First time in history!! !! The NT/AS open hotline ! !! !! !

Post Reply New Topic

I have been married to my husband for 23 years and I still find it difficult to stay focused when he talks about things that are of no interest to me. I find that my eyes won't stay still and I start looking a little crazy if the conversation goes on too long.

It took him years to accept that when I really AM listening, I'm looking at my buttons, or a zipper pull or the corner of my shirt. I can't do serious hard-core listening and eye contact at the same time. If somebody is talking to me really seriously and I'm looking them right in the eye, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm not hearing a thing... I'm contemplating the way their lips move or what if feels like to have a mustache (I'm a female...) or the length of their eyebrows (or G-d forbid they should have a mole or pimple I can focus on... LOL).

And when things really become intense, I close my eyes altogether.

Good information, It is great for me,
Thanks

I have a question on how reliable online tests are. I took the aspies-quiz at rdos . net/eng/Aspie-quiz.php and scored 177 of 200. I am just asking because I am not in a position to fork out money for a real diagnosis, but everything on the test and in Green's/Matt's cartoon fit me perfectly.
Can I trust it to some extent?

for NT askin question listening to boring stuff... I am aspie and yes it doesnt work
my head is on or off, cant do grey stuff
so good talks go rlly good, dont wanna stop... and boring talk is either sit der and wait or speak up
he is yer bf so u should not sit and wait but say sumthing
faking is stupid

Thanks for everyone that responded to my question although i do have to admit it does make me a bit sad to know i'll just have to let go of the hope that he can just talk to me about things i like. Budfarmer your post actually made me laugh out loud thanks for that, i'm glad your husband eventually got used to you not looking him in the eye i would feel the way you do though i'd much rather know you're listenting to by looking away instead of looking at me and being distracted by facial features.

rebbieh to answer your questiong at least for me:

1: Yes i do hae the occasional meltdown the way you do (more than just getting mad) it does take a lot to get me upset enough that i throw things or can't talk and just rock back and forth crying but it does happen. One thing that does happen easier though is a type of sensory overload for example when i was in high school i could never eat in the cafeteria just being in there long enough to get my food sucked sometimes. All those people in there talking it was like the voices just piled up on eachother and got louder in louder i couldn't stand it.

2:As for expressing feelings facial expressions come naturally if i think about it i can make them what i want but i don't have to they just happen on their own. I have trouble verbally expressing things if i think it'll make the person i'm talking to mad or sad. Probably the only odd thing is that i have a tendancy to make weird little noises all the time much to the amusment of my aspie BF but they don't really have much to do with feelings.

3:I guess for weird habits you could take the noises things, i'm weird to most people but i have very very few repetative habits i tend to actively do something different each time for food, clothes, even routes of travel just because i like the adventure/new experience, i do often get food cravings though where i'll want to eat a specific thing but it usually only lasts about a week and then i won't want to eat it anymore. However i think that's more personal to me than to an NT. For example my mother who is NT does a lot of things repetatively she has a pretty set schedule for her days.

1- I sometimes have meltdowns. Not very often but if I get upset enough I scream and yell and break things and sometimes rock myself or pace around to try to come down. Even NT's use these techniques when we are overwhelmed.

2- I've never had to think about my facial expressions. They just happen and I can intentionally do them if I want as well even if the expression doesn't match what I'm feeling

3- I have a couple of the habits you mention, but I don't think they're considered weird. I often listen to one song several hundred times if I really enjoy it, I prefer crossing the street in the same place but it doesn't upset me if I can't, I prefer to sit on the same sofa in the same spot and will kick my boyfriend out of my place because I don't feel as comfortable in the other seats. Lots of people have habits like this, it's not unusual.

I think your answers to their questions summed it up a lot better than mine. Mine seemed to ramble a bit.

Female NT here. I've been told that on my 5th bday I refused to wear the ruffled dressed my mom favored anymore. This was 1986. Don't remember it myself, but I didn't wear a skirt/dress again until I was 12, and even then for dress code reasons.

The point of that story was that while I am most dramatically NT (I've taken many types of tests that put me very heavily into that spectrum) I lean geek, and important to this, tomboy, but as an adult, not a lesbian. From my perspective, skirts leave me feeling vulnerable. I suppose it's the updraft. But it's also exposing m leg. I didn't much like shorts as a teen either. As much as I rebelled against skirts/dressed, once I became more comfortable with my body (comfort achieved mostly because I got into good shape) I found they reinforced and/or amplified my confidence, and thus, my enjoyment of them.

Where does all that feeling (shame or confidence) come from? I can't say for sure, but I'd guess it's a matter of realizing that the impression you make on those around you. Skirts can be quite attractive for guys, what with them getting to look at your legs and all. So, for the NT girl it's a matter of feeling you have something worth showing, or not. Specifically, I don't like my knees, and although I can be told and rationalize all day, I'll never like an above knee skirt.

When you're confident in what you're showing, and saying, with your skirt, it can be empowering. Of course that's only if you recognize the power of desire. I feel like many aspies may read this and think it's a goal toward manipulating people. But really, aside from the occasional pervert, I believe in the proper setting, that it's about realizing that no matter how you dress, those that choose to reduce your clothing choice down to a sexual preference are most likely qualify for sexual harassment lawsuits.

Turn taking is not instinctive although I guess it can feel like that because we can't as a rule remember how it was to learn to speak and to learn how to have meaningful conversations as a child. It is learned, and then becomes sort of ingrained knowledge.

It's not really possible to advise you to say this much , or this little etc as it all depends on context, what subject you are all talking about, and how many people are taking part in a conversation.

The main part is really to listen what's going on. Every "turn" should contribute something either interesting, or meaningful, or at the very least relevant. If you are discussing nuclear physics then it may be necessary to say quite a lot in one go, if you're comparing favourite foods then a one sentence contribution is probably enough.

You can take a turn if a natural gap has opened up because someone else has finished their point (hence the need to listen out for this). The gap will not be long, much less than a second. Or if the other person takes a breath you can sometimes jump in, but if they hadn't finished their point it may be best to prefix this with 'sorry to jump in here' so they won't be annoyed. Then you can speak for a bit but you may then want hand the turn back to the previous speaker:'I interrupted you earlier, sorry, please carry on with what you were going to say'.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, sometimes it might help you to openly verbalise the mechanics of turn taking, but if you did that all the time it would probably annoy people.

Not sure how helpful this is, it's a complex thing to have to learn from scratch, but it can be done. I guess information dumping is something to avoid in conversation, think of it as saving up smaller chunks of information which you can then contribute over several turns rather than running out of things to say after one long speech.

Question for NTs:

How can you guys tell whether you're butting into a conversation versus joining in a conversation?

People keep telling me to "join in" a conversation, but I can't seem to figure out a way to do that. Sometimes, I'll try my best to, and everyone just ignores me and keeps going on with their conversation.

A friend has told me that what I say can be really irrelevant or that I bring up my special interests a lot. I don't get it. I have another friend who's EXTREMELY irrelevant, and somehow, this friend finds her easier to talk to. She also tends to interrupt and ramble on about her own things too, but still, it's easier to talk to her than it is to talk to me.

I don't know whether you've had a chance to read my previous post which is just above your question, as I think it is somewhat relevant to your question too.

If people are ignoring you despite your making obvious efforts to join in a conversation then maybe they're just not very nice people.

Joining in a conversation means listening and then contributing something informative, amusing, interesting, or as I say above, at least vaguely relevant. Butting in is ignoring what other people are saying and talking over people when they haven't finished yet and hijacking the conversation for your own ends.

Just like joining in with an activity might require a period of observing what's going on, so does joining in a conversation, which requires listening before anything else.

I have two questions for NTs.

When you go to party (or a large get-together that includes many people you don't know, like at a bar), how do you know what to do? How do you know who to talk to? I always feel utterly lost at parties. There's rarely any structure (beyond "open presents after cake" or "countdown at midnight"), and people tend to be spread out around the property. I don't know if I should be in the living room, in the backyard, in the kitchen, etc. I could sit down on a couch, but I feel out of place, like I'm intruding into a group of friends' space. Then when there's a conversation going on, it seems like the topic is constantly shifting, that many little comments that I or others make just get ignored as the talk moves on. It's like, what's the point of even trying to talk if half of the conversation's comments are ignored? I just feel like an idiot for trying to talk at all, yet it seems that everyone else is just fine and dandy with this structure. The end result means I might enter the party feeling hopeful and ready to socialize, but over time I get more and more discouraged the more and more I realize that it's just a group of strangers talking about meaningless, easily forgettable fluff. I then end up going home early (or sitting in the car for hours, if somebody else drove me), reassured of my hatred for parties and wondering why in the world I thought this attempt would be any different.

I also apologize if either of those questions have been asked before. I only read a few pages so far (107 is a lot!)

Im new and I do not know what the hell im doing

I'm an NT- and I also find parties difficult- only strong extroverts fully enjoy group socialising without any anxieties or fears.
At parties it can be difficult to know who to talk to- you are much more likely to get a more positive response from an individual rather than a group of friends. I generally tend to look for someone who looks a little uncomfortable, perhaps standing awkwardly in a corner or busying themselves with small irrelevant tasks like checking out books on a shelf or making an origami boat with their napkin!
These kinds of people are likely to be extremely relieved that they have someone to talk to, and will be more receptive and make a bigger effort to say something engaging, or to listen to you. Once you have spoken to one person, their friends may come over later, or you can try to include a further person into your conversation by asking someone standing around a relevant question that could introduce them into your conversation.

The above approach, I find much easier than trying to join a group conversation on my own- generally the conversation topics in group conversations are going to be dumb and meaningless- the person speaking needs to be quickly interchangeable, otherwise you end up with one person speaking for a very long time, and everyone else becomes a spectator, and the dynamic becomes unbalanced, and it stops being a conversation. Unfortunately, if people are discussing interesting things, it means the same person speaks for a long period of time, and hence wouldn't work in a group conversation (in a party context).

In a group scenario, people don't really respond to what is being said, because again, it's impossible to know who should respond, and what direction the whole group wants to move the conversation in, so again, the 'conversation' has to be directionless. If your comments throw the conversation down a track that people generally don't want to go down (such as, if they're too serious) then they will just ignore them.

In general I would agree that parties suck, especially if you try the group convo stuff- but Ive come to realise that if you can do the garbage conversation on a 1-2-1 basis with someone for a few minutes at first, you can quickly move it to something more worthwhile, you just can't start off that way.

I hope that helps!

readingbetweenthelines, I think I've observed that joining in / barging into a conversation is more welcome / accepted the more you're regarded as important to that group, and conversely. Rank in the group plays a meaningful role here, regardless of what and how you enter the conversation....or am I mistaken?

Dear Moondust, that's a topic for a whole new thread. Partly I agree, partly I disagree. It depends on the group, and for the purpose of practising conversational turn taking I'd be inclined to do this in a very small group, a pair or group of three.

If you have the time it's worth reading the very start of this thread. This thread is designed for questions & answer, rather than follow on discussions. Even so I felt you should at least have a short response! No hard feelings I hope.