A couple days ago, Mad in America published a good summary piece on the problem of communication between autistics and allistics (neurotypicals). Briefly: there can be significant communication differences between the way neurotypical people communicate and the way autistic people communicate. While autistic people are constantly critiqued and criticized, neurotypical people are assumed to be perfectly fine and left alone. No training is deemed necessary for the majority to learn to get along better with minorities.
There’s an obvious bias there, which the article doesn’t go into much. But it does point out the innate unfairness in explaining the Double Empathy Problem and the Privilege Problem. These ideas suggest that autistic communication difficulties aren’t just “we don’t communicate the way others expect.” There is also, “others don’t make efforts to understand us the way they should.”
To quote a particularly good paragraph:
While autistic people are forced to understand and predict neurotypical behavior, allistics are remarkably bad at empathizing with autistic people. Inability to empathize can translate to a lack of compassion towards autistics and contribute to the pathologization of autistic traits. This pathologization has leadto interventions that focus solely on surpressing behaviors that are considered odd or abberant by neurotypicals. In fact, some commonly used autism interventions, such as Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) have been found to be both ineffective and abusive, inflicting trauma on those subjected to them.
Personal Experience
ABA is staggeringly common. I thankfully missed out on this particular kind of systemic cruelty. But the feedback from the autistic community is pretty clear.
And to be honest, I didn’t need ABA to tell me that my existence was wrong. The rest of the world accomplished that just fine. My life has always included overtones of “what a weird person,” and subtle forms of rejection and alienation. I was bullied for years, starting in elementary school. I was the favorite target. Because of that, I spent most of middle school alone, because that was safer.
It’s a minor miracle other (undiagnosed) autistic people found me in high school. But it took them bodily shoving me across a gymnasium floor and demanding I sign up for a school club to even start the process of reaching out. There is zero exaggeration in that last sentence. That literally happened, heels skidding as they each pushed on a shoulder. It wasn’t a mean action. It was a “this is your for your own good,” action. Typically I don’t take well to those, since it’s rare that others actually understand me better than I do. But they were right. And it was the first community that accepted me in a meaningful way.
It wasn’t a purposeful peer support or mentoring program. No one instructed them to reach out to the obviously alienated weirdo I seemed to be. As a society, we didn’t really understand autism that well then, especially not in people raised female. Their kindness just happened, messily, the way life does. But it helped. I would be a very different, far less compassionate and happy person without it. Even now, part of me still insists I’m obviously defective. But most of me knows better.
Looking Forward
The article is correct that acceptance builds confidence. Properly supported, autistic people can lead happy, healthy lives. Once I had that accepting community in the anime club, I began to reach out and accept alternative philosophies to life that weren’t, “Emotions are stupid, people suck, and I want nothing to do with either one.”
I hope you find this article as helpful as I did. It’s a medium length read. But it does a good job summarizing where things currently stand in communication between allistic and neurodiverse humans. And it includes links to relevant, recent research all throughout, in case you want to follow up on a particular subject. Check it out!
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