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muzikislyf
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04 Jul 2011, 11:45 pm

aliensyndrome wrote:
when people say how are you and mean hi - ugh - that confused the snot out of me...


That still messes with me, I often answer them, but they are in the process of walking past me in an opposite direction. So I am speaking and they are already gone, talk about awkward. A lot of times I don't say anything, or I just nod, because I know I wont have time to actually tell them how I am and politely ask them in return before they aren't even in sight anymore. Every time it happens, even though it happens every day, I feel my anxieties rise and feel extremely awkward.

I ask people "how are you?' But only when I really want to know how they are, which is rare.



MyriaJean
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05 Jul 2011, 6:32 am

My knowledge is better than my actual social skills. For example, I know I should ask someone about themselves after they ask about me (like if they ask how I am), but there's usually a delay and it sounds very awkward when I ask (if I remember), and I think it makes people think that I don't care about them and I'm only asking to be polite. That's not true - if I didn't actually care about how they are and their feelings, I wouldn't go through the effort of awkwardly asking the questions. But it's hard for me to know what to say and my timing is off.
I didn't understand until I was 24 that people really do need me to "keep up" my part of a friendship - do my part of the calling, my part of the asking about them, my part of the planning what to do together. My mom had been telling me since elementary school, and I kept telling her that they'd call me if they wanted to talk to me. I really didn't get it and I lost a lot of friends that way. I try to regularly check in with friends and family now, and I figure if I'm annoying, at least they feel cared about :D
I realized lately that I feel like I'm failing more socially because I've been spending more time around other women. Guys are so much less work to talk to. I think that they're just happy that someone is listening and that they don't have to keep up appearances.



YippySkippy
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05 Jul 2011, 11:28 am

Quote:
My knowledge is better than my actual social skills. For example, I know I should ask someone about themselves after they ask about me (like if they ask how I am), but there's usually a delay and it sounds very awkward when I ask (if I remember), and I think it makes people think that I don't care about them and I'm only asking to be polite. That's not true - if I didn't actually care about how they are and their feelings, I wouldn't go through the effort of awkwardly asking the questions. But it's hard for me to know what to say and my timing is off.


This is so me. :)



kotshka
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05 Jul 2011, 1:23 pm

MyriaJean wrote:
I didn't understand until I was 24 that people really do need me to "keep up" my part of a friendship - do my part of the calling, my part of the asking about them, my part of the planning what to do together. My mom had been telling me since elementary school, and I kept telling her that they'd call me if they wanted to talk to me. I really didn't get it and I lost a lot of friends that way.


I have precisely the opposite problem. I'm always the one doing the calling and the checking in, and it makes me feel like I'm being needy. I had a whole group of friends that never invited me to anything. They always seemed happy I was there, but I always had to call and ask what was up - no one ever contacted me, even if I asked them to let me know if they were doing something. Finally I decided that maybe they weren't interested in being my friends after all and were just tolerating me, so I stopped contacting them to see if any of them would give me a call and ask where I had disappeared to, or invite me to something. Not one of them ever did, so I decided to move on with my life and focus on friends who wanted me around. I later found out from a mutual friend that they had all been angry at me for not calling them for so long, even though none of them had tried to contact me at all.

Sometimes NT behavior makes NO SENSE at all.



abc123
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06 Jul 2011, 9:51 pm

Yes. I can do things on a delay. I often realise things after the event too e.g. woke up in the middle of the night to realise what a question was getting at in a job interview and how I failed to notice at the time. I'm leaving the house and realise I should have taken a bottle of wine as I am a guest but have no time to buy one. I realise what I should have done when it gets too late.
NT people can be predictable e.g. everyone will talk to you about getting married and yet normally will not say a word to you. Once I tapped into this I found I could talk to anyone about weddings.

I often have things down to options e.g. a wedding guest was named after a character in a book with a dog, I was told they were bringing their dog and I thought yes this could be a joke, but on the other hand we were getting married on a farm so they may have thought it was OK to do this. Turned out it was the joke option.
I watch how other people react and react appropriately. I am quiet and blend into the background. If I don't say anything I can't say anything wrong. If you try and fit in with people i.e. politely accept their opinion and smile they tend to like you or at least don't object.



Koko23
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06 Jul 2011, 10:54 pm

Interesting thread, its cool to read all these answers!

I do not seem to have any great chameleon abilities, but here is the main "skill" I use to get through one-on-one interactions with people I find boring:

I focus on asking questions about the person I am talking to, keeping them talking about themselves. As long as my brain is working on the next question I'm going to ask them, I can suppress the temptation to start blabbing about my interests or to bring up a heavy, controversial, or 'personal' topic. Of course, I can't say enjoy these interactions very much, but sometimes it behooves me to have people walk away from me saying "well wasn't she nice".

The trick is to figure out what they want to talk about. Confident people like to talk about what they are good at, self-pitying people like to talk about their problems, etc. Once you figure out a person's most unmet psychological need (and many people wear it on their sleeve), you can figure out what questions to ask.

Its amazing to me how often people forget to ask me questions in return. Not that I mind. If they do ask me questions about myself, I keep the answers short and shallow, and quickly change the topic back to them.

I understand this is somewhat dysfunctional, but it makes my life a lot better to have casual acquaintances who spread the word that I am "a nice person". Its been a life saver a few times, actually.

And its a lot like being a therapist. :D

Maybe that's why therapists don't work on me. Whenever therapists ask me questions, I'm thinking, "you don't give a s**t, you're just doing exactly what I do to everyone else! I'd rather talk to my cat, at least he won't insult my intelligence by trying to trick me into believing he understands or cares about what I'm saying..."



Xenia
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16 Jul 2011, 4:47 am

I am still working on the 'alright' question, I often answer yes then get laughed at!

I didn't try to hide my wierdness until a few years ago then I realised that I could and that when I did life got more interesting, more epople pseak to me, I have more contacts though no more friends, I am doing ok with passing conversation, a little bit of small talk and group situations but am still rubbish at more intimate and one to one conversations and so still struggling to make close friends, I still avoid a lot of situations too because if you try and seem normal then you seem even more strange when you get stuck preteding!



Koko23
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16 Jul 2011, 10:26 am

Xenia wrote:
I still avoid a lot of situations too because if you try and seem normal then you seem even more strange when you get stuck preteding!


I really relate to this!

In college, now that I think about it, one of the things I did that helped me get friends was play up my quirks. I figured out what quirks got laughs and what quirks didn't, and over time I formed myself into something of an endearing oddball. It worked out well because people didn't expect me to be "normal" as they got to know me, but I made up for it by being helpful and smart. Being "helpful and smart" was easiest in special interest groups, because I would always have something to contribute.

I was lucky that my interests for the most part have a place in academia, so by taking the right classes and hanging out with the right people, I could function as a tutor/discussion leader and be a likable weirdo that people wanted to hang out with (at least when it was study time).



keerawa
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16 Jul 2011, 8:08 pm

I fake it. I fake it big time. I spent 7th and 8th grade rushing thru my school-work so I could get back to my intensive anthropological study of the people around me, the summers in drama, and all of highschool in a command performance of playing normal.

In the decades since I've found more of a balance between me and normal, in work, and in my personal life can be mostly myself with my husband.

But I still fake it lot.



MyDogSasha
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16 Jul 2011, 11:09 pm

i just nod to everything...i dont really talk to anyone.



Ai_Ling
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17 Jul 2011, 5:24 pm

kotshka wrote:
MyriaJean wrote:
I didn't understand until I was 24 that people really do need me to "keep up" my part of a friendship - do my part of the calling, my part of the asking about them, my part of the planning what to do together. My mom had been telling me since elementary school, and I kept telling her that they'd call me if they wanted to talk to me. I really didn't get it and I lost a lot of friends that way.


I have precisely the opposite problem. I'm always the one doing the calling and the checking in, and it makes me feel like I'm being needy. I had a whole group of friends that never invited me to anything. They always seemed happy I was there, but I always had to call and ask what was up - no one ever contacted me, even if I asked them to let me know if they were doing something. Finally I decided that maybe they weren't interested in being my friends after all and were just tolerating me, so I stopped contacting them to see if any of them would give me a call and ask where I had disappeared to, or invite me to something. Not one of them ever did, so I decided to move on with my life and focus on friends who wanted me around. I later found out from a mutual friend that they had all been angry at me for not calling them for so long, even though none of them had tried to contact me at all.

Sometimes NT behavior makes NO SENSE at all.


Ahh man, Ive had similar experiences. I realized at some point that I needed to "try" to keep maintain contact with my friends/acquintances. There was a time at the end of school yr I was so exhausted that I stopped trying and just went with the flow like everyone else. I didnt have the energy to make effort. And apparently I started isolating my friends. I was like WTF?



Lahmacun
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22 Jul 2011, 9:33 pm

I fake it until I have the scripts come out of my mouth "naturally," whatever that means. I ask questions in conversations to keep people talking, and I learned to make female "I'm listening to you carefully" utterances while you're figuring out the next question to ask. (Fortunately, you don't have to make quite so many noises when talking to men.) I've studied books on communication that provide great scripts to use and really work...etiquette books, business communication books, and psychology books can all be helpful here.

I am 45 and only have two really close female friends, both of whom are in their sixties. I have always found older people more interesting than people my age or younger, although I love to hear what comes out of young kids' mouths...they can be so funny, since they also haven't developed the adult mask of communicative artifice.

My mother drilled into me the habit of writing thank-you notes after events (dinners, parties, etc.), and these small gestures led to much appreciation among the people who invited me, and, ironically, more invitations to social events that I find extremely stressful.

Hang around the edges of parties, if you have to go to them. Arrive late and leave early, OR, arrive very late and just talk to the smaller, quieter, and more tired group that has been partying all night but is winding down!



humanjukebox82
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27 Jul 2011, 3:40 pm

it took me till this year to work out that "how was your weekend" was the same question as "hey, hows you" they dont want an answer, if it is just a casual work collegue, I would always answer what i had been doing and they would stare blankly at me, i wouldnt ask them and then i would just walk off, so now i say either "good, how was yours?" or "quiet, what did you get up too" depepnding on how it was. obviously if it is an actual friend they probably want to know what you did, so i tell them just dont go thru everything day by day, which i am working on.

I have decided that i am accepting my quirks and my boyfriend understands most of them, thou sometimes i have to say, you do realise i wont notice if you are annoyed about something, so you have to tell me, which he is getting better at doing, and accepts that if i have too much stuff in my head i fall asleep. I am sometimes concerned that he is pandering to my weirdness, but dont really know what to do about that.



theslanket
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28 Jul 2011, 4:14 am

Ai_Ling wrote:
Like do you guys have ways of faking it. Cause for the most part the amount of socializing that I show is my actual skill level.


Aspie women are good at mimicking because they notice details. Picture taking a drawing of a dog and drawing your own dog... by making a bunch of dots, and then connecting them. You have enough dots, and you have a very fine picture of a dog... but it's the same dog as the first one.

Exposure, controlled exposure is key. I learned through years of cashiering, customer service, volunteering, friendships, relationships... rigorous social exposure in a variety of settings. First I focused on eye contact as a teen. Then I practiced what I wanted to say to each person: ("Hi, how are you?" "How's your night been?" "What's new?") There are infinite to greet a person, and none of them are extraneous. Different people will respond more naturally to different phrases.

Eventually, you connect so many dots with your experience that your social "face" presents itself as a complete picture: No jagged lines, no corners, nothing that stands out.

Due to the fact that when we're inevitably awkward, it hurts like hell, and it may disincline us to try saying hi again. Learn how much you are able to try without overstimulating yourself, and studiously keep yourself below that danger level. But, no matter what, keep trying. This is, by far, the most measurably important factor in developing social skills.

tl;dr practice makes perfect, don't hurt yourself, go go go.



LuxoJr
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01 Aug 2011, 5:46 pm

Well playing chameleon (LOL) is how I am currently surviving being around people.


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TheOtherMe
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02 Aug 2011, 2:53 pm

I read this thread and I recognized myself in many of your posts. But right now, I just hate myself for doing that. Icchy business. Many of you posters are much better at socializing than me, but I just can't stand my fakeness sometimes and I hate spending countless hours practicing pointless conversations. I know that my past has made me a "yes-girl" eager to please and not wanting to hurt anybodys feelings anyway. Kindness is a sickness sometimes. Now I feel angry and frustrated as I can't stop being like this. I do not know how much of this act I can drop without actually turning to look like a rude and impolite person, because I am not like that.
But this concealing and learning and remembering is taking way too much space in my head and my act takes all my energy away. And I drink way too much on social occasions and nowadays even when not. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.
I do not know about as and I really don't care if I have it or not, just a label to me. I don't know why I am ranting here about this, quess 'cause I am feeling so isolated and weird. I really identified myself in many of the posts on this forum and I quess I'd like to talk about my problems with people who have similar problems. So the the question is, has someone "come out the closet"?