How to undo conditioning?

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When I realised that I was on the spectrum I needed to figure out who I was... which parts were the real me, and which parts were as a result of conditioning.

At a subconscious level my filter or perception of the world was automatic, built over the years through experiences. Many of these were negative, learned when I was a different person.

I wanted to undo these auto responses to reflect who I had become, e.g. Feeling irritable with people when they couldn't understand me during conversations. They weren't at fault but until I understood that I communicated differently I believed they were at least 50% to blame for the confusion.

Now when I notice that the other person doesn't understand me, I let the initial frustration pass and inwardly practice some self compassion.

What has helped you undo conditioning?

By being more flexible in general, learning from life experience and how you feel in the same situation.

To get irritable at true lack of knowledge is useless, and won’t get anybody anywhere.

To make hasty assumptions is irritating to the person who is the recipient of the assumption. Before you get mad, ask.

It's been really beneficial to me to realize that for a lot of people, it's not what I'm saying, it's how I'm saying it. Knowing this, I then get less frustrated when conversations go badly. It's not me who is bad, and it's not what I think that is bad. The phrasing just isn't reaching the other side as I wanted it to. People are inherently insecure, and they generally can only listen to the content of what I'm saying after they are settled in how they think I feel about them. Knowing this, I can plan how I communicate a bit better.

It both helps and hurts that I'm a non-imposing person. When I'm polite it works quite well, but sometimes people get whiplash when I speak harshly because it doesn't fit what they expected I think.

In my current job I have one employee to supervise (I don't know how that happened). When I get frustrated with not understanding what I've been asked to do, or if I've asked a question and I get a half answer rather than a detailed one, I tell her about the task and she usually has an idea of what the person who has given me the task/responded to me means.

I don't know what I would do without her. She stops me stressing out.

I've had to unlearn feeling like I must not ask questions. I don't know if a teacher way back in the 80s instilled that in me, but I found that method does not work in the real world.

Like Kraftie I've learned patience over time and I've learned that asking questions or explaining further is actually ok. I won't look stupid because the other person just wants to get the task done too. Again I'm fortunate that in the place I work people are quite reasonable. I had one boss years ago who hated explaining himself and we just couldn't communicate with each other. That was stressful.

So I guess that's where patience comes in. I'm just remembering one incident. He lied to a client, but didn't tell me he had lied, and the client then asked me a question about the product and I innocently told her the truth. I was totally oblivious. I didn't realise that we as a company were passing it off as our own, when we were in fact buying it in. He wasn't that mad at me because he realised what an innocent person I was, but yeah, I find work situations a bit stressful because I am quite straight forward in my way of thinking and don't expect people to lie.

I find it harder and harder to imagine a place where people don’t think you should be seen as little as possible, unless you’re a pretty young lady, and preferably not heard at all.