Dealing with covertly condescending people

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Jayo
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31 Dec 2013, 9:58 am

One area in which people tend to underestimate me is being able to discern when someone is obliquely mocking or patronizing me, typically they disguise it as being "helpful" or praising me (when it's really damning me with faint praise) or out of concern for my well-being. They automatically assume because I don't pick up on more "neutral" unstated expectations and intentions, that I won't pick up on negative ones as well. They are mistaken. :wink:

I've had this with co-workers, room-mates, and former friends. They take it upon themselves to "baby" us folks on the spectrum, when the behaviour is unsolicited and not beneficial to anyone other than the warped sense of gratification the other person gets. :evil:

Case in point: with a co-worker in the recent past, I made a couple of blunders where I didn't see "the big picture" and had to re-work something, then she pointed it out and had to wait for me to re-do it. She knew about my intention to prepare the item in question a certain way while it was a work-in-progress, but she never raised the concern until after. I also asked her to clarify a couple of things that I didn't find obvious and she basically told me it was common sense, brushing aside my intentions to err on the side of caution and check if my perception was accurate. From that point on, she would routinely end her explanations of things with "does that make sense?" stated once in an email, twice if it was verbal, and most of those times it DID make sense. :roll:

So I found this especially rude and patronizing. People might say it was my fault for not having accurate intuition into the other situations or unstated expectations, so suddenly I'm "untrustworthy", but I could tell that the behaviour was deliberately rude and intended to provoke me. I could tell by the tone of voice and facial expression that it was most definitely not out of concern or trying to be "helpful". What it essentially said to me was "You frustrated me by not picking up on what's expected of you, now it's payback time." 8O

Another time, she'd asked me to proofread a 20-page report she prepared, and I did so but spent two hours on it when she was hoping for it to be done in an hour because of tight timelines...there were several mistakes on it, mostly grammatical. She approached me to ask when it was ready a minute before I was done, I said it's just about ready but had to make sure it got "the final polish" - she then laughed in a patronizing way saying "Oh, You are TOO funny...oh, I don't know sometimes...you know, you should really be the right-hand person for an executive manager with that talent" - basically damning me with faint praise and telling me I'm only cut out to be a secretary and not a systems analyst. After that, I had to take a good 10-15 minute walk outside to work out my anger. :evil:

Even in one meeting with two others present, she told me something that I KNEW had to be kept discrete from a vendor based on the nature of it - but then she explicitly told me "oh by the way, don't tell the vendor about this - I just want to make sure you know not to do that." I replied "no, I would never do that, I've never done anything like that before" just to emphasize the point, which was met by a sarcastic expression and "well, I don't knowwww...given other things I've seeeeen...." even though I don't have a reputation for being indiscreet. :evil:

But that's the thing - as soon as I confront someone with their behaviour saying I find it (deliberately) rude and demeaning, the other person will likely justify their actions by saying either a) how dare I say that when they are trying to help me because I lack common sense and can't figure things out for myself - and how are they to know what things I can't intuitively figure out, or b) "well, I wouldn't HAVE TO say those things if you did what was expected of you" - basically getting into a no-win situation where you tell them in essence that you don't like being treated as a child, only to be told that you'll stop getting treated like one once you start acting like one. To me, it's nothing child-like; it's just a fundamental difference in how people on the spectrum process information versus neurotypicals. Sometimes we intersect, by chance or by conscious thought; sometimes we don't, and we don't always realize it until it's "too late". And if I complain to a manager (that I refuse to work with so-and-so due to their attitude problem), they will trivialize it as a misunderstanding, and/or further push the perception that I am "child-like" and can't get a thicker skin and deal with my own conflicts, and/or start preparing for my exit from the place. If however THEY complain about ME to a manager, I'll always get in s**t for it. It's a total double standard (no shortage of those!!) :x



Jayo
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31 Dec 2013, 11:17 am

I suppose that if you ever get the "you're funny" rude comment, you could always retort like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: "Funny??! Funny HOW?!? Am I a clown?!? Do I amuse you?! !?"

...but if the patronizer has seen that movie many times and knows the scene well, they will pick up on it, and well, yeah, you WILL look kinda funny then, won't you?? :P



jk1
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31 Dec 2013, 11:32 am

I think it is implicit bullying. They do it implicitly because they want it to be harder for you to prove that they are bullying you. Even if you have weaknesses, a truly professional person/a well-intended person wouldn't have to point them out in that manner. Unless they have an intention to put you down, it wouldn't come out like that. So whether or not you are intuitive enough/have common sense, your co-worker is not being professional and is being destructive. Simply put, she is a bad person.

My boss tends to be like that, too. He is like that to many people but he is worse with me.



TexasCottontail
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31 Dec 2013, 11:48 am

Jayo wrote:
People might say it was my fault for not having accurate intuition into the other situations or unstated expectations, so suddenly I'm "untrustworthy", but I could tell that the behaviour was deliberately rude and intended to provoke me. I could tell by the tone of voice and facial expression that it was most definitely not out of concern or trying to be "helpful". What it essentially said to me was "You frustrated me by not picking up on what's expected of you, now it's payback time."


Going through this with my boss lately. Been doing my job for five years, now my past decisions are being questioned because they want to do something different in the future. So I hear, "Why would you do that?" or "Why would you do this that way?" a lot, but I'm thinking, "Because prior to this, I THOUGHT I understood what was expected of me, and no one has had a problem with it before now." All I want to do is my job - I WANT TO DO WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO. I can't do it if you don't tell me what you want, and I CANNOT read your mind!! !! Communication is the biggest problem in my office, and it shows. And my biggest problem is, I can't say any of this.


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Ashariel
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31 Dec 2013, 12:33 pm

I don't think I would recognize if someone was being condescending to me, because I don't pick up on subtle social cues. I'd just be confused by the scenario you described, and figure they were making some kind of joke that I didn't get?

But I know that certain people in my life do think I'm inferior due to my autism, and I've just had to learn to shrug it off. It's true, I'm not as socially sophisticated as they pride themselves on being, but it's not a huge priority to me, so I'm okay with it. It's like if someone told me I'm bad at drawing... Okay, I agree, and your point is...? :D



Jayo
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01 Jan 2014, 2:29 pm

If some of you are curious, and I'll bet you are :) you should read up on FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamenta ... tion_error

This is something that is deeply ingrained in interpersonal human psychology, and it's basically an assumption that how somebody will behave in one context is how they'll behave in another. So if somebody sees me make an error or an oversight in one situation, they'll assume I'll make the same lack-of-common-sense mistake in a similar situation, which is not always the case.

Still - the unspoken rule seems to be that I'm held to account for their perception and it is I who must act to change the perception, not point out FAE (which will only likely make me look pedantic or Spock-like). I can only share that comment among my fellow Aspies on this thread (and I know you guys won't commit an FAE and assume I'd share the comment elsewhere :P )



Davie333
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04 Jan 2014, 10:31 am

ya my neighbour ends allmost ever sentance spoken to me with does that make sence to you or something like that, Its got nothing to do with you he or she is probably just a standover/bully /sociopath /ashole that thinks he is so clever that every1 around him or her is ret*d.



ReaperDan84
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05 Jan 2014, 12:01 am

I've had a few people do this to me, if it's outside of work then I generally make use of my rather extensive vocabulary to quickly put them back into place. A lot of people quickly leave me alone when I make them look more stupid than they've tried to make me look.


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foxfield
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05 Jan 2014, 6:13 am

This seems to me a classic example of passive-aggressive behaviour in the workplace.

I have my own method of dealing with this.

Take the example "Does that make sense?", said to someone in a passive-aggressive manner.
I would find some way of repeating the covertly-aggressive comment back, but in a neutral way.
In this example, I would say "it does, thank you" in a very pleasant tone of voice. (Not in a false/sarcastic pleasant voice, but in a completely genuine pleasant voice).

This disarms the attack because you have taken the logical meaning of the statement, and responded to that, instead of showing that the undertone of the statement has affected you. This will annoy and frustrate your passive-aggressive attacker (which is good, they deserve it)
You have also taken the moral highground to your attacker, by acting in a more mature manner than they.

To pull this off, you need to be sure that you can keep any tone of anger/upset/sarcasm out of your voice when you reply. If you had replied in an aggressive, offended or upset manner, then the attacker takes the moral highground on you, and uses it as an excuse to attack you further.

If you had simply remained silent and not acknowledged the comment, the attacker feels like they have won.



foxfield
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05 Jan 2014, 6:17 am

Jayo wrote:
If some of you are curious, and I'll bet you are :) you should read up on FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamenta ... tion_error


PS, I also wanted to say that this was a good read, thanks. Not something I've ever heard of before but it makes a lot of sense to me.