Copying/Mimicking

NT people often mimic each others behaviour, it’s a way of bonding with someone. If a person wants to show you that they want to be your friend they may copy a mannerism or part of your accent. It all sounds very bizarre to me, as an autistic person. Actually it took me a long time to even notice this behaviour in other people.

Autistic children have very poor copying skills. I’ve also hear T. Grandin say in a talk that autistic children have to be taught to take turns at something. I think copying and turn taking are both essential skills in social interaction.

Last year I had to go and see the Disability Employment Officer my local job centre, not long after I’d got my diagnosis. I didn’t want to go. I don’t like talking about myself as having a disability, I’m better now than I was then because I recognise the advantages of talking about it. But back then I wasn’t used to talking about autism. It’s still a bit a taboo with my family. I would rather we talked about it openly, but they all seem scared to, as if it’s something shameful.

The reason I’m going to tell you this little anecdote is because it illustrates the confusion and misunderstanding created between an autistic person and an NT person when the autistic person does not understand the codes of behaviour in social interaction.

The Disability officer turned out to be a nice, friendly lady and very sympathetic. Unfortunately she didn’t know anything about autism. I tried to explain, but I didn’t communicated what I wanted to say very well as I was too nervous. I dread people asking me to define autism because there are so many different symptoms. How do you sum it up in few sentences? I wish I’d had a leaflet to give her. There must be one out there, or maybe I could try writing one.

Anyway, when I’m nervous or worried I sometimes display this in my face. (It’s one of my few facial expression, that and smiling!). I do it in the hope that the other person will see my uneasiness and offer me some comfort. But it never seemed to work and the other person would just mirror back to me the same expression. I had no idea what was going on. I wasn’t comforted by this reaction, instead I was thinking, what could I have done to make them worried?

So this is what happened during my interview with this lady. Now I know she didn’t mean to upset me, she was very nice, so she could only have done what she did to be nice. I went over in my mind the things NT people do in conversation. I realised that all she was doing was showing me she was friendly by copying my expression. This was one of those eureka moments. I suddenly realised that all the time I’d been feeling rejected, I was simply misunderstanding the other person.

Now I understand this you might think the next step would be for me to adopt the same social techniques, but this would be very difficult for me to do. I’ve said else where that I am really bad at accents; I have difficulty with pronunciation and adding changes in tone and pitch to my voice. Also autistic people don’t use expressive body language, (if they have a mannerism it is probably a disguised stimming practice). Also my range of facial expressions is quite limited, I would never attempt to copy a facial expression without a mirror, I’d have no idea what I was doing otherwise.

The actions that people mimic when they’re talking to each other are either just impossible for an autistic person to copy or feel so unnatural the autistic person will have a very strong aversion. The whole thing would be done very clumsily, probably at the wrong moments, and the other person would either think you were making fun of them or were just some weirdo. But at least now I have an understanding of theses rules so there is now less chance of misunderstandings.