What do aspies really think of "social skills"

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After reading this thread, I think my social skills training was in speech therapy. I remember learning communication skills like staying on topic, turn taking, always say someone's name when you start speaking to them (not true because people don't say your name when they start talking to you), no interrupting, and we all earn speech bucks for following the rules in therapy.

Speech bucks was fake money our teacher made and she also had prizes and students could trade in their money for the prize. You could save or spend them.


I also remember group therapy where I learn passive aggressive and assertive and it was mostly about problem solving and how to talk to people and handle things. We all earn poker chips for participating and we all did role play. We would trade our chips for prizes the teacher had. We could save them or trade them.


These helped me. I used to think they were just rules my speech teacher had for her class regarding social skills. But I still don't know how to switch topics without going off topic. I mean if you want to change the topic, you go off topic and talk about something else. That wasn't allowed in her class. I have noticed that topics tend to change when people talk about something and then it drifts off to something else, it's not abrupt so I guess that is how you do it?

I had some social skills training during one of my times in college - but they were classes that were intended for all of the students and didn't address any of my problems specifically. As far as I can tell, they only had minimal impact.

For gods sake stop teaching kids to ask 'Will you be my friend?'

Take a hard look at what is being taught - theses classes are all very subjective to the style and the education of the teacher presenting it. Some of it is good, some of it is just ridiculous. High functioning AS kids need to learn the nuances - body language, tone of voice, filtering their words in social context... I have yet to see a program that does this.

Teaching a kid to ask 'Will you be my friend?' is just making them a bigger target for bullying...

For the higher functioning kids, call it psychology. You're probably going to have to teach them some stuff out of a high school or college psych textbook. Sounds weird, but they're probably not going to learn "it" (how to play the game) any other way (except for getting it beat/arrested/ridiculed out of them.) It's very easy to just allow them to study psychology, and the way other people think about different things, then they can apply their theoretical knowledge of psychology into interacting with kids. It could also make them into a psychopath, as they're learning sorta how to "program" people, so use caution and discretion. But yeah, psychology teaches you to read and analyze people, so that's what you need to teach, how to read, analyze, and react in a way that benefits them.

That's my idea, if they're high functioning. Low functioning, they're obviously not going to get the scale of psychology, but yes.

OK, so I may not be an Aspie as I am undiagnosed, but having not benefitted from any of this I have reached the age of almost 33 and not had any major bullying issues as an adult by the following means:

Being confident - even if I'm putting it on a bit sometimes, people seem to respond better to me if I act confident
Being honest - I still put my foot in it (or do the reverse and don't say something I should have said) frequently, but if I am quick to repair the situation I usually get forgiven; I usually just dive straight in and ask what's wrong (if they haven't already told me), apologise, explain that it wasn't my intent to upset them because... or I'm just the sort of person who... and it wasn't meant personally, and compliment them on something truthful
Recognising that I won't get on with everyone and avoiding the people I don't

I want my teen son to have a bicultural, bilingual conversation group--very small group of 3. So the neurotypical could try out how to speak respectfully with an ASD person and my son could safely experiment with neurotypical communication as well.

'Social skills' involve going along with what everyone else is doing. That's society in general. Occasionally there will be some sort of inevitable conflict and you'll figure out some way to deal with it. In general though, 'social skills' involve you not doing anything. I suppose some people simply always want to be doing something

To me, social skills is the same as acting skills plus repressing my natural urge to tell the blunt truth. I'm not bad and can act for quite a while. Though it greatly stress me out.

To be honest, though I'm sure I'm still quite awful compared to "normal" people. I forget lines frequently, especially if someone says something I'm not expecting. I often forget to say please and thank you, and have a mental block regarding saying "you're welcome". I look at people's chest too much instead of their eyes. I ask too few questions and show too little interest in their lives. I keep interrupting at the wrong time, and not leave the right gap in my speech for people to respond. I'm sure I have a lot more to learn and to practice. But there's not much help for adults. I'm especially bad when people tell me some bad news, i.e. their dog is dead. I'd say "That's awful! I'm sorry to hear that." OK, then what do I do? Pat their shoulders? Hug? Then I have to resist the urge to say things I really thought to say "It's not too bad, he lived long enough." "Well at least you can stop spending more money on it now." "Maybe you should get a parrot next time, I heard they live a looong time."

I think on one hand we should practice social/acting skills, on the other hand we should also accept ourselves, and the reality that we'll never be too popular no matter what, so don't worry too much about being yourself sometimes.

Some linguist needs to observe human nonverbal behavior, code it out and describe it including all the languages and dialects(sublanguages) there are and when and where to apply them. And put it all in one location with words, charts, and diagrams for easy digestion.