We use words and body language to share our thoughts, ideas and experiences with other people. This involves people listening, understanding, and conveying a message, both verbally (speaking words and tone of voice) and non-verbally (using facial expressions and gestures). There are many challenges that both autistic people and their communication partner may experience at each part of an interaction.

Autism and communication  

Autistic individuals may find communication can be overwhelming and exhausting. This can lead to autistic individuals feeling socially isolated, frustrated, angry or anxious. Everyone experiences communication differently. Some people may find it hard to understand their own emotions and find language to describe them (alexithymia).

Potential challenges

Information is given, received, and exchanged between speaker and listener through various methods.

Some people can navigate this with ease, but for autistic individuals, this may be a challenge due to differences in communication style, misunderstandings, negative first impressions, or unconscious biases.

It is important to try to understand each other and find compromise within communication.

The double empathy issue 

The double empathy issue explains how autistic and neurotypical people may struggle to understand each other. ​It is not the autistic persons sole responsibility to behave in a way that a neurotypical person understands. Neurotypical people can also better understand the autistic person and both can be curious about each other’s preferences.

The picture below shows some examples of the double empathy issue:

(Filbey, 2021).

The communication process

The following information is informed by ‘The Communication Chain’ (McLachlan and Elks, 2012).

Receiving and recognising:

• Noticing that someone is making a social approach to talk to you.
• Focusing attention and listening.
• Hearing and understanding the words.
• Being able to ‘read’ facial expression and body language.

Processing:

• Get the meaning and intention of what is being said.
• Having an idea of what to say in response.
• Knowing what is appropriate to say.
• Finding the words to say.

Expressing:

• Saying the sentence you have planned aloud.
• Working out the ‘right’ facial expression and body language.
• Checking the other persons expressions and body language.

Challenges can happen at different points during the communication process

Autistic individuals may:

• Have differences in use of and experience of eye contact.
• Having a passionate interest and detail focused thinking can make it challenging to have brief conversations.
• Word finding difficulties can make it difficult to respond in a timely manner.
• Have a preference for certain words and phrases.
• Differences in voice pattern and facial expressions can be misinterpreted.
• May find it difficult to filter out sensory information to focus on conversation.
• May process information in a systematic way, considering the individual details.
• Interpretation of the information may lead to misunderstanding and communication breakdown.
• Sometimes not noticing the way that information differs based on the tone of voice and body language of their conversation partner.

When communicating with an autistic person, remember to consider how hard they are having to work to interact with others and everything they are having to process at once to maintain the interaction with you.

It is important to recognise that you both may have different ways of experiencing communication and preferences in the way you are most at ease.