Complaining…

What do you do if you’re bullied? Do you stand up for yourself or run and hide? It’s a dilemma for children in the school playground but also potentially for adults at work. To dial that down a bit, what do you do if you feel you’re being treated unfairly – do you question it or put up with it? Are you, in fact, the person who sends their soup back in a restaurant because it has a hair (waiter’s thumb/mouse) in it or the person who says “everything’s great” with a fixed grin when it isn’t? If you’re autistic I’m going to guess it’s the second of those.

Why should that be? Reflecting on my own experience I struggle through social situations every day of my life, trying to get the words right and avoid embarrassment. Complaining is an inherently embarrassing and risky thing to do – the person you’re complaining to/about may reject your criticism and say you’re mistaken. That can feel like having the rug pulled from under you. If you’re autistic, the moment of being questioned is likely to lead to a lurch in your sense of the world while you quickly reassess whether in fact you’ve been wrong about everything and are being stupid. (Again.)

If you’re autistic you are also likely to have a strong sense of justice and logic which can work against you. If what you said is true – why is someone arguing? If they’re arguing, then what you said probably wasn’t true. So you must be mistaken. Your unreliable autistic perceptions seem to have let you down again. You’re always getting things wrong – probably what you should do is slink away into a corner and try not to embarrass yourself and everyone else any further.

So given that risk you’re probably not going to say anything and risk another round of humiliation of which your life is probably already a bit full.

But there’s another risk – that the person you’re talking to will lash out. It’s probably not all that likely to happen in the waiter/soup scenario, but suppose you complain at work. You might say “when you cut me off in what I was saying, you made me feel disrespected” or some such, after a meeting where you’d not been heard. With your autistic sense of logic and justice you’re probably expecting the person you’re complaining to to say: “gosh – did I do that? So sorry – didn’t mean to – I got carried away in wanting to get through the meeting quickly. I won’t do it again”. Unfortunately given human nature and our instinct to defend ourselves, that’s a quite unlikely response, and you’re more likely to hear: “you were talking for too long – I needed to move the meeting on”. Or worse, “you always talk too much – I’ve been meaning to tell you that – you just don’t know when to stop” – which, given autistic people can struggle with how much, how often and how long to speak for, can be absolutely devastating. It gives you the message that your autism makes you a failure – you always do the wrong thing, and your wrongness is built into you so it can’t be got rid of. You’d better slink back into that corner and try not to embarrass yourself and everyone else any further.

If you’re autistic, you may be quite used to things seeming to be your fault, and prone to mis-identifying the underlying issue perhaps because you’re not great at identifying emotions. You may be used to rejection and sensitive to it, and all those things make it harder to stand up for yourself and believe in yourself. All of those things could make you doubt yourself and defer to others rather than stand up for yourself. So given all those considerations – which you’re almost bound to have overthought – you’re probably not going to stand up for yourself are you?