A lack of words
I get this problem frequently.
I run out of words to say.
That’s perhaps not quite true, but it sums it up succinctly.
What really happens is that I have a busy day, or a perhaps more accurately I have some time with too much sensory input. I need to recover a bit from that sort of thing, which means having quiet alone time. Except that my life means that I don’t get this because I’m either at work, or I’m out for the day with the family, or because I’m just home from work and the kids need bathing, or I’ve sat down after the kids are in bed, and my wife wants to tell me about her day and her ideas. This is real life, and I can’t very well just shut myself off from it – not unless I’m really badly overloaded at any rate.
So I’ll end up in conversations that are very one sided. The other person will make almost all the running, and my answers will be short. Sometimes I’ll forego answering at all, and I’ll just nod or shake my head.
What’s going on in my head is that I don’t have the words to respond. When I withdraw, be it in reality, or more frequently when it happens when I’m not on my own as above, the part of my brain that deals with social interaction pretty much shuts down.
This is the pattern matching bit of my brain that says, “So the question was this, do we have an easy/obvious/logical answer to use, or do I need to fetch something out of the stock cupboard?”. This sort of process feels very much like hard thinking to me – it’s often quite a concious process where I’m trying to juggle listening and thinking of responses at the same time as trying to think three questions ahead.
With this thought process shut down, I sometimes litterally have no words of response for people.
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10 Responses to “A lack of words”
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Soph on May 6th, 2009 Soph(Quote)
I bet your wife likes it because you listen instead of butting in with “helpful” suggestions the way most men do.
Anna on May 7th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
I think it is the same for me. The more tired I am, the longer the walk to the stock cupboard seems, and sometimes I just can’t walk that far at all, and so no words are forthcoming. Does that make sense?
Anna, formerly Anon.
James on May 7th, 2009 James(Quote)
Soph – That’s sometimes true, but equally frequently she finds it annoying, as I appear not to be listening. I am listening – it’s just that my body language and reactions suggest I’m not.
Anna – That’s a great metaphor. That’s just what it’s like!
Anna on May 7th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
Sometimes when I can’t get out of my chair to walk to the stock cupboard, I look around and see if there is another word within easy reach that means nearly the same thing, and sometimes I’ll use that word instead, if I think the person I’m with will be accepting and prepared to work out what I’m trying to say. I do prefer to use the correct word though.
It’s as if some parts of our brains are better connected than normal, but other parts are less well connected. The parts with the words and the social behaviour are less well connected.
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-autism-spectrum/200905/does-hyperstimulating-environment-cause-asd
Anna, formerly Anon.
James on May 7th, 2009 James(Quote)
Ha! Well put. Isn’t it interesting how it’s easier to talk in metaphor sometimes? Interestingly I can’t think of another way that you could have put this that would have made it easier for me to understand. Sometimes, metaphors really do rock.
That’s an interesting link too – I’d not seen it.
Anna on May 7th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
“Isn’t it interesting how it’s easier to talk in metaphor sometimes?”
I’ve been reading some other Asperger blogs, if I could remember where I read these I’d link and credit, but I can’t remember, so all I can do is not claim them as my own.
1) Imagine that instead of speaking, the primary mode of communication is drawing and painting. Now imagine that you are not good at drawing and painting. So instead you have to make a collage to express yourself.
2) Other people are connected to each other by social string. Some strings are strong, some are weak, and they are colour coded to indicate the nature of the relationship. The more people there are, the more complicated the web of string becomes.
This string is invisible to us, and we easily blunder around, get tangled up in it and make a mess of the web.
James on May 8th, 2009 James(Quote)
Both of these are fabulous, and explains things so simply to me.
It’s a shame you can’t remember where they are from. I’ve not come across either before, and I feel I should be reading the blogs they came from.
Anna on May 8th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
It’s annoying, I wanted to find my way back, I went through my browser history but just could not find them. I think the first one about the collage might have come from mumsnet. I’m not a mother, but sometimes I lurk the message boards there.
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/special_needs
Anna on May 8th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
Do you suppose that for the more severely autistic people who don’t speak, it might be because they reach sensory overload much sooner than us, and their stock cupboard of words is even further away than ours?
James on May 8th, 2009 James(Quote)
…and perhaps the stock cupboard doesn’t have as many ingredients in it either.
This has the feeling of being one of those little leaps in understanding that isn’t in the books about the subject.
I think you may have hit the nail on the head.