lenyberry:

fierceawakening:

lenyberry:

I wanna Say Things about theory-of-mind failures and how aggravating it is to be the person who actually recognizes them happening (thanks to a lifetime of being forced to git gud at a thing that pretty much all humans are naturally bad at) and is trying to compensate for them as much as possible on her own end, and then is still getting accused of only thinking of themself. 

But I don’t know how to say them and tie it in to the topic at hand, without writing a rambling and semi-incoherent essay that only maybe 1 person will even bother trying to read and then probably fixate on some weird detail which is entirely tangential to the point, and miss the actual point entirely. I’ve tried three times and then deleted them knowing there’s no way they’ll hit the mark I’m trying to hit.

I can’t promise I’ll understand but I’d like to see this.

Ok, I’ve had a break and some food and got myself tea and now feel like my brain is being a little less “lol what are sentences and paragraphs”, let’s give it a try. I’ll just reblog here @fierceawakening​ so you’ll be likely to see the notification, since you expressed interest. Can’t promise it’ll be totally clear, and it’s definitely not gonna be very concise, but I’m gonna have a go at it.

It’s about… well, I’ll illustrate it as I see it, rather than trying to break it down to abstracts (blockquoting the part that’s “illustration of the thing” to make it more clear where the illustration ends and the explaining-my-point begins): 

You made a post, in which you didn’t “at” anyone or make any claims about specific people doing anything wrong, expressing a frustration with a thing people do that bothers you. 

Some people took issue with that post, thinking that you meant something you didn’t mean at all, complaining that you misinterpreted them (misinterpretation on both sides; a simple mismatch of communication, with both sides having assumed that their meaning should be clear enough on its own to not need further clarification). 

They complained of the existence of a dynamic wherein they point out something that bothers them, and someone else starts crying about it and makes their tears the focal point of the interaction – and then proceeded to come to you with descriptions of their tears (in an online, text-based forum where no one knows if you’re crying unless you say so) expecting you to center THEIR feelings on the matter, one which you originally initiated by complaining of something that bothers you.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think they were fully aware of this or being manipulative on purpose. The point I’m getting at is that, to them, I believe they honestly believed they were doing something significantly different in nature than the thing they were complaining about, because they felt differently about it – a theory of mind failure, in that they based their assumptions about objective reality including YOUR motivations and intentions, around what was happening in THEIR OWN minds, without considering that some people’s minds work differently than others for various reasons including both socialization and neurodiversity. 

And probably one of the most frustrating experiences of being neurodivergent, for me, is noticing things like that happening and knowing that I’m the kind of neurodivergent that’s stereotyped as “bad at theory of mind” (autistic), but recognizing that I’m not actually impaired at it more than average but everyone’s just kinda bad at it in general unless they put in a lot of work to get better at it, but because neurotypicals are a significant majority and people tend to naturally gravitate into social groups where everyone’s had similar socialization and has similar preferences (boys hang out with boys, girls hang out with girls, jocks hang out with jocks and nerds hang out with nerds), most people can skate by on the assumption that other people think the same way they do, because in the majority of their social interactions that assumption is more likely than not to be correct. But for neurodivergent kids, it doesn’t work that way – we’re unlikely to end up having much of an option to mostly socialize with people who think the same way we do. In most of our social interactions, the assumption that the other person’s motivations and likely reactions to various hypothetical actions we’re considering is more likely to prove false. So we’re forced to learn that we can’t rely on that, and to try to learn how to predict people’s behavior and suss out people’s motivations who are very unlike us – the whole time being saddled with 100% of the blame for all failures, because OBVIOUSLY if everyone ELSE in the room thinks what you did was rude, YOU should have known it would be rude as well – it’s… understandable, to an extent, but it really really sucks for neurodivergent kids, particularly those who are undiagnosed and thus being expected to behave “normally” and assumed to be acting out on purpose if they don’t…. anyway, the point is, all that childhood punishment for not being one of A) neurotypical or B) good at theory of mind, forced me to get better at theory of mind than probably most neurotypical people are – simply because they never had the impetus to notice their lack of skill and practice it, while for me it was a necessity if I wanted to have any social life whatsoever. 

Because I notice theory of mind failures in both myself and others, but they’re near-impossible to correct without everyone involved being on board with “ok, we all know that not all of us here have the same thought patterns, access to information, and motivations, right?” And it’s next to impossible to GET everyone on board with that when at least half of them have probably never even heard of theory of mind before, have never had reason to question their assumption that their own mental patterns are near-universal, and just flat out don’t even have a frame of reference for the subject at all, and I know that I only have any power over HALF the equation of communication anyway. And also because it’s only very recently that I gained the vocabulary to discuss the matter at all, rather than just kind of realizing that There Is That Thing Happening Where Other People Assume Silly Things About The Inside Of My Head and not being able to articulate it at all beyond just “no that’s not what I meant/why I did this/etc” (and then getting blamed for “not being clear”).

Anyway, hopefully that at least kinda got the gist of the thing. Feel free to ask for clarification if stuff’s confusing.