Recommended literature

Autism is a natural part of human neurodiversity, meaning the differences between people and how our brains work. For a great short introduction to autism as understood through the neurodiversity paradigm, watch autistic researcher Jac den Houting's TED Talk Why Everything You Know About Autism Is Wrong on YouTube. 

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The autistic neurotype is characterized by an incredible amount of variation; autistic people are at least as different as everyone else. This is why it can be challenging to set very rigid guidelines for what it means to be autistic. However, there are some areas where autistic people are generally different from most other people.

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A different way of being social

Autistic brains interpret social cues, both spoken and unspoken, differently than neurotypical brains. This means that autistic people often find it very stressful to have to communicate in neurotypical conditions, and that they quickly tire or become stressed by neurotypical social contexts.

 

You can compare it to a person from Denmark having to socialize with people from a completely different culture, e.g. Japan: you have to spend a lot of energy constantly trying to read and decode social cues that your brain does not naturally find meaningful. Some autistic people observe, practice, and become good at masking, i.e. communicating in the same way as neurotypicals by analyzing and copying the neurotypical way of being social.

 

Unfortunately, having to constantly communicate in a way that is different from what comes naturally to you takes an enormous amount of energy and can also make autistic people feel wrong or invisible when their own identity and needs are hidden in social situations.

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It's a myth that autistic people are not interested in being social, or have no social needs. The vast majority of people, regardless of neurotype, do have these needs. Unfortunately, autistic people often carry a lot of bad experiences, stress, and strain in their backpacks, which can make it difficult to find the motivation or belief in having good social experiences.

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Communication and the Double Empathy Problem

When you have a different brain, it's also often difficult to communicate. There's a lot of prejudice that autistic people are bad at communicating... But this is only true when autistic people have to communicate with neurotypical people.

 

Research shows that autistic people are often really good at communicating with each other. It's when communicating across neurotypes that challenges arise, and the challenge applies to both sides of the communication, i.e. neurotypicals typically have just as much difficulty understanding autistics as the other way around. This is called the Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012).

 

So it's not that autistic people communicate 'wrongly', but autistic people and neurotypicals communicate in different ways, and this needs to be acknowledged and tolerated if communication is to work. ​

 

Autistic people have a variety of ways of communicating: some autistic people may prefer to write, use body language, or employ other forms of communication rather than speak.

 

Senses and feelings

The vast majority of autistic people have brains that process their sensory impressions differently. Again, there is enormous variation, but typically there will be hyper(over)- or hypo(under)- sensitivity (compared to the neurotypical average) in one or more sensory modalities, often both in the same individual. For example, there may be a high sensitivity to sound or light, and at the same time a lower sensitivity to hunger or temperature. Autistic people with high sensory sensitivity are vulnerable to sensory overstimulation and stress, which can contribute to distress reactions. ​

 

Similarly, many autistic people experience and process emotions differently from most. For some, emotions may be experienced very intensely, while others may have difficulty feeling them, or may feel them in other ways, such as through bodily cues. It's a persistent myth that autistic people have no sensitivity to other people's feelings: a great many autistic people do, sometimes to a degree that can be overwhelming. But because autistic people communicate and process emotions differently than neurotypicals, it can be difficult to communicate around.

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