I am thinking that possibly I am not a great communicator not only ‘because I’m autistic’ but because my communication skills have been blocked when I was younger.

First, it was not possible in my family to ask why certain things are happening, at least not when my dad was around. Mum was happy to give some explanation but if dad was in the same room that wasn’t possible; he would just scream at you in response even if I spoke to mum.

The other thing is that we weren’t supposed to discuss my dad’s mental health issues. His problems had a massive impact on my family and yet we couldn’t talk about it.

Now I can see that if I need to ask a question like ‘could you please tell me what you meant when you said…’ I feel really uncomfortable; as if I expect that there is something really bad hidden there. It seems to me that, if there was nothing wrong going on, there would be no need to be indirect and I wouldn’t need to ask. I remember situations from my past when I didn’t like something, yet I asked questions about it in a way that I knew wouldn’t get me the answer, because I didn’t want the answer, I only wanted to look like I wanted one. So am I really that bad at communication? Because, in a way, I knew exactly how to achieve the result I was after.

Maybe I’m not a bad communicator, maybe I’m just bad at focusing at positive intension?

As I said multiple times on the blog, I believe that we, autistics, understand life through patterns in our past, and possibly those are mine: if things are hidden, that means there’s something bad going on; asking clarifying questions can have negative consequences.