Here is a template (feel free to use) that you might find useful as an introductory message if you find it hard to consider how your actions make other people feel:
Do you subscribe to Crooker’s rules? Did you notice that Eliezer sometimes seems inconsiderate of people’s emotions, when he just shoots down one (bad) alignment idea after the other? He just says things like “No, this does not work.” My guess is that there are some algorithms missing from his brain or are atrophied, just like for me. For me, it’s pretty hard to take into account how other people will feel when I say something. It’s just not something that comes naturally and I need to be very explicitly thinking about this in order to make what I say not come across as offensive.
Basically, I think it would be good if you model me as a person who is missing the hardware in his brain which is automatically inferring how I will make people feel with my actions. I need to repurpose some other machinery for this, which takes a lot more effort and is slower. Often people call this autism, but I think my description is more precise and useful for telling other people what is going on, such that they understand.
And it seems very clear that there is a big gap. For example, Buck once said that he does not like to shoot down the ideas of other people because he does not want them to feel bad. At that moment I realized that I could not remember that this thought ever occurred to me. It seemed very alien, but also obviously good. Of course, I don’t want to make people feel bad. But even the possibility of this happening was, I noticed, missing from my world model.
It would make things easier for me if I could not worry about this too much. If you subscribe to Crooker’s rules then I could optimize my messages only for content. For example, if you subscribe to Crooker’s rules then I could just not optimize my messages at all for sounding nice.
If you find that my mode of communication causes you emotional trouble, we could always revert back to me optimizing more for not sounding harsh.
Some harsh things I might do are:
I write a thousands-of-word document describing how you’re wrong on a particular topic, which makes it seem like I’m really critical of what you do and don’t think it’s good at all, when in fact I mean something more like, look here are some issues I think I discovered and I’m not even thinking about the implicit message that I send by sending a long document that just contains criticism.
I use phrases like <No/wrong...[Explanation]/This doesn’t make sense/This doesn’t work>
I am going to assume you subscribe to crooker’s rules. I am happy to with you.
I think this places a big burden on someone to read all this text. I think that it depends which space you are in, but for most spaces it’s typical to escalate to this kind of communication rather than start there and leave if people want.
Good point. Probably there is a one-paragraph version of this that would be sufficient. I think escalating can be fine, though I think it is always better to be explicit about it, and at least at some point go “Let’s do Crocker’s rules and its opt-out.” That makes it clear that opting out is an acceptable action. I think it’s also good to raise the awareness of optimizing the communication for usefulness. Sometimes I talk to people and then start out just saying nice nices of how good everything is that I am doing at a very superficial level. And that is not useful at all.
Many people do not think opting out is an acceptable action. That’s the problem here. There isn’t a perfect signal or secret code to smooth discourse at the right level.
You can say “Ouch that hurt me emotionally, I would like this to not happen again.” Then you can both think about how to prevent this in the future and change your behavior accordingly, such that you incrementally converge onto a good conversation norm. I think something like this is the right approach.
I have some reflections around this that you might, or might not find interesting. The reason I wanted to comment is that I wanted to write about some experiences in a fitting context, and this seemed a good match. Here goes.
My frame of thinking takes reference from MBTI, or more specific the concept of cognitive functions—or how I see it, small people in my brain, that live really different lives.
Optimizing for information is something I care about myself, and I relate it to my Ti (Introverted thinking), and since my partner has a lot of Fe (extroverted feeling), there are/have been a lot of ruffled feathers. Long story short, when I read people say that they “don’t want to sound harsh”, usually what I interpret that to mean is that they focus on Thinking (Cognitive functions), when the other person they are talking to is more Feeling (Cognitive functions).
In my experience, and since me and my partner introspect a lot, one thing that became quite clear to me is that I have “emotions” in my thinking function; they are just different. I will care about values like transparency, honesty, fairness and cooperation—And I perceive an increase in these values, I feel emotions like willingness, dedication, trustful and/or engaged—and when they are opposed or things go wrong, I feel disgruntled, entangled, discouraged and/or lost. And surprisingly, and uncomfortable, my ‘rational, thinking, masculine side’ was full of emotions—just not the kind of “emotions” that I am conditioned to describe as emotions/feelings.
What I also noticed more and more as time went by—that by not myself acknowledging, and by not getting recognition from my partner with regard to my emotions in my Thinking, I noticed that I felt hurt and dejected. These more intense feelings, I automatically tried to hide beneath technical, rational, meta and structured words and sentences, and to not feel them and recognize them.
Now, your case might be different, but I also wonder if culture plays a role in what “emotions” we see in others, and for many people here on LW, a forum where as far as I can remember the last “test” showed is inhabited by many INTP’s, don’t really get a lot of recognition for the kind of feelings they have—and might also reject the ‘logic’ of feelings themselves, as it (on the surface) seems to contradict the rationality of their beliefs.
My second point is in regard to “hurting the feelings of others” as opposed to “Trying to convey a message”. What our exercises together also showed me, was that my perception of Extroverted Feeling, what I regard as the “I feel hurt by words”-part, isn’t a function that is ‘simple’. The ability and complexity that this function can hold with regard to holding dualities and opposites, is just as ‘information efficient’ as my own.
Usually, the reason I would resort to “more thinking” in the face of “more emotion” was simply that I got overwhelmed. In the face of something that is really difficult or hard, I at least try to make it easier. Trying to deal with a tornado is much easier inside my rational fortress—but I’m not really fully challenging my inability to hold space for the chaos in the Fe space. Which relates to the last things you wrote, that I also just assume that my default state of mind is the “right one” for a specific situation, when in fact it is just my default one, not a conscious choice.
As far as I know this is the first comment I have made to you, so I hope it lands relatively well. I did read a little bit about you in your bio, and saw your photo, but that might not be enough to gauge correctly.
Do I understand correctly that you think I am ignoring my emotions and that this is a problem? I agree that it is terrible to ignore your emotions and I am trying to not do this. I definitely feel emotions and in my experience not acknowledging them makes things just a lot worse.
I can definitely feel very hurt when people say extremely negative critiques about something that I am saying. And I know that this can be pretty harmful because it uncontrollably activates some reinforcement mechanism in my brain changing me for the worse. At least I think very often for me it has been for the worse. So not being aware of this mechanism and how it interacts with emotion is not a good thing.
So I’m not sure what to take from this message as it seems like I already was aware of the problems you were pointing out. Of course, I think I’m not really as good as I could be at recognizing emotions and handling them correctly.
I’m a bit confused. Do you understand the concept of not having some hardware in your brain that other people have? Here is an interesting thing that happened to me when I was a child. Other people would sometimes bully me. However, I was unable to project a harmful intent onto their actions. And then the bullying didn’t work at all. Because I failed to recognize that a piece of language was supposed to hurt me, it didn’t. That is pretty funny I think.
I think the only way this can happen is if you’re just missing some functionality in your brain for understanding the actions, intentions, and emotions of other people. I think that is the case for me, But I am not sure if this is the case for you. I think this is a very important distinction.
thanks for you reply, and to answer the last part first—if you are referring to some specific function, than that might be the case, and some of what I say might not apply.
I’m not saying you are ignoring your emotions. The point I am trying to get across is how little awareness I, without missing that specific functionality you talk about, have of how emotions feel. Or even what kinds of emotions it is possible to feel. So even when we aren’t intentionally ignoring them, we might still be unable to see them. Similarly to how people that aren’t really familiar with birds can’t really differentiate between the numerous kinds or separate their calls. Moreover, what might also contribute to mask exploration and self-understanding, might be things like upbringing and culture, not inability, unwillingness or “not being emotional”.
My idea was that even if you are different, you might also have similar issues with awareness; that you also haven’t really delved into what you feel, and connected that to the stimulus that created it. If you are on the spectrum, I would assume that the responses and feedback you get are even less useful than what I have gotten. I mean, if you look at something like a chart of emotions, like this one from NVC, it at least became pretty apparent to me that my understanding of emotions was sorely lacking. One thing is to have heard the words, similar to have heard the different bird names, another is to with increasing accuracy pinpoint and differentiate them in the real world, or in this case, in my own body and mind.
And with regard to the bullying, I can see your point, and yes, I do recognize that there can be a fundamental difference between people. My point wasn’t to disregard that, or to not recognize your effort of self-understanding. My point was to maybe show that what can be an initial difference might increase in size from a lack of good feedback and understanding.
I’m not sure if that clarifies things for you. I wasn’t expecting to step on your toes somehow, but it seems I did… So ironically enough it seems we are playing out what you talked about, just inversely, where you seem to be the one being hurt by what I wrote, where my intentions weren’t really to disregard or not respect you, or to imply that you have to change or be different. I wrote about it as it seemed to fit with some experiences I have myself, and so I wrote a reply to you.
...where you seem to be the one being hurt by what I wrote…
LOL, what makes you think that? I experienced no negative emotions while engaging with your content. At least that’s what it feels like retrospectively. Maybe I failed to see some subtle ones, but certainly, there were no strong/medium negative feelings. I was simply trying to understand what you were saying. In fact, I remember thinking something like “Hmm interesting let’s see if this person says stuff about how I am failing such that I can do better”, and that was a thought with positive valence.
I think now I understand better. My model this far has been that in the past I have been suppressing my emotions. That definitely happened. But now I have updated my model so that I probably very often was unaware of them. Being unaware and suppressing emotions seems different and independent. I can be angry and not aware that I am angry, not noticing how it changes my behavior. That is different from suppressing the anger, trying to not have it influence your behavior. Though I am pretty sure that you can suppress emotions without being aware of them. I think that is probably what happened most of the time.
To be clear I am not saying that the part of my brain that feels my emotions is atrophied. I am not sure about this. It’s hard to say not having any reference frame (for interpreting the emotions of others you can get a reference frame).
Actually, now realize that a major part of how I realized that I am missing certain brain functions is that other autistic people were hunting me unintentionally because they just did not realize the emotions they were creating in me. And then I realized that I was doing the same. But this I think really did not happen here. When these autistic people hurt me on accident, it was so over the top what they were saying that people normally laugh if I tell them what they said.
It is good to hear you say that you don’t experience it that way, and I may be overly focused on many subtle and incredible minor emotional nuances, many of which probably aren’t really relevant in our specific interaction anyway. Good to know that those are overshadowed by the positive valence, so I’ll just focus less on that.
Yes, I agree with you on the differentiation. Especially to me, the tell-tale signs have been minor changes in behavior, more than distinct or detectable emotional sensations.
If I follow the logic I have proposed so far, and since you can feel emotions, are you sure you don’t have an emotional reference frame for other people—or are you only sure that your reference frame is wholly different from non-autistic people? To me at least there is a big difference between feeling Nothing at all, and feeling Something, but it ‘seems’ useless when it comes to predicting and understanding people. If what you feel is in the latter category, I wonder what you sense or feel, as it might be a social emotion. I’m not asking you to tell me, but I just believe it might potentially be relevant in a social context.
Again, I’m not saying you have a hidden superpower or anything, I just wonder if specific kinds of awareness of emotions might give you a different angle with which to react and understand others and yourself—and that this might also be quite interesting for a willing recipient to connect with.
I mean, if it is related to mirroring or something, I guess what you feel might be unrelated to what is happening with/to the other person—but I do not want to go there yet, at least if you aren’t sure about it.
Ah, I have two major experiences with autism. One was as a support person for an autistic person, but they also had some developmental issues, so there was that as well. I remember feeling as some sort of fixation-point, that they kind of couldn’t maneuver in the world without me. They felt more like a chick dependent on their mother, but as this person was older than me and pretty strong, I did feel a bit anxious that they didn’t understand ‘No’ or ‘Stop’. They only understood being physically taught things by repeated example, to a degree.
The other experience is meeting a young youth sitting alone on a bench outside a church. Not anything special by itself, were it not for the fact that it was getting late at night on the weekends and in a big city. I remember sitting down and saying hello, and kind of just trying to figure out what was going on. Simple questions, which were met initially with short responses, and to me red flags about something being wrong. So I asked more directly what was up, not sure how, but then they suddenly gave me this in depth sitrep of what had happened at home, how they got angry, left the home and came here… I noticed how open they were, the way you talk to close friends, not strangers you just met. The kind of personal and private detailed information you share with close ones, not people you just met. Well, to be on the safe side I decided to accompany them home to where they lived—relieved parents, even drove me home. Later I got a call from that person, asking me if I wanted to step in as their “support person”, as he was sick or something. I said yes, and my experience those hours was that they couldn’t really stop talking about what they were interested in, but I mean that isn’t really unnatural and I found the level of detail quite interesting. All youths have quirks of some kind, and so they weren’t really a person that was hard to be with. However, it wasn’t like they took turns with regard to conversation, and so I noticed that they would answer questions, but not really interact with me in the same way. Again, it isn’t like it is totally uncommon to have youth ignore you and rant on and on about their interests, but they did not read social cues the way I am used to. So I could understand how the people around them, in school especially, didn’t really have the patience or lacked the skill to work with the differences, and so they felt really alone without friends in School.
I mean, my understanding is that understanding emotions also is a social process—but even though nobody would really think I wasn’t emotive, as I am decently sensitive and read cues well, I am learning a lot of emotions I am/were unaware of. I mean, it is probably pretty advanced compared to the norm, but some of it is basic, it was just mislabeled. So I wonder if the same might be the case for you, or if it might be a very different situation.
You are the expert when it comes to you, so even though I hope to write something that fits, it might not be quite right for you—but I do hope it might be useful nevertheless, as it is to me.
Yes, I would, because then I would need to use that social inference engine that is <atrophied/not exsistant> in my brain. I don’t remember what they said, but I don’t think it was very ambiguous to anyone but me.
Here is a template (feel free to use) that you might find useful as an introductory message if you find it hard to consider how your actions make other people feel:
Do you subscribe to Crooker’s rules? Did you notice that Eliezer sometimes seems inconsiderate of people’s emotions, when he just shoots down one (bad) alignment idea after the other? He just says things like “No, this does not work.” My guess is that there are some algorithms missing from his brain or are atrophied, just like for me. For me, it’s pretty hard to take into account how other people will feel when I say something. It’s just not something that comes naturally and I need to be very explicitly thinking about this in order to make what I say not come across as offensive.
Basically, I think it would be good if you model me as a person who is missing the hardware in his brain which is automatically inferring how I will make people feel with my actions. I need to repurpose some other machinery for this, which takes a lot more effort and is slower. Often people call this autism, but I think my description is more precise and useful for telling other people what is going on, such that they understand.
And it seems very clear that there is a big gap. For example, Buck once said that he does not like to shoot down the ideas of other people because he does not want them to feel bad. At that moment I realized that I could not remember that this thought ever occurred to me. It seemed very alien, but also obviously good. Of course, I don’t want to make people feel bad. But even the possibility of this happening was, I noticed, missing from my world model.
It would make things easier for me if I could not worry about this too much. If you subscribe to Crooker’s rules then I could optimize my messages only for content. For example, if you subscribe to Crooker’s rules then I could just not optimize my messages at all for sounding nice.
If you find that my mode of communication causes you emotional trouble, we could always revert back to me optimizing more for not sounding harsh.
Some harsh things I might do are:
I write a thousands-of-word document describing how you’re wrong on a particular topic, which makes it seem like I’m really critical of what you do and don’t think it’s good at all, when in fact I mean something more like, look here are some issues I think I discovered and I’m not even thinking about the implicit message that I send by sending a long document that just contains criticism.
I use phrases like <No/wrong...[Explanation]/This doesn’t make sense/This doesn’t work>
I am going to assume you subscribe to crooker’s rules. I am happy to with you.
I think this places a big burden on someone to read all this text. I think that it depends which space you are in, but for most spaces it’s typical to escalate to this kind of communication rather than start there and leave if people want.
Good point. Probably there is a one-paragraph version of this that would be sufficient. I think escalating can be fine, though I think it is always better to be explicit about it, and at least at some point go “Let’s do Crocker’s rules and its opt-out.” That makes it clear that opting out is an acceptable action. I think it’s also good to raise the awareness of optimizing the communication for usefulness. Sometimes I talk to people and then start out just saying nice nices of how good everything is that I am doing at a very superficial level. And that is not useful at all.
Many people do not think opting out is an acceptable action. That’s the problem here. There isn’t a perfect signal or secret code to smooth discourse at the right level.
You can say “Ouch that hurt me emotionally, I would like this to not happen again.” Then you can both think about how to prevent this in the future and change your behavior accordingly, such that you incrementally converge onto a good conversation norm. I think something like this is the right approach.
Hello Johannes,
I have some reflections around this that you might, or might not find interesting. The reason I wanted to comment is that I wanted to write about some experiences in a fitting context, and this seemed a good match. Here goes.
My frame of thinking takes reference from MBTI, or more specific the concept of cognitive functions—or how I see it, small people in my brain, that live really different lives.
Optimizing for information is something I care about myself, and I relate it to my Ti (Introverted thinking), and since my partner has a lot of Fe (extroverted feeling), there are/have been a lot of ruffled feathers. Long story short, when I read people say that they “don’t want to sound harsh”, usually what I interpret that to mean is that they focus on Thinking (Cognitive functions), when the other person they are talking to is more Feeling (Cognitive functions).
In my experience, and since me and my partner introspect a lot, one thing that became quite clear to me is that I have “emotions” in my thinking function; they are just different. I will care about values like transparency, honesty, fairness and cooperation—And I perceive an increase in these values, I feel emotions like willingness, dedication, trustful and/or engaged—and when they are opposed or things go wrong, I feel disgruntled, entangled, discouraged and/or lost.
And surprisingly, and uncomfortable, my ‘rational, thinking, masculine side’ was full of emotions—just not the kind of “emotions” that I am conditioned to describe as emotions/feelings.
What I also noticed more and more as time went by—that by not myself acknowledging, and by not getting recognition from my partner with regard to my emotions in my Thinking, I noticed that I felt hurt and dejected. These more intense feelings, I automatically tried to hide beneath technical, rational, meta and structured words and sentences, and to not feel them and recognize them.
Now, your case might be different, but I also wonder if culture plays a role in what “emotions” we see in others, and for many people here on LW, a forum where as far as I can remember the last “test” showed is inhabited by many INTP’s, don’t really get a lot of recognition for the kind of feelings they have—and might also reject the ‘logic’ of feelings themselves, as it (on the surface) seems to contradict the rationality of their beliefs.
My second point is in regard to “hurting the feelings of others” as opposed to “Trying to convey a message”. What our exercises together also showed me, was that my perception of Extroverted Feeling, what I regard as the “I feel hurt by words”-part, isn’t a function that is ‘simple’. The ability and complexity that this function can hold with regard to holding dualities and opposites, is just as ‘information efficient’ as my own.
Usually, the reason I would resort to “more thinking” in the face of “more emotion” was simply that I got overwhelmed. In the face of something that is really difficult or hard, I at least try to make it easier. Trying to deal with a tornado is much easier inside my rational fortress—but I’m not really fully challenging my inability to hold space for the chaos in the Fe space. Which relates to the last things you wrote, that I also just assume that my default state of mind is the “right one” for a specific situation, when in fact it is just my default one, not a conscious choice.
As far as I know this is the first comment I have made to you, so I hope it lands relatively well. I did read a little bit about you in your bio, and saw your photo, but that might not be enough to gauge correctly.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Do I understand correctly that you think I am ignoring my emotions and that this is a problem? I agree that it is terrible to ignore your emotions and I am trying to not do this. I definitely feel emotions and in my experience not acknowledging them makes things just a lot worse.
I can definitely feel very hurt when people say extremely negative critiques about something that I am saying. And I know that this can be pretty harmful because it uncontrollably activates some reinforcement mechanism in my brain changing me for the worse. At least I think very often for me it has been for the worse. So not being aware of this mechanism and how it interacts with emotion is not a good thing.
So I’m not sure what to take from this message as it seems like I already was aware of the problems you were pointing out. Of course, I think I’m not really as good as I could be at recognizing emotions and handling them correctly.
I’m a bit confused. Do you understand the concept of not having some hardware in your brain that other people have? Here is an interesting thing that happened to me when I was a child. Other people would sometimes bully me. However, I was unable to project a harmful intent onto their actions. And then the bullying didn’t work at all. Because I failed to recognize that a piece of language was supposed to hurt me, it didn’t. That is pretty funny I think.
I think the only way this can happen is if you’re just missing some functionality in your brain for understanding the actions, intentions, and emotions of other people. I think that is the case for me, But I am not sure if this is the case for you. I think this is a very important distinction.
Hello again,
thanks for you reply, and to answer the last part first—if you are referring to some specific function, than that might be the case, and some of what I say might not apply.
I’m not saying you are ignoring your emotions. The point I am trying to get across is how little awareness I, without missing that specific functionality you talk about, have of how emotions feel. Or even what kinds of emotions it is possible to feel. So even when we aren’t intentionally ignoring them, we might still be unable to see them. Similarly to how people that aren’t really familiar with birds can’t really differentiate between the numerous kinds or separate their calls.
Moreover, what might also contribute to mask exploration and self-understanding, might be things like upbringing and culture, not inability, unwillingness or “not being emotional”.
My idea was that even if you are different, you might also have similar issues with awareness; that you also haven’t really delved into what you feel, and connected that to the stimulus that created it. If you are on the spectrum, I would assume that the responses and feedback you get are even less useful than what I have gotten. I mean, if you look at something like a chart of emotions, like this one from NVC, it at least became pretty apparent to me that my understanding of emotions was sorely lacking. One thing is to have heard the words, similar to have heard the different bird names, another is to with increasing accuracy pinpoint and differentiate them in the real world, or in this case, in my own body and mind.
And with regard to the bullying, I can see your point, and yes, I do recognize that there can be a fundamental difference between people. My point wasn’t to disregard that, or to not recognize your effort of self-understanding. My point was to maybe show that what can be an initial difference might increase in size from a lack of good feedback and understanding.
I’m not sure if that clarifies things for you. I wasn’t expecting to step on your toes somehow, but it seems I did… So ironically enough it seems we are playing out what you talked about, just inversely, where you seem to be the one being hurt by what I wrote, where my intentions weren’t really to disregard or not respect you, or to imply that you have to change or be different. I wrote about it as it seemed to fit with some experiences I have myself, and so I wrote a reply to you.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
I think now I understand better. My model this far has been that in the past I have been suppressing my emotions. That definitely happened. But now I have updated my model so that I probably very often was unaware of them. Being unaware and suppressing emotions seems different and independent. I can be angry and not aware that I am angry, not noticing how it changes my behavior. That is different from suppressing the anger, trying to not have it influence your behavior. Though I am pretty sure that you can suppress emotions without being aware of them. I think that is probably what happened most of the time.
To be clear I am not saying that the part of my brain that feels my emotions is atrophied. I am not sure about this. It’s hard to say not having any reference frame (for interpreting the emotions of others you can get a reference frame).
Actually, now realize that a major part of how I realized that I am missing certain brain functions is that other autistic people were hunting me unintentionally because they just did not realize the emotions they were creating in me. And then I realized that I was doing the same. But this I think really did not happen here. When these autistic people hurt me on accident, it was so over the top what they were saying that people normally laugh if I tell them what they said.
Hi again,
It is good to hear you say that you don’t experience it that way, and I may be overly focused on many subtle and incredible minor emotional nuances, many of which probably aren’t really relevant in our specific interaction anyway. Good to know that those are overshadowed by the positive valence, so I’ll just focus less on that.
Yes, I agree with you on the differentiation. Especially to me, the tell-tale signs have been minor changes in behavior, more than distinct or detectable emotional sensations.
If I follow the logic I have proposed so far, and since you can feel emotions, are you sure you don’t have an emotional reference frame for other people—or are you only sure that your reference frame is wholly different from non-autistic people?
To me at least there is a big difference between feeling Nothing at all, and feeling Something, but it ‘seems’ useless when it comes to predicting and understanding people. If what you feel is in the latter category, I wonder what you sense or feel, as it might be a social emotion. I’m not asking you to tell me, but I just believe it might potentially be relevant in a social context.
Again, I’m not saying you have a hidden superpower or anything, I just wonder if specific kinds of awareness of emotions might give you a different angle with which to react and understand others and yourself—and that this might also be quite interesting for a willing recipient to connect with.
I mean, if it is related to mirroring or something, I guess what you feel might be unrelated to what is happening with/to the other person—but I do not want to go there yet, at least if you aren’t sure about it.
Ah, I have two major experiences with autism. One was as a support person for an autistic person, but they also had some developmental issues, so there was that as well. I remember feeling as some sort of fixation-point, that they kind of couldn’t maneuver in the world without me. They felt more like a chick dependent on their mother, but as this person was older than me and pretty strong, I did feel a bit anxious that they didn’t understand ‘No’ or ‘Stop’. They only understood being physically taught things by repeated example, to a degree.
The other experience is meeting a young youth sitting alone on a bench outside a church. Not anything special by itself, were it not for the fact that it was getting late at night on the weekends and in a big city.
I remember sitting down and saying hello, and kind of just trying to figure out what was going on. Simple questions, which were met initially with short responses, and to me red flags about something being wrong. So I asked more directly what was up, not sure how, but then they suddenly gave me this in depth sitrep of what had happened at home, how they got angry, left the home and came here… I noticed how open they were, the way you talk to close friends, not strangers you just met. The kind of personal and private detailed information you share with close ones, not people you just met. Well, to be on the safe side I decided to accompany them home to where they lived—relieved parents, even drove me home. Later I got a call from that person, asking me if I wanted to step in as their “support person”, as he was sick or something.
I said yes, and my experience those hours was that they couldn’t really stop talking about what they were interested in, but I mean that isn’t really unnatural and I found the level of detail quite interesting. All youths have quirks of some kind, and so they weren’t really a person that was hard to be with. However, it wasn’t like they took turns with regard to conversation, and so I noticed that they would answer questions, but not really interact with me in the same way. Again, it isn’t like it is totally uncommon to have youth ignore you and rant on and on about their interests, but they did not read social cues the way I am used to. So I could understand how the people around them, in school especially, didn’t really have the patience or lacked the skill to work with the differences, and so they felt really alone without friends in School.
I mean, my understanding is that understanding emotions also is a social process—but even though nobody would really think I wasn’t emotive, as I am decently sensitive and read cues well, I am learning a lot of emotions I am/were unaware of. I mean, it is probably pretty advanced compared to the norm, but some of it is basic, it was just mislabeled. So I wonder if the same might be the case for you, or if it might be a very different situation.
You are the expert when it comes to you, so even though I hope to write something that fits, it might not be quite right for you—but I do hope it might be useful nevertheless, as it is to me.
Kindly
Sometimes bullying is plausibly deniable. Just in case an adult would accidentally see it.
If they punched you instead, I suppose you would interpret it correctly.
Yes, I would, because then I would need to use that social inference engine that is <atrophied/not exsistant> in my brain. I don’t remember what they said, but I don’t think it was very ambiguous to anyone but me.