Can a Neurotypical even control their social cues?

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I've lived a life of miscommunication. I've tried making some point of contact between me and other people using multiple methods, retrying and readjusting. It's wearing me out.

Sometimes I get so fed up I have to tell the person (NT's specifically) to just listen to my words, and stop trying to get some deeper meaning out of what I am saying, or look at my face or my appearance. Sometimes I tell them that I cannot read them, and they proceed to throw cues at me that though I can recognize them, I can't understand them. It's a very nasty cycle.

Just like we can't seem to pair our emotional/social cues with theirs, can they do so with us if they attempt to? It seems like the cues and nuances in speech typical to NT's are actually embedded into their psychology, paired with every single word and term so that there's some underlying structure to every sentence that is completely invisible to me.

This wouldn't be such a problem normally. People who are blind can still live their lives, though with difficulty. But for some of us we have needs as well, emotional needs, that don't get met because we cannot make a "bridge" between the abstract portion of our minds to a NT, where that bridge is already formed. I'm having serious difficulty processing my own abstract information and no amount of therapy is going to help. I wonder if I should just revert back to my exclusively detached, logical state for my own self preservation, and any NT who wants to ruin the meaning of my statements can just figure s**t out on their own.

Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow shows remarkable control of his body language which changes throughout the movie. I've watched it over and over again.

Another aspect related to self worth is the problem of individuals misinterpreting the feelings of Aspies. Many Aspies do not make good eye contact, which neurotypicals use automatically to interpreting feelings. Neurotypicals focus on the hidden tells on the face and eyes. But this hidden tells are not accurate when applied to Aspies and can often be misinterpreted.

When I was a teenager in college, I bought a pair of motorcycle policeman sunglasses. These were sunglasses that had a perfectly reflective mirrored finish. I found it to be very interesting wearing these. It was almost like I was invisible. No one could see into my eyes. It was like I was in a box with a one-way mirror. All that anyone ever saw when they looked at me was a reflection of themselves. Normally I never look into people's eyes, an Aspie trait. But when I wore these glasses, I found it easier to look them right into their eyes. I could walk right up to their face and they couldn't see my eyes.

Reflective glasses shield the eyes, which limits the other person to assess the response of the user. NTs will find it difficult to try and interpret your feelings because they no longer can read these signals. They will be forced to listen to your words.

By the way these glasses come in a variety of colors nowadays. I prefer blue.

Maybe they can't understand why you do what you do and they're trying to understand it.

Like my friend told me something the other day and it makes no sense to me. What he did is totally illogical. I'm convinced he hasn't told me the truth because what he did is so weird and abnormal. So I've been asking more questions and explaining my side of the story to him.

I think he thought I'd just accept his statement of this was what I did and I'm sorry, but it makes no logical sense to me at all. I feel like there has to be a deeper reason for what he did.

But he started getting frustrated and said, "there's nothing else I can say."

If he's telling the truth he's pretty unreliable and capricious.

I don't trust him anymore.

As an Aspie I do lots of weird and abnormal things. I've learned it s best to avoid telling people what I would do. Instead, I tell them what a normal person would do.

Being autistic, I can't read people's feelings intuitively like NTs can. However I can pair my emotional/social cues with theirs quite accurately. I had to learn to do that for my job where I had managerial and team lead responsibilities. Learning to read voice tonal inflection, body language, eye movements, facial expressions (really facial features, as I'm face-blind) and the like took about ten years to grasp the basics and around twenty years to do it about 80% as well as an NT. I practiced the cues at the same time and over the decades I've gotten good at such signaling. As a manager I would have to interview employees to collect performance review feedback on others and I had to present performance reviews/bonuses/promotions and other emotionally-sensitive info and it was critical to send the right non-verbal signals and cues in such intense interactions. I did well - my own reviews as well as employee comments to me indicated I was a good manager. In addition to learning such "unspoken NT language" at work, social situations provided fertile ground to learn and practice signaling, like meet-ups for dinner or discussions.

NTs definitely are neurologically wired to automatically interpret emotional and social signals and to react to them and signal back. I'm most definitely not - what they do automatically and nearly effortlessly I have to do with lots of concentration and attention. When I'd make mistakes and really offend someone or hurt their feelings or start an argument, that would strongly motivate me to work harder. NTs don't normally have to control their social cues - to even do so makes them come across as 'creepy' or 'phony' and they get strong negative feedback from peers to cut that behavior out. There are some folks who can control their social cues to the point they can fool NTs and these include actors (like Tom Cruise) and psychopaths (I've known one up close). That by the way is a lot of why NTs can react negatively to autistics - their neurological wiring leads them to (incorrectly) sense us to be manipulating our interactions with them via confusing signals. They don't even necessarily consciously form that idea - it's almost instinctual with them. Very, very few NTs have ever been able to understand that when I am just being myself, I speak literally and don't do social signaling. And even if they do understand, their feelings can get hurt anyway - so I've learned to synthesize the interpersonal cues that show caring and interest and concern and joking around and regret, etc. I feel good about making others around me feel good. But if I somehow wind up in an unusual and unfamiliar social situation I can be totally clueless. Oddly both my ex-wives would try to provoke such situations because they thought I was "hiding the real me" from them...

Something I struggled with for a long time was just plain understanding that what I'm saying has implications I don't intend, and people explaining those implications to me is not their misunderstanding my intentions, it was my refusing to acknowledge the implications of what I was saying. If that makes sense. I can't be sure that's what's happening in anyone else's case, but having had my experiences, that's what it reminds me of.

The clever ones can.