Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through Autism’s Unique Perspectives

Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships:  Decoding Social Mysteries Through Autism’s Unique Perspectives by Dr Temple Grandin & Sean Barron, edited by Veronica Zysk 

(Arlington TX:  Future Horizons Inc, 2016  ISBN 9781941765388)

(xi)  Our brains started shifting from only seeing the details into appreciating larger concepts.   Smaller, specific unwritten social rules started migrating under the umbella of broader categories that described social behavior.

(18)  TG:  The one thing that was the core of my self-motivation was building things.  I’ve mentioned it often now, and on purpose, as I don’t think most neurotypicals understand how much fun building things can be, and how it satisfies innate need of people with ASD.

(39)  TG:  Neurotypical people have a “social sense” right from the time they’re born.  Their learning happens through observation, whereas for chidlren and adults with ASD, learning only happens through direct experience.

(41)  TG:  Everything I feel falls into one of a few categories:  happy, sad, scared or angry.  I think part of that is the physical way my brain is built.  Other people have more association-circuits in their cortex so they develop highly complex emotional connections.

(42)  TG:  Simon Baron-Cohen’s book Mind Blindness

(46)  TG:  It took me twenty years to figure out how to handle that complex social interaction [jealousy on the job]:  pull the person into the project and give him a piece of the action.

(47)  TG:  The multidisciplinary team [studying young couples in love] found support for their two major predictions:  1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with sub cortical reward regions rich with dopamine;  and 2) romantic love engages brain systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward.

Using functional MRI scans, they discovered love-related near-physiological systems operating  in the brain, and postulated that romantic love may have more to do with motivation, reward and “drive” aspects of behavior than it does with emotions or the sex drive.

(58)  TG:  They [adults] require less from them [ASD people], probably because they beleive they are capable of less.  Only a small percentage of people with ASD have jobs today.  

Low expectations are dangerous for people with ASD.  Without raising the bar higher and higher,  we arbitraily cap their potential and rob oursleves of the chance to learn what they are actually capable of learning and doing.  When I spoke at an Asperger conference in Japan, every single one of the AS adults at the conference had a job.  And, you know, they were halfway decent jobs.

(59)  TG:  We need to give them [ASD people] the services they need, but within an environment of high expectations and a real belief in their capacities to succeed.

(110)  TG:  People with ASD think specific-to-general while typical people think general-to-specific, and this difference in thinking pattern tips the scales heavily on the side of misunderstandings for ASD kids.  Their whole world is comprised of details - thousands of little bits of information that at first don’t necessarily have any relationship to each other, because concepts are not yet a fluid part of their thinking patterns - especially in very young children.  Furthermore, all those myriad little bits of information each have equal importance in the mind of an autistic child.  Their ability to assign various levels of meaning to the information they’re amassing is a skill yet to be developed, and in its early expression can often be wrong.

(113)  VZ:  Based on the social understanding we have achieved in our lives, we emphatically agree that perspective-taking, being able to look beyond oneself and into the mind of another person, is the single most important aspect of functioning that determines the level of social success to be achieved by a child or adult with ASD.  Through doing so, we learn that what we do affects others - in positive and negative ways.  It gives us the ability to consider our own thoughts in relation to information we process about a social situation, and then develop a response that contributes to, rather than detracts from, the social experience.

(116)  TG:  1. Visual thinker mind.  Thinks in pictures.  Often poor at algebra;  good at drawing.
2.  music and math mind.  Thinks in patterns.  Good at chess and engineering.  Instantly sees the relationship between numbers that I do not see.
3.  Verbal logic mind.  Poor at drawing and good at memorizing facts or translating foreign languages.

(143)  TG:  Flexible thinking is what’s difficult, not learning the rules.

(171)  SB:  All the rules I devised and expected the world to conform to were equal in importance.  Why?  Because each time a person followed a rule I felt a measure of control and security, regardless of the rule or situation.

…It took me many years to learn that when it comes to social interactions among people, and even understanding these social encounters in relation to myself, an unwritten rule was understood by everyone but me:  that not everything tips the scales evenly, and I needed to weigh things against each other in importance.

(173)  TG:  There are three basic levels of conceptual thinking:  1) learning rules;  2) identifying categories;  and 3) inventing new categories.

(175)  TG:  Helping children “get into their head” different and varied ways of categorizing objects is the first step in developing flexible thinking.

…It’s an unwritten rule of social relationship, and of life itself:  change is inevitable.

…On a conceptual level what we’re talking about is teaching compromise, along with a sense of what’s fair/unfair.

(181)  TG:  The only way for me to control anger was to switch it to another emotion;  you can’t get rid of emotions, you have to change your reaction - in this case, to one that would not result in me being kicked out of the plant.

(183)  SB:  I wasn’t yet able to link my need to control the situation (and those in it) with my feelings of being powerless over the world around me.

(198)  TG:  … an unwritten rule of relationships:  people keep “social history” in mind;  they weigh your good points and bad points when it comes to mistakes you make in determining their own reactions.

(199)  TG:  It’s an unwritten social rule:  there is a difference between honest mistakes and careless work.

(210)  TG:  Skills and self-esteem have to come first, or any change of feeling good about learning social rules will be squashed.

VZ:  …what matters more than the mistake you make is what you do once you realize you’ve made it.

(215)  SB:   An unwritten rule of social relationships is that forgiveness is something we do for ourselves.

(227)  SB:  As a general rule, people who seek an opinion, who are experiencing difficulties or who may simply need help and encouragement neither want to be told what to do nor want advice, because intellectually they know what to do.  Instead, they need validation that someone cares, and diplomacy is a much more effective way to go in this case.

(233)  Patricia Rakovic:  What was most startling to those of us who run this social skills group was the emotional toll just talking about the subject of honesty and lying had taken on the ASD boys.

…This is one of the few times we have experienced such a strong, anxiety-ridden, emotional reaction from the students in our social skills group when discussing any topic.

(240)  VZ:  Whereas honesty is mainly about what to say, and diplomacy is mainly about when to say it, it behooves every child and adult to learn that offering unsolicited comments isn’t always welcomed….

(253)  VZ:  An unwritten rule of social relationships is at play:  when you’re not polite in any given situation, a polite apology is the next best thing.

(260)  SB:  It’s hard to miss;  you see this lack of civility - which goes hand in hand with an overall sense of personal entitlement - at political rallies, on cable news talk shows and even at a local restaurant.

(263)  TG:  I was very project-loyal, so when I was told that something I said or did might negatively impact the overall success of the project, it made sense to me,  It didn’t lower my self-esteem because it was simply a behavior I needed to work on, not a different person I needed to become.  People who are highly social wrap everything in emotions, and tie behavior into judgments about self-worth and self-esteem.

(266)  VZ:  Keep in mind at all times that children with ASD don’t learn by observation, but by experience.

(271)  TG:  I feel the emotion associated with an event, but then it gets stored on my hard drive in pictures without the emotion.  It becomes a logic puzzle to figure out.

(294)  VZ:  Fear within any relationship is unhealthy.  Good relationships foster trust between the individuals and a sense of comfort, whether they are business or personal.

(313)  TG:  However, we concentrate so much on teaching appropriate behavior and responses that we overlook teaching the child or adult that all people in a social situation contribute to its success or failure.

(321)  TG:  As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I didn’t even know that people communicated with their eyes until I was ini my fifties.  I missed a whole language of public behavior that was going on around me.

(326)  VZ:  It’s an unwritten rule of social relationships that most people are quick to call your attention to what you’re doing wrong and slow to praise you for what you’re doing right.

(344)  TG:  I’ve noticed with the people I’ve met over the years, both on the spectrum and within the meat packing industry, that visual thinkers oftentimes have horrible anxiety problems.  

(378)  VZ:  Whether you think of it as psycho-babble or psychological truth, an oft-repeated mantra of social relationships is this:  “the only person you can ever change is yourself.”

(398)  TG:  On the job I remember to always be “project loyal.”  My job is to complete a project I have designed and make it work.

(415)  VZ:  Adopt this mantra:  All behavior is communicatioin - what is the child trying to say?