Autism and close relationships (incl. friendship): clarifying the challenge and the challenge of clarifying.

Description

Engaging in relationships, especially close relationships like friendship, is a tough challenge for children and young people with an autism spectrum disorder. Many of the relational skills and knowledge that neurotypical people seem to develop effortlessly and spontaneously are clogged by the way an autistic brain understands the world. In this presentation, we explore the challenges autistic people are facing when building relationships. We will describe how many of these challenges are linked to the specific way of information processing in the autistic brain, which we call context blindness. Relational competence is not just a matter of social skills and Theory of Mind, but a case of making good guesses. The virtue of context sensitive guessing.

In order to make the smart guesses that are needed to successfully engage in close relationships, we need to clarify a lot of things that seem to be natural and obvious to non-autistic people. We will describe some general principles for helping young people with autism to understand and build relationships. In particular, we will focus on the importance of clarifying for autistic people the abstract, vague and context sensitive rules and ingredients of relationships.

Topics that will be covered are:
• Close relationships demand much more than social skills, empathy and Theory of Mind. They require knowledge and contextual sensitivity.
• Absolute thinking in autism and the consequences for understanding the (hidden) rules of close relationships.
• Knowledge is power: the importance of psycho-education on relationships.
• Why we need to clarify for autistic people even the most obvious things about relationships.
• How to help people with autism to understand the complexities of friendship and other close relationships?