Fans, friends, and everybody have been talking about the altercation between Chris Rock and Will Smith at the Oscars in 2022. While it was visible that Rock didn’t budge when Will came up and slapped him, many people didn’t understand why he didn’t come back defensively.
It could be because Rock didn’t understand what was going on at the moment, seriously. A couple of years ago he shared that he suffered from a learning disorder.
Comedian Chris Rock The now 60-year-old comedian opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about his nonverbal learning disorder (NVLD) and how it’s affected his day-to-day life.
Rock has been doing seven hours of therapy a week since a friend suggested that he may have Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum with generally higher functioning. The actor went through nine hours of cognitive tests and was eventually diagnosed with NVLD, which makes it difficult for him to understand nonverbal signals.
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“All I understand are the words,” he said.
He explained that he can take things “too literally” and has an “all-or-nothing thinking,” as The Hollywood Reporter described it.
“By the way, all of those things are really great for writing jokes — they’re just not great for one-on-one relationships,” he added. “I’d always just chalked it up to being famous. Any time someone would respond to me in a negative way, I’d think, ‘Whatever, they’re responding to something that has to do with who they think I am.’ Now, I’m realizing it was me. A lot of it was me.”
What Is Non-Verbal Learning Disorder
The name “non-verbal learning disorder” is confusing; it suggests that those with NVLD do not speak, but quite the opposite is true. Approximately 93 percent of communication is non-verbal — body language, facial expressions, tone of voice. Those with NVLD have trouble interpreting this non-verbal language, relying on the seven percent of communication that is verbal to understand what others mean. Once considered highly rare, NVLD may also be as prevalent as dyslexia — though the high incidence of missed diagnoses makes it difficult to estimate its true impact. We do know that NLD affects girls just as frequently as it does boys, and tends to run in families, like most other learning disabilities.
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Symptoms of NVLD
NLD varies from person to person and is not defined as a separate condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 5 (DSM-V). However, commonly reported symptoms include the following:
- Trouble recognizing nonverbal cues (facial expressions, body language)
- Early speech and language acquisition (talks “like an adult” from a young age)
- Poor coordination; seen as “clumsy” or always “getting in the way”
- Poor fine motor skills (difficulty using scissors, tying shoes, etc.)
- Always asking questions, to the point of being repetitive or interrupting the regular flow of conversation
- Needs to verbally “label” information in order to understand it; difficulty comprehending unsaid or spatial information
- Visual-spatial difficulties (discrimination of differences of objects, visualization of images, determining one’s location of body in space)
- Extremely “literal;” struggles with sarcasm, innuendo, or other linguistic nuances
- “Naïve” or overly-trusting
- Difficulty coping with change
- Trouble following multi-step directions
- Difficulty making generalizations or seeing the “big picture”
- Overall challenges often masked by highly advanced verbal skills
Despite their verbal proficiency, those with NLD — particularly children — often exhibit poor reading comprehension.
According to Today.com, through therapy, Rock has been unfurling and understanding his childhood trauma alongside the new diagnosis.
“I thought I was actually dealing with it, and the reality is I never dealt with it,” he said, acknowledging that being able to laugh about his childhood didn’t necessarily mean he was over it.
“The reality was the pain and the fear that that brought me, I was experiencing it every day.”
Rock has also introduced a new activity to his workout routine: swimming.
The Emmy winner is putting his previously unused pool to good use to boost his new fitness regimen.
“Do you know how f—ing hard it is for a grown-up to learn how to swim? You’ve got to not be scared to die,” he said. “The other day, this guy says to me, ‘OK, you’re going to dive into the deep end and swim to the other side,’ and I’m like, ‘Are you f—ing crazy?’ But then I dove into the deep end, and I swam to the other side, and it’s a metaphor for what I’ve been trying to do during this time.”
How Bullying Made Chris Rock the Person He Is Today
Bullying for Chris began when he was just in second grade.
“We lived in Bed-Stuy, one of the most famous ghettos in the world,” Chris says. “My mother and father wanted me to go to a better school, so I was bused to this poor, white neighborhood…I was the only black boy in my grade for most of the time. I was a little guy, too, a skinny runt.”
Chris says his bullying isn’t as uncommon as people may think.
“Put the most successful men and women in the world in one room, and ask them to put their hands up to see which ones were bullied. Most of ’em!”
In 2007, Chris went so far as to tell host James Lipton of Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio that bullying was “the defining moment of my life … it made me who I am.” He even thanked the pack of boys who regularly “kicked my a–, spit in my face, and kicked me down the stairs,” because the experiences not only helped him to think quick on his feet, but also fueled his drive to succeed.
But Chris is the first to say all that bad has to be tempered with the good, or no good can come out of it.
“Either somebody whose dad or mom owns the place, or someone who’s put up with a lot of adversity and overcome it. But you need love, too,” Chris says. “Bullying without love? You can be destroyed. But you know, I was bullied and I had love at home, so that was kind of the perfect storm for me, you know? I just read the Steve Jobs book. There’s no way you can tell me that guy wasn’t beat up in school! And what happened? He used that pain to make sure he’d be in a position where he would never be bullied again.”
“We live in this world where everybody wants to be so self-made,” Rock said. “And I did this by myself. And what happens is we shut ourselves off to people, we don’t ask for help for a lot of things we need help for. … I do two therapists and I do a group, telling people my problems but also hearing other people’s problems and realizing you’re not alone. … And if you can talk to people, everything will be better.”
