- So it's a pretty common aspie thing
to like being significantly more direct
than most people
and what I've found is that it doesn't always go so well
because a lot of the time,
other people really don't handle that very well.
They much prefer things to be a little bit softer.
A little bit blurred around the edges.
So to better understand that,
I've put together a bit of a flow chart
to try and figure out where things go wrong
when I'm too direct.
Essentially, it starts off here
where I have something to tell someone, right?
Your actions are hurting me
and part of being on the spectrum
is that I'm a bit more sensitive to some things
than most people.
So this actually happens quite a bit
where something that would not be an issue for someone else
is an issue for me.
What do I do?
So let me just run you through the flow chart very quickly.
First question is do I tell you about it
because if I don't tell you, you're not gonna know.
Do you care that your actions are hurting me
and do you actually want to change?
Do you have the ability to change?
If yes, great.
You know what the problem is, you care enough to change it,
you do change it, everyone wins.
The difficult thing comes in when sometimes
people literally don't have the ability
to modify their behavior.
So if I say please always remember
to leave the kitchen scissors in the same place
or please always remember to clean up your dishes
when you've finished, or something like that.
It's very common actually for people to just not have
the ability to always remember to do something
and whenever they forget,
it can impact me quite significantly.
When that happens, we've got a secondary problem
because the person knows what's wrong,
they care about fixing it,
they've promised me that they will change,
and then they don't.
All of a sudden, we've got a broken promise
and that is when being excessively direct
can lead to complete relationship breakdown
because what happens is I confront the person
saying, hey, you said you'd do this thing and you didn't
and if I point that out, that can be really too confronting
for a lot of people and it will lead to excuses
for why the promise wasn't kept
and if we go through this cycle again,
and you promise me again, I'm sorry,
I'll do it better next time,
and you don't do it better next time,
then we're here again and now,
not only am I still getting hurt by the actions,
but now we've got two broken promises.
Which is really difficult for you to accept
that you've broke a promise to me
because you know exactly what I need
and you care about it and it's really hard to accept
the fact that you can't do anything about it.
And if we go around that loop a couple of times,
then it just leads to broken promises
and complete relationship breakdown.
So, I guess, this situation happens to me a lot
because I can be quite sensitive to some quite little things
that would otherwise not bother anyone else
and when I ask people to modify their behavior,
they promise me that they can but actually they can't.
And, unfortunately, the closer the relationship is,
the bigger a problem this can be
because you don't want to let someone down,
especially not someone you care about.
So the more someone cares about me,
the more they will be upset at the fact
that they have broken a promise to me
and that they're continuing to accidentally hurt me.
So now that I can see the trap that I often fall into,
I actually do have a number of strategies on how to deal
with the situation.
When you get to this point and the answer is clearly,
no, I do not have the ability to do what I promised,
then there are actually other ways to progress from there
to, one, save the relationship,
and, two, actually help myself to not continue to get hurt
by this person accidentally.
If that sounds a little bit abstract.
In my written blog, I've got a much more detailed example
of an actual incident that happened a little while back
with a housemate.
Hopefully that will be more concrete for people
that need a specific example.
So, yeah, flow charts, I love them,
I hope to do more of them. I hope you love them, too.
Bye!