say what you wanna say, & let the words fall out (don't run, just stop holding your tongue)

[erika]

So rydra_wong asked me how I learned to express my needs LIKE A MOTHERFUCKIN' ADULT:

I'd say there were probably some number of factors that I'm forgetting here, but here's my path:

Therapy.
In therapy I learned the basics, the kind of stuff I probably should have figured out as a kid but couldn't, for whatever reason (*cough* shitty parenting, as J would say).

Things like:

• Identifying my feelings—turns out when you [ignore/are not allowed to have] vast swathes of emotions, your ability to identify them goes down the tubes and they tend to get all murky and hard to define. Since feelings are a clue to what one needs, this is Ungood.



• Everyone has needs. (Yes, me too, evidently.)



• People will be harmed if their needs are not met. (Yes, me too. I side-eye this rather hard, because I would rather be a robot and never ever need maintenance, but that is not the world we live in sooooooooooo.)



• It is possible to get one's needs met skillfully and "harmless"ly rather than in ways that [demand more than the other person can give/manipulate the other person into giving you what you want/guilt-trip the other person/harm the other person in a way not mentioned]. (Yes, and I don't need to put up with this either, supposedly!)



• Mutual respect and appreciation for the other person in the relationship needs to be the BEDROCK of communication.

---

Friends!
In order to communicate like a mofo, first we need to know what has to be communicated. In general, things to be communicated include:

needs
wants
thoughts
dreams.

BUT WHAT, you say, WHAT IF I DON'T EVEN KNOW WTF THOSE ARE. I hear you, caps lock person! Therefore, here I'm going to link some posts from the board I moderate on identifying and meeting needs. They say it so much better than I can, seriously.

WINTERROSIE:
I needed to relearn that it's okay to have needs, and what might those be, anyway?

Lysergia: how to find out what your needs are - that's a hard one (seems like it should be easy but i know it's not). [...] when i was learning these things i needed someone to talk to me like i was five.

---

Buddhism has been a big help with my communication skills.

Some of my problems with communicating are that I dissociate frequently and have a lot of trouble identifyng when I have certain emotions, like anger. As you can imagine, this makes communication of needs a bitch.

However!

As Viktor Frankl said:

Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

You don't need to be a Buddhist to benefit from mindfulness and meditation. The space mentioned in that quote grows and becomes easier to identify, and that's where I find myself realizing I'm having an emotion.

Before I started meditation, I would react to a stimulus so quickly that my brain was like "oh, she doesn't even need to know she's upset, let's just start throwing poo!" Now I find that both my emotional response and my choice lie in the space between.

This is extremely beneficial to communication because! if I'm not having a kneejerk reflex reaction, I can choose to take the time to identify and communicate my needs.

I stress the choice repetitively because it is something I have to make a conscious effort to do, nearly every time. (Evidently I have some serious trust issues, but I'm working on that too.)

(I've really just dipped my toes into Buddhism——I have all the scary titled "when things are falling apart and you're a crazy person" books but haven't been able to get myself to read them, so whenever that day comes, I look forward to further discussion of how Buddhism is the ultimate '10% Happier' solution.)

---

Josh. Josh has been both a mentor and a tormentor (as my therapist says) in this fight learning experience.

(Tormentor in the sense that my therapist means: bringing up emotions that are hard to deal with.)

He learned to talk about his emotions and needs growing up thanks to his supportive father, but had a few girlfriends who literally told him that, for ex, crying wasn't manly. (Yes, wtf, but moving on.) So! During this relationship he's been growing away from that again, and back to his childhood. This means I have a good role model, but one who makes mistakes occasionally and also models how to fix them.

He still needs me to explicitly state what I need in very literal language. I think that's related to the probable fact that he has ASD. (What used to be called Aspergers and is now Autism Spectrum Disorder.) As much as I hate to go the self-diagnosis route, I also have three friends with ASD and a friend who works with kids on the spectrum, and they all agree he sounds "spectrum-y".

(Hey, look! I have friends with it so I ~*TOTALLY*~ CAN DIAGNOSE RIGHT?
(no, I know it's not, BUT. BUT. It's nearly impossible to get a dx as an adult here, and I don't view being on the spectrum as a bad thing and it's helped our communication SO much for me to think of him that way so hopefully you, potential reader, are not upset with me for assuming he's on the specccccctrum)

Obvs, this is not a problem for me, but whereas I could more reasonably expect peeps who are neurotyp and/or allistic to "get" what I left unsaid (even though they never did), I actually grok that I can't do that with him. For this reason my brain now switches tracks when it hits that roadblock, instead of refusing to explain.

Even though I still do some of that.

So here are some lessons I've learned from him:

• it's better to ask forgiveness right away if I slip back into my being-nasty habit during fights, because it shows that I noticed the slip and the words/actions don't have as much time to sink in.


• A lot of fights can be avoided if I simply state "I feel [X]" and/or "I need [this] to feel [better]" rather than expecting him to read my mind/understand it from my body language/be a selfish asshole who would never give me what I want anyway.


• People see the world differently. The person you're trying to communicate with doesn't need to have ASD to be unable to anticipate your needs—that's like walking up to a bank teller and expecting her to read your mind and know that you have to deposit a check.


• If I state my needs explicitly, I have a far better chance* of receiving whatever it is I need.
  (* Josh makes a point of nearly always giving me what I ask for when it's a need, or at the least explaining the reason why he can't.)


• Reflecting what the other person said is a great thing to do. Likewise, it's okay to take notes or make a recording if you feel like you're going to mess up the other person's words in your memory, 'cause I do that all the time.

---

There are a number of things I haven't mentioned—certainly keeping this journal has also been a way of learning how to communicate, navigating various interpersonal dramas in my history, etc etc.

In the end, it all came down to whether I wanted to continue having the communication skills of an angsty teenager. I had to have a reason to change, because it wasn't and likely won't ever be easy—but worth the hard work.

I know that if I want to act with integrity and live my life according to my values: being open, honest, and authentic—communication, a true communion— is the best way to do that.

Comments

[kaberett]

(OKAY SO HI I'm autistic and I self-diagnosed, just like I did for every single one of my other conditions often years before I managed to persuade any medical professionals to take me seriously. If you are sneering at me right now, then you can fuck right off, because that list includes "stage IV endometriosis" and "joint hypermobility", okay, both of which have completely unambiguous physiological manifestations. And that's the thing: getting diagnoses is hard, getting diagnoses is incredibly fraught - I deliberately delayed my depression diagnosis until it was that or die - and getting diagnoses is at least to some extent pandering to medical gatekeeping. If "these resources aimed at communicating with people who have this profile of communication style make obvious sense in our case and make everything better" is true, then that is enough for me and I will bite anyone who gives you shit for it, for serious.

ETA I mean also I will kind of bite anyone who thinks that my self-diagnosis of autism is somehow ~less legitimate~ than my eventual ~official~ diagnosis of autism by none other than Herr Professor Doktor Simon Baron-Cohen, right, because that dude literally thinks that my wheelchair use is because of my sensory hypersensitivity rather than my HMS and the lower-limb nerve damage caused by endometriosis no seriously I have it in writing. You do not have to justify thinking that clinicaly incompetent douche is a clinically etc etc. You are, I guarantee, more qualified than him, and he gets set up as a bloody world expert on the topic, so. We are the experts on ourselves, your partner is not being appropriative if they consider it a useful label, you are not being appropriative to use a term that your partner finds useful when describing them, etc.)

[rydra_wong]

Aaargh I wrote a long reply and Firefox crashed and ate it aaargh.

While I try to reconstruct it: thanks so much for writing this up. Okay to link?

[erika]

Absolutely ok to link.

[rydra_wong]

and it's helped our communication SO much for me to think of him that way so hopefully you, potential reader, are not upset with me for assuming he's on the specccccctrum

What kaberett said, basically. And I am also autistic, also self-diagnosed and then got a formal diagnosis.

I once knew a speech and language therapist (and autism specialist), who wrote an article on "autism as a context" (re: diagnosing children). She argued that instead of asking "does this child have autism?" (in terms of "do they tick enough ticky-boxes on the checklist of symptoms?", we should ask "does this child's behaviour/issues make sense in the context of autism?" Does applying what we know about autism suddenly make sense of stuff that seemed baffling before, does it enable us to provide support that's more useful, etc.?

So, yeah.

It'd only be "wrong" if it led to inaccurate conclusions and predictions about someone's behaviour and the reasons for it -- for example, assuming someone's insensitivity to other's emotions is due to them being on the spectrum when actually it's because they're an asshole, or alternatively it's because they're so severely depressed they're being overwhelmed by their own needs, or something.

(These things not being mutually exclusive, of course.)

If thinking of Josh as spectrum-y enables you to understand what's going on and communicate with him better (and rings true to him), then that seems like a pretty damn good reason for saying that "spectrum-y" is a good framework to use here.

(Of course, it doesn't necessarily determine whether, according to whatever the current set of criteria is and which doctor he happened to see, he'd officially score as having an autistic spectrum condition, having autistic traits that don't quite meet the arbitrary clinical threshold, or having a "cousin" condition like ADHD leading to autistic-like social issues, or whatever, but really, that's so not the point here.)

[recessional]

Yeah my diagnostic criteria at this point have become "does everything about interacting with and understanding this person become easier and make more sense and generally improve if I assume ASD? Ok."

I will not insist to them they are unless they ID, of course, but dude. (And this totally applies to me.)

[feldman]

Taking this stance greatly improved my relationship with my mother, and gave me perspective on some of the emotional disconnects we've had from infancy.

To really unpack it would require the psychological equivalent of forensic accounting, but simply taking a more spectrum-friendly tack day to day helped loads.

[minxy]

This was a neat post to read. I really liked the intersection of therapy and personal relationships and spirituality all supporting a very deliberate decision to create new habits, and to work really hard. I appreciated the use of "choice" and "decision" in the language because that seems very true to me. Even if you think you are an extraordinary communicator and the greatest, most well-balanced emotionally astute person ever, you can still make a decision in a moment to not communicate. Because it's a constant choice.

This was cool. I'm not being very articulate, but I'm feeling very thinky about the whole thing.

[erika]

Jsyk, I wasn't making fun of the words "on the spectrum", I was making fun of my own anxiety and tension to defend a self-diagnosis when I can't imagine it isn't correct. Half my friends are on the spectrum and while I'm pretty sure I'm not, I still have a LOT of empathy for the chronic outsider just based on my own experiences.

[erika]

Thank you! Jsyk, I wasn't making fun of the words "on the spectrum", I was making fun of my own anxiety and tension to defend a self-diagnosis when I can't imagine it isn't correct. Half my friends are on the spectrum and while I'm pretty sure I'm not, I still have a LOT of empathy for any other minority just based on my own experiences and would never want to misuse or appropriate terms.

[kaberett]

I absolutely didn't think you were. <3

[beatrice_otter]

I already knew he was an incompetent douchebag, but really? That bad?

I, personally, was self-diagnosed with Aspergers for years before I got the formal diagnosis. (From someone with a lot less fame than Baron-Cohen, but infinitely better as a professional.

[beatrice_otter]

One of my kid brother's friends was diagnosed with autism, primarily because it was obvious something was wrong and autism was the trendy disease that all the doctors and therapists were reading about in the journals right then. (Five years earlier and it would have been ADD/ADHD, I'm pretty sure.) And NOTHING WORKED. Everything they tried made things so much worse. They were taking him to all kinds of doctors hoping one of them could help them. Finally, one of them said "you know, I don't think this kid has an autism spectrum disorder at all, I think he has Tourettes." And you know what? He was right! And it made so much difference, because when you use appropriate treatment for Tourettes, he responded well.

[rydra_wong]

Jsyk, I wasn't making fun of the words "on the spectrum",

Worry not, I didn't think for a moment that you were. And I think kaberett and I are both very much endorsing your approach here.

[rydra_wong]

Yeah, exactly. A "wrong" diagnosis means this is the wrong angle for approaching and understanding this person, it gives wrong predictions about why they're behaving in a particular way and what will help.

[rydra_wong]

and autism was the trendy disease that all the doctors and therapists were reading about in the journals right then

I have been known to joke that I have hipster Asperger's: I HAD IT BEFORE IT WAS FASHIONABLE. *g*

[kore]

Here via rydra_wong -- this is really great! I especially like the parts about mindfulness.

[kore]

//chokes That was me and bipolar ii for quite a while!