Verbal Processing: Do you talk too much? (the reason we constantly interrupt)

do people often tell you that you talk too much if so you might be a verbal processor in which case for you ironically interrupting might be a form of listening so in this video i'm going to share uh three damaging messages that we often internalize around talking too much and finally a um a positive way to understand what's actually going on so that you can embrace your identity in instead of trying to to hide it and suppress it in front of others welcome to asperger's from the inside my name is paul michaleff and i make weekly videos sharing the human side of autism so make sure you hit subscribe to get the latest content i thought it might be good to start with a quick story i have a friend of mine who constantly interrupts whenever you're sharing a story or telling us something she will interrupt you while you're speaking and for a long time i've got really frustrated with that because for me personally when someone interrupts me it um i lose my train of thought but eventually we figured out that the reason that she talks over the top of me is because if she doesn't say the words out loud basically repeat back mid-sentence what i'm saying to her then she won't remember what's being said and by the time i get to the end of the sentence she'll have forgotten the start of the sentence so ironically interrupting speaking over the top of someone was actually her form of listening and staying engaged and without doing that then i'd be talking and i would feel great because i'd get to the end of my sentence but actually what would happen is there'd be no meaningful communication exchange there i would say what i want to say and it just would not land at all so ironically interrupting was a form of listening a form of verbal processing where when you say something out loud that is the easiest way for you to understand the information so some of us uh like reading and we read the information in our head and understand it some of us like listening for like an audio book for example and i'll listen to information and understand it verbal processing is saying things out loud and when you say it out loud that is when your brain clicks about what this actually means and you start to understand it so the first damaging message that we often hear around around this um and and i hear this a lot uh from from members of the community they'll say things like i feel like i'm messed up i there's something wrong with me i should be able to do this um i'm i'm constantly trying to stay quiet and i can't do it it's taking a huge amount of um concentration and energy and there's something wrong with me i'm messed up because i can't do what i think i should should be able to do in this situation and part of the the way that we internalize that message is if people are constantly telling you whoa you're talking too much stop talking stop talking talk less talk less talk less then that is a pretty significant message to internalize i need to talk less and i'm not okay if i talk too much i'm gonna drive people away if i talk too much you know no wonder that person left the conversation you were talking their ear off you need better social skills right it's it's it's internalizing the fault always on ourselves thinking that i must be the problem because i'm the one with the problem of talking too much so we wanna we're going to dispel all three of these things um later on so the the the second um thing that we can internalize um is around social anxiety and thinking that it's my job to get it right if i've internalized the first message that there's something wrong with me i'm the problem then the next message that i'll think naturally is it must be my job to get it right and this can cause a huge amount of social anxiety i'm about to go to a social gathering or a party or talk to someone on the phone or meet a new client or anything where i'm engaging with someone i don't know for the first time and i need to make sure that i don't slip up and talk too much and have this have this negative impact so what does social anxiety feel like um some people have described it as like an elephant sitting on their chest some people um you know so like it feels really hard to breathe it's hard to think it's hard to do things it's concentrating it's overwhelming ironically it can be really hard to form any words and speak at all when when you have a huge amount of social anxiety so it comes about because i think it's my responsibility to fix the problem socially and to meet the other person a hundred percent where they're at because that with that first message you know the the problem is is with me so what that what that leads to is constant suppression i feel like talking i'm i've got all of these ideas i want to share but it's not appropriate so i'm constantly going to hold it in because it's my job to behave it's my job to hold it in another word for that is masking it's transforming who i am into something that that other people will accept as socially appropriate so that's very different to being my authentic self i can be a socially appropriate version of my authentic self but if i'm constantly suppressing a key part of my personality that's not being authentically myself so a third common damaging message that's easy to internalize is that i must be really slow i don't get it i'm the one who's constantly trying to catch up to what everyone else is saying because if you're uh if you're a verbal processor and you've been suppressing your urge to say things out loud then just like i was talking about with my friend it might be difficult to actually understand the information that's going on around you so another type of processing is called auditory processing auditory processing is where you listen to information right someone is talking to you you're listening to an audio book there's an announcement over the pa system and you hear it and you understand what it means immediately what what i've noticed uh is often is common with verbal processes is that sometimes it's accompanied by a delay in auditory processing which means you might hear something and not immediately process and it doesn't immediately mean anything to you until a couple of seconds sometimes even longer later and then oh that's what that person was trying to tell me so when you take away your natural form of processing for example interrupting someone as a form of listening then it means that it's harder to understand the information that's going that that's coming at you in in a form that that is not your natural way of processing it so this can uh lead people to feel like i'm slow i don't get it i'm always the last one to understand and it's not because i'm actually slow or i can't understand it's because my processing style isn't being met um very well in this situation so how can we understand this in a really positive way the the positive way is to think that everyone has a different preference when it comes to understanding and processing information some people will read books and will read an entire book a week or sometimes even more than that just love love reading absorbing information via just looking at text on a page i can't do that i when i put the time and effort and energy into reading it takes a lot out of me i personally am a ver not verbal auditory processor i actually really love hearing things um from audiobooks from listening to i i get my computer to use text to speech software to to say everything to me because that's the easiest way i can find to understand the information that that is being delivered to me so if we understand all of these things as as a an individual preference and and some are easier for others some are easier for you than others then what it means is if you're a verbal processor then you actually need to speak things out loud before they make sense and sometimes i i had someone tell me this the other day sometimes you have to say it wrong before you realize that it's wrong i can definitely relate to this in terms of processing ideas i get millions and millions of ideas i'm not sure if that's an exaggeration it might be but it might not be all at once and i really can't tell which ideas are good and which ideas are not good until i speak them out loud to someone else and then as it's coming out of my mouth i instantly realized that is a really dumb idea how on earth did i think that was going to work it it made so much sense here and then when i said it out loud suddenly i could understand the information in a different way because i had verbalized it and now i was processing the information in a different way so regardless of whether verbal processing is your number one preferred style most of us benefit from some uh degree of diversity in in having multiple ways to process information so i would suggest try it out see how it feels to actually read something out loud so if i'm reading something i will read it out loud because it's easier for me to understand if i read it out loud and then i'm verbally processing it and auditorily processing it as well it's a lot easier than just reading it off a page so the the three damaging messages were that i'm the problem i'm messed up i'm broken there's something wrong with me if you believe that then it's easy to think that well it must be my responsibility to fix the situation which can cause a huge amount of social anxiety and if you are suppressing your natural um information processing style it's easy to feel like you're really slow and you're catching up and everyone else is understanding things around you because you've actually got a serious disadvantage there um compared to someone who um is processing in their natural style that that they're used to so uh this video is all about i'm making a positive narrative around that verbal processing is just another way of processing and in the autistic community it's it's quite common which means that if someone is telling you you talk too much or if someone is telling you to stop interrupting you can tell them that this is how i process information this it's not something that's wrong with me i'm not broken this is my personality if you don't like this personality then we can find some other way of of interacting with each other and we're going to meet each other halfway because we are both valid in this situation my my information processing style is just as valid as everyone else's even if it is not common even if i'm the only one in a hundred people who's a verbal processor that is still just as valid just because you're the odd one out does not make you any less valid in the the way your brain works and and what you what you need so i hope you enjoyed this video um today uh please leave us a comment um if you are a verbal processor and what you do to manage manage that in in in real life if people tell you you talk too much um so i i hope i've helped you to reclaim that identity as something positive um thanks for watching and i'll see you next week bye you

Channel: Autism From The Inside

Views: 67,651

Keywords: real life aspergers, coping strategies aspergers, aspergers emotional intelligence, autism emotional intelligence, autism communication, verbal processing, auditory processing, auditory processing disorder, auditory processing disorder autism, talk too much, autism talk too much, autism verbal processing, information processing, adhd, interrupting conversations, paul micallef, stop interrupting, compulsive talking, adhd interrupting

Id: 6qcqAvXsvy4

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021