Re:It all made sense when we found out we were autistic
by erpellan on Monday March 26, 2018 @03:45PM
(#16681838)
From my experience, it can definitely be learned. I went through a very deliberate process of approaching social interaction and communication skills as I would an interesting programming problem. I refined a mental model and tested it out (yes, with occasionally hilarious misfires). Thankfully none of the failures went beyond 'highly embarassing'.
It felt like most people have a social automatic pilot while I was flying entirely manually. Once I developed some models and internalised them it was as if I'd built my own approximation. It still takes a little effort to keep things level, but much less than it used to.
The literature that I was given during my diagnosis was very clear that even if all the symptoms disappeared in adulthood, you still "had it". (And of course, the doctors were all trying to give the parents hope, so, "oh, yes, it's very likely your child will have a normal adult life".)
(I'm still not 100% sure whether this also applies to the revised DSM-V definition.)