My last blog post outlined some things which I think are unhelpful in relation to autism and social skills. I will now take the glass half full approach, and discuss what I think is helpful.
For me the single most helpful thing was going to Autscape where autistic people are in the majority. It was the first time I was in a situation with a level playing field socially.  I am not the only one who has felt transformed by this experience.  The confidence I gained at Autscape has enabled me to deal with a much wider variety of social situations and to build connections within the larger community.  I found that understanding how and why I am atypical made it much easier to accept myself as I am and to address my various challenges.  This understanding also enabled me to feel comfortable explaining my differences to others.  

Interestingly the book I think best addresses difficulties talking with others was not written specifically for autistics.  It is entitled “How you can talk to anyone in every situation” by Emma Sargent and Tim Fearon.  Of course there are very few people, autistic or otherwise, who could achieve this – but this is as good a guide as I’ve seen in terms of helping people improve their ability to connect socially.  The fact that is written for a general audience is a plus, as it doesn’t condescend or assume that there is an inherent deficit that needs addressing.

I think the point here is that the social differences and difficulties experienced by autistic people are not only about specific social skills, they are also about contextualising complex communications in real time.  This is why a lot of autistic people with first class degrees in psychology are hopeless in social situations.  Expecting theoretical training to enable people to perform socially is like expecting a male obstetrician to give birth.

Social skills training and social stories (which like ABA are touted everywhere as a brilliant thing for autism, without this being verified by rigorous research) assume that there will be a predictable context in which to use those skills.  This is manifestly not the case.  In real life the aim of social skill is to facilitate actual connection and connection requires more than one party.  It makes sense if connection is not happening to look at both parties and try and find a compromise.

Exhibiting “social skills” without being honest or true to yourself is not relating to others or learning social skills, rather it is acting.

Social interaction by its nature requires more than one participant This brings me to the radical idea that maybe the non-autistic participants in social interaction with an autistic person should share responsibility for finding a way of relating that works.   Non- autistic people often don’t have to think about their social style they just assume it is neutral, but as Gary Younge says in his book ‘Who we are – and should it matter in the 21st century?’  “Those who feel they are without identity do not see the need to meet people halfway and thereby fail to recognize that everyone else is doing all the travelling”.

Damian Milton calls this the “double empathy problem”  .  He suggests that the social difficulties of autistic people are caused by contrasting ways of relating rather than an autistic deficit.  Whatever the complex mechanisms underlying social intelligence, I think we can safely say that this is something that needs to be further explored and that non- autistic people training autistic people to pretend to be non-autistic is unlikely to be the best solution we can come up with.

If you are autistic or think you might be and  would like to explore this territory in more detail you might be interested in my “Exploring Being Autistic” programme which aims to help people accept themselves and communicate authentically.

I’ll finish with some lovely lines from T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets that I think are relevant here.
“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”

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One thing that autistic people have in common is a social difference (of course we humans are all different in that we are each unique, what I mean here is that autistic people interact with others atypically).  I think this is because autistics are unable to pick up non-verbal and other communication that is below the level of consciousness.  Like much to do with autism, the cause of this social difference (which everyone across the contentious field of autism agrees exists) is not clear.  While I believe that the lack of social radar equipment to detect social signals is one of the main reasons for social atypicality there are other factors that also contribute to varying degrees.  
It is clear to me that issues with “theory of mind” (the very non-literal term used for the intuitive awareness that the contents or other people’s minds are different from the contents of our own mind) and what psychologists tend to call mentalising can impact severely on the ability to relate successfully to other human beings.

Autistic people are often distressed by problems mixing with others and making friends and therefore jump at the chance to learn social skills which they hope will solve these problems.   Despite the popularity of social skills training the limited research that exists suggests that such training is not very effective in real life* .  I find this totally unsurprising. Nobody has suggested giving deaf people hearing training or blind people sight training. As social skills require an ability to pick up social signals that is absent in autistic people, training is unlikely to be effective because, despite high motivation, the social radar equipment is just not there.

What I suspect happens is that the social skills sessions themselves are successful in that the people attending get to have a nice time which includes limited socialising with each other. They learn what to do in specific scenarios, they learn the steps to go through, and they have enjoyed it so they give the training good feedback.  Everybody is happy, outcome measures get nice ticks but nothing changes in the outside world, the lessons that seemed so relevant in class turn out to be irrelevant in the real world because the real world does not use the same scripts that were taught in class.

I regard this lack of “social radar” as being somewhat analogous to tone deafness in music (I am tone deaf).  I used to love singing, but unfortunately I was exposed in front of the class at age 7 as the one who was singing incorrectly and since then I have been unable to sing in public. What is particularly humiliating about this was that I was doing my best and as far as I am concerned I was singing in tune, but everyone else could hear that in fact I wasn’t.  Most autistics have had the experience with trying to engage socially, trying to get along with people, doing what we believe to be the right thing, but discovering that others think we are doing something wrong.  We tend to get rejected without ever finding out what exactly we did wrong (or we realise ourselves a week later when the time to rectify it has passed). We are just not able to “tune in” in real time to the social context we find ourselves in.  
The underlying issue is that the point of interacting socially is to connect with other people, and you don’t do this merely by exhibiting a set of skills, you do this by being your authentic self and being open to another human being.  Too many autistic people have been taught supposed “skills” which leave them in the words of Lianne Holiday Wiley “Pretending to be Normal”.  As Valerie Gaus points out in her book “Living Well on the Spectrum”  appearing “normal” does not make a person likeable and being “weird” does not necessarily make a person unlikeable.  Learning a set of rules might be necessary but it is certainly not sufficient to enable you to connect in real time with real people.

*See for example http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02179376


A core quality of autism is an atypical way of connecting with other human beings.  It is often (mistakenly) believed that autistic people lack empathy.  We are also said to lack TOM, which is not a person but an acronym for Theory of Mind.  However, I think often the use of the term Theory of Mind in the context of autism is misleading as what is usually being referred to is intuition and not theory.

The attribute called TOM is the ability to understand what thoughts another person is likely to be thinking.  For this to affect your actual interactions with other people you have to be able to discern and respond to their thoughts in real time. Having an excellent ability to work out what someone might be thinking in theory or in retrospect wouldn’t help your relationships with people if you are unable to do it while you are engaging with them.  

Saying that difficulty with relating to others is due to lack of theory of mind is therefore not particularly helpful, as someone can have a brilliant theoretical understanding of how minds work, but this is useless to them in practise if they don’t  have access to that understanding when it matters most, that is when actually interacting with other people.

My guess is that most obstetricians are male, and have a better understanding of the processes involved in childbirth than most mothers, all of whom are female. Despite the fact that male obstetricians have the best theory of childbirth, they will be trumped every time at actually producing babies by women who may have absolutely no theory of childbirth, but possess the equipment to produce babies.

Similarly autistic people might have what would be called in everyday English theory of mind, however without the equipment to intuit what other people are thinking this theory does not enable actual real time typical social interaction.

It seems to me that a disproportionate number of autistic people study psychology, however this study being theoretical doesn’t really help them with actually getting on with people. Many non- autistic people who have never formally studied psychology have an intuitive grasp of what another person might be thinking and use that to socialise.

However, the idea that autistic people lack “Theory of Mind” is often a barrier to people believing that they or another might be autistic, because the relevant person is extraordinarily adept at explaining motivation, despite not getting along easily with other humans.

So while I do think that autistic people tend to lack the ability to intuit the thoughts of others, I know for sure that we don’t lack empathy and many of us are superb at explaining psychological theory!