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Regular reminder that being an asshole is not a symptom of any form of neurodivergence. (You can replace “neurodivergent” with depressed, anxious, bipolar, etc. and the diagram works equally well)
ETA: social faux pas, awkwardness, and genuine symptoms of neurodivergence don’t make you an asshole. I shouldn’t have to say this? An “asshole” is someone who enacts a pattern of abusive, controlling, harassing, and/or harmful behavior with no remorse or concern for how other people are affected.
I agree but would qualify my agreement with a note:
Some of our neurodivergent traits come across as assholeish or rude behavior and while most of us try and temper and mask it does slip out especially in high stress situations.
Intention matters.
I think it's my responsibility to explain to coworkers and make super sure they understand how I am especially after a high stress event (for me that'd likely be a server outage in production).
This is true! But there’s a very easy way to tell the difference.
When you find out you hurt someone’s feelings, do you apologize, express how terrible you feel about it, and try to do better? Not an asshole.
Do you double down, make excuses, and blame them for feeling bad? Asshole.
Saying the wrong thing doesn’t make you a jerk. Not caring about other people’s feelings, does.
You're still making it a bit too easy for you. "Not caring about other people’s feelings" is very close to "Not able to understand why somebody reacts and feels a certain way" but is definitely not the same thing.
I'm a parent to (at least one diagnosed so far) autistic child and there are plenty of situations in which this very kind, friendly and empathic person is simply unable to understand why one of the other siblings reacted as they did. Has nothing to do with whether they care or not.
This is valid criticism and I’m going to sit with it.
All the same, most of the (adult) autistic folks I’ve known in my life have been quick to apologize and take responsibility, even when other peoples’ reactions don’t make sense to them.
Absolutely. Part of masking is to emulate behavior you've observed even though you don't understand it.
The child in question often need us parents to point out what happened and then they're able to say the correct things. What I meant was that it's not obvious to them that someone got offended - at all - to begin with.
Well said and point well taken.
I always encourage people to communicate, gently and clearly, what the other person did that was hurtful. I have so much empathy for people who are clueless (hi, hello, it’s me). But no empathy at all for people who callously, intentionally harass and hurt others.