Autism and Taking on Others' Perspective as Truth

[lovely_darlingprettybaby]

i'm moving soon and had my final meeting with my psychologist this week, and we were curious if this is a me thing or am autism thing, so i'm interested in you all's experience.

i found that in the interpersonal conflicts that i went through over the past few years, i consistently took the perspective the person who felt wronged by me as the objective reality of the situation.

for example: i would hear my housemate say that something that i did really bothered him (and he would often use very extreme language, that he felt i was dehumanizing him or that he felt threatened or was worried about his mental health because of my behavior) and i took that at face value and believed that i was doing something wrong and needed to change my behavior drastically, but kept failing to meet his expectations. every "failure" of mine was actually easily attributable to adhd (e.g. he would take issue with my hyperfocusing on an interest and not noticing something he was doing, or forgetting information that was told to me in passing) or to autism (e.g. not recognizing social cues, flat affect that he would perceive as antagonistic), though he would say that i was just trying to avoid taking responsibility for choosing to behave a certain way.

it was only until i brought these things to my psychologist and began discussing them with other friends that i realized that his perspective and conclusions about me (that i'm intentionally insensitive, that i'm racist, and that i refuse to take responsibility for what he perceived as harms i was perpetuating) were not only not necessarily accurate, but that they felt bad that he was treating me this way and they were surprised that we were living together at all.

all of this to say: have you found that you have trouble not talking on others' perception of you as definitive reality? is this just a me thing, or could this be related to autism? both me and my psychologist were curious to look into it, so i thought i'd post here and ask. thanks!

Yeah maybe in a different way that I blame myself for things that are often not my fault and see them somehow as my fault.
I do get I loops like that where I mix things up a bit and instead of blaming the other person, blame myself.
If the pump is put on me, I can get all kinds of mixed up.
And I often do blame myself when people are mean and think it is me who has to change and when someone is the slightest bit mean in adhd, I am often reduced to tears. If people raise their voice, I her scared and sad.

 

[lovely_darlingprettybaby]

Do you know about Compassion Focused Therapy? I think it addresses this sort of thing. Because, for example, social situations in life happen pretty much every day, and autistic people tend to find them distressing, we're basically anxious and in flight or fight mode multiple times every day. So there's a lot of "threat" in our lives. Over time this means our brains get very used to noticing and reacting to external threat - that part of our brain becomes bigger and stronger and more active. This can lead to it dominating the part of our brain that deals with self, the internal stuff. And this can lead to internalizing the threats. We come to think that somehow the negative things we experience are our fault - which is referred to as shame in psychological models.

I'm no expert in this. It's just something that came up recently in my treatment. CFT was mentioned by a specialist psychiatrist as a potentially useful model for autistic people - sometimes more effective than Cognitive Behavior Therapy for example.

Exactly we should have compassion on ourselves and our limitations because that is the way our brains,are designed.
And even though a lot of autistics,are smart well it is actually people who should learn to understand us amd that is where there can be a gap is often people are not smart enough to understand us and then accidentally mistreat us or expect us to be something else or function in a different way
So we feel pressure to over explain ourselves which is hard for an autistic too and may be a form of masking and lead to burn out
So it is difficult

 

[Hypnalis]

No convo yet, so here's an anecdote that might give you some ideas.

I was sitting with a small group of people who all know each other very well, and where there is no risk of random ill-will over misunderstandings. Something came up that will be clear from my response, and a woman I know can take a "sharp response (at least from me) in the right spirit made a comment. My response:

"If you weren't a sexist, you'd have noticed <<the issue being discussed>> is the same for both men and women"

This is a stronger version of the "thought-stopper" style. It may have a specific name, but if so I don't know what it is. It works somewhat like an "RVO".

The use of two incompletely-related parts is the core of the technique. Ideally, you start with an accusation that's difficult to refute, then follow with something right on topic that's also plausible evidence for the accusation.

The target has three interacting ideas to handle at once:
* How do I defend against the accusation?
* Is the evidence valid? (I only do this IRL when it is valid, but the technique works even if it's just "not obviously wrong").
* Which do I address first?

In my experience the usual result, if it's used well in the right context, is a kind of "cognitive dissonance", and the target will switch the topic themselves in order to "clear their mind".
It leaves a mild inhibition behind not to revisit the same topic (this is why I think the mechanism is the same as "cognitive dissonance"), but that's just a personal theory.

I suggest you don't actually start by experimenting with this. There's a chance it induces anger rather than deflection, which would be a loss in your situation. Or you might get it wrong, and take a loss without any corresponding benefit.
I included it so you could starting working on "micro scenarios" so you can get some ideas for later.