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10:55pm June 15, 2013

Communicating without words without anyone noticing.

People I know have told me they are often surprised by something:

We get together. We start interacting. We have a conversation for half an hour, forty five minutes, two hours even. Then they look up and are shocked to notice that I didn’t have any of my communication devices with me. Or wasn’t using one.

People say autistic people have no body language or other nonverbal communication, or have no ability to understand it. Both are wrong, especially as generalizations. Some of us lack some of those things some of the time, and that’s all you can truthfully say.

More than that. Many autistic people are good at reading other autistic people’s body language. Especially autistic people the most similar to us.

So within these conversations, this is what happens:

The other person talks to me.

I react. Mostly not consciously. I just respond instinctively. To either the ideas or the emotional content, depending on which I understand best. And my body responds equally instinctively to my thoughts and feelings.

My body language is not always the same as nonautistic body language. At times, I’ve had nonautistic authority figures insist to my cognitive interpreters: “You can’t possibly be interpreting her body language – she has no body language to interpret!” When one of my shrinks had to fill out a form on me in my mid twenties, his description of my affect was “unusual, odd, bizarre, childlike”. I had come to his office very happy and bouncy, I forget why. Another shrink, when I was fifteen or sixteen, saw me dancing around squealing and flapping my hands with delight because I got to help him pick out a fish for his fish tank. He spent an entire hour lecturing me on how the way I showed happiness was “inappropriate behavior” and that I should never act this way in public, and we would have to extinguish this awful behavior as soon as possible. I often smile or laugh when I am highly upset or terrified or witnessing awful events, not because I am happy but because I’m wired to respond to negative emotions that way. People have deliberately used that against me, saying it means I take delight in terrible events. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s fairly common for neuro-atypical people, especially autistic or schizophrenic people, to have that reaction and it absolutely is not happiness.

So it’s clear that much of my body language isn’t the same as most people’s. Nonautistic people will often either interpret it as bizarre, overly intense, inappropriate, or even absent.

Other parts of my body language can be closer to standard. I smile and cry when happy or sad, even when sometimes the quality of the smile or crying may be unusual – I remember being six years old while my brother coached me in how to laugh properly, and I always cried in a way that annoyed people rather than provoking sympathy.

So it’s also true that some of my body language is fairly typical. Nothing here is absolute. Some things are very unusual, some are very typical, and everything in between. And things like this can vary day to day. You can’t ever make the assumption that they’ll stay the same.

So with all this in mind.

My friends start talking to me, and I respond.

Some of my responses are just instinctive body language. Stuff I can’t help or control. It just happens because of how I feel.

Other things are sort of semi-instinctive with some more voluntary aspects. For instance, my friend will say something that sets off thoughts as well as feelings. Many of my thoughts take on very kinesthetic forms. So before I know it, my hands are waving through the air with my fingers flicking around, tracing the shape of my thoughts. Or before, when I walked better, I’d run around the room with my body acting out my thoughts the whole way.

Other times it’s far more voluntary stuff. Saying uh-huh and uh-uh. Waving my hands to emphasize feelings. Things that most people do. I am better at these things without speech, and even better without typing.

There’s also stuff that’s much harder to describe. Stuff that is more about the quality of how I hold myself than about anything obvious to most people. About expressions rather than motions. About what I don’t do, rather than what I do.

So all of these things and more are happening as my friend is talking with me. I am constantly responding both to their words and to their other signals. Because they know me well, they are pretty good at reading me.

So, contrary to just about every stereotype about autistic people, I will hold a possibly hours long conversation without saying anything at all. And both me and the other autistic person will understand perfectly well what is going on. In fact, if anything my comprehension problems will tend to be problems with understanding the words, not the body language. Because for many autistic people – even Temple Grandin has talked about this – it’s not that we can’t understand nonverbal communication, it’s that we can only understand one thing at a time: verbal OR nonverbal. Many of us develop a tendency towards understanding one better than the other. For me, it’s usually nonverbal stuff I understand better, although I sometimes get stuck in verbal mode.

Anyway, I think it’s very important to recognize that many autistic people can communicate without using words. And do it so well that people around us don’t even notice we weren’t talking or typing.

I happen to love conversations like that. My neighbor has to wear compression garments on her legs. It used to be my job to put them on her every night. And I loved it. I could go over there, with my hands too tied up by pulling on the straps, to be able to type at all. She would talk to me and I would strap on her stockings, and we would both get what we wanted out of the interaction without having to strain ourselves by doing any form of communication that was too difficult for us. And everything was exactly how it should be.