Faking it vs. acquiring skills

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I was wondering, it seems that a lot of aspies "fake normality". And I've made numerous posts asking about this and I still quite don't get it. What's the difference between faking normality vs. improving and improving yourself to the point where you come off as normal. This is what I've done.

I've worked my butt off for the past 6 years improving my social skills and stacking up huge lists/algorithms of social rules for everything. I've taken past flaws and attempted to work on them. Some examples is learning to make eye contact, I learned to initially look at someones eyes only recently have started to read what the eyes mean. I've come to many realizations when things socially suddenly make sense, that's when I mastered a skill. I've done little "faking", well now I only do it for my job.

It seems you read a lot about faking social competencies, masking social awkwardness. I just don't get it. Cause when I fake things(for my job), I still make many faux paus and slips because the situation doesn't always play out the same. So if I'm adhering to a script, something changes, opps I just said, "thank you" at the wrong time. When I fake, I fumble with my words more easily. That's why I can't think coherently on my job. The customer service is mindless only 90% of the time, it gets hard when I actually have to think about what to tell customers.

Last edited by Ai_Ling on 13 Nov 2011, 2:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well the thing with me is I don't see gaining the ability to come off as normal as self improvement, I feel its better for me to work on the skills I do have than the ones I lack. For instance I do have a lot of the issues with social interaction that are common amoung the spectrum and I tend not to notice things like body language, facial expressions ect very well hence the reason I can miss those things.......but I seem to have developed an extra sense that tells me if someone is trustworthy or not and I can sort of feel peoples moods..........like if someones angry I can feel it. The problem with this is I have a tendency to always blame myself for things so I tend to attribute negitive feelings about someones mood to me being the cause when that's not the case. But where I don't have social skills I have other ways of sensing things. Though according to the last therapist I went to its not abnormal for kids who grow up in alcoholic families to develop extra senses like that......so that could also play a role because my dad is an alcoholic and it sort of runs in the family.

As for eye contact I know how to do that, and can with people I trust........but other then that it is very uncomfortable to the point of being painful for me to make eye contact which is one of the main reasons I avoid it other then the fact that things like that sometimes don't occur to me...........like when I was a child it just did not occur to me that there was any reason to make eye contact so I was confused when people yelled at me for it.

But yeah I am not too great at faking it.

I think the 'faking it' part speaks to conscious effort it takes to accomplish these skills on a day to day basis. sure Aspies can learn them but it is always a conscious mental effort to keep those skills in working order, and an exhausting task at that. AS needs to mentally maintain these learned skills which are intuitive, unconscious skills in an NT. They expend no mental energy whatsoever in the basic everyday back and forth.

'Faking it' because it will never come naturally without thought.

I don't think "faking it" really exists. It's just something aspies made up because that is how they feel. They feel they are pretending to be something they are not. I felt that way as a kid and now I don't feel that way anymore. I saw it as changing who I am and to improve. Everyone does that. Even NTs have things they have to change about themselves or should but that doesn't mean they are faking it. What if an a**hole decided he wanted to not be an a**hole so he started working on not being one. Does that mean he is faking not being an a**hole because it's not who he is? What about when a bully decides to not be a bully anymore, are they faking not being one? My mother used to hit us out of losing her temper and she had to work hard at not hitting us when she gets angry, was she faking not hitting us because she learned to control it?


But when you look at it another way, "faking it" can exist because even NTs fake it too. They fake small talk because they are talking about things they have no interest in and they don't want real answers. Even store employees fake their enthusiasm for their customers and have to fake small talk or use scripts like 'Hello, welcome to Wal-Mart" and I am sure professionals fake it too because they can't be blunt and say what they mean because they don't want to lose their jobs. They also fake interests. If you're having a bad day, you have to hide your feelings and pretend to be happy and do fake smiles.

If a gay person were to decide they didn't want to be gay anymore so they refuse to date other men and date women but they don't find themselves sexually attracted so they have to pretend to be and they keep telling themselves they are not gay and they like women now. Okay that be faking it and they be lying to themselves. You cannot change your sexuality. That is probably how aspies feel about their AS but I look at it this way, are people with mental retardation faking their skills when they have learned them? Are people with dyspraxia faking good balance now once they learn it? Am I faking not having anxiety because I have learned to control it better and stay calm and not have them for certain situations to stay calm? Are people with autism faking their speech after they learn to speak? Are people with speech disorders faking not stuttering just because they learned to not stutter? I see it as the same thing with us when we learn skills and keep using them. So I say "faking it" doesn't really exist and in other ways it does exist if you know what I mean. I already explained it in this post.

Last edited by League_Girl on 13 Nov 2011, 3:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

It's the difference between doing something because it's "you" versus to avoid trouble.

It makes sense to make a distinction between what are you doing because you enjoy it and what are you doing in order to deal with circumstances, because if you don't make the distinction you risk falsifying what you really want in your conscious mind and then should the opportunity arise to go after what you really enjoy deep down your conscious has been tricked into thinking you don't want it.

Everyone has to wear a mask, and you either acknowledge the masks you are wearing and your purposes for wearing them or the mask will control you.

Ironically people wind up letting the mask take them over by trying to "be themselves" on the outside, and then when something in the outside world conflicts with what they really want they feel guilty about putting on an act and lie to themselves that it's what they actually want. Psychologists have termed this phenomenon as "cognitive dissonance". I have realized that experiencing "cognitive dissonance" is really a choice, and by being honest about one's true purposes to oneself one can truly "be oneself" on the inside while being aware of one's masks and what they are using them for.

100% true, see I work at the Supermarket, and we need to act all cheerful and stuff and yes a lot of it is fake. My co-worker who works at customer service, always has this very cheer tone and laughs at everything(even when its not funny). And in the break room, she is talking about how she wanted to strangle a customer. Yeah....For me its a lot of fake smile, follow script, do work, etc. Then when I leave the floor for a break, I decompress and don't talk to my co-workers much and walk around with the "aspie" face. Course we're getting into the holidays and work has been too exhausting for me. I'm not sure if I can ask for a small cut in hrs.

How does one act cheerfull and stuff when their brain is trapped in the depths of hell?

Not express your bad emotions. Bad emotions be if you are in a bad mood or having a bad day.

Plus you put on a smile.

Well that means I express no emotions.......because chances are if I am seriously working in customer service I would not be having any positive emotions. I already tend not to, but that would really make it impossible. And I suck at fake smiles.

Ehh scratch my last response, you were asking me? Well, I "try" to act cheerful, not always successful at it. Its pretty hard, it took me 1-2 months to pull my customer service levels up to a "passable" level. Not "good" just simply passable. It would be equivalent to giving me a C- on customer service. Its fairly exhausting but then my job also requires pushing carts where we don't need customer service, so I typically decompress outside(and on breaks), its like taking walk.

And yes to someone else's comment. This job is really good social training. My abilities to make small talk, smile, greet people and talk coherently has improved a lot.

Last edited by Ai_Ling on 13 Nov 2011, 11:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Improving would imply that you had some social skills to begin with....

I went through most of my life not knowing things like saying Hi and Bye to people, smiling when you see people, making eye contact etc. Social skills were not an automatic function like NT's..... Everything I do is faking - its not improving, its a learned behaviour that makes me appear to be more normal.

I still get things wrong enough that I seem to repel people (both in my personal life and work life), they quite happily go out to lunch with each other, talk about their weekends to people etc.

I suppose I used to feel as though I was faking it but these days I quite like being myself, (because lets face it everybody's different) and I've found that being myself as an autistic person gets easier in an NT world because the older I get the more accepted I become. I have learnt little tricks however where socialising is concerned, like what questions to ask and when to shut up and so-forth but on the whole I'm having quite a nice time of it. The only problem I do seem to have is that sometimes I do drift off in to a world of my own when I'm in groups of more that 2.

draelynn expressed it very well.

I agree, except for the bit that talks about NTs doing those things unconsciously and intuitively. That may be true for many NTs, the more outgoing, naturally gregarious types.

As ever I'm flying the flag for those of us who are nothing like that. Come Monday morning I will, as per usual, launch right into work talk unless something stops me and makes me utter the obligatory 'how was your weekend" etc. I'm not really interested and would really rather prefer if I wasn't asked about my weekend either. So going along with this sort of thing is faking it. What I am trying to say, it may look unconscious when it works well but even for NTs this is learned behaviour. Perhaps it looks innate because it is learnt at a younger age, much like children end up sounding near native if they are exposed to a second language at an early age. 

Then sometimes, small talk actually morphs into a topic that's actually interesting, then I actually enter the conversation without a ticket tape running through my head saying "how soon can I reasonably extricate myself from this tedious situation". Then it's not faking it. 

I haven't researched the idea that a previous poster mentioned, ie cognitive dissonance, but it sounds like the right thing.

If you're actually on a roll within a conversation or a situation then there isn't that split in your head that's asking, am I doing the right thing here?

This. Feels like you start every day again from zero.

Umm well my history is a bit more bizarre then most aspies. I had little/no social skills before I was 18. When i was 17,18 yrs of age, I had the social abilities of a 7,8 year old. If you consider that having social skills then I suppose I had some. That's when I started working hard and acquiring tons of social skills over the past 5,6 years.

And as I think of some the skills is faking it, especially the smiling part, but others not as much by now. Tho with close friends, all the "social skills" comes fairly naturally. But its different because I can put as much quirks in it as I want.