Social filter and social fake

This blog post is a transcript of Episode 106 of my podcast/YouTube series. Because of that, it is not written to be grammatically/syntactically correct.

You can listen here and watch here.

Once upon a time, there were autistic, ADHD, and anxious students who struggled with thinking about others during conversations.

Sometimes they would say things that hurt other people's feelings or were perceived as rude or disrespectful, or even things that other people didn't really want to talk about or hear about.

Sometimes these students would stop listening when people talked about things that they didn't care about.

Sometimes they would even tell people they weren't interested in what the group or the person was talking about.

I created the lesson I'm sharing today for all of these students.

In this lesson, our students learn what a social filter is, how it's different than lying, and when and why using a social fake is a good idea. We also practice taking some of our common complaints that we might have and turning them into problem-solving opportunities.

This lesson is from module three, which is all about conversations and communication. It is lesson four in module three.

Just like all the lessons in my entire program, this lesson is based around whether students want to use the skills and the strategies that we talk about this week. It is always up to all of my students whether they want to do the things that we're talking about. This lesson in particular can be a little challenging for some students, because it has the word 'fake' in it, and we talk about using a filter, and some students don't want to do those things. Some students aren't ready to do those things. That's absolutely fine. I want to make sure all of my students have the information so that the ones who want to use them can, the ones who are ready can take this lesson and run with it, and even the students who don't want to use the information, at least know how to if they choose to use it in the future.

We talk about two concepts in this lesson that are similar, so I package them together. The first one is the concept of a social filter. I start this lesson by asking the group, "What is a filter? What does a filter do? What's its purpose?"

I have everybody give me an example that they can think of a filter. The common ones are a water filter, a pool filter, a coffee filter. Some students will say things like a Snapchat filter an internet browser filter. I will prompt for as many examples as we can think of. Sometimes we'll even think of things like a fish tank filter. So I will prompt for students to think of as many different types of filters as they can: an air conditioning filter, an oil filter, so many kinds of filters.

And then we talk about: What is a filter? What does it do? What's the point of a filter? What's its purpose? And we decide that a filter is meant to keep back the stuff that we don't want, like dirt and debris and coffee grounds, and to let through the stuff that we do want, like clean air or clean water.

I then ask everybody to imagine that we have a filter in our brains. I say, "We don't really, there's not really such a thing. So we're just going to pretend. We're going to pretend that we have a filter in our brain, and it is called a social filter.: So we talk about: What might it look like? How big might it be?

I ask the students, this is something that we talk about often, is it okay to think all the things that you think? The answer is always yes. It is always okay for us to think whatever it is that we're thinking. Whatever they are thinking in the moment, whatever you are thinking right now, it is always okay. The same with feelings. It is always okay for us to think whatever we're thinking and for us to feel however we're feeling.

What we want to be mindful of is how we affect the people around us, and that comes from the third part of the triangle. There's thoughts, there's feelings, and there's behaviors. So our behaviors are what affect the people around us. That's why our thoughts and feelings are important, because they tie into the choices that we make.

I explain to the students that this imaginary filter in our brain helps us keep certain thoughts and feelings in our brain so that they don't hurt anybody's feelings, upset anybody, offend anybody, and they let everything else come out. Everything that's a part of a conversation, everything that would be helpful or friendly, anytime we need to have an honest conversation with somebody, all those things go through our filter and come out as words. That's the point of our filter.

The next part is a poll where I ask the students, "When is the hardest time to be careful about what you say? When is it hardest to be careful about what you say?" First answer choice is when we're calm. The second answer choice is when we're upset. And the third one is always I'm not sure, because I always want to give my students the option to not be sure.

Once students see those choices, they absolutely recognize that it is the hardest to be careful about what we say when we are upset. I use the word 'upset' as a catch-all because it's the word that I feel best encompasses all the feelings that we would talk about in any situation where we're talking about feelings that might need to be filtered. I explain that upset can refer to angry, sad, frustrated, disappointed, lonely, anxious, but even things like excited, overwhelmed, ecstatic. It doesn't even have to be emotions that we would normally think of as negative.

If we think about and practice using our filter when we're not upset, it becomes easier for us to remember to use it when we are upset. All the students understand this. Every time we talk about it, everybody understands it. It's one of those things that I don't know that anybody practices enough when we're not upset in order to default to it when we are upset.

We then talk about examples of things that someone might say that might affect our reputation. It might hurt somebody's feelings, it might be offensive, it might be inappropriate, it might be inconsiderate. A lot of times the term 'social filter' is used to talk about things that are socially inappropriate, but that's not even the whole story. There could even be things that somebody says out of lack of awareness for somebody else's situation, for example.

There are students at Starfish Social Club who have done outings with me where we go out into the community. It was something we did every week before I left Texas and came back. And then there are students who have never done something like that with Starfish Social Club, because they're not part of our program at this time. So even helping my students who have done things like that understand that you are more than welcome to talk about them in the group if you want to, the students tend to talk about them very fondly, just recognize that not everybody in the group has had that experience, and so it might cause some students to feel left out. It doesn't mean you can't talk about it. It's the same as having a birthday party and there might be people in the group that you have not invited. It doesn't mean you can't talk about it. I just want my students to recognize how it might affect other people if they do talk about it, and then they get to make the choice.

Some of the examples I give of things that might hurt our reputation if they make it through our filter and come out of our mouth, things like telling our parents that we hate what's for dinner, telling a teacher,
"This is boring." Telling another student that we don't like the movie that their shirt depicts. It's always okay to think what we think and feel how we feel, but not everything that we think and feel has to come out of our mouth as words. Some of it we can keep in our brain. We can keep thinking it, we can keep feeling it, we just hold on to it in our brain.

There are some students who have not yet developed this skill of keeping things in their brain. It's the same skill that it takes to read to yourself, and some students just have not developed that skill yet. It can absolutely be developed. Most kids develop it when they're young, and so when they're in elementary school, they're able to sit in a classroom and read silently to themselves. But a lot of neurodivergent kiddos don't develop that skill, and so not only do they not know how to read to themselves, they don't know how to keep their thoughts in their brain. They don't realize that it's even an option.

And so if this is the case for a kiddo or a student that you know or work with, what I teach them to do is to first turn it into a whisper. If they don't know how to say things in their brain yet, I teach them how to turn it into a whisper. So you can feel really bored, and you can whisper that to yourself instead of it coming out as words to another person. Or you can not like somebody's haircut, and you can whisper that to yourself instead of saying it out loud. And once we get the act of whispering down, then we can work on sometimes it's even moving your lips with no noise coming out. And then we get to the point where we can keep it in our brains. So just know that not everybody has this skill yet, but it is something that we can develop over time.

We talk in this lesson about complaining. This is not the first or the only time that we talk about complaining. We also talk about it in module one, when we talk about having a reputation for being smart.
Everybody complains. A lot of us have certain people we choose to complain to, maybe a partner, maybe a friend, maybe Facebook, we have learned to hone in on who are the safe people for us to complain to. Most of our students don't have that awareness, and so again, complaining just comes from lack of recognition of a filter.

The challenge with complaining, and I remind the students again, it's always okay to feel the way that you feel. Whatever it is you're complaining about, it's perfectly okay to feel that way and to think that way. I even tell the students, every once in a while, somebody will complain about coming to our group. It's absolutely okay to feel that way. And when that happens, I'll ask everybody in the group, "Has anybody else ever not wanted to come to Starfish?" There will always be a couple people that very seriously say, "No, I've never wanted to not come." But most of the group will say, "Yeah, sometimes if I have a lot of homework, if I'm tired, if it's raining." And I will say, "Me too!" There are days when I don't want to come to Starfish. I just want to stay at home with my kitty cats. So I always want to normalize the things that we are all thinking and feeling sometimes.

And then I'll give an example. I'll use me or I'll use a student in the group that I know is comfortable being used as an example. We'll talk about what it means... Oh, we also talk about this in module four. So we talk about this several times throughout the program, what it looks like for one person to complain about something. So what it looks like and feels like for one student to come into Starfish and complain that they don't want to be there, and how the rest of us feel in that environment and in that moment.

To make it a little more fun and a little more light, I have everybody practice their best complaint. Everybody gets to think of something that they complain about sometimes. I do, every once in a while...
So triangles are all over this. Triangle kids tend to have a reputation for complaining. Triangle kids have strong opinions about things. They are very vocal about things. And so if you have a kiddo who has a reputation for complaining, they are probably a triangle kid.

Square kids don't tend to complain a lot because they're not very vocal. They're not speaking up a lot. They're trying to not draw attention to themselves. So they might have complaints internally, but they're not always voicing them.

Circle kids, honestly sometimes don't complain. A lot of circle kids are happy-go-lucky kind of people, and so they don't find fault with a lot of things. There aren't a lot of things that they honestly complain about. So when we do this practice, I will tell the students that if they can't think of anything they complain about, think of someone that they know who complains about something.

It could be complaining about, since I live in Texas and the majority of my students are in Texas, it could be complaining about it being hot, which is something we do probably nine months out of the year. It could be complaining that you don't want to do your homework. It could be complaining that you don't want to go to bed, complaining about your sibling, complaining about not wanting to go to school, all kinds of things. Everybody gets to come up with an example, and then they all get to complain. Tell me, what does it look like? What does it sound like when we complain? It just makes it fun and funny. We do the sing song, whiny voice.

Then I ask the students, "Does complaining make anything better?" And everybody acknowledges and realizes that the answer to that is no. Complaining doesn't make anything better. All it really does is make the people around us uncomfortable. It makes the people around us not really want to be around us. It definitely doesn't make them want to help us in any way.

In order to address this, we want to try to become problem solvers. Complaining is when you're sharing something that you're upset about or that's bothering you, but in a kind of stuck, whiny kind of way. Being a problem solver could start the same way. You can say the same thing, but then you propose a solution to it, or you ask someone if they can help you with it. So if we go back to my classic example of complaining about it being hot, I'll ask the students, "What solution could you propose to that?" Or "How could you ask for help with that?"

Depending on the context, it could be asking a parent to turn the AC up/down, fan up, temperature down. It could be asking to go inside. It could be asking to turn a fan on. Those are much different than just complaining about it being hot, and you're likely to get a much different outcome. So that's our focus is focusing on it being a problem solver instead of a complainer. Every student in the group gets to identify something that they might complain about, or someone they know might complain about, and we practice all of them. We go through everybody's example and practice what each one of them could look and sound like if we were problem solving instead of complaining.

So that's the concept of social filter, being aware of how the things we say affect the people around us and affect our reputation. Even a couple of weeks ago, there was a student in the group who started talking about a pet passing away, and I asked if we could talk about something else. Can we change the topic? Can we talk about something else? It wasn't something that had happened recently, it was the students response to something someone else had said. And so it wasn't this student coming to the group and sharing that this had just happened, it was their response to something that someone else had said. And so I asked if we could talk about something else.

Talking about death, a lot of our students don't recognize that that's something that the general population does not want to talk about. And I am definitely in that category. I do not want to be part of conversations about things that are scary, things that are sad, things that are upsetting. I don't even really want to talk about news or current events with most people. I don't want to be in that emotional state. I don't want to intentionally do things or intentionally have conversations that will put me in that kind of an emotional state.

I think it's important for my students to recognize that there are certain topics that we should use our filter with that might, they just might not be things that other people really want to talk about. Death is definitely one of those things. We always add politics to that. We always add religion to that. It's part of being sensitive to the fact that people think and believe different things. And this is another topic we have often is about politics, religion, race, cultural, identity. We want to be really mindful of the things that we say and the things that we share about topics that people might be sensitive around if we want to have a reputation for being friendly, which if you're coming to my group, that's our goal.

If it's somebody that you know well, or if it's inside your family, if it's with a romantic partner, you can talk about whatever you want to talk about. That comes up in module four when we talk about the different levels of relationships. There are certain levels of relationships where we should feel comfortable to talk about anything. But if we're talking about conversations we're having at school, at work, at Starfish, we're not that deep. These are not that deep of relationships where we can just kind of talk about anything. We need to be a little more mindful of using our filter.

Social fake is basically pretending in order to get the reputation that we would like to have. It could even be something like not correcting somebody when you hear them say something. Maybe they use a word the wrong way, or maybe they they say something that's not real or true, but it's not that important. Maybe your teacher misspells something on a handout or on the board. Social fake is even things like that, not pointing out when somebody's made a mistake when it doesn't really matter.

Social fake also can be pretending to be interested in what other people are talking about, even if you're really not. Because here's the thing, we talk about this all the time in the group, we all have things that we're interested in that other people aren't. Even in a group that I had last week, I asked everybody to share: What's your favorite topic? What's your favorite thing to talk about, to research that you really are interested in. And all three students said things that none of the other students knew about. One of the things a student said, the other two students didn't even know what it was. One of them, the other two students had zero interest. The other two, the other students had zero interest in what those students were interested in.

And so that happens to all of us. All of us have things we're interested in that other people aren't, so it's important to be able to use a social fake and to pretend to be interested in things, even if we're not. Otherwise, we end up with a very, very narrow range of things we can talk about, and a very, very narrow range of people that we can have a conversation with. So being able to talk about things, even if we don't really care, is a really important social skill for those who choose to adopt it and practice it.

Another example of the social fake is pretending to pay attention, even when you're not. In Starfish Social Club, I don't care when kids aren't paying attention. Most of us have ADHD. It is impossible for us to pay attention all the time. If you're reading or watching or listening to this, I guarantee you have zoned out at least once. When I listen to podcasts, I have to constantly go back, go back, go back, because I'll hear them talk about something and it takes me off on a tangent, and five minutes later I realize the podcast is still playing but I'm not even listening.

So at Starfish, not paying attention doesn't matter. But there are other environments where it is socially expected to at least pretend like you're paying attention. A school classroom, even a college course, a work environment, a work meeting, a conversation with someone who's important to you. We at least want to use our skillset to the best we can and pay attention to the best we can. But if we're not paying attention, especially in a situation like a classroom, what can we do to look like we're paying attention?

I don't want my students to be called out for things like this. I don't want them to be singled out and called out because they're not paying attention, because that would happen quite frequently. So things like, look at the person who's talking. Keep your head facing the teacher. Even if you're thinking about macaroni and cheese, keep your head facing the teacher. Nodding. Gentle nodding of your head is a sign that we're listening and following along. So there are things we can do to social fake that we're paying attention if we're not able to pay attention all the time.

One of the things that we talk about the last week of classes before we go on the holiday break, which lines up with when this episode is publishing, we talk about how to respond when you get gifts, even if you didn't really want that gift. And I remind students that this is a great opportunity to use the social fake. We will always, our entire lives, get things from people that we don't really want, or that we don't really like, or that we don't really care about, or that we have three of already.

This is a great opportunity to use the social fake because anytime anybody's giving us a gift, they are thinking about us. They are showing us that they're thinking about us. And so the friendly response would be to show appreciation for the thought, even if we don't like the gift, we don't want it, whatever. I think even for me, I am a recovering hoarder, and I, over the last five years or so, have really gotten down to where I don't have a lot of stuff, and I really love that now, being able to live with very little stuff. Because of that, I don't want things from anybody ever. Unless I have specifically asked for something, which I almost never do, I don't want things from people. But gift-giving is very big in our culture, in our society. It's probably one of the best ways that people think of to show appreciation, gratitude, love, celebrate holidays, celebrate milestones. For me, it's anxiety-inducing and overwhelming, and so I get to use the social fake pretty much anytime anybody gives me something, because I don't want people to give me things.

Being able to use this, being able to appreciate somebody's thought and somebody's gesture as opposed to focusing on the item, as opposed to focusing on what it was that was gifted. Being able to appreciate that they were thinking about you.

We also talk about smiling. If I were to make a list of five little things that make a big difference, smiling would absolutely be on that list. Smiling makes people appear friendly. Just by looking at them, it makes people appear friendly. And there have been research studies done that show that people are much more likely to approach, engage, interact with somebody who's smiling than somebody who's not. Smiling makes people appear friendly.

It's a really helpful tool to have when we're feeling anxious or upset, because when we're feeling anxious, we tend to look anxious, and anxiety is actually repelling. People tend to be repelled when they feel like someone is anxious. It's not an energy that we want to be around. But if you can feel anxious and smile, people will see the smile. That's what people will notice.

I'm not advocating the whole 'you should smile more'. I'm not advocating that. But I am advocating, if we are in a public place and our goal is to be able to interact with people, if our goal is to be able to have a reputation for being friendly, a smile can make or break all of that. A smile just makes a huge difference.

Even me, I don't default to smiling, and sometimes... When I post videos on YouTube, YouTube will automatically scan through the video and find snapshots/screenshots of me to use as the thumbnail on the video. And almost never am I smiling because I just kind of have a natural RBF, if you know that that reference. I just have kind of a non-expressive emotion normally. I have to put energy and effort into smiling because I know how important it is for the way that other people perceive me. Anytime I'm meeting somebody new, I intentionally put a smile on my face because it's important. It affects the way that other people perceive us when we're smiling versus not smiling. So those are just some examples. I have a lot more, but those are just some examples of social fake.

We do talk about in my groups how some people do not want to do the social fake because they feel like it's fake. It's pretending. It's not honest, it's not real. And that's okay. Everybody gets to make their choice about what they do and don't want to do in the groups. There's never anything that anybody has to do.

I do remind the students that we're all here because we want more friends. We want maybe better friends. We want to have an easier time interacting with other people, getting along with other people. We're all here for the same reason, and so being able to use the social fake will make a big difference in that for most of us, because it will help us build that reputation for being friendly if we're able to use both the social filter and the social fake. So nothing is ever required, but these two things go a long way, especially when we know that we're doing them. We know that we are making the choice in this moment to listen to this person talk about something we're not interested in because we want to connect with them. Or we're making the choice to pretend that we like something that somebody gave us because we want to see this person again in the future. It's making the conscious decision that this is something we want to do because we know how it will benefit our relationships now and in the future. But again, it's always up to everybody whether they want to do these things or not.

One more thing I add to this lesson is we want to try to avoid using the word 'hate'. For the teenagers in the group, who tend to be quite dramatic, hate comes up often for people in the like, I don't know, 12 to 17 age range, which is a lot of my students. 'Hate' has a really strong connotation to it. And so when it comes to social filter, social fake, it's a another little thing that can make a big difference. You can feel however you want to feel about something. Instead of using the word hate, what words could we use instead?

We practice this. Everybody gets to think of something they really don't like. My example is onions. And then we practice, how could you talk about that without using the word hate and without being overly dramatic about it? We can say things like, "I really don't like...", "I prefer to not have...", even things like, "Onions make me unhappy." Even things like that. The word hate just has a strong connotation to it.
It also, when people use the word hate, it kind of makes them seem like they're very rigid and black and white. If we can use other words besides the word hate, if we can use our social fake and use a little bit different terminology, it doesn't mean anything different. Even 'strongly dislike' means the same thing, but isn't as abrasive. We can even use the social fake just to change little words like that, just to change little things like that.

So that's our lesson on social filter and social fake. We will be on a break for end of December/beginning of January for the holidays, so let me see what our number generator has for us when we return. It has 25. Twenty-five would be module four, the first lesson in module four.

Module Four is all about relationships and connections, the people that are in our lives. The first lesson of module four is about strangers. Most of the people in the world are strangers to us, but that doesn't mean that... I'll just give you a clue, a preface to this week. I am not a fan of the concept of stranger danger. I think it actually steers our students in the opposite direction of where I would like them to go, especially students who are black and white thinkers. So when we come back from the break, we will talk all about how I teach my students about strangers and what I teach them instead of stranger danger. Thank you for being here, and I'll see you next time.