How I Got Started With Social Communication

The first place I learned about social communication norms was in my Mandarin Chinese classes in college. Culture and language are inextricably linked and I found myself learning a great deal about my own culture in the process. I remember my professor telling us about an older Chinese greeting which translates to "Have you eaten?" One day someone asked him that and he was hungry and hadn't eaten, so that's what my professor said. Much to his surprise, the person who asked him that dropped everything, brought him back to their house, and fed him then and there.

Our professor explained that's when he learned that "Have you eaten?" was a greeting like "How are you?" where the other person isn't really asking it as a question. Instead it was more or less a way of saying "hi". That blew my mind - not about older Chinese cultural practices, but about my own. Because I realized it's true!

When someone asks "How are you?" when they're greeting you in neurotypical American culture, unless you're in a context where it's expected that you'll talk about your feelings (sitting down to catch up with a close friend, going to see a mental health counselor, etc) they're not actually asking for a full answer. In fact, if you give a particularly negative answer (such as "Honestly, I've been really sad, my grandma is in the hospital and dying") that person is going to feel like their greeting just turned into an unexpected moment where now they're socially obligated to drop what they're doing and attend to your problem, whether they actually have time to or not. Just like what happened to my professor!

And then I realized there's a social script for answering a question like that. You're expected to say something short that's neutral or positive. The acceptable length and detail of the response varies based on how much time both people seem to have and how close you are. For instance, if it's a greeting while you're walking past each other, it's expected that your response will be a sentence or even just a word, combined with a follow up question about the other person. "I'm fine, how are you?"

That was the moment that I really started analyzing my own culture's practices. I was honestly even more fascinated by the unspoken cultural norms around me than I was by those of the places I was learning about. I remember going to a family gathering and feeling like I was an anthropologist studying American culture in the South, because all of a sudden everything was so clear. I had always been a few years behind my peers in terms of social communication, so I had already been trying to consciously analyze other peoples' interactions for years to figure out where I was going wrong. The lens of culture, however, provided the paradigm I felt like I needed to unlock everything.

When I entered into the world of learning about autism, I heard of an essay by an autistic adult called "An Anthropologist on Mars" and found the discussion forum for autistic adults called "Wrong Planet". To me, just the titles themselves showed the cultural divide between autistic people and neurotypical people. There was no better or worse culture - just different.

Aaaaaaand then I went to graduate school to become a speech therapist. I was exposed to so many out of touch practices and outlooks related to autism there, and while my previous experiences did inoculate me somewhat, as a beginning clinician some of it did make it into my practice. (I'm so sorry, kids, I wish I could go back and do it better.) But the whole time I had this niggling feeling that something was wrong. Bit by bit, I began to tease out the ableist crud I'd been taught and get rid of it. (Because when you know better, you do better.)

One of the biggest turning points for me was when I talked to my sister, who is Autistic, about some of the interesting things I'd been learning about social communication. I talked to her about how people use what you're looking at to guess what you're thinking about, and how they will use eye gaze to indicate their thoughts themselves - sometimes purposefully, sometimes not. I can't remember her exact response, but it was something along the lines of, "Wait, what?! I wish they would have told me that back when I was a kid instead of just showing me pictures of smiley faces and asking me how they were feeling!"

That's when I became convinced that this information could be useful to neurodivergent folks. Yeah, there was loads of ableism embedded into most social communication instruction, as I'd already found out the hard way. But it didn't have to be like that! The way I'd talked to my sister about it, just sharing an interesting fact, didn't have any implication of superiority of one culture over another. (In fact, my attitude was more of a "Isn't that weird and fascinating?") And it had been useful to her! And the way I had been taught Chinese social communication norms back in college had been completely neutral (and a real life saver in trips to China) as well.

But there wasn't anyone teaching neurotypical social communication through that lens. It seemed like pretty much all the therapists and teachers I saw were either using the social communication curricula that were laced with ableism, or they had decided that since there was so much ableism in existing methods, the teaching of social communication must be inherently ableist and you shouldn't teach it at all. (And let me tell you, being in the middle ground of that divide is not a pleasant place to be.)

So I decided to just cobble together my own way of teaching social communication. I went based on struggles I'd read from neurodivergent authors, what I'd learned in my culture classes, my own experiences, my sister's experiences, and of course, my clients' experiences. Bit by bit it came together.

It's not pretty and it's not perfect. In fact, my Social Communication Ideas page on this site should really be considered a living document, because it is going to always be in flux as I learn new things. But I do consider it proof of concept that it is possible to teach social communication in non-ableist ways.