Safe words... Honestly.

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My friends have used "safe words" with me for awhile now... and I'm just starting to realize their significance.

So my friend Tracy (who is mostly to blame for all my normalcy) now uses "toaster" when I've made a jump/assumption and skipped something that she doesn't know (unlike my mom, who just yells at me all the time).

We also have a safe word- combination for ending a discussion where I'm not seeing her POV or won't let it go (or vice versa) and that is "poptart" ... and "poptart" has etiquette. For example, you can call "poptart" or "chocolate poptart" (which you want to continue the conversation later) first, but you can't call "strawberry poptart" (which means you don't want to continue the conversation later) first because that is rude. If you either don't want to finish the conversation or don't care either way, you can call "poptart" and leave it up to the other person to call "strawberry-" or "chocolate-" "poptart"

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I find that using words and phrases (like we have ever since we met each other... which is scary) helps to hit some sort of "reset" in my head and that allows me to drop something or see what is wrong in a line of conversation without getting upset or stuck ... (sometimes when I get stuck I have to talk to myself and work myself out of it... this saves a lot of time)

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that's about all I feel like sharing on that right now... Does anyone else do anything similar?

Sounds like you've got a good friend.

Tracy is awesome.

That's such a cool idea!! !

That is a cool idea...

it certainly beats the long-winded tirades I have to put up with sometimes...

No. But Tracy is incredibly fortunate to have the patience to reconcile her confusion with your friendship. I have a friend whom I play around with numbers and letters with all the time, but none whom tolerate long-windedness and abstract explanations.

I've only just found this thread, but this is a great idea, I get stuck in arguments that could do with this kind of diffusing quite often... Perhaps next friend I can tell them early about this and AS, I'm not sure I can have that conversation with older friends, they don't believe I'm on the spectrum. Still, fantastic idea

I don't do this.
Although, my mother and grandmother have a sentence that they use when they need to discuss something about me! (My mother told me when she was drunk). The sentence was..."We need to bake some chocolate buscuits".

I think it's been changed though, since I found out what it meant.

you're fortunate to have a good friend like her, in my case esp with my family, we're so dysfunctional that i've become paranoid that even if my sister had a "safe word" for me i would think she was making a fool of me and just wanted to get her way. i wish i had someone i could really trust.

gonna see if my friend'll do that

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Name: Yoshiyahu
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