9:17pm June 10, 2014

can aspies recognise body language

Without practice, we seem to be pretty terrible at reading nonverbal social cues. But some autistic people become really good at reading body language, either by making it into a special interest, becoming self-taught via patterns/rules or through social skills classes in childhood.

I’ve pretty much failed at this and get probably less than 5% of people’s nonverbal communication. It’s frustrating but I also can’t be bothered to make an effort to learn.

Also some autistic people can read some body language really well.

I read unconscious body language really well. Body language that most NTs can’t read, mind you – but to me it’s very obvious. I have a harder time reading conscious body language, the stuff people send out as more-or-less-conscious social signals.

I read the body language of autistic people exceptionally well. The closer a person is to being like me, the more I can read their body language. For someone who is extremely close to me (in form of autism), it is practically telepathic the amount of information we can get back and forth.

Thing is?

I don’t think this makes me that different from a nonautistic person:

1. I read body language better the closer it is to my body language.

2. For people whose body language is very different than mine, I can only read parts of that body language well, and read other parts very poorly.

You can say that about just about every nonautistic person. I fail to see how I’m different, simply because the type of person is different.

Or as I’ve put it before (and this is another phrase I’ve sort of coined):

“I don’t understand you, because I am disordered.

You don’t understand me, because I am disordered.”

(I sometimes replace other things for “am disordered” like “have poor social skills” or something like that. But you get the idea. I invented that particular… couplet, or whatever it is.)

The main way that my ability to read people differs from a nonautistic person is not the body language. It’s the fact that I’m highly ‘sensing’, which is a term Donna Williams coined to refer to an intuition based in a mode of understanding the world that is sensory rather than conceptual. Like I can sense from the first footfall, as she puts it, how everything else is going to turn out. I can gain loads of information about things and people from tiny, tiny bits of sensory and pre-sensory data. And that’s the one area where I’m different in this regard. (But it also makes me different from autistic people who are not highly sensing. Sensing is not a necessary part of being autistic, it’s just very common in some kinds of autistic people more than others.)

But about being able to read people similar to me, and read people less well the less similar? That’s as normal as normal can get. The only reason people don’t recognize it is ableism.