this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Autism
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Same here. It's something that can be learned
It really depends on the way someone's autism effects their social skills. Not everyone has the capacity to learn these skills, Autism does create a skill cap for many people.
It's also a question of involved effort. I was in a form of ABA therapy as a kid and I was capable of learning to identify sarcasm and read social cues, so I did.
But it doesn't come naturally to me, it requires a level of concentration and conscious processing that I don't hear non-autistic people discussing. It causes headaches and migraines and after a few days of work, using these skills every minute of the day, I'm exhausted and struggle with basic tasks at home. I don't have these same issues with exhaustion or conscious processing when I'm with other autistic people (I work in disability programming, I coordinate/admin 3 days a week with mostly neurotypical people, and run programs 1 day a week with mostly neurodivergent people, and there's a big difference on how much "effort" it takes to understand people in those two environments)
Not saying it's not worth learning. If you can learn these skills they are incredibly important and at the bare minimum they will keep you safe.
But as a society we need to accept that for a small subset of people with disabilities, these skills are unachievable, and reasonable accommodations will still need to be made, and for a slightly larger subset, accommodations may still need to be made on occasion because while someone may have these skills, they might not have the cognitive capacity to employ these skills 100% of the time.
I’m sorry what? This is a new concept in neurology to me: a new type of nervous system that cannot learn beyond a certain point?
Every time I hear the current “wisdom” about autism, I thank god I wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood.
I told my dad I trained my cats to sit and wait quietly for dinner. He said “but you can’t train cats”. I said “You can train anything with a brain”.
Same way here, I am deeply skeptical of this “skill cap” concept you just mentioned. Is there any science on that?
I think the reason the idea of a "skill cap" feels instantly incorrect is because there is obviously no point at which any human "stops learning". There will always be more to learn an more that someone (autistic or not) can learn.
The skill cap applies to specific metrics of measuring skill gain.
A large number of people with "level 3" autism who are non verbal will never learn to communicate verbally as fluently as non-autistic verbal people, even with decades of supportive education. But that doesn't necessarily mean they have a "communication skill gap", there's a lot of communication skills that can and will be developed with the right support. But expecting someone in that situation to "try harder" and "learn to talk" is unrealistic, when the more achievable goal should be "learn to effectively communicate".
I just never had issues with it in the first place.
Now, basically every other kind of nonverbal communication on the other hand...