I’ve previously written a post about the need to learn social skills through practice until they become automatic.  I recently had some very interesting conversations with two other autistic graduate students, both of whom research autism, in which I was able to refine some of my thinking about this topic.

Furthermore, I’ve realized that my previous post didn’t address the important concern that deliberate attempts to look more neurotypical – to “camouflage” our autistic selves – might adversely affect our mental health.

Before, I talked about how we might learn some basic social skills through a workbook, or lesson, or some other explicit teaching device or curriculum (or even, I should add, a curriculum we develop ourselves based on observations of our social worlds), but we would then need to practice until we can automatically apply the rules in the moment.  I essentially said that we need to be able to proceed through social situations on autopilot, without consciously thinking about them, because in social interactions, there’s simply far too much information to be processed and far too little time to process it.

However, I now want to make it very clear that I don’t oppose the idea that we should have conscious rules and strategies to help us in social interactions.  Such rules can indeed be extremely helpful – but as a scaffold, as a temporary measure.  While I believe our ultimate goal should still be automaticity, I think there are some intermediate stages between reading about a social rule and being able to apply it without conscious thought.

One intermediate step is being able to automatically bring a rule into conscious awareness in the appropriate moment.  Our consciousness and working memory can only hold a very small amount of information at any given moment.  We can’t constantly be thinking, “Remember, when somebody asks about your day, give a short, small-talk answer.”  We need to be able to think about other things!  Instead, we have to be able to spontaneously remember the rule when it becomes relevant – in this case, when somebody asks us about our day.  (This is a relatively explicit prompt, but usually, it will be harder to tell when a rule becomes relevant.)  At this stage, we’re still thinking about the rule and using it to guide our behaviour, so we’re not completely on autopilot, but we have to be able to start thinking about it when we need to implement it.  Practice with the rule will help us bring it into our awareness at the proper moment.

The other intermediate step is taking the basic rule that one finds in a workbook and refining it through experience.  No matter how comprehensive a social curriculum is, it just won’t be able to include all the sub-rules and exceptions one can encounter in one’s own daily life.  Eye contact is a great example of this.  Have you ever met autistic people who, in defiance of the stereotype that autistic people avoid eye contact, actually stare excessively at others?  I have, and I think it’s because they have been taught to make eye contact, but they haven’t yet learned that they shouldn’t make continuous eye contact.  We call social rules “rules,” but they’re at most guidelines.  Furthermore, many of the exceptions to the rules will be unique to the individual social contexts in which one happens to find oneself.  A workplace, for example, may have its own little conventions and customs.  Interactions with specific people also bring up specific exceptions.  Because these exceptions may only be found in specific contexts, they must be identified by individuals as we go about our daily lives.  This also requires practice.

Eventually, as we continue to practice and as our comfort levels in social interactions increase, we’ll be able to stop consciously thinking about the rules.  Instead of drawing our modified rules into conscious awareness at the proper moments, we’ll be able to proceed completely on autopilot.

I believe that this complete automaticity should remain our goal.  As we learn to apply more basic social rules automatically, we can keep improving our social skills by thinking of new subtleties, exceptions, and refinements.  We can then practice applying these newer, more specific rules and exceptions until they become automatic in turn.  Thus, we can always continue to learn.

However, as I was saying earlier, we have to consider whether attempts to “pass” as neurotypical – attempts to “camouflage” ourselves – might have negative consequences.  Although researchers and professionals spent many decades simply assuming that looking neurotypical was desirable and good, we’ve slowly started to realize that the reality is much more complicated.  Conscious attempts to fake being neurotypical can cause exhaustion and fatigue.  Furthermore, deliberately attempting to pretend to be something that you are not can have serious adverse effects on one’s mental health and on the development of one’s identity and self-image.  Indeed, several recent studies have offered quantitative evidence suggesting that camouflaging of autism is related to mental health challenges (Cage et al., 2019; Hull et al., 2018; Lai et al., 2017; Livingston et al., 2018).  It’s very hard to be confident, happy, and proud of who you are if you’re busily pretending to be someone else!

At the same time, it’s obvious that we, as autistic people, will have to make efforts to learn social skills if we want to succeed in the world.  Evidence suggests that subtle differences in autistic people’s style and behaviour can elicit rapid, negative judgements from others (Sasson et al., 2017).  Can these negative judgements be unfair?  Absolutely!  Can they constitute a form of bias that is socially unjust?  I certainly think so.  But in the world that exists today, we simply can’t ignore the social domain if we want to succeed.  We need to recognize that others will judge us negatively if we don’t make some attempt to improve our social skills.

How, then, can we balance the dangers of excessive camouflaging, with its negative effects on mental health and identity development, with the danger of others’ negative reactions to our original social behaviour?  I believe that practicing social skills to make them automatic, so that we can implement them without conscious awareness or effort, can help us avoid many – though not all – of the negative consequences of conscious camouflaging.  For example, moving the effort of social interaction outside our conscious awareness (with its very limited processing power) isn’t going to entirely eliminate social fatigue, but it may help.

Some people might disagree with me here.  They might argue that pursuit of automatic social skill actually changes the person far more than conscious attempts to camouflage, and in a sense, they’re right.  Years of social practice have left me a very different person from who I was.  I’ve changed.  But to what extent is this a problem?  All of us – neurotypicals and autists alike – change and develop over time.  We are not static beings, but dynamic ones.

I don’t believe that learning new social skills to the point that they can be applied unconsciously fundamentally changes who we are.  Even if we learn some new skills that will help us in the world, we can still take pride in our shared identity as members of an autistic community.  Armed with this pride, we can try to remain confident enough to not exhaust ourselves consciously thinking through every interaction and planning for every eventuality.  Furthermore, we can still pursue our passions and autistic intense interests.  And we can make sure that we define our social learning goals in a circumscribed and positive way: rather than explicitly trying to change who we are, or explicitly trying to be more neurotypical, we can simply work to learn and practice new social skills that will make our lives easier.