When You Misunderstand and Don’t Know It

It’s one thing to mishear speech as gibberish and get “mumble mumble” instead of distinct words. Or to know that something isn’t sinking in. In that case you can ask a person to repeat or wait for you to process.

Another processing difficulty that autistics and those with auditory processing disorder have involves hearing speech that sounds normal but is out of order or missing parts – and the listener is completely unaware. It can make sense on a surface level, although sometimes the listener might be able to tell that such an utterance doesn’t seem acceptable for the situation.

A simple example:
Last week, we had an appointment to get the dog groomed and the groomer didn’t tell us what time to bring the dog in. The day before the appointment, I asked my husband: “Did you ever hear back from the groomer about a time?” I was pretty sure his response was “no”.

So I grumbled about how irresponsible that was of the groomer. Knowing about my tendency to mishear things, R explained that he had in fact said “NINE”. Instantly it all made sense to me.

It never even occurred to me to say “what?” because “no” was a logical answer to the question!

A more complicated example:
There’s an anecdote that I’ve heard several times from people who originally witnessed the incident when it happened. I recently made a comment about it to one of the people involved, who wrote back and pointed out that I was wrong and retold the story but with a completely different ending from the way I remembered it.

Okay, this really confused me and made me upset. Was the person trying to tell me I was stupid?

I found out that in fact, I had mixed up the order of the story every time and didn’t understand it until I saw it in writing. If it was a story in which A, B, and C happened, I had always understood it as B, then A, and no C, maybe X. That’s how mixed up the words were to me until I saw them in print!

Dealing with it – Or, Isn’t ignorance bliss?

It’s not easy coming to terms with how much this affects the way you perceive the world. Just how much of what you’ve heard in your life was accurate and how much of it was distorted? How can you trust any of your own perceptions anymore?*

But you can’t spend your life apologizing for yourself when it’s not even your fault.

You can, however, learn to ask before jumping to conclusions. When in doubt, ask. Ask people to rephrase, not just repeat something that you might misunderstand the same way. Ask people to break down a long set of instructions or a story step by step. Tell it back to them in your own words to make sure you understood, and say “did I understand that correctly?” Better yet, get it in writing.

If you live with someone who tends to do this, try to have compassion for them. This means not ridiculing them or accusing them of being mean when they react inappropriately to something you say, because there’s a good chance they’ve misunderstood you. Learn to break long rambles into short, digestible bits (it makes for better conversation anyway!), and give one instruction at a time.

*P.S. – Sometimes your hunch or sixth sense is just right.