What Happens When No One’s Watching (and We’re Allowed to Finish Our Thought)

A Study About Us, With Us. Radical, Right?

When autistic people talk to each other, it works. We already knew. This review of Sutherland et al. (2025) explores resonance, rhythm, and the quiet power of being understood without translation. Someone finally wrote it down.

Introduction: The Conversation We Always Already Knew

Sutherland, H. E. A., Fletcher-Watson, S., Long, J., & Crompton, C. J. (2025). ‘A Difference in Typical Values’: Autistic Perspectives on Autistic Social Communication. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 27(1), 313–329. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.1184

So apparently—brace yourself for this one—when autistic people talk to other autistic people, it goes well. I know. Shocking. Who could have predicted such a thing besides, well, all of us. And yet, here it is, written down in ink and footnoted glory in Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Volume 27, Issue 1, no less. Sutherland and colleagues (2025) spent time with nine autistic adults, let them speak in a space not drenched in clinical spotlight or the expectation of neurotypical translation, and found—would you believe it?—that the conversations flowed. Not always linearly, not always neatly, but richly. Honestly. Without the drag of performative accommodation. It’s a bit like that moment in an old fae tale when the outsider’s clever decoding contraption breaks down because the music wasn’t made for gears and wires in the first place. There’s a kind of joy in that, isn’t there? Not the breakdown itself, but the way the machine fails to flatten what it never understood. This isn’t a dry lit review. I’m not here to summarise findings like I’m handing in a book report to a headmaster who never quite liked the way I spoke. This is a walk, a gesture, a slow returning. Because we already knew. We always already knew. And now it’s been written down in the Official Font. But the knowing? That was ours.

Theme One: Autistic Self, Attention, and Environment

“My eyes aren’t avoiding you—they’re busy listening.” That line doesn’t come from the paper, not exactly, but it might as well. It lives in the soft in-between of the themes, threaded through the way participants spoke of their attention, their orientation to space, their way of being-with. And it’s familiar. Bone-deep familiar. The kind of knowing that lives in the body before it finds a name. That sensation of pulling one’s focus inward and outward at the same time, of tuning one’s whole self like an instrument—because that’s what presence is, for us. Not a narrow beam of gaze aimed at someone like a laser pointer, but a field. A gradient. A quietly shifting frequency tuned by context, safety, light, noise, heartbeat, memory. It’s not that we’re not paying attention. It’s that we’re paying attention differently—holistically, relationally, somatically.

The study names it gently: autistic self, attention, and environment. But those are such tidy words. The experience itself is not tidy. It’s immersive. Attention, in the autistic register, is not merely a flicker of interest but a full-bodied orientation—a being with or through something. And that something might be the way someone speaks with their shoulders, or the strobe pulse of an overhead light that interrupts a sentence midstream. It might be the texture of a word, the sound of its ending, or the movement someone almost made before they masked it back into socially acceptable stillness.

I often think of our attention like mist—settling where it will, condensing around meaning as it emerges. Not fixed. Not directed. Receptive. And that receptivity, that ambient attunement, is so often misunderstood by neurotypicals as distraction, disinterest, or delay. “Why don’t you make eye contact?” they ask, as though the eyes were the only reliable gate of connection. But eye contact, let’s be honest, is a colonial construct. A demand disguised as politeness. A compulsory gesture of submission coded as sincerity. And for many of us, it’s loud. It’s not neutral. It’s invasive, a kind of visual grab—and sometimes, it severs the very sense of presence they claim it represents.

This is what Sutherland et al. allow to surface through their participants’ reflections: that autistic communication is not a lack of awareness but a different geometry of attention. Our conversations are less like duels and more like dances, unfolding in radial space rather than linear turns. Our listening may come with closed eyes, our speaking may arrive with rhythmic stims, our silences may hold more meaning than their interruptions can bear. We are not absent when we do not perform presence according to their scripts. We are here—fully here—just not in the way they were taught to measure.

The paper doesn’t use the word embodied, but it’s there, tucked into every gesture. Because communication for us isn’t just about words. It’s regulation. It’s posture. It’s breath and blink and proximity. It’s knowing that the room is too loud to speak truthfully. It’s the decision to step out, not because we don’t care, but because we do—so much so that we’d rather pause than lie with our bodies. That is care. That is presence. That is integrity.

So when the researchers identified “autistic self, attention, and environment” as the first of five themes, they were touching something essential. Something foundational. Not a preamble, but the soil. And what grows from that soil is a form of communication that is relational, poetic, immersive—often missed by those looking for eye contact and orderly sentences, but unmistakable to those of us who speak in rhythm, in resonance, in the long curve of breath that only begins when the room feels safe enough to hold it.

Theme Two: Expectations About Social Norms

Typical values. That’s the phrase the researchers landed on—the polite academic rendering of a much older question: who the hell gets to decide what counts as normal? And while we’re at it, where’s the complaint box, and do they accept submissions in echolalia and flapping? Because honestly, if we’re going to build an entire system around a standardised idea of how humans should communicate, it would be nice to know who got consulted. Spoiler: it wasn’t us.

The phrase is used with care in the article, I’ll grant that. Not as a judgement, but as a framing—a recognition that what’s “typical” in a neurotypical-majority world gets mistaken for “correct,” and that this mistake shapes everything from school discipline to friendship advice to the sinking feeling in your gut when someone says, “you’re just not trying hard enough.” But there’s something deeply satisfying in turning the phrase over in your mouth like a stone, letting its smoothness wear off. Typical values. As if values are neutral. As if they don’t come bundled with power.

Participants in the study spoke about what feels right to them in conversation—not in some abstract theoretical sense, but in the rhythm of actual interaction. Some described circling around topics instead of diving in. Others talked about long silences that don’t signal disconnection but attention. Several noted a preference for not having to rush to fill space. There’s an internal logic, a relational pacing, a felt sense of timing that doesn’t map neatly onto the rules of turn-taking they teach in social skills groups. It’s not that we don’t know how to take turns. It’s that we don’t believe conversations are competitions.

And anyway, the rules don’t work if the rhythm isn’t shared. Imagine a dance floor where the music is in 3/4 but someone insists on marching in 4/4—and then blames you for being out of step. That’s what it’s like, trying to follow “social norms” when they were never built with your timing in mind. The beat feels off. The cues don’t land. And yet you’re the one who gets pulled aside and told you’re being inappropriate.

This brings us back—looping, as we do—to Theme One. Because those expectations? They aren’t just ideas. They aren’t floating rules in a textbook. They live in the body. They manifest in tone, pressure, volume, the breath you hold when someone’s watching you too closely, the tension in your shoulders when you try to phrase your truth in a grammar that’s not your own. Expectations shape not just what you say, but how you exist while saying it.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? We’re not just navigating a different set of norms—we’re navigating judgement for not having internalised those norms as natural. The participants in the study didn’t talk about “lacking social skills.” They talked about difference. Different instincts. Different timing. Different internal metrics for what constitutes presence, warmth, interest. But in a world where typical values are silently enforced, that difference becomes deviation. And deviation becomes pathology. And suddenly, your way of being is something to be corrected, not understood.

But what if we didn’t centre those typical values? What if we let autistic pacing, autistic resonance, autistic rhythms be the norm in a space—just for a moment? We already know what that feels like. We’ve felt it in the quiet comfort of a shared stim. In the joy of parallel play that suddenly turns into a conversation without anyone planning it. In the relief of being able to pause, and pause again, without someone jumping in to fill the space with concern or correction.

The study captures this beautifully, even if it stays careful with its language. It honours that what feels “right” to autistic people is not wrong. It’s just different. And in naming that difference without apology, it opens a door—a way of saying: your values are valid too. Even if they don’t align with the ones scribbled in the margins of some social curriculum. Even if they loop and gesture and pause.

Especially then.

Theme Three: Conflict with Neurotypical Expectations

Enter: the misunderstanding. The tragic comedy of mismatched norms. Curtain up, lights harsh and fluorescent. You’re mid-gesture, mid-thought, mid-silence that is not a gap but a shape—one of those spacious silences that means I’m thinking, I’m with you, I’m not done yet. Across from you, another autistic person nods, maybe taps gently, or echoes the last word back with a slight inflection, because yes, that’s exactly it. There’s a hum of agreement in the room—not a sound, necessarily, but a coherence. The conversation is happening. You’re building something together. No one’s rushing the mortar.

And then: a door opens.

A neurotypical walks in.

They look around—at the silence, the loose posture, the lack of eye contact or clearly delineated turns—and immediately begin rearranging the furniture. “Don’t mind me,” they say, already moving the chairs into neat rows. “I’m just here to help.” They suggest “taking turns” in a more structured way. They compliment one of you for “finally speaking up.” They fill the silence with small talk, smile too hard, blink too little. The coherence wobbles. Something fractures. One of you retreats, the other taps faster, the rhythm’s been broken and they don’t even notice.

That’s what the study captures so well in its third theme: conflict with neurotypical expectations. The moment when something fluid and mutual is interrupted by someone trying to standardise it. Not out of malice, often. But out of a deep, learned certainty that their way is the way. And so difference becomes disruption, and the harmony of autistic interaction is reframed as dysfunction—not because it didn’t work, but because it didn’t look like what they were expecting.

Participants in the study talked about this—not always in dramatic scenes, but in the quiet language of constraint. They described being told they were “too intense,” “too literal,” “not engaged enough,” “hard to follow,” “inappropriate,” “off-topic.” These weren’t just personal criticisms. They were structural ones. The kind of feedback that implies not just a momentary disconnect but a fundamental failure to participate “properly.” But proper to whom?

This is where things so often go sideways—not because autistic people are broken, but because expectations are silently enforced by a majority that doesn’t even know it’s making demands. They call it a social script, but it’s really more of a border checkpoint. There are no signs, but plenty of infractions. You’ve violated the law of acceptable gaze. You’ve misused a smile. You’ve stayed too long on a topic deemed “niche,” or failed to signal “interest” in the correct neurotypical dialect.

Meanwhile, the neurotypical observer is baffled. “Why is this so hard for them?” they wonder, unaware that their presence reshaped the space before a word was even spoken.

And here’s the part they miss: when it’s just us—just autistic people in a room or on a thread or sharing a rhythm that doesn’t need translation—those misunderstandings dissolve. Not completely, of course. We’re not a monolith. But the ground stops shifting beneath us. We can start to trust that a pause is just a pause. That a delayed response is thoughtfulness, not disinterest. That our way of being-with makes sense to each other, even if it confounds the outside gaze.

The conflict, then, is not intrinsic. It’s imposed. It arises not from our failure to meet expectations, but from their refusal to question whether those expectations were reasonable in the first place.

And still, we try. We script, we translate, we buffer and soften and double-check our phrasing, just to avoid the inevitable correction. But in that process, something gets lost—some clarity, some rhythm, some shape of ourselves. And maybe that’s the real tragedy. Not that we’re misunderstood, but that we so often have to misunderstand ourselves on purpose just to keep the peace.

So yes, it’s a conflict. But not one we started. And not one we need to keep pretending is neutral.

Theme Four: Compensation and Masking

Now here’s where it hurts.

It’s one thing to be misunderstood. It’s another thing entirely to pre-empt it—to feel it coming before it arrives, to live in the anticipatory flinch. That’s what masking is, at its core: not just a performance, but a defensive choreography. A kind of constant translation tax paid to keep the peace. Or maybe it’s more like autopilot—with the safety off, the map upside down, and the destination always just out of reach.

The participants in the study don’t use that language, exactly, but you can hear it between the lines. One speaks of the way they “monitor themselves” constantly. Another talks about “trying to be smaller” in conversations, not physically, but socially—minimising traits, managing expressions, curating reactions so they don’t take up too much interpretive labour from the neurotypicals around them. Another reflects on the sheer energy it takes to “stay appropriate,” as if they’re holding a fragile structure together with white-knuckled attention. The tone is quiet, but the exhaustion pulses beneath it.

And exhaustion is the right word. Not just tiredness, but erosion. The wearing down of the self, moment by moment, as you chip away everything that might be “too much” for someone else. The brightness of your joy. The sharpness of your focus. The length of your pause. The gestures you make when the words don’t quite fit. All filed down. All softened. All suspended. Not because you want to hide—but because you know what happens when you don’t.

This is what masking does. It takes the shape of neurotypical expectation—those typical values again, from Theme Two—and folds you into it, origami-style, until your own outline disappears. And the world calls it “success.” The therapists & behaviourists call it “progress.” The workplace calls it “professionalism.” But inside, there’s a haunting. A sense that you’ve been wearing someone else’s skin for so long you’ve forgotten how yours feels.

Looping back to those expectations—because we always loop back—you remember: the rules didn’t fit. So you folded yourself to match them. And the longer you held the fold, the more it felt like the only way to be. Until maybe, if you’re lucky, you meet someone who speaks the way you do. Or would speak, if the rules ever loosened. And something unfolds. And you realise you were never the problem.

The study handles this with care. It doesn’t pathologise masking, but neither does it romanticise it. It lets it be what it is: survival. But survival at a cost. One participant described the difference they felt when talking with another autistic person—not needing to “work so hard,” not having to explain themselves. That absence of labour becomes presence. Not performing becomes connecting.

Because masking doesn’t just cover expression. It mutes desire. It dampens the impulse to reach out, to share, to build. If every gesture might be misread, better not to gesture at all. And so masking becomes both shield and silence. And silence becomes distance. And distance becomes loneliness.

And so we arrive at the edge of this theme—not with a solution, but with a reckoning. What would it mean to communicate without that tax? To live unmasked, unmuted, in a world that didn’t demand constant translation? The study doesn’t pretend to answer that. But it gestures toward it, softly. It listens. It lets the mask slip, just a little. And in that slip, we glimpse not just the pain—but the possibility.

Theme Five: Creating Shared Understandings

And then… we find each other.

Not in some sweeping, cinematic way. No spotlight. No music swelling. Sometimes it’s just a comment left at the right time, or a shared stim across the room, or the way a pause is allowed to stay a pause. But when it happens—when autistic people speak with other autistic people—something opens. Something softens. The walls don’t disappear, not entirely, but they stop pressing in so hard. The air shifts. The whole rhythm changes.

This is what the study’s fifth theme gestures toward with such quiet clarity: creating shared understandings. Not as a technical outcome, but as a lived, relational unfolding. In autistic-to-autistic interactions, participants described a kind of ease. Not the absence of all misunderstanding—because that’s never guaranteed—but the absence of constant defence. The burden lifts. The translation engine powers down. Communication stops being a performance and becomes presence.

One participant said it outright: with another autistic person, they didn’t have to “work so hard.” Another described a sense of “connection” that wasn’t forced or effortful, but mutual—co-created in the pace and shape of the conversation itself. There’s a kind of coherence that comes not from sameness, but from shared difference. A mutual recognition that says: we’re not broken—we just don’t bend the same way they do.

Double empathy theory is supposed to explain this, academically speaking. It posits that the communication gap between autistic and non-autistic people is bidirectional, not a one-sided failure on the part of the autistic speaker. But for those of us who’ve lived it, it’s more than a theory. It’s relief. It’s the moment you realise that maybe—just maybe—you’re not hard to talk to. You’ve just always been talking across a canyon that you didn’t dig.

I remember the first time it happened for me. Really happened. A friend I’d just met through a mutual writing group. We started talking, slowly at first, and then all at once, like breath held too long finally let go. There were loops, tangents, metaphors stretched past breaking. Whole gestalts offered up as if the other would catch them—and she did. No requests to clarify. No forced eye contact. No false smiling. Just receiving. The pauses weren’t mistakes. The echoes weren’t interruptions. The silences weren’t awkward. They were space.

It felt like coming home to a language I didn’t know I knew how to speak. Not because I’d learned it—but because I’d never been allowed to use it freely until then.

This, the study suggests, is what emerges when the demand to perform recedes. When we speak not in opposition to the neurotypical gaze, but in the company of those who already understand the shape of our speech. The rules change. Or maybe they don’t change at all—maybe they were always there, just hidden under the noise. Maybe what we call misunderstanding is less about deficit and more about refusal—refusal by dominant norms to honour any register they can’t control.

So yes, shared understanding. But not through some fixed script, not by corralling us into neat behavioural bullet points. It happens through resonance—that moment when two signals meet in balance, when the inductive and capacitative reactances cancel just so, and the system opens. Maximum energy transfer. Minimum resistance. It’s not just a metaphor I borrow from electronics—it’s a shape I carry in my bones. Resonance is what happens when the frequency of a signal aligns with the natural frequency of a system—and in that moment, the signal lands. Fully. Without distortion. That’s what autistic-to-autistic communication can feel like: not just being heard, but being matched. The circuit sings. The barriers fall away. We stop fragmenting. We stop bracing. We speak in whole waveforms, not compressed packets. And what lands on the other side isn’t just language—it’s us, in form and phase.

This is what the paper catches in its final theme, without quite saying it in those terms. Not a cure, not an intervention, not some new compliance technique dressed up as inclusion. But an invitation. To listen differently. To make space for resonance—to let meaning ring, rather than interrogating it into submission. And in doing so, to recognise its opposite too. Because I’ve seen what it looks like to oscillate on station—to push signal through a system misaligned, to hold frequency under load without resolution. It’s exhausting. You generate all this effort just to stay visible, just to stay intelligible, and nothing transmits clean. That’s the condition we’re too often left in when neurotypical norms dominate the exchange—oscillating on station. Signal output without connection. Energy spent, but nothing received. No match, no landing, just the strain of holding frequency in a system that won’t open. You keep transmitting, but the line stays dead. No resonance. No return. But when resonance does happen—when the system clicks into alignment, when something finally meets you in phase—that’s the shift. That’s the circuit humming clean. That’s us, speaking in full waveform, and knowing—knowing—it will land.

Implications: So What? (So Everything.)

The researchers call it relational, which is the academic way of saying: it takes two. Or, more precisely, that communication isn’t something that happens from one person to another, but between—in the shared air, in the tuning of signals, in the space where meaning coalesces or doesn’t. They don’t frame autistic people as broken radios or bad transmitters. Instead, they name what many of us have been trying to say for decades: that when connection fails, it’s not because we’re speaking nonsense—it’s because we’re speaking in a different key. And no one’s bothered to learn to listen.

So what does that mean? What’s the takeaway?

Not a deficit, but a mismatch.
Not poor communication, but poor recognition.
Not brokenness, but difference—and often, coherence.

The problem isn’t our speech. It’s your ears.

And that would be enough. That alone is worth writing down, worth publishing, worth citing and waving gently in the faces of every clinician who ever asked us to flatten our expressions into a handout-shaped checklist. But I find myself wondering, too—what was missed? What couldn’t quite fit within the frame? Because whilst the study does a beautiful job honouring autistic rhythm and rapport, it remains, as all studies are, a partial view. A small sample. Nine autistic adults, mostly white, mostly from a country with a high-context monoculture and a relatively cohesive set of social norms. A room, yes—but not all the rooms.

And yet.

Even knowing that, I still feel it: the tug of something shared, something possibly universal across the wildly diverse ways autistic people move through the world. Would an African American autistic woman read this and find herself there? I think… perhaps. Would a queer autistic in the rural South, or a non-speaking autistic teen in Jakarta, feel that same breath of recognition? Maybe not in every word, but in the current. In the resonance of it. In the way the study frames our difference as something relational, not deficient. That part might travel.

But what of autistic time? Autistic flow states? The way a conversation can stretch or collapse depending on how it feels, not how long it lasts? That’s not in the paper, not quite. Nor is the particular grief of trying to speak in your natural tempo in a world that’s always speeding up or slowing down just enough to throw you off balance. That’s the thing with studies, even the good ones: they catch the waveform mid-oscillation. They pin the butterfly to the page and try not to tear the wings. But the wings are still motion. Still rhythm. Still living.

So maybe the real implication isn’t just about understanding each other better. Maybe it’s about understanding ourselves fully. Allowing for a theory of mind that isn’t about mind-reading, but about mutual regard. About saying: I see you, not because you mirror me, but because you don’t. And we can still build something from that difference.

Because what this study really tells me—beneath the themes, beneath the quotes, beneath the cautious phrasing—is that we were never speaking wrongly. We were speaking in resonance. Just waiting for someone to stop re-tuning us and start tuning with us.

Final Thoughts: A Spiral Back to the Start

And so we spiral back to the start. Not in conclusion, exactly, but in gesture—in the shape of something returning changed. Because this study, for all its citations and cautious wording, didn’t discover something new. It validated something old. Something many of us have carried, quietly, like a hum under the skin. A knowing passed in pauses and side-glances and unfinished sentences that still made sense. Something we recognised in each other long before it was named.

It’s not that we don’t know how to communicate. It’s that we’ve always known how to communicate with each other. That knowing didn’t begin with a focus group. It didn’t wait for ethics approval. It lived in every unspoken agreement, every hand flap met with a matching rhythm, every hour-long monologue greeted not with interruption but with resonance. And now, finally, someone wrote it down. Someone bothered to say: yes, this counts too.

There’s a kind of grace in that. A small exhale. And also: a flicker of grief. That it took this long. That it will still be ignored in some rooms. That nine people’s truth, rendered in tidy themes, may still be questioned by people who have never once felt the ache of being misread at every turn. But for us? It lands. It hums. It resonates.

Because the circuit was always there. Because the frequency never changed. Because what looked like silence was signal waiting for match. Because we already knew.

And maybe that’s the line we keep returning to—not to end, but to echo:

We already knew.
We already knew.
We already knew.

And now, so do you.