Accepting Compliments While Autistic
Many autistic people find accepting compliments and being kind to ourselves difficult, especially if our experience has been that other people lambast us if we dare to exist openly while autistic.
Many autistic people find accepting compliments and being kind to ourselves difficult, especially if our experience has been that other people lambast us if we dare to exist openly while autistic.
Autistic people are usually left to our own devices when it comes to navigating a social world defined by non-autistic rules. And when we make social errors, it’s very common to wish to retreat. Here are some (hopefully) comforting guidelines for such situations.
You know where I didn’t learn how to figure people out like that? Anywhere that was not a game. Not in previous jobs, not in books, not in school. I learned these life skills using a table top role playing game (TTRPG), purely by accident.
Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) taught me that social skills were context-free rules I had to follow: forcing my hands to be quiet, staring back at eyeballs that bored into mine, contorting myself to make myself look less autistic at the expense of my happiness and overall well-being.
So what’s going on here? Does my autistic son lack social skills or does he not? The answer is that context matters. Socializing costs a lot of tokens. When he is in a situation that is already difficult for him, he won’t have those tokens to spare.