WHY do Autistic People Interrupt and Talk Over You? | Autism Experiences

today we're talking about why autistic people can't stop interrupting so please stick around hi friends my name is claire and this is my channel which a theory here i make content about what it is like to live as an adult on the autism spectrum and whatever else feels good to me so if that sounds good to you or if you're feeling particularly gracious today and i hope that you are please go ahead and click the subscribe button ring the bell i almost forgot to mention that i put out videos three times a week i'm slowly trying to get a backdrop together uh this is not permanent but i just figured it was better than a blank wall so that's where we're at right now with that interrupting if you are a verbal autistic person this may be something that you've dealt with a lot throughout your life a lot of asd people struggle to know when to speak how much to speak and what to speak about anything that has to do with interacting with other people as you probably know asd is a neurological difference in a person's brain that usually results in great difficulty in everyday social situations to an outside party you might think that this means a person is socially awkward or just seems a little weird or different to you but really the social difficulty can present in many ways and one of the major ways that people probably aren't aware of is through interrupting or talking over people in conversation before i was diagnosed i felt like this was something i was going to struggle with for the rest of my life it is no matter how hard i tried to tackle it it just never changed i couldn't have a conversation with someone without butting in during the middle of their thought or starting to speak when i thought that there was a pause but really we both just started to speak at the same time i was always pegged as a poor listener and probably as a person who didn't care about the thoughts or opinions of others but this was really not the case on my end on my end i felt like i was doing my best to listen to a person and also trying my best to have a normal conversation it was and is still hard for me to focus on the conversation at hand and also to maintain eye contact and then bounce thoughts back and forth as one does in a conversation or at least that is what i have been led to believe i am not exaggerating when i say i would pray and pray that i would be able to get this under control and i didn't understand what the big issue was it was really distressing to me because it kept me from getting into deeper relationships because people felt like i didn't care about what they had to say and i wasn't being cognizant of their feelings when i was a younger person i spoke all of the time i felt like i had to speak and to get my thoughts out like i had to share what was on my mind just to get it off of my mind i remember my father would always say in reference to me i'm talking and i can't shut up and looking back i totally get that sentiment because it was a lot of talking and it was rarely at the correct time this kind of behavior can be considered rude and is embarrassing it can be pretty embarrassing if you are really trying to engage with someone but they in turn think that you are just trying to interrupt them and you don't care about their thoughts so why do asd people do this why do we interrupt talk over people over share or overspeak in a conversation why can't we just not do that shouldn't it be easy enough to correct especially if everyone else read neurotypicals can also do it without having to put in much effort well the thing is that asd people process information differently than neurotypical people sometimes it may be more slowly or it may be that we are processing more information than a neurotypical person does during a simple conversation we are processing what you are saying coming up with a response and by the time it starts to come out of our mouths the other person has started talking again or moved on to another topic or when there is a pause in the conversation you find out that the person was just taking a breath and is now trying to finish their thought but you've already busted in and spoken over them so really what i want people to know is that asd people are not trying to interrupt and we're not trying to speak over you or take over the conversation we're really just struggling to communicate with you in a more neurotypical context because our brains are routing the information differently than your brains are so i've tried a lot of things over the years to get better at this and not much has helped so first of all if you have advice on this please go ahead and share it with our community in the comments i know people always really appreciate that first thing i would normally think is why don't you just mask through it so you're not interrupting well that is something i have found that even when i'm masking the interrupting and talking over people is something that i can't mask through i can't make myself a great communicator that doesn't interrupt and always knows when to speak at the correct time even when i am masking maybe this is how you can truly be tipped off that a person might be neurodiverse because it's extremely hard to hide this trait it's easy to act like a different person but that doesn't mean that you can change the way that your brain is processing information and how it responds to information it's impossible second thing i would try to do is to really listen to what a person was saying and then not to think about what i was going to say until after they finished their thought but this didn't work for me because i don't and can't read those signals very well the ones that say oh i finished my thought now you go so there's only been a few things that have really helped me over the years the first is diagnosis and self-awareness this has definitely helped me the most now that i know that i have a different style of communication from other people i know that it's something i need to watch out for it's not that i'm rude or that i don't care it's just that there is something different about the way i think and process information knowing this has really taken so much pressure off of me especially in the moment and i found that it really does help for this to happen less the interrupting i'm going into the situation knowing that this is a struggle for me rather than being overwhelmed and thinking oh my goodness i can't do this because i'm going to interrupt or oh this isn't going well i don't know how the person is perceiving me oh am i doing the conversation right like i don't have that stress anymore because i know i'm processing the information differently second i give myself more time i now try to give myself twice as much time as i used to to let someone complete their thought or thoughts i know that i have the tendency to sneak in early never late so i have learned to give myself more time to let that person speak and process their thoughts three learning to apologize sometimes you are going to mess up and the best thing that you can do is to be honest with people let the person know that you have some communication issues if you feel comfortable with doing so and that you didn't mean to interrupt them people are usually pretty understanding if you were open and honest right from the get-go i know that for me letting people know that hey i'm so sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you i have some communication issues it does help sometimes especially if you don't know the person and they think that you're just being rude so what do you think i know that this is something that i felt really self-conscious about for a long time so i just wanted to bring it up and talk to my autism community about it is this something that you struggle with and what have you found has helped you be a better communicator as far as interrupting or talking over people in conversations that's everything i wanted to go over today i hope that you have a wonderful day and i will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Woodshed Theory

Views: 5,772

Keywords: autism meltdown, asd adult, autistic female

Id: RBuUa0elApw

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022