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Telephone conversations

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Recently, the past 4-5 months, telephone conversations are becoming increasingly difficult for me, and this is compounding problems as many people just don't seem to want to communicate by anything other than a phone. I mentioned it to my doctor last week, and he said just think about what you want to say and phone. That hasn't made any difference

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  • I loathe telephones.  I have a land-line out of necessity, but still haven't ever had a cell-phone.

    I get so frustrated with this.  It's not as if I can think of any examples of where a phone call has gone disastrously wrong for me.  In jobs I've had where the occasional phone call is unavoidable, I've been told that my telephone manner is pretty good overall.

    But that doesn't stop me from becoming extremely enxious, and procrastinating and cogitating for hours, or even days, before I can make a call.  I wonder if maybe it is as much a phobia as an autistic social impairment, as it is so much worse than the anxiety that I get from dealing with people face-to-face (which is also considerable).

    The irony is that in face-to-face interactions, I am very poor at recognising voice tone, facial expressions and body language - so it's not even as if I'm losing out on critical social cues by using the phone, as I'd likely miss them anyway!

    I do try to use scripts a lot both on the phone and in conversation.  The trouble is that it only works so long as the other person follows the script (which of course they are unaware of) - as soon as they take a course of action that I neglected to plan for, I am hopelessly lost.  I also have to be very careful that the planning of my script doesn't just become another way of procrastinating so that I can avoid the call for longer.

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  • I loathe telephones.  I have a land-line out of necessity, but still haven't ever had a cell-phone.

    I get so frustrated with this.  It's not as if I can think of any examples of where a phone call has gone disastrously wrong for me.  In jobs I've had where the occasional phone call is unavoidable, I've been told that my telephone manner is pretty good overall.

    But that doesn't stop me from becoming extremely enxious, and procrastinating and cogitating for hours, or even days, before I can make a call.  I wonder if maybe it is as much a phobia as an autistic social impairment, as it is so much worse than the anxiety that I get from dealing with people face-to-face (which is also considerable).

    The irony is that in face-to-face interactions, I am very poor at recognising voice tone, facial expressions and body language - so it's not even as if I'm losing out on critical social cues by using the phone, as I'd likely miss them anyway!

    I do try to use scripts a lot both on the phone and in conversation.  The trouble is that it only works so long as the other person follows the script (which of course they are unaware of) - as soon as they take a course of action that I neglected to plan for, I am hopelessly lost.  I also have to be very careful that the planning of my script doesn't just become another way of procrastinating so that I can avoid the call for longer.

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