1:41am November 27, 2014

Social skills problems that don’t stem from autism.

I hear a lot about how autistic people have social skills delays. And I won’t deny that I have massive problems with what most people call social skills. Massive ones. They aren’t generally the focus of my discussions of autism, because they’re eclipsed by even more massive problems with language, cognition, perception, and emotion, but believe me, they’re there. And they’re there big time.

Thing is, I’m not sure the social skills problems come from autism. In me, or in other autistic people. Or at most, there’s a small kernel of truth somewhere in the idea that autistic people lack social skills, but the kernel is small indeed and has been overinflated by people pointing magnifying glasses and microscopes at it.

One of the problems in the autistic community is that we are a community full of people who have never had a community before, for the most part. We have never had a place full of our social/perceptual/cognitive/emotional equals, true peers (though I normally hate that word, it fits here). And it’s only among true peers that you can learn certain social lessons.

Most people are surrounded by true neurological peers from an early age, and have no perceptual or movement issues getting in the way of perceiving what’s going on with said peers emotionally and socially. That means that they are learning tons of social lessons by osmosis every single day without even barely trying half the time.

Autistic people come to the autistic community without learning things that three-year-old NTs have already learned. Some of us act like three-year-old NTs, as a result. Not because we’re really children inside, but because we haven’t learned those lessons yet. And we hurt each other in all kinds of ways without realizing we’re hurting each other. And we do, many of us, learn those lessons, finally, now that we’ve been given a chance. Others are more set in our ways and may never learn, because past a certain age we just think why bother. But we’re all finally exposed to an environment in which we can learn. (Even if there aren’t a lot of autistic people of our type around, autistic people are still closer to who we are than most other people are.)

And what really tears me up inside is that I see this destroying communities. I see people doing things they wouldn’t do if they’d had a chance to learn these lessons as children. And I see other people geting hurt. I see people getting hurt on a personal level. And I see people getting hurt on a community-wide level. I see people acting as if we’re all still in grade school, or junior high, or high school, but people acting this way in the context of things that have massive consequences for our self-advocacy movements. I see people forcing people to pick sides and hold grudges. It’s just… really ugly.

And it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve noticed by the way, that people who are considered more severely autistic are more likely to have themselves and their families acknowledge this as a problem. My suspicion is that this is because they’re more likely to have been visibly and totally cut off from social contact with just about anyone. So when they begin making strides in cognition and communication and behavior, “catching up socially” becomes something people actually actively talk about how to do. I remember this most vividly in Sean Barron’s book but I know I’ve heard of it in other contexts many times over, and it’s usually with people who had a very severe and obvious lack of social contact in their formative years.

TL;DR: Many autistic people have problems with social skills that stem from lack of social experience more than they stem from lack of social experience, than from some “core deficit” of autism itself. Autistic community presents us with an opportunity like no other, to learn these things, if we so desire. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize this, so autistic community also presents us with a possible breeding ground for major social disaster and drama with long-reaching consequences for everyone involved, and totally unnecessary.

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