Unwritten rules of socializing...would you read a book on it

Post Reply New Topic

The problem with the usual books written on using nonverbal communication to land a job is mainly that, for me at least, reading them is like learning how to swim by reading a Wikipedia article on it. It is impossible and absurd. These books however would inadvertently point out things to me, like eye contact or posture, and I was indeed able to practice getting better at them.

Something that has been useful to me in this vein isn't a self-help book at all, but a satire and economics book by Thorstein Verblen, called "The Theory of the Leisure Class". He talks about how people are constantly striving for social status. I had only a vague idea of this before I read it, but it helped me understand social behavior and how people react to me.

If a book explains to me why people behave as they do, and it doesn't rely on psychobabble to do it, I find it very useful.

If you don't feel how other people feel, you must learn to recognise the body language rationally. Psychology literature can help you with that as well.



It's all about the dopamine, baby. People tend to adjust their behavior based on whatever gives them the largest dopamine release (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that makes you feel happy and that's deficient among people with AS - which is why people with AS have only a few and very intense interests).

Well, I think that is exactly what many of us do. The problem with putting such a book into practice (presumed that it was written in a way I could understand, wich would be highly unlikely) would be exactly that: analysing body language and other signs rationally keeps me occupied to an extent that I can not possibly analyse more than the most obvious ones (and that with a rather not satisfying success rate).
Would I try to analyse more I would have hardly any capacity left to actually communicate or react to these signs!
Presumably that is the reason why NT's learn to do it subconciously.

The more you try, the more signs you'll know to recognise. Flirting will probably never work as it should and professional mistakes will probably continue to occur, but in the end you should be able to make at least a some people genuinely enjoy your company and personality. For some people on this forum that seems already quite a lot to achieve.



True. It does take a large amount of processing if you need to do communication consciously and people of average and below average intelligence are f***ed in this regard since they're simply uncapable of having a fluent conversation at all.



NTs do almost anything that isn't too intellectual (that doesn't require too much rational analysis) at a subconscious level. Communication is just one aspect.

Well, from an early age, 10 onwards, I would read psychology books because I knew there was something off about me and I wanted to understand it and other people better. I now think that it got me off track, because I read a lot of Freudians, and they have this onion skin layer theory of humanity that goes self-ego-id, and in a way it's no more scientific than the Christian "theory" of a soul. They rely a lot on introspection for their conclusions about people, and contemplating myself hasn't given me much insight about the NT mind, a different brain architecture.

In fact I think that is a major problem for autistics seeking psychotherapy -- we are treated exactly like NTs, with our autism tacked on as an additional problem. An autistic with an anxiety disorder will have different triggers for their anxiety than an NT, and what may seem at first to be social anxiety may actually be an autistic difficulty with socializing and sensory stimuli.

I'm not sure if knowing that dopamine is behind autism is helpful if my dopamine triggers are very different from more NT people. I already assumed that most people pursue pleasure and avoid pain. If autism is a dopamine deficiency, we should see many more autistic addicts even if we control for socializing problems that make drug procurement difficult.

Try reading some recent literature on neuropsychology. I found if very enlightening.



Psychoanalysis has been rejected as pseudoscience by many psychologists a long time ago. Your comparing it to the Christian "theory" of a soul is actually a very good comparison because both are pseudoscientific. You should try some genuine scientific research.



You should go to a psychologist or psychiatrist specialised in autism and avoid psychoanalysists AT ALL COSTS... not because it only works for NT people but because it doesn't work at all (at most it has a placebo effect).



It's the same for all autists. For me, my main "obsessions" in recent years have been antiquarian books, film and socio-political discussion. It's not very NT-like to be obsessed by these at that level but the feeling I got from it is the same kind of feeling (a dopamine rush) that NT people get from just communicating with others, spending time in nature, watching sports with their buddies, etc.



Autism is the inability to use the subconscious mind for preprocessing data due to an excessive amount of dopamine-beta-hydrolase, which is the enzyme that turns dopamine into norepinephrine. This inability can be overcome with a combination of introspection and excessively high dopamine levels, which allows you to put your subconscious in charge which is normally impossible for autists. This process will allow you to increase the production of dopamine in your brain after first jumpstarting your prefrontal cortex, but it can lead to an increase heart rate as a side-effect. Nevertheless, two weeks after my "transformation" I still have my subconscious as primary thread of thought.

I wouldn't read it. I would think it's all nonsense.

My sister used to love to play the "unwritten rule" card when I wouldn't listen to her or do what she wanted. She'd come up with some unwritten rule that just happened to be against me. I never quite understood why the unwritten rules were never against her or anyone else, only me. This told me they were all a bunch of nonsense, so I never obeyed any of them.

Same here. Written by an Aspie for Aspies would be a big help. An instructional video series would be even better.

I'm still contemplating on writing such a book, however I believe I should still get a bit more experience with flirting and professional communication. Those are the toughest to master and I wouldn't want to give anyone advice in these areas before I mastered them myself to a satisfactory degree. Half-assed advice can be worse than no advice...