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CONCEPT-BASED AUTISM INFORMATION: Social Relatedness
When will I be able to really connect with my child/students with Autism?”
How individuals with and without Autism may or may not become ready, able, or willing to relate to each other is probably where we find the most critical area of emotional impact for persons with Autism and our family members. This personal relationship dimension of the mutual impacts of Autism is where we parents and teachers of children and students with Autism will find our greatest sorrows and challenges and yet our most profound joys and rewards. This important individual and personal social reality, is distinct from, but also in exhorably linked to, the able-group relations between people with and without Autism, which are discussed over in the CULTURAL link pages. Here we will focus on the individual experience of Autism of persons with and without Autism in relationship to each other.
People with Autism, across the fullest dimensions of its spectrum, clearly demonstrate universal needs for physical survival resources, environmental comfort, functional communication systems, and meaningful social connections that are similar to those that people without Autism have over our life spans. Therefore, we are more the same in our needs for equitable resource access, individually comfortable work and play spaces, open exhanges of useable information, and valueable personal relationships which are well-matched to who we are as a person who is also a member of a certain developmental group. Therefore, those of us who must live, work, and cope with Autism 24/7/365 have a universal and ever present meta-need to be afforded access to specifically adaptive resources, places, and relationships that best match our needs. These are NOT "special" needs, they are our human needs.
Individuals' needs can only be made "special" if they are held in comparision to a different groups needs as "those OTHER PEOPLES' needs assecondary as comparied to OUR needs as primary." But each individuals needs are primary to US. This is where one's social needs for having bridges for personal connection built, can become inexhorably linked to culturally power-based concepts. Yet this means that our functional needs may get caught up in irrelevant standards of normal versus false standards of abnormal social needs. Each persons needs for social connection are normal for them. A person with Autism often have needs for asocial connections and builds with us that can then meet the same kinds of social needs we all have, which is to be able to survive, function and to feel like we belong with other people. A person with Autism may need to NOT be touched to feel connected. A person with Autism may need quiety togetherness and NOT having to talk, to feel part of a conversational group. A person with Autism may need to NOT talk about emotions to feel they are understood as a person with certain kinds of feelings. Yes, this is all counter-intuitive, but it may be reality nonetheless.
When peoples' needs are met in connection to ourselves as individuals who come from diverse social/cognitive group memberships, we will be stunned at the sense of close personal relationship and equitable social relations that are possible for us all, despite all our differences. Our mutual recognition of the universality of human needs in the meta-need to have our needs met in relationship to who we are as individuals, and in relation to who we are in terms of our various group memberships, can open up new spaces of shared empathy, free up our total energies, greatly conserve our resources, and eventually afford us all the shared and separate spaces we all need for very deep and meaningful personal relationships and peaceful human relations, even in the face of the mutual impacts of Autism. Threshold believes that this is an adventure that is very worth taking over each of our life times. People with Autism around the world are inviting us to take this journey across our vast able diverse universe together.
All along the full psychosocial spectrum, human beings show and report many different emotional experiences and affective capacities in relation to living, working, and coping with life, let alone something as difficult and complex as Autism. People with Autism report that our condition of emotional living and affect FEELS different for each of us. (All these differences will have varied meanings within each of our typical worlds' diverse cultural communities too.) Therefore, it helps the typical world of people without Autism to understand, that contrary to the typical world view, people with Autism may not have a choice to simply learn typical affective capacities or to experience"normal" emotional states and responses. A person without Autism cannot choose to feel HOW a person with Autism feels, just as a person with Autism cannot choose to feel HOW a person without Autism feels. Our brains innate affective capacities control a great part of our stages of psychosocial development, and therefore shape our experiences HOW we may feel in our emotional states. Therefore, who we are pschologically, is effected multiply by 100% who we are innately and biologically and by 100% of who we are nurtured to be socially. Therefore, a person's own neurological realities and affective experiences are equally important to the product and process of who we become.
In our experience at Threshold we have heard and seen people with Autism verbally reporting and nonverbally demonstrating, though visual and physical communications, a voice about our authentic inner worlds in this way: "This is just the way I am. Why can't typical people understand that I cannot always feel in the same mannor or sense or speed that they do. Even if I may sometimes look like I am feeling many of the same things they do--I just may relate to those feelings in a very different way, or time, or speed. I may cry, yell, or shake sometimes at things that would not effect your affective experience at all. I may not be as sad, mad, or scared about the things that create those felt states for you. I may appear to cry, yell, or panic, and yet I may not be feeling that sad, mad, or scared. This may be the way I have learned to express my needs or demand that they be meet. Typical people taught me that this was the best way for me to be heard and seen and to get what I want too. Therefore, what appears as my biggest upsets may be either a ritual of what I learned to do to get through to you, or an authentic felt experience, and yet, I cannot tell the difference. Teach me a new way, so that I am able to express myself, and I will follow--I need and yet do not want to follow someone out of these rituals--even if I appear to first resist the changes. Please remember that my feelings may truely be much less or more in degree and so easier or harder to manage than they are for a typical person. I may or may not be able to tolerate or modulate feelings, and so I may or may not choose to express feelings the way the ways you all do.This because I may be a person who does NOT experience or does NOT enjoy the high arousal stages of your typical emotions. Yet, I may or may not have the same affective needs, expectations, and wants you do as typical people. Therefore, please do not assume a certain emotional reality for all people with Autism, many of us have many very typical emotional needs and feelings, but have information processing and communication barriers to getting them expressed. So, you may not be able to tell who we each are easily--but please keep working to connect in a mutually positive way. Because, we still need the same human relationship supports that you typical people do--to be truly accepted as who we are, and equally valued in becoming who we can be. Please listen/hear watch/see that this is what we are saying/showing to you."
If we can listen and look at both our social and asocial realities, then we can learn when to carefully listen and look for the communications of more and less typically-social and more and less able-to-be verbal people with Autism. This is the response-able way to get into open and meaninful dialog about our mutual needs, to relate better across our social worlds. This means that these very same strategies can help adult providers and peers communicate our needs, expectations and wants to children and adults with Autism. Then we may both begin to more accurately predict how we can best connect around and within our similar and different emotional experiences of Autism.
Yes, all this may be very hard for a new parent and a novice provider to understand and adjust to at first, because it feels so unacceptable to think of our children and students as significantly socially different from ourselves, and that we may have to be the ones to change in how we relate and express ourselves first. We may try to skip this hard work by reversing our feelings onto people with Autism by mind-reading, or projecting our realities onto others even when they may not match well. These are stress coping strategies in confusing and upsetting situations that may help us survive in the short term, but not they cause serious problems in the long term. We just need to reflect on what is really going and learn new and better strategies for connecting and understanding each other.This allows us to slowly let go of our well-intended typical worldviews and their temporary relief from Autism. Then we can let ourself begin to WORK HARD to think about the bridge we need to cross to reach infant and very young child with Autism, and then WORK HARD to feel your way across that same bridge as it develops and changes into two equally useful and wonderful relationship walk ways between the worlds of people with and without Autism. BE SURE to let/insist that the child and adult with Autism participate in all this hard work up to our fullest mutual potentials and you will be amazed. Then we can both feel realistic hope that we will find each other across the equally wide developmental spans that seem to separate us. This is not only a possible best practice outcome it is a very probable one.
"When will I ever understand what the word 'SOCIAL" really means--it seems so vague and general?”
We need to understand that all our many diverse cultural and functional worlds have very real, rich, and different meanings that most of us hold in the most unconscious parts of our typically social and verbal minds. To understand the individual and collective meanings of the word "social" in accurate relationship to each other and in relation to people with and without Autism we must first PULL UP our unconscious sets terms and ideas about the concept of SOCIALNESS and PUSH our typical brains to learn to expand these words and ideas in ways that authentically include, and more ethically engage people with Autism too. This social primer text can help us begin to do that:
SOCIAL BEINGS have a different inner reality than objects, which is SUBJECTIVE. This means that typical people will then experience ourselves subjects of our own lives, and not as only concrete objects in relation to each other. In typically-framed human developmental work we think of this as a necessary, and often the best, way to view human being's innate aspects and nurtured social experiences. Our typical SOCIALNESS develops out of the neurological features and biological processes that afford a person an awareness and eventually a meta-aware consciousness of one’s SELF and OTHERS, and guides our mutual social behaviors and frames our shared experience of being social. However, ASOCIAL BEINGS with significantly atypical social development and even serious social able-loss can also have a equally valid personal view of themselves and a matching functional view of the people objects and places around them, one that is more OBJECTIVE and asocial in nature. (We typical folks then have to work hard to realize how an asocial reality can still be a positive and productive social experience and view of oneself and the world--it is not the same as being totally nonsocial or antisocial--it is just a less subjective and more objective perspective of our social world. Many, but not all, people with Autism report having a less emotive affective experience and a less subjective view as part of their authentic social experience of self and their social view of how they need to function and even the best way to work in relation to others. This can creates a huge social gap between our two worlds. The nature of the social spaces that create gap can found in the terms and elements of our human development in the early years.
SELF-AWARENESS requires the development of a complex self-concept by relating internally to one's own experiences, feelings, thinking, identifiers and social roles--this is our aware if “I & ME” relationship as a typical being. This capacity emerges from infancy through toddlerhood and is functionally complete by age five. Typical preschoolers demonstrate basic self awareness. This is often the period with the more severe to moderate range of the social features Autism may become apparent. However, we all can increase our self awareness throughout our life spans. This is true for people with Autism too--just to a more or less atypical able degree.
SOCIAL RELATEDNESS is about being Ready-Able-Willing to understand/take on the mental perspectives and emotional experiences of other individuals and sharing a base of cultural expectations about all our roles, rights and responsibilities within our social groups.This capacity emerges from infancy through toddlerhood and is functionally complete by age five. Typical preschoolers demonstrate basic self awareness. This is often the period with the more severe to moderate range of the social features Autism may become apparent. However, we all may experience increases and decreases our sense of social relatedness from within from out of our social worlds, throughout our life spans. This is true for people with Autism too--just in a more or less atypical able way.
SOCIAL COGNITION (thinking about ourselves and others as social beings in diverse social worlds) requires a huge and complex base of subjective information about how our own/other’s inner/outer experiences in life relate to each other. Typical people can create mental "social files" to organize these “people schemas.” The social cognitive functioning of all people along the Autism spectrum and Aspergers is atypical and usually identfied as having significant losses in these key typical social reasoning capacities. Without this core social developmental feature a person cannot fall within this spectrum. However, do not assume that this means that all people with Autism have no typical social features, affects, or experiences. The opposite is true, most do have some. We just are usually missing some critical adult social skill sets that create social cognitive splinters. These mean that we will have a more atypical social manner but still more intact social thinking ablility. We just do our social thinking explicitly, and not so automatically as a typical person. Only ongoing individual assessment will reveal our true social capacities.
But it is important that both parents and professional in the world of Autsm understand and realize how people with Autism, by diagnositic definition, do not automatically process or readily gain and retain social information about people. This may be because of the mutual impacts of Autism on: !) everyone’s biosocial ABLENESS to read or hear people’s facial or emotional expressions of nonverbal language by gesture or tone; 2) the long term loss of the capacity of the person with Autism to have innate META-AWARENESS. This how typical mature people can have an automatic and almost instantaneous sense of what we feel/think about what we and others may or may not think/feel, and to project that all onto how we interpret other's to attempt to “feel about what others feel” and to “think about what others think”. This underlies a typical experience of cognitive mirroring or emotional empathy. People with Autism are often frustrated by what is the characteristically very subjective, unpredictable, and imperfect nature of the typical worlds manner of social reasoning. They may have many valid points of critique about social "reality."
Some people with Autism may be more aware of ourselves and others, however usually in a more objective and less subjective way. This is creates a more singular opportunity for a more concrete kind of relatedness to others. This then replaces typical mutual subjectivity and unconscious complexity of peoples relationship building processes. So people with Autism may have some things in common with typical social culture, in other ways we have our own cultural view of life. Therefore it is difficult for people with Autism to sense/express socialness in typical ways. But this does NOT mean we are not social beings too. We may just be “asocial” beings living in a social world. Like all other issues related to diverse status of groups and individuals, social ABLEness status requires increasing awareness of, engagement with and adaptation to our mutual differences. We must notice>name>justly assess each person’s and each group’s social realities before we can safely engage and equitably negotiate them.
"When do children with Autism develop more typical and more able social skills?”
For people across the spectrum of Autism, typical socialness is the least likely developmental skill set to fully emerge over a lifetime. Atypicalness/losses in socialness is at the very core of this condition. So the psychosocial features of Autism are usually apparent for all people with Autism/ASD as children or we would probably not meet any criteria set in the PDD diagnostic group. However, significant atypicalness may be as important in one’s social related-ableness as much as our developmental patterns of both able losses AND gains. So we must remember that being atypically social could also mean having some splinters of atypical GAINS (i.e. over focus on facial expression, obsession with social proximity or seeking to gain social information as a compulsion.) So typicalness in our dominant typically-centered social world is often seen as more important than ableness. This means that both people with and without Autism may need to learn, grown, change and become more stable in our shared social and asocial relatedness skills if we are going to connect across our two worldviews.
Once again, when we are with a person with Autism/atypical socialness, WHO may judge who is being more or less socially “appropriate?” People with Autism often share how inappropriate, even hurtful, well-meaning typical people seem from a more asocial perspective. This reveals the truth that socialness is a bridge that must be built from two sides of the canyon of our all being human beings. Those of us with “typical” social resources must then BE responsible to make sure our side of relating effort is designed to meet other persons at a mutual point of contact/encounter in the middle, or we both fall out of relationship to each other. Expecting any person with Autism to make all key psychological adjustments in relating is usually a waste of both our social efforts and potentials.
As family members we must both grieve the individual social skill losses in relationship to our own children and survive the collective social status loss in connection to a typical world. And the truth is that those of us with Autism may be more unaware and so more untroubled by what typical people see as our critical social deficits, This is seen in those of us with Autism who have ABLE allies in their lives. “We” report less social anxiety and concerns and like all he concrete aspects of life best and have in hope in that, those aspects of life and work can be made more readily available through strong allyships. Many interesting and well paid jobs do not require critical social skills. SO it is VERY important for schools to work on social skill gains while still recognizing that directing our students towards jobs that require or even involve work with social interaction may be aiming them towards employment instability. . This supports the process of building bridges that are intact and connected from both sides. Then we experience having allies in our social world and not being alone or socially isolated!
Our allies are people who can build these social bridges and make life richer and more interactive on a more concrete plane, without holding the standard that being more social is superior. When people do not learn how to reach mutually agreed upon cultural expectations to relate between diverse social/cultural groups, we all experience a lack of mutual rapport and connection. In the case of Autism this happens whenever we are with a any new persons with Autism. We have to stop and assess what is NEEDED to a/socially connect.
But social skill assessment can only take place by us using our singular mind mirrors to reflect on the splintered mind mirrors of another person. This can turn into a hall of mirrors process where our view of people with Autism becomes splintered and we view them as different from us--less human. This is an illusion we have to work at to avoid. People with Autism are our teachers in this way.
People with Autism have told us, that for them living here, in a social world, is like being a visitor from a foreign land--”But not like France--like Pluto.” This person with Autism was offering a valid MODEL. For it elegantly describes our situation in an analogy that lets us explain and predict how Autism will influence the vast space of a diverse social universe that exists between typical and typical people. We must live, work and cope together as people from two different planets in socially diverse worlds. Why is this so? Let’s look at the differences first, then let’s talk about our mutual social needs.
Understanding Autism Webbook. Copyright © 2000-03 by Sharone Lee. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All names, concepts, methods, materials, products and publications are protected by trademark and copyright, and no part of this text or this web page may be reproduced or distributed in any manner, for any purpose, including educational purposes, without express written consent from: THRESHOLD • SALEM, OREGON • 503-375-9462 • sharone@understandingautism.org. |
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