(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

(inspired by Book Review: The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work)

It weirds me out when people talk about I-statements and other such speaking techniques.

Is this an autism thing? Like, are allistics actually capable of doing that anywhere close to reliably (assuming they choose to)?

I...basically, I am a Mass Effect character. I can generally control the *gist* of what I am saying (barring the occasional misclick), but for the most part I cannot control the exact words that come out of my mouth: I just have to hope that the phrasing doesn't have connotations or implications that I didn't intend. It's hard enough to make sure I always have the right number of *negations*, and you want me to use *I-statements*??

Comments

[lunartulip]

Huh, that's interesting! To the extent that's an autism thing, it's one I haven't previously experienced or heard about. Which doesn't mean it's not, but does point towards its at least not being a super common one.

I actually tend towards the opposite extreme; my brain-to-mouth filters are strong enough that I occasionally want to say a thing, but first need to figure out how to verbally formulate it, and end up not having time to interject it before the conversation moves on. One of my therapists commented a few times that I speak unusually slowly, and seemed to think that fact was Significant somehow, although he was never clear about exactly how.

(I move away from that pattern somewhat when I'm drunk, though; when drunk, I talk very quickly and am noticeably less inhibited about what I say, sometimes even starting sentences without knowing yet how I'm going to end them. (Although, from what several friends have told me, Drunk Me is still substantially more filtered than the typical drunk person is.))

[brin_bellway]

I wonder if it's related to the enunciator vs garbled thing.

There are definitely degrees of severity: the more emotional I am (in pretty much any direction, I think), the less resemblance the phrasing that comes out of my mouth bears to the phrasing it had in my head. (Which has many times led to vicious cycles: start off upset, then get *more* upset by people taking my words at their precise literal meaning, as if I could *possibly* speak precisely and literally at a time like *that*. Sometimes by people who have known me for decades and surely ought to have started adjusting for this *eventually*.)

[contrarianarchon]

I match with much of this - the "Am upset, so I am in more trouble because I cannot generate precise and accurate descriptions, messy approximations generate more confusion and upset" seems to be a pretty clear pattern that happens to me a lot. That seems to me like it *has* to be a fundamental trait of everyone right?

(Also "Starting sentences and having to abort them halfway through because I realize any possible termination will be nonsense" - it doesn't happen to me *often* but it *does happen*.)

So I think I'm absolutely on the garbled side of things. (Also the "Adapatation to the expectation that people will cut you off" thing sounds correct - I remember have many arguments in that general domain with my mother as a child).

Note: I am not diagnosed autistic, though that is "Parental refusal to consider possibility on principle (the principle being that seeing a psychologist is a sign of weakness and we're in an unusually poor place to avoid gossip about the matter)" as much as it is "I don't lean in that direction". But I am unwilling to actually self-diagnose minor symptoms into a Thing without professional consideration.

Oh, also on the object level: I feel like I have a switch that makes my internal monologue go through my mouth instead of my brain - it's a good switch that's pretty much never in the wrong place as far as I can tell, but I basically get one of the other - a lot of social advice gets parsed as "but I was talking at the time, what do you mean I'm supposed to *also* run a mental thread trying to tell what's going on - that would require me to shut up and shift resources to thinking about conversation-meta". That is b-tier introspection and may turn out to be circumstantially or totally wrong.

... wow this had a lot of disclaimers that I'm bad at actually knowing what is going on inside my head doesn't it. That *is* true though, so they're important. I don't understand how people can generate useful data about themselves because the act of getting data is so disruptive to actually doing things?