Is this an example of literal thinking?

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Or perhaps focusing too much on details?

I would often get into arguments with my parents because I would do something that they didn't like, and they'd try to teach me a lesson or get me to understand by using some metaphor or common saying to make a comparison. I would always start to point out differences in what they were comparing, because to me the two things seemed totally unrelated and it made no sense to me, and they would get mad and say, "You're overanalyzing!" or "You're missing the point!"

I can't think of a lot of examples, but one was somewhat recently, my grandpa said to me, "You make your own bed, so sleep in it." I was confused, and thinking "...but I don't even make my bed." I knew it was supposed to be a figure of speech so I asked him to explain, but it still didn't make sense to me after the explanation (apparently it means, "you have to live with the choices you make"). I just kept thinking about the fact that I don't actually make my bed, I actually prefer to sleep on the couch anyway, making a bed isn't equivalent to making a permanent choice because you can always remake it, etc. I've learned not to say these kinds of things anymore, people get annoyed because they think I'm trying to irritate them.

I understand it now (sort of), but I'd never use that saying. Is it because I'm being too literal, and missing the point? To me, I think the saying just doesn't make sense as a comparison, even now that I know what it means. But this is what always happened with my parents, and they would get so mad at me, which I didn't understand either. Now I understand, they probably thought I was being intentionally argumentative and ignoring their point, when I honestly was missing point.

As I see it, you pretty much answered your own question.

I sense that your parents think you're being stubborn. They don't understand literal thinking.

People have also told me I was missing the point and I am sure kids would try and teach me lessons and it would always backfire because I didn't know their intention. All it did was teach me that behavior was okay. Then my third grade teacher had the rule "treat others the way you want to be treated."

Luckily my mom has always understood and she had to be very careful what she taught me. One time she unintentionally taught me that if I want something and someone had it, I have to grab the person and scare them to get it from them. What happened was I was holding my brother's rubber bat and my little brother started to grab me and stuff and we got in a fight and then Mom explained it to me and when she was justifying it acting like what my mother did was okay, I learned that was okay behavior and if I wanted something and someone had it, do what he did to get it. I don't know if my mom was just trying to explain why he did it or if she really thought that was acceptable behavior and it confused me because everything had to be consistent, not wishy washy. I don't know if this was literal thinking.

The other night I woke up with my mom handing my baby to me and I asked "why are you bringing her here?" and she said "She has stinky drawers." I pictured her drawers smelling and this didn't make sense because why would she bring her to me over her drawers smelling and why would they smell so I asked what did she mean and she said "She is wet and needs changed. She smells." Stinky drawers has to be a figure of speech because it had nothing to do with a smelly diaper.

Yeah, I tend to do that on here I think. It's hard to make sense of my thoughts until I write them down. I've had a lot of posts I never even submitted because I tend to have these moments of realization while I'm writing. I did that twice last night. But sometimes I still post it because I want to see if anyone else here can relate.



Yes, unfortunately I never realized why I wasn't understanding either, I always thought they were being mean and trying to confuse me. That made things worse, because I felt like they were just trying to hide the fact that I wasn't really wrong, and show me how much power they had over me. I don't like talking to them all that much now.

One time my little brother was watching "Brave", and at the part where it shows some salmon jumping out of the water, he said, "Flying fish!" I immediately said, "No, they aren't flying fish, they're just jumping." And my step mom butted in and said, "No, you're wrong. That's a very common nickname for salmon, everybody knows that." Well I didn't. I got kind of mad, because I felt like she was purposely trying to make me look dumb, she could have just said, "Yes, I think he heard somebody else say it. It's just a nickname for salmon."

I wasn't wrong, fish don't fly. So I tried explaining this, and that I didn't know it was a common name. I was already frustrated at the way she pointed out my error so rudely, and then she said, "You just can't accept when you're wrong. Whatever, you're right, everyone else is wrong." and walked away while all my brothers were laughing at me. She did things like that all the time

When I was rather little I learned about flying fish, so I knew they existed. I looked it up right now, because I've never heard salmon be called that, and I can not find any link between salmon and flying fish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_fish

The genera mentioned are Cheilopogon, Cypselurus, Exocoetus, Fodiator, Hirundichthys, Parexocoetus, Prognichthys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon


http://pnwsalmoncenter.org/fish-fact/salmon-nicknames/

It annoys me when someone states something as a fact when it isn't.

Yeah, I know wha'cha mean----I've been told, in my younger years, that I was being too analytical, too. Just lightin'-up a bit----you're going to unnecessarily exhaust yourself. I think your step-mom might be feeling like you're a "know-it-all", and some people will search, endlessly, to find a way to prove a know-it-all, wrong. In the end, you save yourself a whole lot of hurt, and embarrassment, etc. by just keeping most of those kind of thoughts to yourself.

When I was really little, I had a TERRIBLE time with: "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach"----I spent DAYS being screwed-up over THAT one!! LOL

To this DAY, I don't understand the meaning of "near miss"----cuz, to ME, that means you came close to missing, but DIDN'T, and HIT!! !

My parents were like that with me sometimes & I was like you were with them & got accused of being difficult because they felt I was doing it on purpose to mess with them.

Yes, your response to the making your own bed metaphor was an example of literal thinking. The facts that you don't actually make your own bed and prefer to sleep on the couch are irrelevant to the metaphor, because the metaphor is not literally about a bed. Just like the world is not literally a stage in one of Shakespeare's most famous quotes:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;

Most people intuitively understand metaphors. You clearly don't, and there's no shame in that: it's a common symptom of Asperger's or HFA.

here is an example of literal thinking I have experienced: during Taylor swifts song "New Romantics", she said "we all just wait for trains that just aren't coming" and I imaginely started to think of waiting for the train or the bus and how beautiful that was to me but apparently it means that we wait for lovers who aren't coming around yet I took it completely literally

Well it looks like my step mom was even more wrong than I thought. I've actually never heard of this kind of fish before, I guess you learn something new every day.

I thought that WAS what it meant when I read that I guess it means it missed, but the miss was near to the mark. But I agree with you, it seems like it would be more accurate to say "near hit".

One thing that always gets to me: "Same difference." People would always say this at school, my cousin also says it a lot. Every time I would explain that it doesn't make sense, because what they really mean is "same thing". Then in response they say, "Same difference ".

I just wish people wouldn't think I'm trying to be a know-it-all when I say things like that, I only correct people like that because it seriously bother me that much. My step mom would always purposely try to prove me wrong (along with many people at school). Even my grandpa does it sometimes. It's like they get some kind of weird satisfaction from it. I always get the feeling that others think I'm overstepping my bounds and they want to put me in my place.

I think it's also because I don't often come across as a very intelligent individual, maybe average intelligence at best. So everyone was shocked when my friend told everyone I got the highest ACT score in my school, it was pretty close to perfect. Not that I'm bragging, because I do some pretty dumb things in real life. My brother always said I have book smarts but no common sense.

Hang-in-there!! I remember what a rocky road it was----it's still not perfectly smooth, but it DOES get better.

Last edited by Campin_Cat on 07 Dec 2014, 6:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I say IRL to people at work when I'm talking about things outside work.

I'm more than aware that it sounds ridiculous when I'm saying it. But it gives me a little tingle in my head when I say things like that.

It's the same as when I refer to my childhood as being in "the olden days". I know it's not really the olden days but I just get that same little tingle when I say it.

Here we say (translated): "The stomach gets full before the eyes".
I understood very well what it meant, but it annoyed me because it sounded condescending to me.


Interestingly, in Norwegian we say "nestenulykke", almost accident. That makes more sense.


Makes sense to me. School and work are the forced things, the rest is your real life. That's how I always felt anyway.

When you really stop to think about it, our literal thinking comes from our intense focus on details in the sense that we are so focused on the fine points of what others are saying that we overlook the possible hidden meanings that may be involved. In my case, I have been so overloaded by such hidden meanings over the years that I catch them instantly but find them to be intensely offensive because such people cannot simply say what they mean. Autism isn't a collection of totally independent traits as many psychs like to think of it (and as Jerry Seinfeld seems to still be struggling with from his still-compartmentalized view of autism). All of it is interrelated and contributes to our totally different manner of thinking... or more properly worded, might be the result of our different way of thinking.

Two paragraphs (the first of which I posted here long ago) that I have written about autism for an unrelated email are applicable here. I will include both of them below.

The definition of autism has become quite complex over the years, but the one that I always like to return to time and time again is the original definition from which the word first originated. The word autism comes from the Greek word "auto" and prefix "aut" meaning "of or pertaining to the self". To me this sums it up very concisely and says so much more than all that the psychologists' DSM specifies autism to be. We are people who are intensely turned inwards and spend much time focused on the self, but we are not selfish in the sense of projection of the self... that is what neurotypicals do. Aspies are introverted and observe the self while neurotypicals project themselves.

...

The Aspie brain is simply wired very differently from that of neurotypicals. The brains of most people filter out much of what they perceive of the world almost like seeing the world through a pair of very dark sunglasses. This is a built-in protective mechanism that allows neurotypicals to selectively react to individual events quickly without becoming overloaded by everything else (for example people holding a conversation with the TV blaring, phones ringing, kids screaming, multiple people talking etc). The Aspie brain on the other hand filters out almost nothing and as a result we are highly perceptive and incredibly sensitive, both emotionally and in terms of the physical senses. As a result we can easily be overloaded by things that other people consider to be nothing out of the ordinary. I sometimes wonder how neurotypicals can possibly manage to miss things that hit me like a brick in the face. I am even more surprised by the fact that most neurotypicals don't even seem to care when you point out to them the things that they have missed. This vast flood of information into our brains is too much to be processed in realtime. So there is often a noticeable cognitive delay between the time when an event occurs (such as conversation) and the time when our brains have processed all of it well enough to be able to react. But by this time, the NT world has moved on to other things, so Aspies will always end up out of sync with the rest of the world. This is why Aspies get far more details than NTs do but cannot keep up with a simple conversation... and especially a conversation with more than one person present at a time (to say nothing of aggression). For this reason, many people get the impression that Aspies are ret*d because we do not immediately react, almost as if there was nothing at all going on in our brains when the exact opposite is usually the case. This also makes us a frequent target of thoughtless condescending remarks, which are always highly offensive and yet something to which we seldom react, again because of those cognitive delays that prevent us from getting the words out in time to be relevant. Aspies are often extremely sensitive and perceptive people and generally tend to be rather stoic, quiet and passive most of the time. It just does not seem that way to others who are accustomed to quick witty responses. It is offensive to treat us like babies such as speaking slowly or loudly. We usually get it the first time but still need time to process it all. It is much more appropriate to say something like "just think about it and we can talk about it later". It is also offensive to speak of us in the third person in our presence or near presence as happens to me very often. I personally believe that this cognitive delay is more at the root of all of the other effects of autism than anything else... but that is only my view. If you can understand this one concept then everything else about autism should be easy to understand.

This doesn't completely answer your question, but as I said earlier, it is all interrelated and I believe that this is probably relevant to what you asked... or else I am just being a rambling Aspie.