these problems are not the whole of our sessions, but when they come up I find it hard to move on.

Victim Syndrome, for me, is that I previously had a deep seated sense that when people with bad intentions focus those intentions on me, I had no defense, no way to avert harm. I also had the sense that I was somehow more frequently and more severly victimized than the average Jane.

And yes, I was indeed blessed with a series of insightful therapists. I do not mean to imply that every road they took me down was fruitful. We spent plenty of time on blind alleyways which went nowhere profitable. Somehow, our dynamic struggles ended in net gain for me - over time.

In one notable case, one of the "irrelavent sidelines" my 1st therapist insisted upon and which I consistantly believed was wrong headded on her part; was a thread my 2nd therapist took up (a decade later) which proved very beneficial. It took that long for me to be ready for that issue.

Well, followup:

I was able to say, "I need to discuss this without digressions" or something. I forget the exact words.

I used the video from this thread:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt161934.html

to explain how I interpret (or perhaps, do not interpret) social situations on the fly. I forgot to make it clear how adding more and more variables (that is, people) lag/slow the whole process and make it harder for me to participate.

I was able to explain/demonstrate how, when I look at social situations, pictures, etc. I can't just generate a social idea of what is going on, and in fact I am very unlikely to even try. Why bother? So I managed to communicate a baseline: That I don't really process social situations the way NTs do.

After that it was a matter of discussing how I do function socially - intellectually and deliberately, and some debate over how socially adept I am. We mainly covered one on one stuff so I'll have to go into group things next week.

I feel better about this than I did when I started this thread, though. Thanks for the advice.