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Joe90
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11 Aug 2013, 10:54 am

I've been thinking about my social skills more lately, and I have been reading up on shyness in adults, and by what I have found it seems to me that the description of shyness describes me well, like my social side that is. It makes me feel like if I didn't have all this shyness then I wouldn't be socially awkward, so I feel like I haven't got AS but just all these symptoms I have found:-

/social awkwardness and social phobia that overlap and become the cause of each other
/difficulty making friends due to being slower at developing close connections with others, but once in a friendship it is easier to keep them (Yes I'm like that, I find it hard to make friends but once I have made friends with someone I can usually maintain the friendship)
/difficulty meeting people, initiating conversations, joining in group conversations, and being assertive, but find one-to-one conversations more comfortable
/average with knowing how oneself feels but difficulty expressing it in the workplace or in social situations due to shyness and fear of embarrassment. This also includes fail assert oneself
/mostly males with extreme shyness issues find it harder to date or talk to females
/find interaction with strangers daunting or uncomfortable. The term for this is approach avoidance
/have normal desire to be social but feel they can't and their shyness lets them down. This can cause depression because of wanting something we can't have
/avoiding social situations like weddings and parties where there's going to be lots of people they don't know, simply because being somewhere where they feel they can't be themselves or express themselves as good as they can when around people they know well, can make their time very boring.

That's me in a nutshell. Every single point wrote above describes me EXACTLY, 100 percent.
Some people can just have a shy personality but not so much of the symptoms above, whilst others can have a shyness that interferes with their day-to-day life, without being on the spectrum.
But then I obviously DO have AS because I have the other AS symptoms; obsessive interests, anxiety over silly things, frequent outbursts, dislike change of routine, etc. So I don't know what I've got.

What do you think?


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Willard
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11 Aug 2013, 1:40 pm

Personally, I don't believe that shyness and Autistic social problems are the same thing. I got over my shyness in High School, its been ages since I was intimidated by a stranger, but that doesn't change the selective mutism and the processing issues that make it near impossible to initiate conversations with people I don't know.

When shyness was a problem, I couldn't make small talk even once conversation had been engaged. :oops:

Now I can chat with someone I don't know, no problem, but because of the Autism, its unlikely that I will, unless they speak to me first. I find that often, just making eye contact and smiling, or saying Hello is enough to get an NT started talking. Unfortunately, once they've started, getting away from them without seeming rude is another matter entirely. :roll:



anotherswede
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11 Aug 2013, 8:17 pm

The shyness I believe could just always have coexisted with your AS, or you may have developed shyness as a result of how you are treated and how you get along with others. Perhaps being anxious and such has made you more shy.

I do see people with AS that are shy and those that are not. I am a bit shy but wasn't as much as a kid.

I think this shyness could just be a comorbid that makes you just a little worse off socially. But it probably wouldn't account for social awkwardness.



Runo Misaki
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05 Jan 2019, 7:16 pm

I don't think shyness is just a trait of autism because I've seen lots of neurotypicals that are shy and autistic people that are outgoing. I think shyness could be the result of an introverted personality, a person's temperament, or negative social experiences. Nobody is born shy. You develop shyness through negative social experiences. For instance, I wasn't shy as a child. I became shy in my early teens because I was constantly bullied verbally by my peers from 3rd to 6th grade for 4 years. My peers would always call my ret*d, gross, weird and tell me that nobody liked me. Eventually, I stared to believe those things after all those years and I internalized those comments. From 7th grade and onwards, I because shy and quiet to avoid being picked on more and also because I believed that nobody really liked me and that I was ret*d. I would also get embarrassed and blush over the smallest things as a result of the bullying from grade school. In conclusion: I wasn't born shy, I became shy because of bullying.



KingExplosionMurder
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08 Jan 2019, 11:14 am

Runo Misaki wrote:
I don't think shyness is just a trait of autism because I've seen lots of neurotypicals that are shy and autistic people that are outgoing. I think shyness could be the result of an introverted personality, a person's temperament, or negative social experiences. Nobody is born shy. You develop shyness through negative social experiences. For instance, I wasn't shy as a child. I became shy in my early teens because I was constantly bullied verbally by my peers from 3rd to 6th grade for 4 years. My peers would always call my ret*d, gross, weird and tell me that nobody liked me. Eventually, I stared to believe those things after all those years and I internalized those comments. From 7th grade and onwards, I because shy and quiet to avoid being picked on more and also because I believed that nobody really liked me and that I was ret*d. I would also get embarrassed and blush over the smallest things as a result of the bullying from grade school. In conclusion: I wasn't born shy, I became shy because of bullying.



It was the exact same for me. I actually developed selective mutism from the severe anxiety I was facing. I aam much more shy now, but I'm still very loud and outgoing around people I trust.