social skills Archives — THINKING PERSON'S GUIDE TO AUTISM

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Accepting Compliments While Autistic

April 12, 2024 • By Anonymous

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.

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Considering Interpersonal Skills For Autistic People

October 27, 2023 • By Anonymous

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.

Woman with braided hair and purple glasses is bent over a notebook with a character sheet for "Veri Truestone." There are various dice around her, a rainbow set, a ceramic set, some resin sets and two metal dice in a tiny glass jar. There is a dice vault with rainbow colors, another with wood burning of a map, and then a dice bag with purple fabric.

Learning Life Skills or Just Gaming? Why Can’t It Be Both? An Autistic perspective on TTRPGs

August 23, 2021 • By Shawna Spain

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.

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Teach Social Skills As Values, Not Like Computer Programs

January 6, 2021 • By Finn Gardiner

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.

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Social Skills: Context Matters

April 3, 2013 • By Tasia

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.