as small as a world and as large as alone, About being non verbal. How does that manifest...

9:31pm September 1, 2014

Anonymous asked: About being non verbal. How does that manifest itself? Because while I'm not diagnosed, I feel that I have a lot of non verbal issues. People will talk to me and ask me things and I know in my head what it is but I can't say it or I say the big thing or the black thing or just 'thing' and people get so mad. Or just "fine" or "no" and I feel like I'm just messed up or have no reason to not be able to talk but w/things I like, I can blab forever, sometimes I stumble though.

You might want to look into expressive dysphasia, my friend has it and it causes her severe word-finding difficulties even when she’s verbal. She has a lot of strategies for hiding it, like repeating certain phrases a lot to buy time to find the real words she needs. But if she’s rushed, all she can do is scream or say one word over and over. And people have trouble seeing that about her, because to them she seems “so talkative and eloquent”. They can’t see the cracks in her mask.

About being nonverbal… most autistic people are what I’d call part-time verbal. Like, maybe 90% of the time they can talk, but 10% of the time they either can’t talk at all or have serious difficulty talking. Or it may be 50/50. Or really any combination. But it’s rare that an autistic person can talk 100% of the time, or 0%. Most of us can talk some of the time.

And it’s not just whether you can talk, it’s also whether you have all kinds of communication problems when you do talk. These can range from mild things like being literal, to major things like not being able to find words for things, or knowing the exact words but being unable to get them to come out of your mouth. Or they can be things like saying all the right words, but they don’t match the thoughts in your head so you’re not really communicating.

So even when a person seems 100% verbal they may be only 50% communicative and the rest is non-communicative speech, that just happens to sound communicative.

Autistic people are prone to so many different speech and communication problems that it would probably take an entire book to list them all and go into detail. But I pretty much guarantee that whatever you’re dealing with has been seen before and may even be fairly common among autistic people.

You wouldn’t know it from my typing but I’m around 5% verbal at my best, and that 5% isn’t communicative, so I’m basically functionally nonverbal. I used to be more like 70% verbal maybe, that’s just a rough estimate, but I lost that due to a combination of autistic catatonia and my other speech and language problems closing in all at once. Autistic catatonia can even cause someone who never had a speech delay in early childhood, to totally or near-totally lose their speech as they get older. (I know people this has happened to.)

Also even when you’re nonverbal, there’s degrees of problems like… I can type some of the time, and be very eloquent in my typing, but other times I can’t type at all, so typing isn’t the universal solution to speech problems. sometimes I need picture symbols, sometimes nothing works at all.

So there’s so many different ways that speech and language can be messed up that I feel inadequate to cover them all. LOTS of ways. But being partially nonverbal is incredibly incredibly common, and often takes the form of being able to speak sometimes but not others.

Sometimes those times you can’t speak are because of stress or overload. Sometimes they just seem to happen. Some people have them at times when we are relaxed and our brain feels like it doesn’t need to waste energy on speech or something. So it’s not always a bad thing, but sometimes it is.

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