I’m So Much Worse at Social Cues Than I Even Realised — Explaining vs Apologising

Re-thinking things post autism diagnosis

I’ve strongly related to autistic people all my life. Yet I always thought ‘despite relating to all these autistic traits, I am not autistic because I can understand social cues.’

Part of this mistaken idea came from the stereotypical examples I saw of the ways autistics get social cues wrong. These were always things I had learned to recognise and accept, even if the convention made no sense to me. I hadn’t spent the time listening to autistic people, particularly later diagnosed, lower support needs women, speak about themselves and their experiences in their own words.

Another part of this idea came from the fact that I was so bad at understanding social cues I didn’t realise everything I was missing.

The difference, as perceived by allistics, between explaining and apologising is one of the many aspects of communication I’ve recently learned more about how I typically get wrong.

Explaining vs Apologising

I saw a man explaining this on TikTok a while ago, and it changed my life. My entire life, I’ve done things that bother or upset others, as we all do occasionally, and been asked, ‘why did you do that?’

To me, the natural response to this question is to, well, answer it. I explain the sequence of events and the thought process that led me to take (or not take) the action that’s at issue.

Even though this explanation would always, I felt, make it clear that my intentions were innocent, and that I’m sorry that, nonetheless, they were hurt or disadvantaged by my actions, my response would rarely resolve or improve the situation.

What this man I saw on TikTok explained is that, despite what their words seem to suggest, allistics are often not really looking for an explanation when they ask this. They don’t care what happened or how as much as they care that you understand and validate how what happened made them feel.

My style of response is what I’d want if I were in their shoes — knowing how something happened and what the person’s intentions were enables me to judge the likelihood of whatever has upset me happening again. But to many allistics, this style of explanation comes across as making excuses — even if you are acknowledging that you took an action you shouldn’t have!

Of course, it’s infuriating that they literally ask for an explanation and then don’t like when you provide an explanation. But, essentially, they often don’t feel comfortable just asking, ‘can you understand how this made me feel?’ or saying ‘you don’t seem bothered that you’ve upset me.’

They want a response that engages with their feelings and, ideally, reflects show information back to them.

Here’s an example from my own life that demonstrates just how badly I can get this wrong. I made a really big screw-up at work. I had several meetings with my manger and other staff who had to get involved in the clean-up process to discuss this screw-up and how we would address it, and prevent the same issue happening again.

In these meetings, these other staff members would talk through the consequences of this screw-up. I acknowledged and agreed with everything they were saying about this, explained how it had happened, and presented some ideas for structures and systems I could put in place to prevent it happening again.

Not long after this meeting, I received an email from my manager inviting me to another meeting, with an HR representative, to discuss the situation again. The reason for this meeting, the email said, was that she wasn’t confident I understood the gravity of the situation.

After I had recovered from reading this, which took some time, I wrote out what I wanted to say in the meeting, knowing I couldn’t rely on myself to remember when actually in it. What I said about that comment was that I didn’t understand where it come from as, not only did I understand this immediately we had had meeting where people had explained it to me and I had always agreed with them, I had never questioned their statements about the consequences the screw-up had for them and their work.

My manger’s response to this was understanding but she explained that she had formed that view, essentially, because I didn’t seem emotional. She referenced that this was a situation that would typically make someone quite emotional but that I had seemed fairly unphased throughout the process.

I explained that I was emotional and did care but that I don’t usually show my emotions in the way she might expect. I explained that I had also felt it important to not show emotions during this process because, to me, that would be putting something else on the plate of people who I’d already given a lot of trouble. For me, as someone who struggles with expressing empathy, an upset co-worker would make me uncomfortable and more stressed as I would not know how to or want to comfort them.

The way I thought I was being considerate of others actually led them to believe I didn’t care about them.

So, the upshot of all this is that, sometimes, rather than explaining our actions to those we’ve upset we need some phrases up our sleeve that show we understand how we’ve made them feel, and that we ourselves feel badly about having made them feel that way. Unfortunately, if you’re anything like me knowing that is the easy part, doing it will be harder.

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