Literal Thinking

Taken from:

Unmasked: The Ultimate Guide To Adhd, Autism And Neurodivergence

Literal thinking also means that autistic people can struggle to understand instructions unless they are given in a very black-and-white, literal way. This is true of me too. If instructions aren’t clear, concise and specific, then I spend too long trying to compute each word’s meaning and can’t add them together to work out what the person actually wants me to do. Now that I know how my brain works, I ask that all instructions are given to me in the framework of ‘What by When and Why’:

What exactly do you need from me?
When exactly do you need each of those things by?
Why do you need each of those things?

FRAMEWORK: ‘What by When and Why’

What exactly do you need from me?
When exactly do you need each of those things by?
Why do you need each of those things? </aside>

This way, I know that the instructions given to me will be properly computed by my literal brain, rather than it trying to take fluffy instructions literally when they weren’t designed that way.

EXAMPLE

In the workplace, somebody might show you a document and give you the following instruction:

‘Please can you read through this document, and we’ll touch base to catch up on your thoughts.’

In this scenario, my brain would be asking a whole load of questions:

What do you want me to do? Am I supposed to read through and make notes? Annotate the document? Edit it with my suggestions? Prepare a report or some slides of my findings?
What does ‘touch base’ mean? Should I send you an email? Are we having a meeting? If so, will there be other people there? Do I need to have anything prepared?
When are we touching base? Should I do this now or after the thing I’m working on now? How important is this, and where should it fall within my list of priorities? </aside>

Whereas if the instruction was given using the What by When and Why framework, many of these questions would be answered:

When exactly do you need each of those things by: It is relatively important that this gets done today, but please finish the task you are working on first. If it is possible, taking into account the workload you already have on your plate, it would be great if you could email me the suggestions by 5pm today.
What exactly do you need from me: Please could you read through this document and annotate it with comments stating any edits you would suggest. Once you have done that, please will you email me your edits.
Why exactly do you need me to do this: The document is being sent to a client tomorrow as part of XYZ project, and we would like your input to ensure there isn’t something that we have missed. </aside>

On the flip side of this, literal thinking also means that I will only take the meaning from the words that you say, and won’t know to look for any unspoken meaning, hinted messages or assumed knowledge. If, for example, you were to ask me, ‘Ellie, can you help me with this project?’ I would consider the words of the question, and if I physically and literally had the capability to help you, my answer would be yes. What I would fail to understand or think about would be the unspoken context that you had probably intended to come along with the question:

Do you have the capacity to help me with this project without becoming overwhelmed?
Do you have the time to help me with this project, or is there something more urgent you need to be doing?
Do you have the time to help me with this project within your working hours?
Would you feel comfortable helping me with this project?

Although these additional questions, in neurotypical conversation, might be ‘a given’ when making a request, as somebody who understands words and sentences in their most literal sense they don’t come into my mind, and they aren’t considered when I give my response. This will be the case for many autistic people who work in a literal way, which, as you can imagine, can mean that we end up adding lots of things that we don’t actually have the capacity for to our plates and put ourselves at risk of burning out.

As you can see, it’s important that we don’t just think that literal thinking means, ‘Oh, she can’t understand sarcasm!’ as is often the understanding that is given to us online and accepted by society, when actually, it has a huge effect on our overall ability to communicate and interact with other people. This is just one example of how autistic traits affect so many more aspects of people’s lives than we give credit to in their textbook definitions.