Published on 12, July, 2020
Can you truly learn social skills? This is something I've been wondering about since getting diagnosed.
My social skills aren't brilliant. I don't do well working in groups and I find social occasions difficult a lot of the time. I must have them to some degree as I manage at work (there have been issues but not regularly) and I do have a small group of friends who although not close, have not completely disowned me yet.
One thing my assessor said was that I don't really do 2 way conversation. He then added you probably know the rules but it is not something that comes naturally to you. So does this mean I can do it but I choose not to? Or I know how to do it but simply can't put it into practice?
I know there are people that have said they have used self help books with success but what I wonder is using these like acting/masking. You can put on a front and manage a successful social interaction or can you truly learn how to socialise better and it become an innate behaviour.
Apart from it causing me anxiety, my general issues with social interaction tend to be:
Sorry for this being a long waffly post but it's been on my mind for a while. What I'm wondering is, do I just need to accept this is how I am? Or can I actually learn to manage better?
Hi binary, you know I’m loving Daniel Wendler’s social skills book so I won’t bore you by discribing it a second time.
My personal experience is that social skills can be learned. I personally don’t view it as masking. To me it’s like all my life I didn’t know social skills because I don’t learn them naturally and no one ever taught me (I highly suspect my mum also has ASD). But now I have this handbook that teaches me, step by step how to do social skills. I’m not pretending to use social skills, I am actually using them and it is becoming natural. It’s a bit like if I studied a book to learn how to speak french, I wouldn’t be pretending to speak french, I would actually be speaking french. Not sure if I explained that too well so hope it makes sense?
Your issues with social interaction are things that I also struggle with myself. I’m working very hard on not interrupting people when they are talking, this can be difficult though when someone is talking for ages and I really want to say something. I’ve learned to use ‘the interruption hand’ though, basically raising your hand to about chest height in front of you indicates to your conversation partner that you wish to say something, in theory they then stop speaking and let you say something, I have to say this has had variable success, some people stop and let me speak, but some people just don’t take the bait (so to speak) or they just don’t want to stop talking!
I still misinterpret jokes and over react, I reserve the overreacting for those I live with though. That’s just how we are, we can’t change that.
I still need to find time to do that online coaching module on how to make small talk and the purpose of small talk and how to use small talk to build meaningful relationships. Presently I’m pretty clueless about the point of small talk but once I learn what the point of it is then I’ll let you know.
im also very good at talking at length about something that interests me, I’m pretty sure that I manage to bore/annoy people by doing this though I’m making extra effort not to ‘go on’ for too long these days.
I guess to summarise, we can learn social skills per se, in that we can learn how to have meaningful conversations, how to make friends, read body language etc and that can become natural but we can’t change who we are, we can’t suddenly start getting the hidden meaning in what people say or stop being super interested in a particular subject and wanting to talk about it loads. We can though, I believe, use those social skills to build more meaningful friendships and to widen our social network. Whether or not anyone decides to choose to learn social skills comes down to a cost benefit analysis: does the benefit of making more friends and having a better social life outweigh the cost of having to overcome social anxiety and also having to manage the mental exhaustion that socialising causes? For me the benefit does outweigh the cost, since starting to implement what I am learning in the social skills book and making more friends my self esteem has improved loads, I’ve managed to stop hair pulling which is something that I’ve done since childhood and I generally feel so much less restless and figity. The social anxiety was bad at first but has massively reduced and as long as I allow a few hours quiet ‘me time’ after social engagements to recuperate then all is good. Everyone is different though. What do you and others think about this?
See it was actually your post about the social skills book that made me question a lot. I was already thinking about my social skills as I had become a lot more aware of them but your post saying you'd actually had success learning them made me wonder.
It's hard thing to weigh up. On one hand I don't want to be this person that can't socialise that people find annoying etc. On the other hand like Blue ray says I imagine socialising properly would be exhausting. And should it always be me having to adapt to other people. Surely there should be an element of them adapting for me.
Small talk is the interesting because I actually hate it. I see no point in it and really don't want to take part in it. So I'm really not convinced I want to learn how to do it.
The thing that really bothers me is people sometimes refer to my reactions as aggressive (verbally not physically). This is not intentional and I definitely don't want to be thought of that way. But I don't actually know what I'm doing that gives off that vibe. I'm guessing it's to do with tone of voice. How can you stop doing something when you're completely unaware of it in the first place.
I guess it's such an individual thing it is hard to compare from each other's experiences.
I think it’s a case of different things are good for different people. We’re all different and it’s about weighing up whether learning social skills is in your best interests or not. Sadly, we live in a predominantly neurotypical world and while in theory, it would be nice if they adapted for us, in practice it doesn’t happen. And we have to interact with NTs at work etc it’s not really something we can avoid. Socialising is exhausting though, I’m not going to lie about that.
Small talk is not my strong point but I’m holding out that there’s some hidden point to it that I just don’t understand yet. I guess if people say you’re being aggressive when you overreact, maybe if someone says something that you view as offensive maybe before responding, take a deep breath and count to 5 in your head, maybe ask them to clarify what they mean before you respond, hopefully the time delay in responding will allow your answer to be more measured?
Personally, it’s not just for my benefit that I’m Learning social skills, it’s also for the benefit of my children. My eldest daughter now 21 I’m sure also has AS, I pointed this out to her a couple of years ago and she’s been learning social skills herself and massively improved her own social life as a result. I’m also working with her a lot at the moment on trying to see things from other people’s perspective, something which I’m also terrible at but I’m trying to learn. My middle daughter now 4 is the neurotypical of the bunch, to the extreme, her social skills already surpass my own, as she just naturally learns them, I find it fascinating to watch her appropriate eye contact and facial expressions and reciprocal conversations, but I do worry that if I don’t learn social skills myself then I might inadvertently untrain her in social skills if that makes sense, I want to be able to support her to keep on doing what she’s doing, because she does it so wonderously well and I need to be able to socialise with the mums of her classmates to ensure that she has a good social life and lots of friends, I want her to have the social childhood that I never had. My youngest, now 22 months I’m convinced is autistic, I’ve thought that since I was 7 months pregnant with her, I can just feel it in her, and the delays and little quirks she has support my theory. I’m presently chasing her paediatrician for her long overdue review and will be insisting that they refer her for the ADOS. I’m hoping my own diagnosis will help my case with that. I need to learn social skills so that I can support her to learn them too, to help her to reach her potential and improve her quality of life as she gets older. So I guess alongside my own need to make friends, my maternal instinct and need to do my best by my children has also been a big deciding factor for me.
Yes it would have been so much easier to have been diagnosed and taught all this as a child. I am truly envious of those people lucky enough to have been diagnosed as children and have had all the early intervention in childhood.
Thank you. When you’re a mum you have to act in your children’s best interests.
I think had I done it from a child it perhaps would have been easier. It would become a more natural part of interaction perhaps.
You are right though. I think it is about weighing up the positives and negatives.
It is fantastic that you are learning them to help your children and great that it benefits you at the same time.