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Examples of anti-skills

mulder-are-you-suggesting:

chavisory:

realsocialskills:

quixylvre asked realsocialskills:

…In trying to explain to my mother what “anti-skills” are, she wants me to provide a list of examples. Could you, in a single post, provide a list of anti-skills that autistic people are routinely taught, perhaps also an addendum with anti-skills that are merely occasionally taught instead of consistently?

Some anti-skills I can think of off the top of my head, with some relevant links:

• Inability to say no
• Figuring out what people in power want, and doing it automatically
• Appearing enthusiastic and happy about doing so
• Suppressing and hiding all negative emotions; maintaining an happy affect at all costs
• Holding still in order to appear more neurotypical, even when it makes it impossible to understand things or communicate
• Denying that you’re disabled; lacking awareness of your own disability or impairment
• Hostility towards adaptive equipment and disability-related coping strategies
• Contempt for the body language and other discernibly autistic traits in others
• Inability to tell who is a friend and who has another agenda (this can lead to destructive involvement with ideological groups)
• Pushing yourself really hard to speak when other forms of communication would be more effective and less draining
• Becoming convinced that you don’t really care about other people and aren’t able to understand or relate to them, and so you have to rely on rigidly following rules instead
• Becoming convinced that you don’t have any body language
• Becoming convinced that you’re good at things that autistic people are stereotypically supposed to be good at, at the expense of spending time on things you’re actually good at

I also talked about some anti-skills in this post I wrote for someone considering working as an aide for an autistic kid.

These are some of the anti-skills I know about, what are some others y’all know about?

-Reflexive obedience to or attempting to please authority.

-Becoming convinced that you lack emotion or empathy.

-Becoming convinced of an innate, across-the-board inability to understand social situations, rather than understanding that you have certain perceptual barriers in certain social contexts.

-Reflexive acceptance of the priorities of others for you as your own.

-Falling under pressure to believe that other people’s perceptions of you and your abilities are more reliable than your own instincts and intuition.

-Basically all kinds of pressure to make you believe that your own perceptions are wrong and not reliable, and that paying attention to them, or taking proper care of yourself in atypical ways, is morally wrong.

- Becoming convinced that you can only get a job related to your special interest because you won’t be able to do anything else well

- Becoming convinced that you can only make friends if you behave as rigidly normal as possible, and that you are not entitled to feel comfortable around your “friends”

(via tal9000)

ashestoashesjc:

i love studio ghibli movies. not only for their amazing animation and storytelling, but because whenever characters get upset or surprised they go from

to

(via knittedlampshade)

andrewpauldost:

i just saw a post like “kids these days dont even know what a vhs is” like why do people think kids of modern day dont know about past events like i know what fucking morse code is but i dont use it to order a pizza

(via mommy-cuteella)

So about the so-called lack of boy stuff in YA

seananmcguire:

yaflash:

So I have a lot of feelings every single time I hear that people are “angry” or “annoyed” or whatever that they can’t find ONE SINGLE YA BOOK IN THE ENTIRE YA SECTION FOR BOYS TO READ and YOUNG MEN ARE FAILING BECAUSE GIRLS ARE TAKING OVER LITERATURE and HOW CAN BOYS POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED TO WANT TO TOUCH WHINY GIRLY CRAP WITH A TEN FOOT POLE?????

I have a few thoughts.

1) If you cannot find at least a handful of books in the YA section that might appeal to a teenage boy, you aren’t looking very hard. Maybe peruse this list of 140 titles that would appeal to teenage boys. Also, that list is from last year and similar books are being released every month.

2) LOLOLOLOLOL okay yeah young boys have absolutely nothing to read, you’re right. It’s not like you can walk into any library or bookstore and find that the majority of the books in it are about white men.

3) I resent the implication that a book with a female protagonist OR romantic element, no matter how slight, is a “girl book” unless it’s by some guy who gets really upset when anyone calls him a romance author because HIS BOOKS ARE NOT ROMANCES THEY ARE ~SERIOUS LITERATURE~ because the two are mutually exclusive. I also resent that we continue to encourage our boys to distance themselves vehemently and often violently from anything that could be considered even slightly non-masculine.

There is this thing people say: “My son/brother/I had nothing in the YA section to read! They/I had to go STRAIGHT FROM KID’S BOOKS TO LORD OF THE RINGS/WHEEL OF TIME/ENDER’S GAME/CATCHER IN THE RYE/ETC.!”

Wow. I mean, do you understand what a tragedy it is that these poor boys don’t even get to stop in the YA section and they are forced to go immediately to the thousands and thousands and thousands of fantasy and science fiction and ~real literature~ books that are about young white men coming of age and having adventures? Greatest tragedy of our generation, honestly.

I mean doesn’t anyone find it a little… odd? That the fantasy and sci-fi shelves are bursting with young 16-25 year old men who are doing lots of different things (including kissing/sexing ladies OH MY GOD ROMANCE???!!!!?!?!!?), and then the YA section is hanging out over here with lots of stories with VERY SIMILAR CONTENT (Kristin Cashore! Tamora Pierce! Beth Revis!), but everyone looks at those books and goes “Ugh, girl books, there’s no possible way a young man or even a smart girl could be into those?”

TAMORA PIERCE LITERALLY WRITES ABOUT KNIGHTS AND MAGIC AND FANTASY CREATURES AND WAR AND SASSY ANIMAL SIDEKICKS. She just writes about them from a *girl’s* perspective. Which means boys are physically incapable of reading it, I guess?

I just can’t wrap my brain around the fact that people do not get the irony in what they’re saying. They don’t even realize as the words are rolling off their tongue that YA is so female-centric because coming-of-age stories for young men have already been staples in the “real books” section for decades. Because being a young straight white man is universal, see, while being a girl is something that’s impossible to care about unless you’re both a girl and stupid. (COOL GIRLS read the boy stuff, duh!)

And even then, even then, there’s still plenty of boy-centric YA, too. Because there is no boy-free space, you guys. That’s the thing about privilege — you’re so used to being allowed in every space and have everyone accept you as the default that when you can’t immediately find something that’s obviously “for you,” you claim that it’s excluding you and that you must be included. You don’t even see that you can literally sidestep into another area that is catered exactly to you.

Honestly, to a point, this is not even the fault of young men. It is the fault of a society that continues to tell them that they’re the most important of all. Boys don’t start out believing that they can’t relate to girls, or that romance is sappy and beneath them. They’re not born with the idea that sex is a game or they’re “naturally” better at certain things. We feed them that. And we continue to feed it to them every time we huff about there being no “boy stuff” in YA, which is a flat-out, complete and total lie.

Of course, at a certain point they can reason on their own, and then it’s on them whether they’re willing to learn some empathy, just as it’s on any other privileged class.

There is so much more to this, like the fact that patriarchy often drips from those so-called “girl books,” even though they’re “for girls.” That publishers literally can’t afford to be idealists and they have to take society and money into consideration, and how much that sucks.

I have said this before, and I doubt I’ll stop saying it: if young men aren’t reading, it is not because of women and their stupid girl books. There are other elements at work here, because there has never and will never be a “lack” of books written by dudes for dudes. Please try again.

In the meantime, I might segue into the way we pish-posh “romance” and sex if it’s written by women, but that’s another post.

So much yes.

(via alexandraerin)

thepensivebrony:

“you shouldn’t be depressed, people have it worse than you”

finally, after years of searching, the person with the worst life ever is found. formally, they are granted permission to be sad. but only them. only they have earned it. no sads for anyone else at all ever

(via mommy-cuteella)

Is Xbox live not working for anyone else? It’s connecting to the router fine, and i know the router’s getting internet because my tablet’s connected to it. Soooo… I’m not seeing the problem here.