Social skills-little help even if acknowledged

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Even if they acknowledge you have poor social skills there's very little actual help for it. You're just told that it's good to socialise and encouraged to do so as though that will miraculously improve things. There is no help to learn how to socially interact with others. You're left bewildered and struggling . After a while you get to preferring your own company as interacting with others, outside of family, is too stressful

I was put in a social skills class in high school and it was useless to me. I didn't learn anything and I didn't make friends with anyone in that class.

Those classes are useless.

Has anyone had success with acting classes?

I too find the whole "just do it more and it will all just fall into place" attitude incredibly frustrating, all the more so when the implication is that I just haven't tried hard enough in the past. I experienced a lot of meltdowns and emotional breakdowns in my teens and twenties from trying to keep up socially with my peers, and the only thing I really learned was not to do it so much so that I had at least some energy left for other things.

I had a couple of courses of group therapy involving lots of role-playing, which I guess is similar. I just found the whole setup too artificial to be much use in real life. We were always given very explicit instruction about our roles and were often aware of the roles of the other participants. This defeated the object for me, as a lot of my trouble is with analysing the social context to begin with and then procrastinating about what is appropriate behaviour. At the end, I pointed out to the organiser that it would have been very effective if only he would continue for the rest of my life passing me cue cards and flagging up other people's emotions for me!

The other problem I found is that the role playing happens in a very controlled environment where you know that other people's reactions are just acting and that there can be no long term consequences for getting it wrong. There could never be any simulation of the real world anxiety and partial shut-downs that I would experience in a real-world social situation, or even of the sensory sensitivities that compound the problem in certain environments.