Trust in me, I'll give you a reason

[sovay]

Tonight in shower conversations, I talked to spatch about how ambivalently I feel about the fact that I had to learn to signal my emotions beyond my natural facial reactions because otherwise people wouldn't believe that I felt what I felt (another inescapable form of social lying) and he assured me that by now it looks very natural and microexpressive and then I felt even more ambivalently about that. Does everyone just learn the right faces to make and then never mention it in polite company so that it just looks natural from the outside and each person secretly assumes they're the one acting? Concern, distaste, appreciation, perplexity. All the little noises you make to people to tell them that you're really interested in what they're saying. Did you really think that those gogglers knew you for yourself without any help from me? No, I had to give you an aspect they could understand, and a horn they could see. These days, it takes a cheap carnival witch to make folk recognize a real unicorn. I still have to tell people sometimes that I really am happy about something even if I am not demonstrating the socially normative level of shrieking and flailing. It is just so often exhausting.

Comments

[ada_hoffmann]

I'm sure this isn't an issue unique to autistic people, but it is an issue which is very common among autistic people and likely other non-neurotypical types.

I dated an autistic person a while back who got criticized a lot (even by people who should know better, like his parents!) for "never getting excited", or people would call him a robot, etc - he did experience excitement and many other emotions in ways that were visible to me, but they were subdued compared to what most people expected.

Other autistic people (I know this from the Internet, not personally) have this issue so markedly that they cannot even facially convey pain or distress in a way that neurotypical people will recognize, which leads to issues when, for example, seeking medical help.

My own mother says I acted like a robot when I was 3, but I grew out of it.

[davidgillon]

People are generally bad on pain, whether you're neurodiverse or neurotypical. They expect severe pain to mean screaming, and it rarely does come to that, especially with chronic pain.

OTOH I got to be fairly good at reading facial expressions for the moment they decided I was lying about the amount of pain I was in.

[selkie]

Concur! Sadly. (I am mostly neurotypical except for a squibbly amygdala from childhood trauma, and I have been in escalating chronic genetic pain for years; getting people to take you seriously when you're not bleeding and are generally fairly stoic and, apparently, murderous-looking is a difficult thing. Fun tiiiiimes.)

[davidgillon]

Even the paramedics looked a little dubious when scooping me off the bathroom with acute pancreatitis. Admittedly even I was a little dubious about the amount of pain I was in and saying "I'm normally much better than this at handling pain".

Fortunately the A&E consultant must have been better at reading things, because he ignored the car crash victim with multiply splinted limbs on the next trolley, shot me full of morphine and walked me through the system himself.

[sovay]

They expect severe pain to mean screaming, and it rarely does come to that, especially with chronic pain.

I feel like this is its own entire conversation: I have such history with people not believing my pain and I know I am not alone.

[swan_tower]

I wound up asking once on my blog how many women actually scream when frightened or otherwise provoked -- meaning full-on movie screaming, as opposed to a yelp or some other sound. Turns out some of 'em do! It has always seemed utterly fake to me, but for some people it's a natural reaction, or at least learned so early it feels natural.

The thing that provoked me into asking this was when my husband accidentally kicked me in a badly-sprained toe, causing a sudden, severe, and completely unexpected spike of pain. I yelled, but I didn't scream. For yea verily, I come from a Stoic People (Scandinavian on my mother's side, and I imprinted). One time I managed to annoy my husband because I'd said I would drive someone home that night, but asked him to do it instead because "I'm not feeling all that well." While he was gone I started puking into the toilet, in the first stomach flu of my life. He's got practice in translating Me to Normative English, but even then didn't realize on that occasion what "I'm not feeling all that well" signified.

But it's like asakiyume said above: this kind of thing is very culturally determined, in addition to being individual.

[davidgillon]

It is subtly different, in that people are generally mis-reading pain expressions from lack of experience, but it's also in many ways a cultural bias around how pain is expressed:- "Well, we expect stiff upper lip from people, but I know if I stub my toe I yell, therefore no yelling = manageable pain." But that startled pain reaction only applies to unexpected injuries, not so much "Oh, shit, this is going to hurt," or "so this hurts, as usual".

[ethelmay]

A stubbed toe sometimes is the worst pain ever for the first half a second, though. The one time I've ever had pain that bad that continued, I kept right on screaming until it stopped, which fortunately was not actually very long.

[davidgillon]

And there's the other extreme, where you deliberately suppress showing the pain you're in because it would needlessly complicate the ongoing social interaction. Which ironically was exactly where I found myself when I went out after my initial posts. It was near the end of the evening, so I just made my excuses and left, but realistically I was at 9-10 out of 10, and I know what 10 feels like. (Fortunately it didn't last long).

[rachelmanija]

But if you do scream they think you're faking it unless you are also profusely bleeding.

[sovay]

But if you do scream they think you're faking it unless you are also profusely bleeding.

"No one believed me unless they could see me bleeding on the floor" was in fact how it boiled down for me.

[davidgillon]

There's that, too. Especially for people who present as female.