Autistic needs are not special needs, they’re perfectly normal human needs. However, many autistic people, especially those that have been trained with Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) techniques, have trouble identifying their own needs and thusly have no way of communicating their struggles or how to address them. Accommodating autistic people is rather easy, but it’s identifying these seemingly invisible, unsolved problems that are the challenge.
❝Why should I have to do all the work? Communication goes both ways!❞
—a neurotypical person ignorant of their privilege
When I ask people to accommodate me and my autistic communication style, this is usually their first question, “why should I have to do all the work? Communication goes both ways!”
The problem with this question is that it comes from a place of ignorance. It assumes that I am doing nothing on “my half” and that my request for you do to anything different than your usual communication style in order to communicate more effectively with me is too much. Here’s the truth:
My autistic brain does not process data the same way as your allistic brain. This means that when we are both given the exact same information, we may reach different conclusions (in case you’re wondering, yes, I asked questions like, “what is happening?” during movies only to be dismissed with, “I don’t know, we’re watching the same movie!” until I learned having closed captions on helped me actually watch the movie).
Autism is more than just a disability of the social model, it is a disability of the medical model too. Beyond the different thought patterns, the neurotypical brain does not have issues with working memory, cognitive flexibility, auditory processing, visual-spatial processing, and more. The mental gymnastics, hoops, and other cognitive, mental, and emotional work that autistic people employ just to have a “simple” conversation with an allistic or neurotypical person is already taxing. Autistics have already been doing more than 50% of “the work” when talking with another person.
So if someone is asking you to accommodate them, they aren’t asking for you to do 100% of “the work,” they’re letting you know that they’ve already been overdoing it and would like you to help them so they can pull back so that you can assist them by taking on some of “the work.”
And if you feel offended when someone asks you, take a moment to reflect and ask yourself why. We learn and grow the most when we step outside our comfort zone and challenge the things making us uncomfortable.
Featured photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.
