(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

[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?