Hello, welcome to another episode of Unpacking Neuroqueerness. This is your
host George Muniz Gund. Today I wanted to talk about how challenging it can be
to navigate friendships as an autistic person. And this is something that's come
up a lot in support groups that I've been a part of lately. And it's a lot of
people have talked about the difficulty with being able to tell if
someone considers you a friend or not. And that's something that I certainly
relate into a lot. I certainly relate to, I've had that experience a lot through
my whole life. And I feel like a lot of that for me comes from, and I feel like
this is similar for other people from what I've heard. But for me it's about
not being able to tell if someone is your friend or not. And feeling like it's
always a very gray area until it gets said or mentioned somehow, like usually to
another person, your friend, let's say your friend Martha tells Julia, oh yeah my
friend Harold, and let's say you're called Harold. So when Martha says my
friend Harold, that might be the first time ever. You two might have been friends
for two or three years, like whatever. But that might be the first time ever that
it is declared. It becomes knowledge that Martha does consider you a friend. And I
feel like it's very interesting. We talked a lot about this in group. It's very
interesting how with relationships it's defined. With relationships it or
eventually you reach a certain point after a few dates, generally, where you
sit down and you have a conversation. Okay, so what are we? Are we dating? Are we
friends? Are we still not sure? There's usually, and sometimes it can be that
you're still not sure and there's nothing wrong with that, but there's usually
early on in the relationship some kind of, it gets defined like okay, like what
the the relation, like how the two, what each person is to each other, basically.
Whereas with a friendship that doesn't happen, there's not, you don't reach a
point where you talk about where you get, where you sit and you're like okay, so
are we friends or are we just acquaintances? Like it doesn't happen, so
you kind of, it's, I feel like because it's one of those things in most
socialization circles nowadays, where it's a lot about non-verbal, non-direct
communication, I feel like that's why it tends to be very hard for autistic
folks to understand, because autistic folks communicate through direct
communication and do not tend to pick up on the non-verbal
communication nuances that non-autistic people tend to use in their
communication and there's actually a study that came out recently, I'll probably
do an episode on this, but a study recently came out saying that 93% of
the way most neurotypical presenting people communicate is through non-verbal,
non-direct communication, which is what autistic people struggle a lot with, so
you could, they're taking that information, you could say that you could
conclude, and I would not dispute this as an autistic person, I would not dispute,
you could conclude that it makes it extremely difficult for autistic people
to interact with most neurotypical presenting people that communicate
almost entirely, not just mostly, but we're talking 93%, we're talking almost
entirely off of non-verbal communication and that is really a spot that
autistic struggle with, we thrive with direct communication and I will, I will
remind everyone again that autistic communication is not deficient, it is
different, it is like speaking a different language and it's been shown in
studies that autistic people communicate better in between themselves,
autistic to autistic, the neurotypicals do neurotypicals to neurotypical and the
huge disconnect and difficulty comes when you try to communicate, when an
autistic person and a neurotypical person try to communicate and the
neurotypical person will misperceive the the autistic person as being
deficient in communication, but the reality is the autistic person just
communicates in a very different way, in a very direct, very verbal communication
centered way and the neurotypical person, the way that they've been socialized to
communicate, they're constantly looking for non-verbal cues and and that's why
they might struggle to read an autistic person because autistic people
don't really use those cues and they actually generally mean, we generally
mean what we say when we're using very direct communication, there's no like
hidden nuance or anything like that and then it's hard for the autistic person
because the neurotypical person might be saying something with like a hidden
meaning, not really meaning exactly what they're saying, but the autistic person
isn't gonna pick up on that non-verbal part and is going to take what is being
said literally as it is and then it ends up that what gets understood is
different than what's being communicated and of course this goes both ways, like
neurotypical to autistic vice versa and so that's the big issue and I've spoken
about this on this podcast before but I think it's so important to just remind
everyone of that, remind everyone of the double empathy theory by Dr.
Damian Milton which touches exactly on that, the fact that autistic
communication is different, it is not wrong or disordered, it is different, it is a
different form of communicating, it is like speaking in different language, it
is nothing that needs to be fixed or corrected or molded into neurotypical
norms or treated, it just needs to be understood. So that's what I have to
say for today, this will be another short but sweet episode. Thank you all for
listening, I hope you enjoyed this episode, I hope you were able to get
something out of it and I'll see you all next time.