Helping My Work Colleagues Understand Me

Hi Mark.  There are 2 things which help me at work.  The first is that I always familiarise myself with the room / venue before meetings / events take place.  The second, which on the surface seems bizarre, is that I tend to run the meetings and events.  I hate talking in front of people, but if the meeting is 'mine' then I create and run 'the script' ie the agenda.  My niche at work is that I'm the person who is very good at organising things - I am, because the alternative is the sort of messiness and randomness I can't deal with.  The other thing about being the chair or host is that I'm not expected to interact with individuals in the group, so much as set agenda, keep to time, create minutes / follow on actions - ie I have a specific and known role to perform. Although it's difficult, I find this much easier than being a participant 

I have been trying to describe the mask also ... I don't know if this is the best way but ....

As autistic people are not able to understand the expressions and body-language in the way that others do, that we cannot simply react to what others are expressing, because we do not see what they are expressing, we learn a basic set of almost rote interactions ... we watch other people and note, 'person 'A' does this, then person 'B' does that' ... we build up a library of pieces of script, scenes from a play if you will, about how we are supposed to interact with other people.   

As long as the social interaction falls into one of the scenes we have practiced before, we can act in a manner that others expect.  But picking up the signals for which scene we are playing can be very taxing (see my other answer in this thread).  When we get tired or there are too many people, or the situation is one we have not learned the script for, we are lost, overwhelmed.

You’ve described it very well. I think what confuses other people sometimes is that at times (and especially when first meeting someone or starting a job / being interviewed) we can mask quite effectively. That then makes people think that we can deal with these social situations and they do not realise at all how much effort this is taking. It can be so draining… i am becoming more concious now of the impact …

I am still working out how my autism affects me and one recent 'discovery' may be a good way to describe it to your colleagues...

I do not process faces and body language subconsciously as everyone else does, I have to see everything and try and piece together what is happening around me through conscious effort. 

I dont see 'someone happy to see me', I see a person looking at me, maybe a smile on their face and a wave ... and I know it is the first time I have seen them that day ...  I have to collate all the factors and infer they are happy to see me.

I can do this with one, or maybe a small number, but if there are many people, or i am tired, there is simply to much to have to work through for me to be able to interact.  The phrase I believe is 'task saturation'.  The brain cannot handle the amount of input that is required for the task.  The workload of having to consciously pay attention to anyone who may be interacting with me, then having to think through all the factors and to try and understand what the situation is, is utterly exhausting.

Also it just occured to me- does your workplace have a dedicated advisor for this kind of thing? Maybe you could reach out to them? I am just thinking of this as my university has a whole department to help disabled students ( i don’t like to think of being autistic as a disability but this is how it is classified)- and I actually have a mentor to help me

Hi, 

I actually just opened up the NAS page as I was considering posting about a similar issue. I can relate to this a lot- I recently started my PhD in a new lab. The people are lovely- I can only think of positive things to say about them but I still feel utterly overwhelmed socially. I cannot work at all in the office and technically I could do most of desk work from home and have started doing this more but I am worried it will look bad and is not ok. But whenever I am in the office with lots of people anf noise I get nothing done and am extremely stressed. I also haven’t felt able to join them for lunch- eating socially is a particularly difficult thing for me. i joined twice but it drained me so much tjat I had to take a break afterwards. 
However now my supervisor has said I need to join more for social events such as lunch etc. I tried again today but had to leave and still it drained me so much that I feel nauseous and stressed and it is impacting my ability to work. I’m quite overwhelmed anyways at the moment as everything is new and my health isn’t great so my capacity for social situations is very low. 
Even for lab work I have started doing it late in evenings or weekends when it is quieter. 

i am also not sure how to manage this situation as if I try to meet my supervisors expectations in being more social it will render me unable to work well and will take a toll on my health. I actually find it quiet hard anyways to allow myself to opt out of certain situations and do what is best for me. 

Is socialising and team work important for your job? Because if it isn’t I feel like it really doesn’t make sense for you to push yourself to attend these team building and social events. Can you explain to your manager that these kind of situations can be stressful for you and take a lot of energy and that if you have to attend them this will ultimately mean that you won’t have as much energy for your work and make you less efficient? I don’t know… but isn’t that the most important thing anyways? That you do your work well? So surely it makes sense to opt out of activities that impact your wellbeing and ability to work… this should make sense to a manager too but like you say I also worry that they would npt understand. It’s hard for me to understand that other people find these activities fun and relaxing- but this in return I think makes ot really hard for them to understand that we find it hard. 

The situation for me is complicated by the fact that according to my supervisor being ab’e to join social events etc will be important for me to network as a scientist. 

I don’t know what the best way to explain is… what I said so far is that social situations for me just take a lot more energy than average. So that especially when a lot is going on and I am overwhelmed, this makes it even harder. 

I am sorry that I can’t really offer any useful advice… and I hope it’s ok that I wrote about my own challenges with this. You are not alone. 

Finally I keep thinking that technically these social events or team building activities are not part of the job, so can anyone really make us do it? but then I still worry about how that would come accross… 

hope you find a way of sorting this situation out! 

BigSully48 said:

I can't seem to get them to understand me and how it effects me.

A starting point would be to list what does effect you - can you be a bit more specific about the situations where you feel it is your autism causing you issues and we can recommend some tactics.