pendragyn:

scriptautistic:

Perhaps the most immediately recognizable trait that most autistic people have is difficulty with eye contact. It’s one of the first signs doctors use to look for autism in young children, before language skills would be expected to develop, and it lasts throughout our lives.

Like all of these traits, it’s important to understand this issue from the point of view of your autistic character. (And also like every trait, it’s important to remember that everyone is different, and there are autistic people out there who naturally make eye contact in the typical way and for whom the info in this post does not apply.)

Many autistic people have difficulty explaining why they have a problem with eye contact. First and foremost, it does not come naturally. There is no instinct to look someone in the eye while engaging them in conversation.

Mod Cat says:
“I don’t actually know how to make eye contact. I can’t look at both eyes at the same time. Which eye am I supposed to look at? How do I choose? Do I change periodically? The funny thing is, I didn’t even notice this difficulty before I was about 17, which says a lot about how often I do make eye contact.”

There are autistic adults who seem to make eye contact normally (or almost normally), but this is something learned and trained through repetition. Also, for many of us, most of the time it’s faked.
Faked? Fake eye contact? Yes, you read that correctly. Making real eye contact is actually not nearly as necessary as you might think. There is an area around your eyes we can use as a fakeout zone. If someone is looking within this area, it will look to you like they’re looking you in the eye.

Mod Aira says:
“I had exactly the same issue as Cat regarding eye contact. People were always telling me to ‘look them in the eye’ while I was talking to them, but that was an illogical statement. Which eye? I can’t look in both! No one ever explained it, and I couldn’t figure out how to ask. Whenever I tried, I was accused of being sarcastic and rude, which confused me a great deal. Finally, when I was in my twenties, one person recognized that I was autistic and took the time to explain to me how typical eye contact works. She told me you pick one eye and look at that, then switch now and then. When I found that this made me incredibly uncomfortable and was even painful, she instead taught me how to fake it.”

Try it sometime. Sit with a friend (as many of us have done during our lives) and test out different areas. Have the friend raise their hand when they think you’re looking them in the eye. You might be surprised just how far away your eyeline can be before it becomes noticeable.

This is how Mod Aira personally manages eye contact. “As an accommodation to those around me who are not autistic, I do my best to give the illusion of eye contact whenever possible. I know that a lack of eye contact is uncomfortable for them.” This is something else to note for your characters: autistic people generally spend a lot of time thinking about how they affect those around them, out of necessity as well as empathy.
So there you have the how of eye contact – what about the why? What is it that makes eye contact so difficult for autistic people, to the point where we have to fake it? There are a few reasons and, as with everything else, each person has a different combination of these.

It’s scary. When we look in someone’s eyes, we are overwhelmed. It can feel like their eyes are about to suck you in. It can also feel like they are staring directly into your soul. Since so many of us are incredibly sensitive and hyper-empathetic, we feel an intense discomfort from knowing that someone is looking directly into our eyes. We can be afraid of what they see there. We can get an overwhelming feeling that they will find something wrong, some mistake, some secret. It feels like a massive invasion of privacy, like they’re staring at you naked.

It’s painful. As a part of physical hypersensitivity, there is an incredible amount of information to be found in someone’s eyes. All those little details can hurt to look at, as our brains struggle to keep up with the constant flow of tiny changes. The pain can be physical, like a piercing feeling behind the eyes, a headache, or a feeling like there’s electricity zapping you from inside your head. It’s awful.

It’s distracting. Processing information can be difficult and take a lot of time, and it takes energy to process visual or auditory information. Since conversations are difficult for us in many ways, we really need to focus all our energy on listening to and understanding what the other person is saying. If we’re focusing on remembering to make eye contact (which, remember, doesn’t come naturally), it means we’re paying less attention to what the person is actually saying. Processing both the visual and auditory information takes so long that we can’t keep up with the conversation. Very often, we have to choose between listening and appearing to be listening. Interestingly, some of us find that it’s more effective socially to focus on eye contact while pretending to listen.

Mod Aira says:
“I have to choose between listening and appearing to be listening. I would prefer to actually listen, but processing speech is incredibly difficult for me. To really listen and understand, I have to either close my eyes and focus all my energy on listening, or look at your mouth and watch your lips move, which helps me understand the words you’re saying. I’m a primarily visual thinker, so looking at someone’s lips really helps a lot. But I’ve found that allistic people don’t like this. Even if I assure them that I’m paying attention, they think I’m being rude or not listening. Often they will simply stop talking, convinced I’m not listening anyway. On the other hand, if I focus on eye contact, I can only really process the tone of what you’re saying, and some of the words. But when I do this, look between someone’s eyes and nod when they do, laugh when they do, respond to their tone as well as I can, I find that people accept this positively. Even if I don’t remember anything they said, they still think I was paying attention. It’s very frustrating.”

An autistic person might try to explain this to close friends and family in the hopes that they can ignore eye contact without accusations of “not paying attention.” Sometimes this works, and when it does, it’s a massive relief. To be able to carry on a conversation without worrying about eye contact at all lifts a huge burden. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t work. Many people demand that the autistic person “put in the effort” to appear normal and accommodate those around them, or accuse them of using their autism as an “excuse” to be “lazy” and “rude”. There will be more on reactions like this in another post.

On the other hand, not everyone has the luxury of even trying to explain themselves in this way. They might not know they are autistic (in which case they’re probably constantly confused by social interactions and why people seem to get upset for no reason). They might know they’re autistic but not have an official diagnosis, and be afraid of being told they’re a hypochondriac, lying, or making it up for attention (something that happens a lot). They might simply be afraid of how people will treat them if they find out they’re autistic, and often, there is good reason to fear. In circumstances like these, the person is probably trying their best to succeed at social interactions, but frequently getting bad reactions from people who think they’re rude, selfish, aloof, not paying attention, etc.

When you write your autistic character(s), you have the freedom to mix and match from this list. Maybe they are afraid of eye contact but don’t know why. Or maybe it hurts, and they know exactly why. Or maybe they have no trouble with eye contact. Maybe they fake it, maybe they endure and do it for real, or maybe they rebel against society’s expectations and don’t bother at all. You have a lot of freedom here.
Happy writing!

I find this really interesting because I’ve always had an issue with eye contact making me feel uncomfortable. To me it feels aggressive and very disconcerting to have prolonged eye contact, even with close family. I too watch lips, because I have a hard time hearing people if there’s a lot of background noise. The only times I recall making prolonged eye contact was when I was super pissed off and both times resulted in the other person crying and leaving. I don’t have a formal diagnosis but this reinforces some other things that make me think I should see if I can get a evaluated.

I actually wouldn’t say that there’s anybody who “naturally make[s] eye contact in the typical way”, as much as expectations of how that’s even supposed to work can vary. There are definitely people who have more or less difficulty with meeting the expectations placed on them.

I mean, I’m coming from a culture where the type of sustained eye contact some other people consider “natural” does come across as aggressive. Some very different expected patterns there, so that mine never even really stood out as particularly odd. I had no idea what was going on at first when I got hold of teachers who turned just plain abusive about the issue. (While no doubt wondering wtf was wrong with me that I just kept defying them…)

The big thing there for me is that I am also totally shit at that kind of code switching, even after finding out what the problem was even supposed to be. I’m one of the people who does find some other expectations there near impossible to manage, between the personal discomfort and sustained eye contact continuing to feel very aggressive in most situations because early cultural training. Probably most nonautistic people would have less trouble there, but it’s been a bad combo for me. Especially now, living somewhere that expectations around a lot of things are very different.

Pointing out this other set of factors mostly because so many actual professionals (much less teachers and other people in positions of power) really don’t get it. And often don’t even try before making some really unflattering judgy assumptions, regardless of the reason(s) kids in particular aren’t showing exactly the body language and other behavior they expect.

That’s another story, but unfortunately relevant to so many things. There is no “natural” there, which can make the potential for misunderstandings extra frustrating. It’s also something good to remember when writing, especially involving characters from sufficiently different backgrounds.