Social Motivations, Goals, Strategies, Skills

The idea of “Social Skills Training” can be controversial among autistic people…

…For clarification, before I go any further, the word “social” in the sense we are using it here means much more than what we often classify as our “social life” (activities such as meeting friends, going to parties or to comic book conventions, going to a movie or restaurant, etc). When we talk about “social” skills we mean interpersonal/relational skills, the kind of skills we need to interact fruitfully with other people, whether they are our friends, our family, our workmates, our customers, etc…

…So, as I was saying, the idea of “Social Skills Training” is controversial in the autistic community.

On the one hand, there’s the unwelcome reality that this kind of training/coaching usually (and wrongly) assumes that autistic people need to learn social skills, and have social goals, that closely match the neurotypical norm. On the other hand, many autistic people (along with many non-autistics) can indeed sometimes benefit from appropriate guidance and assistance in learning to navigate the complex world of other people. It's an ongoing, lifetime process for everyone, after all…

I think more sense can be made of these concerns and needs if we use a framework that

• begins with trying to explore and clarify an individual’s Social Motivations/Needs
• then looks at the Social Goals that may arise from these motivations
• next considers the broad Social Strategies that it may make sense for the individual to use in their attempts to achieve these goals
• and finally provides some information & support in relation to specific, relevant Social Skills.

We can apply this framework to helping an autistic person with social challenges (I would be doing so as their therapist, but it could be a parent, older sibling, teacher or friend who is providing this “social skills coaching/support”).

 

Motivations/Needs

The first thing we should be taking into account is that their motivations and needs in the area of social/interpersonal life (friendships, family relationships, colleague relationships, romance, dealing with strangers, etc) are likely to be “atypical” in some ways. It’s quite common, for instance, for autistic people to have a greater need than average for intense, content-filled communication. However, they may not need it very often, and may be quite happy with large amounts of alone time, especially if their needs for intense communication are being sufficiently met. And of course, there’s lots of individual variation within the neurodivergence – some autistic people have very little interest in a romantic relationship, while for other autistic people finding romantic love is what motivates them most strongly. So we need to drop our assumptions about social motivation, and listen to what someone really wants/needs (or help them explore and discover what they really want/need socially – the process of masking leaves a lot of autistic people confused about this).

 

Goals

Some social/interpersonal goals of autistic people will overlap with those of the non-autistic majority (for example, finding a life partner, in some cases), but other autistically-minded social goals generally won’t (for example, finding a friend to meet every few months, to have an intense mutual “infodump” about common areas of deep interest, and perhaps also about life struggles).

The big mistake in a lot of social skills training with autistic people is to assume that the social goals of all human beings can just be derived from some imaginary standardised “life-template”, without taking into account factors such as neurotype and individual personality. As described above, individual goals are based on individual motivations (as well as on the range of realistic options available to the individual). For instance, an autistic person’s goals may be more interest-driven than average. This might mean that a goal such as “make friends with your classmates/neighbours” might be irrelevant to an autistic person – their motivation would be to make friends with people they like (as would anyone), but who also share their interests, not with those who just happen to be around them. This of course may have implications for social strategies, as we’ll see below.

 

Strategies

Focussing on specific social skills only makes sense once broad social strategies have been clarified (at least provisionally clarified; social strategies of course may need to be reviewed periodically).

As mentioned above, the goal “to try and make friends with a number of the people around me, especially those of my own age” is likely to be best served by very different strategies than the goal “to try and find some people who I like and who share my interests, whatever age they are, and see if I can make friends with any of them”. So differing goals may require different strategies, but the neurodivergent “operating system” of the autistic person may also operate better using different strategies even when their goals are similar to those of the more “neuro-standard” part of the population.

Of course, one possible broad strategy to try is “see if I can meet as many of my social needs as possible through interaction with other neurodivergent people”. The challenge of finding someone to date and maybe form a romantic/sexual partnership with might perhaps be approached this way. There are no rights or wrongs here – it might work, it might not (like anyone’s attempts in the mating game). On the plus side, communication and mutual understanding may well be easier (but not always); on the minus side, it’s a smaller pool.

When it comes to friendships, we could say that neurotypical people are more likely to “spread their bets” as a strategy, whereas autistic people tend to invest more heavily in a small number of people (or one person) at a time. Again, different strategies aren’t right or wrong – different ones just suit different people in different contexts, and what we autistic people need is for our differences to be seen and accepted as just differences, without judgment.

 

Skills

And so we come back to skills. Or do we?

Perhaps sometimes some people benefit by being helped to rehearse “ice-breakers”, or learn “active listening skills”, etc… But doesn’t that all seem a bit false and (funnily enough) rehearsed?

And is there really some reliable, fixed “social skills curriculum” that we can usefully teach everyone? Social/interpersonal life is not a clearly defined, or even relatively fixed, context (like, perhaps, plumbing, or playing the piano). What may be “the right thing to do” varies not only from culture to culture (and indeed subculture to subculture), and changes over time, but it ultimately depends on two or more here-and-now individuals in a here-and-now context.

An interesting comparison is the training we get when we study to be therapists. While we are indeed taught "listening skills”, we soon find out (and are warned) that no amount of consciously learnt interpersonal skills can substitute for genuine encounter with the client in front of you (Carl Rogers, the founder of Person-Centred Therapy, called this genuineness “congruence”).

So once sufficient attention has been given to personal motivations, goals and strategies, maybe all we need to be teaching anyone is self-trust, self-knowledge, authenticity, genuineness, enthusiasm…

You know, funnily enough, autistic people are already really good at that stuff if you just don’t train it out of them…