11:36pm September 28, 2014

An anti-skill that it helps to know of, and be rid of.

Lots of disabled people pick up anti-skills: Skills that actively hinder us in getting through the day. And this one has to do with communication.

I notice it when I’m talking to someone.

I’ll start a sentence, and before I’ve gotten five words in, they’re interrupting me and telling me they don’t understand. They get extremely agitated and the more I say, the more they say they don’t understand.

But when we talk about it, it will turn out that they didn’t understand one word or phrase in a long sentence or paragraph. And if they had listened to the entire sentence or paragraph, they would have understood what I meant, because the part they didn’t understand was either nonessential, or something that you can pick up from context.

I know about this because I do it too. I freak out about not understanding something because of a few words at the beginning don’t make sense to me. When if I just continued listening, in many cases I would understand.

This doesn’t mean I’ll always understand.

This doesn’t mean it’s okay to bully disabled people for saying we don’t understand things, or to grumble at us “Just keep listening and you’ll get it.”

But there’s got to be some way to find a middle ground.

For the speaker to be able to communicate, “There’s more coming and it’ll probably make more sense in the end.”

For the listener to be able to slow down and not freak out at the first sign of a word they don’t understand, and to see it through to the end, then figure out if they understood everything or not.

But I have no idea how to navigate such a touchy conversational situation from either end. The listener is used to being considered stupid and told what to do, including “use context clues”, that can get insulting after awhile. Even though in this case the advice may be totally valid. Meanwhile the speaker is trying to contend with an increasingly frantic person freaking out about something that may not be worth freaking out about in the end.

Very confusing social situation from either side. But the freaking out is definitely an anti-skill, whether the person is right or not that they will not understand what’s being said. Because the freaking out doesn’t solve anything, it just makes everyone more tense.

How to unlearn this, and learn better ways of handling the situation? I have no idea.

Could #realsocialskills weigh in if you have the chance?