The CC of Fear

 It's obvious sentence time; communication can be hard for those on the autism spectrum. Okay, now that is out of the way let me expand on one of the reasons why this is.

I've also been hearing this a lot from parents and that is that one-on-one conversations can work great but if one extra person joins the conversation the whole are of conversing breaks down. Why is this? In my book Finding Kansas I believe I explained it by having the reader visualize a chess board. This is how I see a conversation; one person moves, and the next person reacts. Now let's say a third player joins the game and the chess board becomes a triangular board but all the same rules applies. While that may sound cool think of all the possible moves for each other player in regards to your own.

In a conversation my brain is working like an overclocked computer trying to analyze everything; to put simply I'm thinking, "if I say A they'll say B and if they say B I'll say C unless they say D then I'll have to say E..." There is no off switch to this line of thought but there is one thing that will derail my confidence in anything I say and that is the CC.

For those that know e-mail the CC, or carbon copy, is how you can send an e-mail to a whole list of people and to me, this is the scariest of scariest things, especially in a conversation. The way my brain works, if I tell a person something I can't calculate the fact that they might go tell someone else. If I do think that then I'm having to play phantom chess, the board grows from two, to three, to maybe even more players but I can't see there moves right away. Also, in a future conversation, should the other person bring up what I said to the first person I will be caught off guard and then I will try and figure out what else they know and since there is no way to actually know my brain will be endlessly spinning and working trying to figure out the impossible.

This is one thing you have to watch out for as if too many instances of the "conversation circle" as I call it (circle because something said comes full circle and returns to the beginning) and I will hesitate and speaking. Now here's another important thing; you might have come to the conclusion that the stuff talked about within this blog post, as in something I say, might be something derogatory towards a person. This isn't the case; this full circle aggravation is done with anything. If I told person A that I went to a gas station and the pump acted funny and then that person told person B who then asked me about that incident that would be just as bad as anything.

What this all comes down to is processing. If I know what I've said in the order I've said it I can predict in my mind what is and is not known. If everything that is said is repeated to everyone else then I can't predict what may or may not be said. Perhaps this simply may look like a control issue, but it's more than that as my brain has to play the processing game of, "statement A=B unless C=D..." and if words are endlessly repeated then the mathematical possibilities are infinite and for a brain that has to be able to calculate the finite the infinite shuts the whole system down.