Masha du Toit

Whether you’re neurodivergent or neurotypical, communication can be confusing and frustrating. Your personal history, culture, context and neurotype all come into play. We all rely on guesswork and intuition to some extent. “Guess culture” can look like this:

1. Everyone avoids saying what they want directly, because they don’t want to override what everyone else wants.
2. Everyone assumes that everyone else is doing 1. So they don’t believe what people are saying, they think there’s a hidden level of “what you really think” and that their guess about this is accurate.
3. People get annoyed with one another for either stating, or appearing to have needs, either real or assumed. They feel they can’t say no, and everyone should avoid placing them in a position of being forced into saying no (because saying no is selfish!), or forced into saying yes (because they want to say no!)

Do you recognise yourself in this?