At the same time, many autistic people have difficulty recognizing and understanding other people’s body language, facial expressions and tones of voice. I’ve seen two possible explanations for this, which I think are both probably part of it.

First, non-autistic people’s ways of expressing their emotions may be unintuitive for us to understand, since they’re often different from ours. It may take more time and effort for us to realize what certain expressions or ways of speaking mean, since we don’t do them ourselves.

Second, as I mentioned at the top of this section, difficulties that aren’t directly related to emotions or body language may take our attention away from them.

I don’t think I have much difficulty in this area myself. I’m very good at recognizing tones of voice. When I was younger, I used to be able to very reliably guess who my mother was talking to on the phone based only on her tone of voice. I don’t always notice body language, but when I do, I don’t find it particularly confusing. Very, very rarely do I notice it and find myself at a loss to explain what it means. When I don’t notice, it’s because of the third reason for problems with socialization that I talked about earlier: I’m distracted, because I’m overloaded, or thinking about what I want to say, or various other things.

Actually, I often get confused and feel awkward because I usually follow the body language and not the words when my understanding of someone’s body language clashes with what they’re saying. Spoken words may be clearer and more specific, but I tend to understand body language quickly and intuitively, so it comes through first. I need longer to process spoken language, especially if I’m not expecting someone to talk to me. The result of this is that I end up doing things like walking towards someone who is telling me to go somewhere else, because they’re turning to face me in a way that looks like they want to talk to me.

For more about social interaction and understanding body language, the comments on this post include a lot of autistic people talking about various kinds of problems with social interaction, including understanding people’s emotions from their voices and body language.  This post by thecaffeinatedautistic focuses on tone of voice and sarcasm.

As I’ve mentioned before, autistic people often express our emotions through body language in ways that are different from the norm. There’s more to that difference than the addition of stims, though– autistic people can also lack aspects of body language and facial expression that most people expect. It seems to be a pretty common autistic trait to have facial expressions that are smaller or more subtle than most people’s. I can’t count the number of times I’ve smiled for a photo and been told I wasn’t smiling enough, that I needed to show my teeth. Some autistic people also speak in a subdued or monotone way, without much variation in their tone of voice, even when they’re upset or excited.

Since I’m used to my own face and voice (and since I have a lot of other things to think about when I’m speaking) it’s hard for me to evaluate these characteristics in myself most of the time. When people react strangely to me, I usually don’t know if it was something about my voice or body language that caused it. However, as I said earlier, I have had people tell me that my deliberate, exaggerated expressions, like smiling or making silly faces for pictures, aren’t really that exaggerated. I’m not sure how my everyday speaking voice compares to other people’s, but my voice does tend to become more monotone, instead of more expressive, when I’m upset.

The responses to this post on the Real Social Skills blog have a lot of autistic people discussing how pain shows in their body language and speech, and this one by Cynthia Kim discusses differences in tone of voice.

One small but significant way that autistic people often stand out as different socially is our avoidance of eye contact. The best explanation of it that I’ve seen is Amythest’s video here.

As far as I know, an Official Medical Explanation of why autistic people avoid eye contact doesn’t really exist. It’s just one of those inexplicable behaviors (or else it’s taken as proof of a lack of empathy or interest in other people.)

Based on my own experience, I agree with Amythest. It’s fairly normal for non-autistic people to look away from what they’re focusing on when thinking or trying to remember. Since autistic people are often prone to sensory overload and likely to have executive function problems, it makes sense that we’d find maintaining eye contact even more distracting than the average person does. The discomfort and even pain that some autistic people describe having when they make eye contact makes sense considering the existence of sensory sensitivites that can make other inoccuous things feel painful.

Personally, I can usually make eye contact comfortably when I’m listening to someone else talk, but not when I’m thinking hard or while I’m talking. When I’m tired or otherwise stressed, making eye contact is more difficult– it feels like an extra burden on top of all the other things I have to think about or pay attention to. Sometimes when I’m tired, people’s voices seem very loud and hard to ignore. I look away because I want to make things somehow less overwhelming, and looking away is the best I can do, especially if I do also want to hear what they have to say.

I also avoid eye contact when it comes to people who I’m neither listening nor talking to, because of social anxiety. The prospect of having a conversation with a random stranger in a public place is stressful, and I’m not confident that I can do it “correctly”/politely, so I want to avoid catching people’s attention.

Finally, I want to talk about autistic people and social interaction. There’s a whole section of the DSM 5 criteria devoted to “deficits in social communication and social interaction,” making it one of the main characteristics of autism. Over the years, there have been some remarkably awful theories that try to explain this. There are people who claim that autistic people lack any understanding that other people are intelligent and have their own minds and thoughts (the thing we supposedly lack is called “theory of mind”.) There are others who say that autistic people lack empathy, the ability to recognize and share other people’s emotions, or even that we don’t really have emotions of our own. I’m not going to address these ideas directly right now, because my main point is that there are much better, more straightforward explanations for why autistic people struggle with social interaction. I’ve already talked about several of them, in fact:

It’s hard to socialize when you have difficulty putting your thoughts into words.

It’s hard to socialize when you have difficulty understanding other people’s words.

It’s hard to socialize when you’re distracted by sensory sensitivities.

Autistic people’s problems with relating to other people are (mostly) not because of any fundamental problem with empathy or understanding. Instead, we have problems with all sorts of different aspects of communication. I’ve mentioned problems with verbal language already, and now I’m going to talk about body language and nonverbal communication.

In the sections about sensory sensitivities, stimming, SIBs, and executive function, I’ve said a few things about autistic people being stressed or overwhelmed. Now I want to say a little more about stress, and how autistic people’s reactions to it may be different from other people’s.

Autistic people— children and adults— sometimes seem to have very disproportionate responses to minor problems. This is partly because we can become stressed and overwhelmed more easily, as I’ve already talked about, and partly because the ways we express our emotions are often not typical. Autistic people (especially those of us with severe sensory sensitivities) may be under a lot of stress even in situations that seem calm to others, and on top of that, our facial expressions and body language don’t always show that stress in ways most people can recognize. We may also feel pressure to cover up how stressed we feel, to hide that we’re autistic or to avoid inconveniencing others. So, people around us often assume everything is fine until we’re so stressed that we start crying or run out of the room.

Two terms that are used a lot in the online circles I follow are “meltdown” and “shutdown”. Meltdown means obvious outward expressions of stress— feeling frustrated or angry and showing it through things like crying, shouting, and the self-harm that I discussed in the last section. Shutdown means reacting to stress by withdrawing— feeling exhausted and mentally foggy, not understanding or responding to what’s going on around you, physically withdrawing by covering your ears or trying to avoid people.

I get the impression that the term “autistic meltdown” originated from parents of young autistic children, as a better word than just “tantrum”. This is an important distinction to make. When people use the word tantrum, they usually mean someone is exaggerating how upset they are and making a scene deliberately, in the hopes of getting something they want. An autistic person’s meltdowns may seem unreasonable, but they aren’t fake or exaggerated. Pretty much anyone, and especially any child, will cry and make a scene if they’re pushed far enough. Autistic people just tend to get pushed farther in the course of their everyday lives.

Here are some autistic people’s descriptions of meltdown and shutdown.  (Cynthia Kim, Sparrow Rose Jones, Aiyana Bailin, CrabbyCentaur)

Personally, I go towards the “shutdown” side 99% of the time. I may not feel calm and in control of myself, but I don’t do anything that looks like losing control— I don’t lash out physically or break down crying in public. I withdraw in on myself, I speak less or not at all. Thinking seems difficult. I know I should be able to deal with the situation in front of me, but my mind stays blank no matter how hard I try to remember what I should do. If circumstances force me to keep trying over and over to do something I can’t do at the moment, then I might get too frustrated and break down, but I can usually avoid that.

From the outside, overload may look similar to anxiety– I can see how “acting like a small problem is huge and serious” is a characteristic of both– but the internal experience is completely different. When I’m overloaded, I’m not feeling anxious (whether rationally or irrationally). I’m not worrying about the greater implications of the small problem in front of me. I’m not emotionally overwhelmed. Oftentimes when I’m anxious, dealing with my emotions is the only thing I really need to do– once I’m calm, the issue is so easy to solve that it doesn’t even deserve to be called a problem.

When I’m overloaded, on the other hand, a problem that may seem small to someone else is actually huge for me. It hits one of my sensory sensitivities, or some aspect of it is too complicated for my current level of executive function. The process of trying to solve the problem is incredibly unpleasant or cognitively difficult, and my emotional reaction comes from the fact that I’m trying to do something very difficult. When someone tries to calm me down when I’m overloaded, it often feels like they’re adding even more problems to my load– now I have to solve a very difficult, frustrating problem and, meanwhile, act like I’m not struggling and frustrated.

When I’m feeling overloaded, the main thing I need is to stop struggling with whatever overloaded me. I either need assistance to get it fixed as quickly as possible, or to take a break from trying to deal with it, including from trying to act calm and controlled.