how did you find out about eye-contact?

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It's like I got told that I should "open" my eyes. I did not understand and I started to lift my head higher but was still looking on the floor, I just gave myself the impression to "look". I do not talk a lot and when I was about 28 I decided when people asked me a question to "look" at them to confirm that I heard that they were saying something, but I did it with lifting my head and still looking down and people didn't understood it, they asked me, if I cannot give an answer, but to me it was an answer.
It is just as I got diagnosed in 2010, that I read about "eye-contact" and that it is important. I didn't know before. Now I kind of "watch" myself if I do eye-contact, but before diagnosis and reading about it, I didn't know about it and I could not link all remarks to having no eye-contact.
When did you find out about eye-contact? When did you start to understand it? By getting diagnosed or reading about autism or did you get told about it before?

edit: before I was not conscious about it and I naturally avoided it. Now I still avoid it, because I can't but I am conscious about it, and I try un-naturally to do it, which doesn't work out. I wish, I never heard about it...

The same way as learning to smile, I had it abused in to me.

I was diagnosed at a pretty young age, and I remember being talked to about eye contact and how to make it properly, techniques of faking it, etc. My main trick now is to make brief eye contact/glance at someone when they say something, like in a group, and if they keep talking occasionally glance back, or look at them when you start saying something.

So people "punished" you when you did not "function"?
Sometimes I can smile easily when I am in my SI or I hear an idiom, which gives me a funny picture or I can feel a lot of joy and jump around.

So you are conscious about it, but does it start feeling natural for you? Because you write you got diagnosed at young age. I have the feeling being conscious about it (and eye-contact is only one example as Orr writes about smiling) makes something natural being "watched" by myself and it distracts me even more in a way.

When my dad flipped out about eye contact when he was already angry at me to begin with the summer that I was 13, going on 14. That's not a pleasant memory.

I am sorry for you having this bad memory.

In school for presentations we were told we had to make eye contact with the audience.

My mother insisted my sisters and I had to look at her while she was talking to us. This was usually said while she was angry. We dared not disobey under those circumstances.

In high school, someone I liked said something in a conversation - I can't remember exactly what - but I understood that eye contact was something she valued. I decided to learn to do it better.

I think I may sometimes have overdone it, but I've been at it long enough that people are telling me now that I do it okay. It's very useful to be able to ask them about things like that, now that I'm open about trying to get properly assessed.

I find it hardest to look at people while I'm talking, because that's when they're most likely to be looking at me. It's easier when I'm listening, because lots of people look away while they're thinking about what they're trying to say.

Eye contact can be very tiring, especially if I'm trying to monitor how I'm doing.

I have always had a problem with this, and been called on it a number of times over my life time. Part of my problem is that I perceive it as confrontational and aggressive. The other part of the problem is that I process vocal input better if I watch the speakers lips while they are talking because I am better at processing visual input. I am not watching their lips because of deafness.

I do try to make eye contact, for at least part of the time--glancing from time to time while they are talking. I can't really do it the whole time because I forget to focus on it while I am focused on processing the verbal input.

I remember either reading or being told that if one has trouble making eye contact you should try to look at the bridge of the speaker's nose at or just below the level of their eyes. This at least puts your gaze close to the objective. I've done that sometimes, but it interferes with my watching the speaker's lips.

Personally, I think people who insist on being "eye balled" the whole time they are speaking are annoying and aggressive, and they are violating my personal comfort zone.

Regardless of the fact that I was conscious of it from a young age, I still find it uncomfortable and difficult. One of the biggest problems for me with eye contact is I need to focus so much on the eye contact and maintaining it, doing it properly, etc. that I space out on the actual conversation going on. It is definitely distracting, so I have chosen instead of trying to do the full normal natural-appearing eye contact, I would do well-timed glances to indicate I am paying attention, and in general this works out well, because I do the same for everyone. Besides, my speech indicates I'm very involved in conversation whether I'm looking or not.

I've never caught flak for the way I go about (or rather, around) eye contact, so I assume it works.

I don't quite remember, but I know I was not even aware of eye contact at first...and when I did find out I still had issues with it and still do. It makes me severely uncomfortable when it comes to people I don't know or feel threatened by its nearly impossible. But with people I know well I make a bit of eye contact here and there but not the typical amount from my understanding.

I remember when I was young - well, this happened until my teens. Whenever my father would decide I'd done something (this was often irrelevant to whether or not I had done anything at all) he'd demand that I "look him in the eye" so he would know I was telling the truth, but looking him (or anyone else) in the eye hurts, so I had a lot of trouble doing so.

At some point I picked up on the idea of faking eye contact by looking at ears and foreheads, but if I do look at someone, I usually focus on their mouth.

nt

One of my friends called me "ignorant" for not looking at her when she was talking to me, and a character in a book I read considered another character more trustworthy because he always looked into her eyes when he spoke.