Group Support Session 2 - Social Communication & Interaction

This week is week 2 of 5 of my group support sessions, and this week's focus was social communication and interaction. Socialising and people skills are the areas I think I struggle with the most in terms of my autism so I was looking forward to this one to see what I could learn. There was 1 more of us in the group this week than there was last week, and we found out that 1 of the remaining absentees has had to drop out due to work commitments. So that just leaves 1 more member of the group who we've not met yet. I think it's interesting that out of the 4 of us that have attended the sessions so far there's only 1 woman. I think that speaks volumes toward the ratio of males to females that have been/are being diagnosed. Autism in women and girls is becoming more recognised and diagnosed more often, but we've got a way to go yet.

This week's session was mostly just things that I already knew, but that's just because I've tried to be as involved as I can be in the online autistic community via the #ActuallyAutistic and #AskingAutistics hashtags so I've learned a lot from that, and I also did a lot of research while I was waiting for my referral.I got the impression that the other 3 members of the group might not be so involved online, in which case it was probably more helpful for them than it was for me. Having said that though, there were a few bits that I learned and will probably find helpful. One part of the session was getting us to think about and write a short list of our social strengths and weaknesses. I literally can't think of any actual strengths but I listed 3 weaknesses. What I put down under the strengths column (just so that I had something to put there) was that I feel more comfortable in places like a work environment where we're there for a reason, so to me that means I don't have to socialise because I've got the excuse of having work to do. In contrast to that, if I'm out in a social or informal situation I feel a lot more pressure because the reason for being there is to be sociable. This is why I don't like going out any more, and when I do go out to a gig or to the wrestling or something like that I usually go on my own.

There was a video about making and maintaining friendships by Robyn Stewart which can be found here, and then some tips for developing friendships. The advice is all good but even long before I knew I was autistic I've always found that this kind of advice is very vague and I've always struggled to translate it into my own personal situations to help me. They gave us this link to a page on Social Isolation from the National Autistic Society's website, which contains a lot of information and resources to help with socialising. The other problem for me personally is that I genuinely don't have time to be sociable. In a typical day I get up on a morning, look after my kids all day, go to work in the evening and then go to bed for a few hours. Maybe when the kids get a bit older and start school full time I might have a bit more time that I can commit to improving my social skills but at the moment I can't fit anything else in.

We were introduced to the concept of social thinking, which is a process to help social development and we were given a link to a company also called Social Thinking. It seems to be an American company offering clinics, conferences, e-learning modules etc, but we were just given the link for information more than anything else I think as there does seem to be a lot on there.

The last part of the session was covering the spoon theory, which I'm familiar with but only recently, and also the social battery, which is basically just another metaphor to help explain the same as the spoon theory but in a different way. There's yet more links that we were given in this bit. Admittedly I haven't had the time to look through them all yet but from what I gather they could potentially be interesting reads if nothing else. This one is an article explaining Christine Miserandino's personal story that lead to the origin of the spoon theory. The other one is a link to a blog by Nell Goddard where she explains the social battery as experienced by introverts such as myself. This one seems particularly interesting and I'm going to make the time to have a read of it before long. Lastly, we covered a brief bit about masking which tied into spoons/social battery by explaining that making an increased effort to appear neurotypical can be very draining and that it's important to take time out to be yourself when you can to prevent burnout.

I hope that by covering my support sessions in the blog I can help people find a bit of understanding of themselves or others, and that I've offered some helpful resources for that.