God that's eerie. I had a pretty much identical conversation with my NT mum yesterday, who was asking the same questions you were. I found it pretty much impossible to explain to her the concept of conversation for information sharing purposes alone, as she is almost like the opposite of me as everything she says has underlying emotional connotations (some of which I pick up on and some of which I don't), so she can't grasp the concept of my form of communication, thus we often have arguments due to mis-communication because she assumes emotional connotations (mostly negative ones for some strange reason) underlying my words which are not there.
In response to your question, I personally find that these days I do understand a lot more of the emotional messages that underlie peoples words, although I am still a bit like a slightly slow child compared to a normal person in this area. However, I can't seem to reciprocate the same thing myself, I can't seem to send emotional messages back behind the information I'm sharing unless I'm really strongly feeling something at the time and it subconsciously seeps through to my words. I cannot do this consciously, and I cannot do it on a regular basis. Probably the only person who can bring this out with any regularity is my mum when we get into an argument, as she is a strongly emotional person (as opposed to information sharing) and the anger/dislike/negative emotion that seeps through her words causes this sort of instantaneous reaction in my words that I don't really get and seems to be completely out of my control.
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Into the dark...
04 Jan 2009, 7:38 pm
