Unwritten rules that lead to dismissal

Autistic Mirror (outside view, role employer)

Before the mechanism is explained: in German law, autism is a recognised ground of disability. This means employers have a duty to make adjustments under the AGG and SGB IX before a dismissal is legally sound. If these adjustments were not documented and implemented, the question is not "why was he surprised" but "were the working conditions accessible enough to make performance possible at all."

Now to the question of why both sides are surprised: this is a classic pattern from the Double Empathy Problem. When autistic and non-autistic people communicate, gaps in understanding arise in both directions at the same time, not only on one side.

On your side, signals were probably running that you perceived as clear: the tone in conversations, the wording in feedback, a noticeably changed atmosphere. These signals work as communication because, in non-autistic communication, they conventionally stand for "this is not going well". But they are implicit. They assume that the other person uses the same signal channel to read urgency.

On his side, exactly this automatic channel is missing. Not because he does not take the situation seriously, but because autistic processing is strongly oriented towards explicit, referential information. Phatic communication, the layer of language that carries relationship states and social urgency, is not read automatically but has to be analysed consciously. If nobody said explicitly "your contract is at risk if X does not happen", then, neurologically speaking, there was no dismissal announcing itself for him.

The surprise on your side adds to this: you sent the signals and probably assumed they arrived. That is the second half of the Double Empathy Problem. Both sides act according to their own communication logic, and both leave the conversation with the impression that they were clear.

Predictive coding adds to this. The autistic brain weights concrete, present information more heavily than contextual predictions. This means: if the employment contract was running, the tasks were described and no explicit warning came, then for him the state "employment continues" was the only reliable prediction. The implicit warning signals that changed the picture for you did not carry enough information density for him to update this prediction.

What this means for similar situations: written, direct, explicit communication about performance expectations and consequences is not harshness for autistic employees but accessibility. "You need to reach X by Y, otherwise your job is at risk" is not too harsh a tone, it is the information that is needed so that someone can actually respond.

Autistic Mirror (outside view, role employer)

Unwritten rules only work for people who receive social information over the same channel it is sent on. That channel is phatic communication: small talk, eye contact, tone of voice, who clears their throat when, who waits nodding before taking the floor. These signals have no explicit content, they carry relationship and status. For many non-autistic people they are read unconsciously, because the social navigation system evaluates them automatically as a background process.

Autistic processing often follows a different pattern: bottom-up processing, in which perception is built upwards from the sensory details instead of downwards from a social expectation. This means the content of a meeting is in the foreground, because it is referential, concrete and processable. The relationship signals around it are not automatically prioritised; they would require attention that is currently directed at the matter itself.

Monotropism adds to this: attention concentrates intensely on one channel instead of spreading across several at once. Someone deep in the topic in a meeting literally has less capacity to watch the choreography of rank in parallel. That is not indifference, it is a property of the attention architecture.

And here is the decisive point for the team: this is also a Double Empathy Problem. The unwritten rule arose implicitly because the majority uses the same social channel and never had to put it into words. It cannot be taken for granted that someone who communicates over a different channel can still decode this rule. Understanding is missing in both directions: the autistic colleague does not read the hierarchy signals, and the team does not notice that the rule is written down nowhere.

The solution does not lie in social retraining. It lies in writing unwritten rules down once, briefly. Not as criticism, but as information transferred over a channel that works: explicit, written, factual. "We always start with Miriam opening the agenda" takes two seconds and makes a barrier completely unnecessary.

Autistic Mirror (outside view, role employer)

Because what looked "unremarkable" for months was in reality active work, not an absence of problems.

Masking is the core of the mechanism. Automatic autistic reactions, stimming, sensory defence, communication style, are suppressed prefrontally so that they do not stand out in the work context. This runs as a dual task alongside the actual work. The result: from the outside everything is normal, on the inside two processes run at the same time, and over months.

For this suppression the brain permanently provides prefrontal capacity. The same capacity that is needed for concentration, decisions and problem-solving. On a physiological level this means: cortisol levels stay chronically raised, the glucose costs of ongoing behaviour control add up daily, and at some point the recovery value of sleep and weekends is no longer enough to make up the deficit. The body is structurally in the red before the first visible collapse comes.

That is exactly why you do not see it beforehand: masking is invisible by definition. Someone who masks well looks healthier than they are. The collapse you observed is not the problem, it is the end of a long exhaustion curve that built up beneath the surface.

This is autistic burnout. It differs from general burnout in that it erodes concrete abilities that were previously taken for granted. Speaking, planning, opening post, starting tasks. And it arises specifically from the combination of masking load and constant sensory strain, not from too much work alone.

Another pattern keeps the problem invisible: many autistic people have no reliable bodily perception of their own exhaustion. Alexithymia, the difficulty of translating body signals into categories such as "I am exhausted" or "I need help", is involved in a considerable share of autistic people. This means: the person themselves often does not know. They function until they no longer do.

For you as an employer this has a concrete consequence: the "sudden" collapse is not a sign that the employee communicated their problem badly. It is a sign that the working environment did not allow early relief. The more meaningful indicators to watch over the long term are not a drop in performance but changes in availability, increasing withdrawal, shorter breaks or the disappearance of balancing rituals the person had previously created for themselves.