help me understand asperger's...therapist new to the area

i am undertaking advanced clinical psychology training and have been assigned children with diagnoses of asperger's (10 and 12 yr old). They were referred for social skills training.
Can someone with Asperger's please help me to understand what your internal experience of Asperger's is. Do you know that you are not able to read people's tone of voice, facial expressions etc or only after you are told this does it make sense? Do you desire to be closer to people or do you find socialising too confusing? At this age would you want help to understand people better or would you not know what the therapist was talking about when she stated that it is harder for you to understand others' emotions and thoughts? I am just wondering if the kids will get the aim of what I am trying to do...or if they will wonder what on earth I am trying to teach them and why do they have to learn it? I really want to do my best for these children...Please help me...

It can vary from person to person on everything you listed. One person with AS might see a facial expression and non-verbal communication gestures and not even have them register in his head, while another person sees them and they register to him, but he might be perplexed as to what the person means. I'm the second type.

For some personal examples, I know what simple things like smiles and obvious laughs mean, but history has shown me that I often confuse angry vocal inflections & facial expressions from my sister and girlfriend as them being happy/amused/or thinking what I'm doing is funny when they are really furious. Gestures often confuse me when they are done as well. I understand what waving means as a concept, but when someone waves at me I'm usually confused about why they are swinging their arm around in the air and for what reason.

Personally, I don't desire to be closer to people because I have a schizoid type personality (and this could be caused by AS), the amount of noise people make often makes me uncomfortable or hurts my ears, and other people would conflict with my routines. Socializing is confusing, but mostly because people are very unpredictable and this doesn't mix well with the ridgid mindset many people with AS have.

I was in counceling when I was 9 or 10 (long before my AS diagnosis though) and I remember everything being kept simple. I doubt I would have understood or accepted statements like "you can't understand how other people think and feel", but this information revealed in small bits over time would be more palatable.

I pretty much agree with that assessment. It varies a decent amount between Aspies. The main thing is to use literal dialogue and try to build some kind of a meaningful conversation between yourself and the kids. They're almost certainly very bright, so the question isn't their ability to understand, just the ability of you and them to understand each other.

For me personally I wasn't always aware of elements that I didn't understand. I'd become aware of the concept of the "inside joke" early on, and the concept of things like "code words" and how the cool kids would make up new meanings for things. So when I didn't understand something I usually assumed it was because a secret was being kept from me. I wasn't a part of the group, so I didn't know the inside joke.

It wasn't an unrealistic deduction, looking back. As a kid, most of the time when I found myself in a social situation that I couldn't get clarification on it was because I was being made the butt of a joke.

The gross, obvious things weren't hard to figure out early on. Smile, frown, classic anger, classic elation, that kind of thing didn't pose a lot of problem. It's when someone would combine things - anger fueled by sadness, false elation designed to actually portray extreme disappointment - that kind of thing would throw me off for a long time. Kids play-acting emotion to try to fool each other, pretending to get mad over something trivial and then saying "ha ha! Got you!" That was just a huge mess.

It's gotten a lot easier as I got more and more experiences to analyze, but it still took a lot of time. I'm 30 now and while I don't get fooled very often it still happens. Mainly it's in the area of predicting one response and getting something completely different. I've figured out a lot, but I still seem to make a lot of mistakes guessing how people will react to what I say.

But the body language and facial expressions, that's not really foreign anymore. It took a lot of study (books and people) to figure out what all of it meant, but I've got most all (if not all) of it down now. I even emulate it without thinking and have to make a conscious effort not to keep it up.

I'd also like to say that I don't believe the statement "you can't understand how other people think and feel" is correct. We can understand. It just takes a huge amount of work. Maybe the work is never really done, but it's never really done for anyone. No understanding of anything is ever perfect, complete.

Every Aspie is a little different. Some are more "clued-in" than others in regards to social interaction, but I don't think many (if any) are actually aware of the levels they don't understand, at least not initially. I can't imagine how you could be aware of something until you've observed evidence that it exists. It's not like a book written in a foreign language - there you can see the words but not read them. Social cues that you can't read will blend seamlessly into the background. Until you come across enough situations where what you do observe can't account for what actually happens you can't begin to formulate the concept of another layer to the onion.

It's like science and math. Algebra worked well for building things, but didn't work well for describing the motion of things in the world. So that's where geometry comes in. Trig, Calculus, all the various flavors of maths were "discovered" or "created" (depending on how you want to look at it) because someone realized that the math they had couldn't describe the world they saw.

But you can't really realize that there's any math missing until you notice that the math you know doesn't account for the world you see.

I'm sure there's some Aspies who don't care about socialization but for the most part we are aware that we are different and want to fit in. Some who don't seem to care have given up because it's too difficult and are teased and made to feel like weirdos. We are subject to bullying, frustration and lonliness because of not 'getting' the social rules that others seem to just 'know'. We desire to be alone more than the average person and that must be understood because we don't want to socialize to the extent others do. No matter how we have adapted we simply must have some time alone. That will never change. Because of our ability to focus and get wrapped up in one thing we have a hard time switching to one and another thing rapidly as others do and having a conversation can be very difficult because it involves switching and trying to pick up several clues in our environment quickly enough to respond in a conversation which is hard for us to do and takes a lot of effort. Also we are overwhelmed by light, color, sound, smell, touch--depending on the individual. I am hypersensitive to sound and people talking can be too much for me at times and I have to get away to a quiet place. Often I get overwhelmed and retreat mentally if I cannot physically and am often thought of as stuck-up. I have worked very hard to learn to hold eye contact and succeed most of the time now. It's too intense for us and we will lose track of the conversation if we have to hold eye contact. We like routines because we can feel a sense of control over an overstimulating confusing world. Breaks in routines can cause us to feel 'off track'. Most of us have high IQs and get bored and frustrated with the mainstream. Social chitchat is difficult and often boring to us, we like to talk about subjects that we find interesting, which also causes social difficulties. Often we are thought of as not having empathy in the sense that we don't have feelings. This is not true, we just express them in different ways, often from afar. Some Aspies do not like to be touched and hugged. It overwhelmed me as a child but now I love it. Caring and heart are qualities of every human and vary individually. It is no different with Aspies.

I have an example which may illustrate the social problems we have and may be helpful to you. I was talking to someone this morning about getting something. They said, "It's in Louisiana, though." I thought they meant it was far away and said, "Okay." Then I realized they meant I couldn't get it because the company was shut down due to the hurricane. Then they were talking about New Orleans and what a beautiful place it was, that they went there last year and how much they liked it". I said, "I hope they can rebuild it soon." Both my comments could appear that I didn't care about the people or the tragedy but that's not true at all. The first one shows the difficulty in switching gears and in figuring out what they're saying. We have a problem with figuring out what people are meaning, especially the what, where questions for me. If someone begins a question with "What--" I panic because I don't know what they are going to want. If they ask, "Where did you stay on vacation?" I'm searching madly in my mind for the answer they want: do they mean what city, if it was a hotel or with someone, do they mean the name of the hotel? To us there's so many possible answers to a question, to the average person there are only a few based on context or what the average person is likely to mean. The other comment makes it seem like I only care about the beautiful city, not the people, but I meant to say that I hope they can fix the levees, drain the water, rebuild the houses, clean it up--for the people, not for tourists but the quickness of conversation demands that you pop out with an answer right away so it often comes out wrong or only half an answer.

thank you very much for that guys, that was very informative. I still have a lot more to learn though so if any one else has something they would like to contribute that would be great! The example about the hurricane illustrated things to me really well. Have the first therapy session in about a week and a half...

Firstly, thank you for not having the God complex, y'know when medical/psychological practitioner assume that they are omnipotent and omniscient and are all knowing...

Lots of Aspies are quite insightful. After the event. I don't know if you're familiar with something called 'fuzzy logic'. Lots of Aspies don't have an inherent ability to 'know' or 'do' something, but they can learn through experience.

We are all different. Personally, I tend to understand obvious idiomatic speech isn't really 'real', but I do take lots of things literally, so I can come across as quite gullible and naive.

I'm not particularly monotonous in terms of tone of voice, so I can pass relatively easy for NeuroTypical (NT), but I do still struggle in terms of body language, nuance and understanding other people's tone of voice.

In terms of facial expressions, I have a kind of face blindness in that I'm not very good at recognising people in a different context. For example, I bump into someone in the street or at a train station and I know I've seen them somewhere before, but I can't remember if I it's a friend of a friend who I was introduced to over coffee or at a party, or whether it's the checkout girl from the supermarket. Because I can't place people, sometimes I ignore them, in case I greet the supermarket checkout girl like a longlost friend. So people can think I'm a bit 'off'.

I can learn things though, like body language. I failed an interview years ago and a colleague gave me a book about interview skills and I read about body language in interviews, firm handshake, gain and maintain eye contact (but don't stare!), etc. I also learned a lot about body language from a personal perspective from women's magazines, the advice columns, 'how can i tell if he fancies me?' kind of stuff, plus a television programme about dating in the UK on BBC2 called "Would like to meet" which had a woman presenter giving flirting advice, lessons in how to read body language, that was great. If I actively *learn* something, then I can put it into practice, but I don't naturally have those skills.

I'm one of those Aspies who is quite self-aware and insightful. I do like to socialise, but I do still find it hard to make and retain friends.

"At this age would you want help to understand people better or would you not know what the therapist was talking about when she stated that it is harder for you to understand others' emotions and thoughts? I am just wondering if the kids will get the aim of what I am trying to do...or if they will wonder what on earth I am trying to teach them and why do they have to learn it? I really want to do my best for these children...Please help me..."

Oh, they will probably understand and appreciate what you are trying to do. Aspies tend to be quite logical, so if you explain stuff in logical terms it can and will sink in. I think probably most teenagers want to fit in better, even those non-Aspies who are a bit different, in whatever way, because peer pressure can be a terrible thing.

To just explain what other people do, and what they mean, will unlock so many doors and make life so much easier. I wish I'd had the same opportunity and the same help when I was 12.

that last reply was great. I have my first therapy session 2moro (intake interviews are completed, which has given me a sense of treatment goals). Am planning the content of the therapy session at the moment. Am going to start with teaching how to recognise facial expressions. Activities include looking at pictures cut out of magazines and choosing the corresponding emotion, recognising that emotions can vary in strength, looking at a video without volume and guessing emotions, and a game of charades which involves enacting emotions via body language and facial expression so the other person can guess what the emotion is. Not sure that we'll get through all that but am going to give it a go. If you've got any interesting ideas that you've found helpful (e.g., from books or therapy) let me know. Topics I want to cover include not taking things too personally (i.e. not interpreting a neutral or ambiguous gesture from another person as hostile), recognition of tone of voice, how to keep calm, reducing correcting other people (or at least doing it more appropriately so as not to embarass them) etc. Although I have lots of strategies available to use from books, videos etc I would like some real perspectives.

You're very ambitious! Don't be upset, though, if it takes longer than you think for the children to learn these things. It will be slow going. They can get frustrated too, if you set expectations too high, especially if they want to learn but just aren't picking it up right away. It's hard to understand why (we can't understand it either) but it seems that the wiring it just not there as it is in NT kids. Creating the pathways takes a while.

With the most concrete and logical explanations you can rarely go wrong. If there is something they don't feel is necessary to learn, for instance common courtesy, etc., all you need to do is explain what can happen if they are rude to everyone-- and if the reaction is something they wouldn't enjoy from other people, then they shouldn't do it. Cause and effect. That is something I could never argue with.

And concrete. Don't forget that. The more abstract logic you use, likely the less effective it will become.

Again, realistic cause and effect. "Johnny, if you do this, someone will do this in return."