Shifting The Communication Burden from Neurodivergent People

The notion that autistic people have social communication deficits is a cornerstone of the diagnostic criteria.

Yet there’s a profound injustice in assuming that the responsibility for miscommunication can be laid at the feet of the autistic person at one end of it. Labelling autistic communication styles as deficient assumes neurotypical communication styles are not only superior, but normal and beyond question.

But all these “deficits” tell us is what is considered important or valuable or necessary by neurotypical standards: eye contact, choreographed facial expressions, still hands, indirect language.

It’s a given that neurotypical communication practices are preferred without any explanation why. It’s only those of us who veer from them who have to answer for ourselves. Worse, autistic children are still being subjected to coercive forms of “therapy” that force them to conform to neurotypical ways of being as they are made to believe there is no other acceptable option.

The double empathy problem, a theory developed by autistic academic Dr Damian Milton, explains that communication difficulties arise from differences between autistic and neurotypical communication styles, not because autistic people have inherent communication deficits.

Despite neurotypical communication styles not having any inherent superiority, they are given higher status in society. The consequences of not complying mean that autistic people often have no choice but to adapt to ways of being that are out of step with how our brains work. Instead, we bear the consequences of compliance in the form of masking, exhaustion, burnout and poor mental health.

The excruciating irony of communication for an autistic person (even before you know you are) is that we have to work so hard to understand and be understood, that we become very good at it. We apply our cognitive abilities of perception, pattern recognition and analysis to get on top of what neurotypical people take for granted because it comes intuitively to them.

We understand the value of good communication better than most and we expect more from it. Bad communication impacts on us disproportionately because it adds to the processing load and triggers uncertainty. We have more at stake.

We value transparency - because of the perpetual flame of social justice burning inside us - but also because missing bits of the picture drives us nuts. Our bottom-up processing style means we need to gather all the details before we can confidently arrive at a conclusion.

Because we give more attention to how we communicate and are under more scrutiny, we end up carrying a greater share of the mental load compared with non-autistic people.

Most neurotypical people however have never had to examine their communication style. If something goes wrong in an interaction between neurotypical people, it’s more likely to be framed in terms of personality or attitude.

The focus needs to be less on individuals and more on the responsibilities in communication which is after all a two-way process. And that goes for everyone, regardless of neurotype. Assuming that the individual who happens to be in a neurominority is responsible for failures in the communication process just won’t cut it anymore.

It’s time we shifted the burden of communication so that non-autistic people take on more responsibility for how their communication efforts land. And I’ve got some ideas about how we can do it.