Paid a big price for getting good at computers

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Socially that is...

Today I remoted into a computer and had my support colleague watch me do a tech support session. He expressed admiration about my computer skills.

He asked "How did you learn this stuff?"
I said "While everyone else was out partying and dating, I was on the computer every day all day."
He responded "Must've served you well!"

Grrrrr!! ! If only he realized the sheer price I paid. All the computer skill in the world does not help me:
- get a date
- know what to do with a lady
- get along with other people
- get humor and sarcasm that most people understand
- pick up body language and inferred meaning from conversations
- feel comfortable in social situations
- never stopped my family members during childhood from constantly bombing me with corrections over my social performance

Was getting strong computer skill worth the price?! I don't know.

Well, if you are an Aspie, you'd probably have all those same problems whether you learned how to use computers well or not. While you might rightfully be frustrated that your social skills are lacking, I doubt that your focus on learning to use a computer had any appreciable affect on them. If you had spent your time partying rather than learning, you very well might still have the same problems with people and have no useful skill to show for it.

You do not say where you live.

However, now that you are employed and even have other people at work admiring your skills with the computer, maybe you can spend some time on improving your social skills. Google, your geographic region, therapist + aspergers.

You need to feel comfortable with the therapist, interview at least three if possible. You decide who you want to work with. Tell them exactly what you want to work on, you are not there to discuss your childhood, you want concrete ways to improve your social skills. If they specialize in Asperger clients, you won't need to explain that part at all.

Plan B, start a 'meet up' group for adults with Aspergers. You set the parameters, age range, must be employed, or doesn't matter. You can practice your social skills with a group who already knows your issues...

You will never turn into an NT but you can learn some social skills that could help a lot with dating. This maybe outside of your comfort zone but on the other hand you sound very motivated.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think being gainfully employed might be a real selling point with the ladies. I assume you mean that you feel the Aspie part of you made it possible to be so focused on computers, as in the price I have paid?

So tell yourself another story about yourself which is, I have worked hard, I am successful, I have a good job, now I am going to work just as hard on learning the social rules of the NT world and succeed at it too.

Where I live there is a group called Social Thinking in San Jose, CA. They work mostly with kids but I know they also work with adults. They will break it down into tiny pieces, how to join a group of people chatting, how to leave a group, your body language, theory of mind and all that it entails.

Being motivated to learn it is to me the most important piece of the puzzle.

Good luck

Dude I live in San Jose, CA. Thanks for the tip!

You are welcome, Michelle is great... very practical approach,

link to the adult services:

socialthinking.com

I generally recommend skipping the skills of followship and moving directly on to the skills of low-key leadership, which are more direct and straightforward anyway.

And it doesn't need to be a spectrum group. It could just as well be a hiking group or a local group that focuses on city politics.

I also learned a lot of ping-ponging social skills, surprisingly, playing poker (just league poker for points these days). You make an overture, sometimes another person picks up on it and sometimes they don't, and either one is fine. I think other people might learn this same thing playing baseball.

If we add new skills to our repertoire and apply them in loosey-goosey fashion, that's all for the good.

But, if we as Aspies instead try to left-brain social skills, that's kind of part of the problem. Social skills by their very nature are an inherently imperfect, right-brain activity. And in zen-like fashion, we should embrace this imperfection.

I think almost all of us probably have an internal censor to some extent, both those of us on the spectrum and those who are supposedly 'normal' (and no such thing as 'normal' anyway!). I have had some success making a conscious decision to turn down my internal censor so that the default setting is that it's probably okay to go ahead and say it anyway, unless it cleary jumps out at me as inappropriate.

So, the group can probably be very helpful, taken with a grain of salt. There is no golden path with social skills. All of us, ourselves fully included, are just too complex. No one method always works.

@PaintingDiva: sorry about saying "dude". hope I didn't offend. i realize you are a lady.
wrt Social Thinking, how do they train you? I have horrible memories of family members constantly pointing out errors in my social skills and never saying anything positive.

@everyone: thanks for the input. I have decided to call Kaiser psychiatry tomorrow and in time, I will consider Social Thinking. still if anybody would like to post further, go ahead.

That's one way to look at it but having a skill in Information technology provides you with a skill that someone may demand so it could lead to financial security and stability. It also offers you the chance to share a mutual interest with someone, I know there are a few girls that like computers and programming, rare to find but they do exist. You can really see the positive side of it when you look at it from a different perspective.

No worries about calling me 'Dude'.

I came to this website because of my son (Asperger + undiagnosed learning disabilities + very smart = depression), in the process I also realized, I have aspie traits, a lot of them ...

Well enough about me, back to your situation. I attended a conference given by Michelle about young adults transitioning to jobs. I have never seen her work individually with a person or group. From what I gather, her business, does their level best to match people with other people who are on the same level. She might work with you in a small group, she might work with you individually, or one of her staff will work with you. She talked a lot about how young adults need to learn to navigate the social situations at work, such as a friendly nod when you come to work each day is so important, not the stone face, and being able to ask questions, am I doing this right, especially during the first few weeks of a job, when you are EXPECTED to ask questions....stuff like that.

For her actual therapy/classes, my impression is, there is class time, there is practice time and there are weekly assignments. Such, as for high school age kids, learn the names of the 4 kids that sit near you in class. Not unusual for an Aspie to have no idea what their classmates names are. She gave a poignant example of life for an Aspie kid in the classroom.

And she said, and I am paraphrasing madly here, you cannot tell these kids to 'just do it' because they literally do not KNOW how to do it. You have to break it down for them into very small parts, such as a group will not come to you, you have to go to the group, how to stand with a group, how to leave a group, proper body language, i.e. do not stand so you are actually posed to walk away, all that kind of stuff....

The class is given a group activity to do. They are told to pick two classmates and work in a group. The NT kids have already scanned the room, before this assignment was even given. They have already checked out to see who they know in the class and who they consider a friend or an acquaintance. In other words, they are all ready for this task. The Aspie kid on the other hand, probably doesn't even know the names of the kids sitting right near him or her. All the other kids quickly get themselves into groups, the Aspie kid sits alone.

I don't know if that answers your question but those are my impressions of how Social Thinking skills are taught by her group.

I do like what some of the other writers have posted, i.e. take up playing poker, or some group activity you already like and work on your social skills there.

Then there is the interesting idea of self disclosure, if you are with a group of friends, or someone you are becoming friends with, you tell them what your deal is and you can let them know it is OK to let you know, when you have inadvertently offended them with some brutal Aspergian honesty etc. etc.etc.

Life is messy, go forth and get messy!

I respectfully disagree on a couple of points.

A person does not want to predictably give a nod every day as if he or she is some kind of robot. It’s okay to be sometimes preoccupied. And it’s almost more important to open to reciprocating and give a nod in return, and be able to recover reasonably graciously and come back to the here and now if you are preoccupied. And it’s more about the general flow of the broad steps and not so much perfectionizing each step.

And then, the “easy” jobs are hard and the “hard” jobs are easy! And I want to say this again and again to parents and coaches.

One of the worse jobs I ever had was being a checker at Kroger grocery story. Because the “managers” (cough, cough) were absentee managers who allowed bullying and in fact rather blamed the person being bullied for causing problems. I mean, it generally was awful.

One of the better jobs I had was at H&R Block where the office manager was in fact himself a tax preparer and appreciated that I was good with both the computer system and with tax law. Now, straight up, H&R Block is an unethical company because they only technically and not really inform their clients of substantial negatives regarding their bank products. But it was a less unethical company with me working there because I did make an effort to inform my clients. My loyalty was with my clients and my direct co-workers, and not so much with the company hierarchy. So, I would underline a part in the paperwork with a blue pen, and otherwise experiment with ways of briefly and matter-of-factly trying to have a ping-ponging conversation with my clients regarding these negatives. I wanted them to understand it. I wanted them to know what they were agreeing to. I was generally appreciated at Block, whereas I was anything but at Kroger. 3 years out of 4 (with counting another tax place as well) things went well. 1 year out of 4, I was fired early, in my judgement because I proactively called clients to let them know their loan has been turned down by the bank but their return has been accepted by the IRS, this instead of waiting for the client to storm the store because he or she wasn't getting a straight answer from the automated system. Well, I’ll pay my money and take my chances so to speak. I’ll take three out of four.

Okay, the part with them encouraging you to ask questions, that’s a little like companies preaching “We want people who think outside the box.” Ha-a-a. You might say that, but you really don’t want someone who thinks outside the box. One thing that has not worked for me is asking a question to show that I’m interested. In fact, that has tended to fail rather miserably. What has worked better is holding the question, trying to find an answer myself, and then if it’s still a live issue, going ahead and asking (an exception to this might be if they're encouraging quesions during the training class itself). It’s almost like you get a grand total of three questions over the first couple of days and that’s it.

And “training” often consists of someone giving you a torrent of information, and this person seems to really like to hear themselves talk. I’ll have to think of some options and strategize, but I don’t really have a good response to this, other than maybe taking sparse notes of the most important points (I usually take voluminous notes with the primary purpose of keeping myself alert).