Communicating across the divide: What to know as a neurotypical

Foreword: The double empathy problem

Neurodivergents and neurotypicals understand themselves a lot better than they understand each other. It's not a moral fault, and I’m not criticising: it's very hard for us to understand how a different brain processes the world. But it's also not insurmountable. A lot of neurodivergents are nearly fluent in neurotypicalese, and neurotypicals are kind of defined as "those who get social stuff easily", so y'all should be able to learn to understand most of what we're (not) saying.

So here goes: your first guide to how we do, or don't, communicate the way you expect us to.

Masking

Masking is how people try to fit in. You do it, too: when you go to a different country, you pay a bit more attention than normal to how people behave and try to match them to keep everyone comfortable. We just do it more often. Or all the time.

We're not lying to you or trying to manipulate you. We're trying to keep the peace. So, yes, I'm probably masking when talking to you. But no, you shouldn't judge me for it. Believe me, even other Autistics can't always deal with my unmasked Autism.

That's assuming we even know how to unmask. Many of us can't fully unmask because we've been wearing a mask so long we can't find ourselves under it. Unmasked Autism is like a language we've stopped speaking; we've forgotten its finer points.

Masking leads directly to the last part of this document: Sometimes we need a break.

Flat affect

I'm sure you've heard of "resting b**** face".

A lot of neruodivergent have resting b**** face and even resting b**** voice. It's called "flat affect", and it just means that we don't express our true emotions, either verbally or nonverbally, a lot or even most of the time.

Some signs of flat affect, as listed in Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, are:

A monotonous tone of voice.
Fewer facial expressions.
Fewer gestures.

The mismatch between our affect and our actual feelings can cause others to assume we're bored, hostile, mad, sad, depressed, or “spaced out”. Basically, if we're not coming across all perky and hyper, we're interpreted as annoyed.

Please listen more to our words, and less to how we say them. And please don't make us monitor our faces non-stop when you’re speaking, because we honestly can’t always focus on both.

Cue clash

Flat affect is only one thing that can make our verbal and nonverbal cues clash. Which is a problem, because broadly speaking, neurotypicals faced with clashing verbal and nonverbal cues believe the nonverbal ones.

This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, because our nonverbal cues, like our flat affect, can send signals that don't represent our emotions at all.

My nonverbal cues are impacted by a lot of things that you shouldn't be reading into. For example:

I'm uncomfortable sitting for very long, especially in a situation where I can't sit crosslegged. This makes me move a lot in my seat, or sit in ways that self-proclaimed body language experts will interpret in a thousand different ways. Honestly, though, it's just my body struggling to sit in a "normal" way.
The more attention I'm paying to you, the less attention I can pay to my facial expressions. When I'm really focused, I look angry or bored. This can make people think I'm rejecting what they're saying exactly when I'm trying my hardest to understand and internalise it.
For a related issue, refer to the eye contact section.

Eye contact

Neurodivergents can struggle with eye contact. It's right there in the diagnostic criteria for ASD. But this doesn't mean what people often think it does.

Taking just one data point (me):

I can make eye contact, but sometimes I prefer not to because it gives me way too much info. Y'all have a lot going on with your faces and that can be distracting: I can't always think or focus on what you're saying if I'm also parsing your expressions.
Sometimes I make too much eye contact. If you're not too intense for me I often have to consciously remind myself to look away from time to time, and who remembers that in the middle of a conversation?
If I turn my face away, it's possible that you made me uncomfortable. But it's equally possible that I'm thinking really hard. This is true for all humans, but a lot of people will wait until you're done speaking to think about what you're saying. I don't always do that - my brain just shoots off.

Silence

I don’t make “noises of listening” when people speak to me. On the phone, that’s made people think the line has dropped. In real life or Zoom, it can make people think I’m bored, angry, or spaced out. Really I just:

Don’t know how to make those noises at appropriate intervals.
Don’t know why all y’all bother. All it does is make it harder to listen.

Not only do I not do them, I can find them annoying. Imagine you’re trying to listen to an interview, but at random intervals the interviewer bangs a cymbal or shouts a nonsense word at the top of their voice. That’s what “hmm”, “yeah”, and other noises sound like to me.

Going off script

A lot of us script conversations and scenarios ahead of time. When conversations don't match the script, or when we didn't expect a conversation at all, we sometimes don't know how to engage 'live'. We just don’t know what to say, and if the conversation veers somewhere not so nice, we may be shocked into mutism. The last time I had a fight with someone, it was because she lost patience, and I lost the ability to respond (how on earth do you respond to unexpected verbal aggression if you don’t want things to escalate?), so she lost her patience even more.

Going off script can also mean that we're more blunt, because we haven't had a chance to find gentler ways of saying something. An unadorned fact, opinion, or emotion will just pop out.

Questions, part 1

If you need more information than we gave you, please ask.

I often don't understand the hidden questions within neurotypical questions and answer just the spoken ones.

In social situations, I can learn what the hidden questions are. "How do you feel about Indian food" isn’t an invitation to discuss my favourite dishes and ingredients; it means "Would you like a curry in the next 15 minutes".

But at work, with more technical questions, it can be hard to understand what information you might want but didn't explicitly ask for. From your perspective, I gave a partial answer. But from my perspective, I gave you what you asked for.

I’m also likely to answer a yes/no question with a “yes” or “no” and no explanation. Remember: I get “you’re talking too much” and “you’re oversharing” feedback as often as I get “you’re unhelpfully brief” feedback. It’s hard for me to guess how much information you’ll want.

So if you need more information, please ask rather than assume I was being deliberately unhelpful.

Questions, part 2

Sometimes, a question is just a question.

A very, very,verycommon problem for Autistics is being accused of arguing, questioning authority, or criticizing, when we ask questions like “Why do you do it that way?”, “Why did we decide that?”, or “Who’s supposed to be working on this?”

Honestly, we’re usually just asking for information. You might be able to go ahead with your job and life without that information, but I often can’t. If I don’t understand something, like the reason or context, I sometimes just can’t fully understand what’s going on or what to do. And I’m much more likely to forget things that aren’t properly contextualised. And sometimes I’m just curious and want to understand.

Questions, part 3

Here’s a question I can't always answer: "How do you feel?"

I have Alexithymia, which in my case means I'm only aware of strong emotions; mild emotions run in the background and I don't know what they are. Alexithymia can mean slightly different things for different people, but the underlying theme is: when we say we don't know how we feel or that we don't really feel anything about something, we're not lying.

Not all neurodivergents have Alexithymia. It's probably a minority, in fact: it's most common among Autistics, which are a small section of the neurodivergent population, and it's not universal even among us. But where it exists, it can make us look evasive. We're not. And it'd be okay if we were, by the way; there's no reason to force someone at work to talk about their feelings, and many neurodivergents are wary of it because we've so often been told that our emotions are wrong.

PS: Alexithymia means I get hangry or sick before I get hungry, or that I don't understand I'm getting tired and have a sudden crash. It's a good idea to keep me in cookies and call an early end to events.

Another issue with answering “how do you feel” is that sometimes the answer is so complex that we can’t find the words. There is too much going on to articulate in a way that a human being - of whatever neurotype - can possibly understand.

Multi-input processing

I think some people can process just the thing they want to process. So in a busy room, they can still process only the words their conversational partner is saying.

Yeah, no.

I process all auditory input. Not in a useful way where I can understand someone calling to Superman from the other side of the room. In a non-useful way, where I don't understand Lois Lane but I also don't understand the person I'm speaking to.

If I'm not trying to listen to anyone, this can actually be useful. Letting my brain burn off some processing power on things that don't matter can make it easier not to think of twenty things that might matter all at once. This is why I have movies I've already watched running in the background most workdays: I don't need to listen to them, but they block out a lot of other potential cognitive avenues.

If Iamtrying to listen, though, it's downright unpleasant. And prone to failure. You know how sometimes a tannoy system has too much crackle in it so you can't parse the words? Like that.

Tip:If we're wearing headphones during a conversation, we're not ignoring you. It's blocking out some other noise and allows us to hear you better. Please don't ask us to take them off unless you really notice we're mishearing you.

Personal space

I think I don’t normally invade people’s personal space. You can tell me if I do.

More likely, you’ll find that I will back a step or two away from your preferred distance. Usually that means that your voice is loud, your aftershave is strong, you make a lot of gestures, or you’re shifting your weight a lot. All of those things overwhelm my senses and make it harder to listen to you. I can’t filter those inputs out, so I back away from them. It’s not personal, and I’m not saying you’re shouting or that you smell. It’s very, very easy to overwhelm my senses - it’s right there on the list of things that got me my diagnosis.

I can even move back just because you’re much taller than me, which you likely are, because it’s easier for me to understand your facial expressions when they’re not at a weird angle (and quite possibly because the ceiling lights are in my peripheral vision when I look up).

Stimming

Stimming can relax us and help us focus.

If a stim is driving you crazy, it's okay to ask someone to pick a different stim while talking to you. For example, maybe they're making some noise that's making you jump, or they're moving a lot and it makes Zoom do weird things (especially common with a virtual background).

Otherwise, there's no reason to mention it. There's certainly no reason to mock it. After all, you stim, too: you pace, or drum your fingers, you crack your knuckles. Or how about those stress balls that used to be so popular? You don't stim as persistently as we do, and your repertoire might be more limited, but you're not stim-free.

Self advocacy

A lot of us suck at self advocacy. We don’t want to impose, or we’ve been criticized in the past for asking for accommodations, or we simply assume everyone is going through the same thing and we should deal with it like they do.

You can help by asking specific questions that invite us to care for ourselves without drawing too much attention to it. For example:

"It's getting really loud here. Do you want to find a meeting room to talk in?"
"Let's have a 10 minute break before moving on to the next topic."
"Here's the menu for tomorrow's team dinner. If anyone wants to change restaurants, give us a shout."
"Here's the meeting agenda to help everyone prepare."
"This presentation will be recorded, so if you can't attend you can wait for the link."
"Here's the off-site schedule. I've marked optional activities in green; feel free to skip if you need to catch up on work, sleep, or quiet time."
"How's the audio in this room? Too loud? Too quiet? Too much static?"

A lot of these things help neurotypicals, too.

As a personal favour to me, but probably to a lot of other people, please pay attention to extreme volume differences between speakers on a Zoom call you’re MCing, and ask people to go up or down. If I turn up the volume for a quiet speaker, the louder speakers will overwhelm me before I have time to take the volume back down. The best way I can put it is that loud noises feel like they're generated by an angry blacksmith who lives in my skull. They aren’t coming from the outside; my brain is just imploding.

Sometimes we need a break

There's no sugar coating it: sometimes we need to step away. We get overstimulated by the lights or sounds, or by the emotions in the room (especially negative ones), or it's just been too many hours and too much of whatever takes more effort than you think it does: talking, listening, masking.

I can feel my brain slowing down, but not in a nice drowsy way like you get late in the evening while binge-watching your comfort show. At the same time, it gets noisy, like there's a bit of static in there. I get more sensitive to inputs, like light and sound, and my prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that helps us make sensible choices) switches off.

Please let us have these breaks without judgement. They're a physiological imperative.

Afterword

The bits in this article that aren't based on my own experience are mostly taken from Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, by Cynthia Kim, and from Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things, by Pierre Novellie. I recommend it to Autistics, and even to neurotypicals: you might learn something about someone you love. You might even learn something about yourself.