I think the biggest thing that has helped has been constant exposure and practice in social situations with NTs who genuinely accept me and see my positive traits. This is because the more I see certain patterns in natural social behavior, the more likely I am to learn them and incorporate them into my own social repertoire. For anyone who also wants to learn social skills: I can't stress enough that having natural practice with NTs is crucial. I am now at a point in my life where I am able to fit in with them and understand most social nuances, though this has taken years to develop and I'm still very socially anxious at times. I have come to the realization that I will never be socially perfect, but I do take some pride in being able to get as far as I have.
I am a very pattern and series oriented person, and love gathering knowledge on different things, so I have focused on assigning meaning and patterns to my social interactions. As another poster noted, learning that the cues people give off actually MEAN something was a pivotal turning point for me and made me want to learn more. I have only figured out very recently how I am able to do this.
Whenever I see a facial expression, body language cue, or figurative language cue that does not come instantly to me, I conciously assign meaning to it in my mind. For example: when a person shows a certain kind of look, I tend to think of a word or phrase, or even think of an emotion in my mind that helps me understand the cue, and then subsequently give a reaction that the person would expect. So, say I interpret the cue as "she wants more information" I think in my head "more" and then that is my cue to give more information to them. Sarcasm was learned by learning that when a person is saying something mean but either has good relations with you or has positive body language, they are joking around and trying to bond with you. The key for me was learning the intention behind it: now I even use it a lot (except for when I'm around others with ASD who I know won't understand it).
It was a very complicated process initially, but now I do this process automatically and naturally without even thinking about it. This was not easy for me to learn as initially my social processing speed was very slow. A lot of this has to do with facial cues... and focusing on people's faces over the years has helped a lot, because the face does communicate quite a lot of social cues. I am conditioned to the point where reading unwelcoming cues by others make me instinctively makes me feel horrible and *very* uncomfortable, so I actively strive to do things to avoid these reactions by others. I even have to conciously remind myself not to take it personally when other people with ASD I know unintentionally give off unwelcoming cues.
For the computer program, maybe the person can be conciously primed with cues that are similar to what goes on in my head when I interact with others. The NT person that the person with ASD is interacting with could push a button on a keyboard that translates what emotion or "hidden" meaning they are conveying into either speech or a visual and then the computer gives the person with an expected reaction to the emotion and the person acts this reaction out. The more of these they practice with, the more likely they might learn to grasp emotions and the "expected" reactions to social cues.
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Given a “tentative” diagnosis as a child as I needed services at school for what was later correctly discovered to be a major anxiety disorder.
This misdiagnosis caused me significant stress, which lessened upon finding out the truth about myself from my current and past long-term therapists - that I am an anxious and highly sensitive person but do not have an autism spectrum disorder.
My diagnoses - social anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I’m no longer involved with the ASD world.
22 Jul 2013, 12:13 am
