Eye contact issues?

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Hello, I know problems making and maintaining eye contact are common issues for people on the spectrum and I was wondering how other aspies find it and explain my issue with it. I have always struggled with eye contact all my life, I worked as a cashier once were I forced myself to make brief eye contact with customers witch is still extremely uncomfortable but bareable as long as I didn't look right into them as it fills me with anxiety, makes me tense and is almost painful. But the strangest thing is that I can't make any eye contact at all with close friends and family, i can't bare the overwhelming feeling, but I can make eye contact with strangers but only for a second, I thought it should be the other way a around. Does anyone know possibly why? Is it sensory related?

It seems sensory related to me. Until I read about autism, I had always looked at people's mouths. I thought people only made eye contact during business deals. Maybe you view eye contact as something intimate, almost like you're "staring into the person's soul(how some people with an ASD describe eye contact)?" Maybe you don't want to feel that way about close friends and family. I don't know, that's just my guess.

Maybe it's easier with strangers because it's less personal? You can do your mandated 0.75 seconds of customer-care eye contact and it's soon over. But with people you actually care about, make eye contact and you risk having to keep doing it for the entire conversation, which is distracting and overwhelming. And they're used to you NOT making eye contact, so it feels wierd to change that. A couple of time I've decided to work on my eye contact, only to retreat in confusion from something I could've handled perfectly fine without.

I taught myself to maintain eye contact with strangers and I think I've gotten fairly good at it. Like you, though, I also really struggle with keeping it with people who I either have or want a close relationship with. I suspect this is one of the reasons why I can't make any friends because I get nervous and can't keep eye contact with people that I'm interested in being friends with. For example, there's a woman with similar interests who I frequently run into and once I decided that maybe we could be friends, I started to duck my head and completely avoid eye contact even when in the same space together. It's something that I know is extremely weird but I get so anxious that I can't seem to fix it. I think a lot of it for me is about being unable to process my emotions very well.

I used to have problems with eye contact, but only with certain teachers I found. I was fine with everyone else, but two teachers- my art teacher and this teaching assistant.

I'm not sure why I found it hard to look into the teaching assistants' eyes, but I would always get this weird vibe from her that would make me uncomfortable so I would often freeze up and not look at her whenever she sat close to me.

As for the art teacher, he would often shout at me for not maintaining proper eye contact with him. Ugh. But since school I haven't had any problems with eye contact, dunno why it was just those two.

I tend to look at one eye.

Absolutely. At age 34, I still don't understand the point of eye contact. Although I don't get anxiety when I make eye contact... it's just that when I make eye contact while the person is talking to me, everything that person says is "missed" by my brain. So I can either look at a person's eyes and not understand what they're saying, or I can look elsewhere (usually "nowhere") and listen to what they're saying. Or in other words... I can't really be looking at something and listening at the same time. So what I usually do is just generally look toward their face, but focus on listening to what they're saying (so then it looks to them somewhat like I may be making eye contact).

I simply can't be observing something and listening at the same time. i.e. in school from k-12, and in college, I learned everything from the textbook or by personally asking the teacher questions. The lectures in school (in college, where I majored in finance and engineering) didn't teach me a single thing.

I don't even stress about it anymore, though I have an eye injury so that's my excuse. I don't even like looking into the eyes of adult human photos. But what I find REALLY interesting is how incredibly warm I find the eyes of horses!! And kids feel light and happy. Eyes tell so much about people, I don't even feel a little bad about not wanting to look and see deeply into the twisted minds and hearts of the average human, it is scary scary.

I have some sensory issues - like things in my vision don't really stay still, sort of continually pop in and out of view. But I mostly relate to not being able to focus on what is being said by a person if I look at their eyes, especially if they're expressing emotion. It takes all my attention just to see their eyes only. I think for non-autistic people keeping eye contact means you're paying attention and being respectful, but they don't understand that if you're autistic, keeping eye contact means you may not be able to focus on what they're saying or remember it. I had a deaf fiancee who would get really angry if I didn't keep eye contact when she spoke because for deaf people looking away apparently means you're ignoring them (both for reading lips and for sign language) and that was pretty challenging for me. I learned to look at people's nose because it's so close to their eyes that they usually can't tell the difference and eventually, I got to where I didn't really see their eyes moving around and making expressions. That was important for me to learn because I did many interviews in my last job. Still, I can just go blank if I'm trying to describe a memory or some feelings if I don't sometimes break eye contact. It's a little better with people who know I'm autistic because they don't take it personally if I just look away while talking. I learned to control another aspect of my gaze too - I normally want to quickly look all around a room and pick up all the little details and record it right to memory. I think it can come across as a little "shifty". Little kids sometimes do that too. But I learned to imitate how most adults look around, studying one thing for awhile, then shifting gaze to another. I still do that in public, but pretending to be non-autistic gets very overwhelming and boring after awhile.

Some good tricks are to look at their nose or their mouth. They'll never tell the difference.

I find my issues fluctuate a bit: it's not so much that it's challenging to me (as in it being difficult) to make eye contact; but rather that it feels like a challenge. That is, when someone makes pointed eye contact with me, something stirs in the back of my mind and I'm a little more on edge and ready to fight. And on the flip side of that, doing it to to others feels like I'm calling them out for something, which is a weird feeling to juggle when you're just ordering food or asking directions.

Poor Eye-Contact was for a while required to make a diagnoses.

yes i do have poor eye contact but its not something i think about., hell i didnt know eye contact was a thing until i was 13 and my dad told me to make better eye contact. it would have to be a conscious decision to look a person while they're talking and even then i suck at looking at a person and listening at the same time. i can only do one at a time so i dont think about it, i think listening is more important anyways.