a neurodivergent guide to neurotypical communication
what makes misunderstandings happen
I am pretty good at understanding what other people mean, so I figured when I explained in detail what I was feeling, other people would get me. That makes sense right? You’d think so, but that isn’t what happens.
My first realisation something was off, happened when I was doing my diploma in counselling. We had this personal development group which was like a kind of group therapy session. While I don’t think I ever properly understood what the group was meant to be about, it became a place where people would talk about things which created strong emotions.
After one session, my tutor took me to one side and she said, “Mark I notice that when you start talking, all your emotion drains out of you.” I was confused, I knew I felt strong emotions, and I felt like she was saying I was unemotional. That night I angrily stomped home. How dare she! I felt emotions, I knew I did! How come nobody else knew?!
When people say things the way my tutor did, they are not just casual observations, they are usually outlining a social expectation. When I observed the group next week, I noticed that my colleagues were doing something very different to me. They would talk and they would remain emotional throughout, but when I talked… I realised my tutor was right!
And so…
… over the next few weeks I worked on being able to emote and talk at the same time. I used visualisations and practice to overcome my ‘deficit’ and of course when a neurodivergent person recreates a neurotypical behaviour, we end up doing it x10. I got so good at this ‘emoting when talking’ thing, that when my end of year presentation came round, my talk ran over, but my tutor decided not to stop me because she could see I was so “immersed in it.”
meanwhile out in the real world…
Around the same time as I was discovering that I communicated differently, I was having lots of problems with my mental health at work. I was explaining to my manager in detail just how stressed I was and exactly why. I came out of meeting after meeting thinking that I had finally got somewhere, only for nothing to change.
Eventually it got so bad, the area manager became involved, who asked me to fill out a stress questionnaire. When we sat down, pretty much the first thing she said was that my stress score was one of the highest she had ever seen; her disbelief was obvious. Her comment annoyed me, and I snapped back at her in an angry tone, “You asked me to fill it out. I have filled it out, that’s the score!”
By accident I had discovered a key feature of successful communication with neurotypical people. Instead of explaining to her why the score was correct, I used emotion to communicate to her that I was annoyed she didn’t believe me.
The meeting was much more constructive than any of my previous meetings. By the end of it, we were talking about reasonable adjustments, and having a risk assessment put into place to take care of my health needs.
Many people have this idea that to communicate effectively we need to do so in a calm and rational manner. I have heard almost that exact phrase used in my counselling room. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite the whole story.
It’s important to understand that for neurotypical people approximately 60% of the meaning in spoken communication is derived non-verbally from things like body language, emotional tone, speed and loudness of speech. The remainder is the informational verbal content. Many neurodivergent people however rely much more heavily on the verbal content to derive meaning.
The so-called 7-38-55 rule, which suggests that only 7% of meaning comes from the verbal content is widely misinterpreted. The result of this study is best understood as showing the importance of spoken communication matching the vocal tone and body language. What the ‘rule’ tells us is just how little weight neurotypical people put on verbal content when it doesn’t match the body language and vocal tone, i.e. almost none.
With this kind of understanding, my area manager’s disbelief becomes understandable. I wasn’t being taken seriously because I did not look stressed.
On top of this there are some further barriers to successful communication. Paradoxically the neurodivergent need to provide detailed explanation can make it less likely you will be understood, while the unspoken assumptions which litter neurotypical communication are actually important for improving understanding - leaving things unsaid paraodoxically helps get your point across.
Later in the article I will go into some theory of why I think neurotypical communication looks the way it does, but first…
isn’t this just another form of masking?
Yes, what I am describing is masking. Masking is not just altering something you would naturally do, it’s also the time and energy spent processing people’s behaviour, so you can replicate it. In this case however, the purpose is so that you can communicate your needs effectively, rather than to blend in.
So yes, doing things like adding emotion to your speech when you don’t naturally do it will increase your cognitive load, so it can add to burnout.
What I am not suggesting is that you should alter how you communicate for everyday conversations. The purpose here is to understand what might be going wrong in conversations where it is important you are understood. You might want to think about using the approach I am going to describe when you have an important work meeting, or need to make sure your health team understand what your medical needs are.
The next part goes into the theory, which you can skip over if it’s not your thing, and go down to the tying it all together section.
three patterns
To understand why there is often an understanding gap between neurotypical and neurodivergent people, we need to go back to a critical period in our development. Starting at around 12 months old and continuing out to about 3 years, the brain shifts from growing new neuronal connections towards pruning out those connections.
It’s this pruning which is responsible for creating the neural pathways that enable us to use language, read emotions, and lays the foundations for our complex social behaviour. Things like ‘Theory of Mind’ typically develops during this period. Pruning continues over your entire life span as does the growth of new neural connections, albeit more slowly.
A key difference observed in autistic people is lower rates of pruning, meaning that fewer of these pathways will be created. It also means that autistic brains are ‘over connected’ compared to neurotypical brains. It’s this lower rate which is thought to be behind the social difficulties and sensory processing differences.
So that’s the bit ‘beneath the bonnet’, so to speak. In the ‘driving seat’, the way this system of pruning neuronal pathways is experienced is largely through something called iterative learning. An example of an iterative learning cycle is,
I try something, I get feedback, I adjust it slightly, I try again
The important part is that the process is automatic and is happening without us being aware of it. What this means is that we are armed with a series of intuitive systems which are capable of reading social situations, which will have been tuned to produce communication which is capable of meeting our needs. At least if you are neurotypical…
...if you are neurodivergent, and particularly if you are autistic, then you won’t be forming as many of these intuitive unconscious systems, instead you will be relying much more on cognitive processing to perform the same function.
This means that the patterns I am seeing are not occurring by chance, they are being pruned bit by bit into people’s brains. Human behaviour is thus being tuned to it’s environment; it is therefore purposeful, meaning I can develop predictive theories and models. Being able to do this is key to my ability to cope successfully in social situations.
There are 3 patterns which I believe are important.
1.why do neurotypical people rely much more on body language and vocal tone than they do on what is said?
It’s because someone’s emotional state is a much better predictor of how that person will behave than what they say. Knowing whether your parent is angry or pleased with you is a pretty important thing to work out, and work out quickly.
As older children we will encounter more people and have to work through complications such as deciding whether that person genuinely likes us, is just being friendly, or is in fact hostile to us. Duplicity and deceit are common experiences in human relationships.
As we grow into adults then not only will we have to form peer groups but we will also have to manage romantic relationships. For instance, how do we know who finds us attractive, and who doesn’t? Then as we enter the world of work we will have to navigate the complexity of social hierarchies and competitive environments.
This all means that being able to accurately read a person’s emotional state is generally a much better guide to how they will behave than what the person says, although there can be notable exceptions.
Neurodivergent people however, are generally focusing more on what is said rather than the body language and emotional tone. This is generally because this is what we have available to understand the social situations around us. Having said that, there are a number of neurodivergent people who are highly sensitive to other people’s emotional states.
2.why do neurotypical people leave important information out, making you guess what they are talking about?
An interesting feature of neurotypical speech is that it is littered with unspoken assumptions. What I am going to suggest is that leaving gaps is a deliberate strategy, which has been pruned into the neural pathways of people’s brains, and has an important social function. Leaving something unsaid does two things,
a. it invites empathy - In order to understand my brain has to fill in the gaps, this draws me into the conversation. Also by filling in with my own experience, I will tend to become emotionally invested in the conversation, increasing my engagement.
b. acts as a filter – It checks if we have similar cultural and social backgrounds, values and goals. It works like a ‘secret code’ which only those who are part of the in-group will know.
3.why is explaining often counterproductive?
I encounter this paradox frequently. If I am not understood, my default strategy is to explain in greater detail, only to be misunderstood, leading to me doing more explaining...
The reason my strategy doesn’t work is likely down to differences in processing. In common with other neurodivergent people I make sense of the world through observation and then building up models of how things work. Explanation helps me, because it builds understanding, allowing me to work out how to behave in different situations. I do a lot of what is known as bottom-up processing.
For neurotypical people much more of their processing is handled by this iterative intuitive system, I talked about earlier. Unlike my bottom-up processing which relies on deduction, this top-down system uses heuristics – a system of interlocking rules which are able to provide rapid answers to complex problems. The application of these rules are fine tuned through the trial and error of iterative learning.
So, when you are explaining in detail about why your trip to the airport was so horrendous, or just exactly how noise in the work place affects you, you are talking to a system which processes the exact same events through an entirely different process. Your carefully thought out explanation, will likely not match the process experienced by a neurotypical person in the same situation.
For instance, my story about the horrendous trip to the airport will start before the taxi arrives. I am telling you this, so you can understand exactly how horrendous my trip to the airport was. However the top-down intuitive heuristic system, I am talking to is extremely good at generalising. It does not need to know the fine detail of the context. It is already generating the context from the experiences it has stored – remember the importance that gaps play in creating understanding? For the person I am talking to, they are likely wondering when I am going to get the point.
There is a further reason why explaining does not work, and this is to do with a difference in how reasoning is typically used. For me and other neurodivergent people reasoning is essential to my ability to function, so I need it to be accurate. However, for neurotypical people, reasons also serve an important social role. A good reason is one which is highly socially plausible when presented to others. The reason doesn’t necessarily need to be true or even the real reason, but it does need to be one that will be readily accepted.
So…
When I am explaining something to a neurotypical person, they are typically not listening to my reasons to understand why I have done something, they are listening to my reasons to see if they offer a sufficiently plausible justification. Reasons which are deemed to have insufficient justification are typically described as excuses. If you have ever wondered why your carefully crafted reason was deemed an excuse, the above is a likely cause.
tying it all together
For me, understanding why is essential to be able to do anything successfully. Other methods such as, copying, or learning things by rote, are pretty hopeless. Hence the previous section is essential for someone like me, and is a distillation of observation and thinking that has happened over a long period of time.
1.using emotions/emotional tone to convey meaning
Matching your vocal tone to what you want to communicate is the single most effective thing you can change which will help improve you being understood by others. It is the most effective because of the importance that vocal tone and body language have in conveying meaning for neurotypical people.
You may without realising already be doing it. For instance, many autistic people have learned to modulate their voice – raising and lowering pitch during speech to maintain interest. This can for some people extend to facial expressions.
If you find this hard, or it feels uncomfortable and/or awkward, then using emotional language by explicitly stating how you feel about something can also be effective. Basic assertive phrases which take the form, ‘when X happens, I feel Y’, utilise this idea. You can strengthen it’s impact by putting emphasis on the feeling word you have chosen.
2.less is often more
I talked earlier how leaving things unsaid are important for securing engagement and conveying meaning, because of how they invite empathy. Also, because of the processing differences between neurodivergent and neurotypical people, it can also give you some leeway.
So, if I am asking for something I need, I will cut down the explanation. So for a podcast, I said I was neurodivergent and asked for some more detail and a framework because I needed to prepare. I then used a politeness structure to apologise for asking so many questions. I figured that if I needed more information I could ask specific questions based on what the PA told me rather than trying to guess everything. I deliberately leave out a specific description of my neurodivergence, nor do I explain why I need to prepare. The person I am talking to does not need to know why I need to prepare, they only need to know that I do.
Notice also how leaving out explanation is utilised in the assertive statement outlined previously. Assertive statements work because they access this gap-filling intuitive system, otherwise known as empathy. An assertive statement’s formulation deliberately leaves out an explanation of why you feel the way you did; it contains the inherent declaration that “you feel the way you do, because you do,” and so no further explanation is necessary.
3.start with the punchline
If you are a strong bottom-up processor then the temptation will be to explain from the beginning in detail, which as discussed can prove to be counter-productive. It’s generally better for the problem to be defined close to the beginning of the conversation. You might want to use a structured problem solving framework such as SCQA to help order your thoughts, remembering that concise is usually better than detailed.
The reason for doing this, is because the order in which you are introducing information will more closely match the processing style of the person opposite you. It’s also generally better to answer questions if/when they are asked rather than to try to anticipate questions and provide answers before they are asked.
My personal experience is that I will have thought through most of the questions I might be asked, as I will have branch tested as many question/answer combinations as I can think of. There is however the annoyance that most of the things I will have prepared I will never get to say, but what that means is that I am extremely well prepared for any questions I might be asked. It’s thus very difficult to put me ‘on the back foot’ in a conversation I have prepared for.
a few last words…
There is however a caveat in using these strategies, such as writing less in an email, or thinking through what you will say - it takes more effort and takes longer - which means there is a burnout risk associated with using these them. I personally only use them when it’s important.
Also it’s really important to state, that while I have laid out what seems be a formula, the above is no more than a framework to guide your thinking on how you might approach communicating with people. What works for me, may not work for you. If there is one thing that neurodiversity has taught me, it’s that difference is a fundamental human quality; there really is no such thing as one size fits all.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash