River: Social skills

[mdlbear]

I'm beginning to wonder whether my (now-crumbling) assumption that I lack social skills is simply due to the fact that for most of my life I haven't been social with more than a very limited number of people.

And I think Colleen, who's one of the few people I do interact with socially and is in a position to give me valuable feedback, simply gave up long ago trying to reach me. (added 3/4) In any case, I don't get feedback or calibration from real people in a real social situation: I have no idea what I'm doing wrong, or what cues I'm missing.

I've always been shy, and afraid to interact much with people I don't know. I seem to have lost a lot of that fear in the last year or so, but not all of it, and the habits are still there.

My biggest problem may still be getting an interaction started. Starting a conversation with a stranger; making a phone call to anyone, joining a conversation in progress.

On the other hand I may just be too tired to make sense -- my brain is pretty seriously fried tonight.

Comments

Re: New friend!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>"...shielding yourself..."
>I think that's what I'm doing, far too effectively. Or maybe not. I don't >know. I have no idea how empathy works or how to control it.

Okay, I'll try to nutshell this. The magical version of empathy is a subtle sense that allows a person to perceive the emotions of other people, or emotional energy left in a space. It works kind of like physical senses, and can seem like "feeling" or "seeing" or "hearing" emotions. (The nonmagical version is sort of a mental extrapolation of emotion based on body language and voice cues.) Controlling it is like controlling your physical senses: you can look at or away from something, you can listen for particular sounds or tune them out. That part just takes practice. And you can actively shield out energy you don't want.

As for shielding: If you can sense people's emotions strongly enough for them to make you uncomfortable, you're not shielded or not shielded enough. If you can sense people's emotions enough to understand them, but not so much that it bothers you, then you're probably shielded at a moderate level and that's usually right. If you can't sense people's emotions at all, then you're shielded. That makes you pretty safe from outside energy, at the cost of losing some awareness of what people are feeling. Usually that tradeoff is worth it, occasionally not.


>>"...try scanning a group for someone who else who is shy and kind of lonely and would enjoy being approached, or even just someone to sit with."
>That would require learning to read body language, wouldn't it? Yet another skill I never acquired.

If you were trying to do it mundanely, it would require knowledge of voice tone and body language, which to some extent can be memorized. There are learning tools for that if you want to track them down.

Scanning with empathy is different. It can be done with eyes closed because it uses a different sense. It's hard to describe because empathy creates different subjective feelings for different people. Happiness might seem "warm" to one person and "bright" to another. Or you could imagine running your hand over a rumpled surface, and the higher "peaks" would be happier people.


>>"...analyze the style..."
>Um... There's also the problem that, when I'm interrupted, I tend to get completely derailed, especially when I'm paused struggling to find the next word. So the "active listening" style where people try to complete your sentences for you, or answer questions before you finish asking them is simply agonizing for me. Not fixable, as far as I can tell.

Okay, that's definitely a challenge. You might be more comfortable with people who are relatively quiet and don't dominate a conversation. I'm talkative; I'd drive you nuts in person, unless you reminded me not to walk all over you verbally (not fun for a shy person). I've had a few friends with speech impediments who just said, "Be patient and let me finish my own sentences. If you don't understand or thought I said something crazy, just ask me to repeat it." So that point isn't unfixable, but it's hard to fix and the solutions won't necessarily work with everyone.

Re: New friend!

[mdlbear]

Um... I don't read minds. As far as I know, any empathy I have is based on physical observation; I have no such "sense" that I'm aware of. I don't "sense" emotions, I observe people who appear to be experiencing them. Sometimes I'm able to observe myself experiencing emotions, but usually I have to piece it together after the fact.

"Scanning with empathy" simply isn't something I believe I'm capable of. If I were even _remotely_ capable of reading minds or detecting emotions, a lot of things over the last year would have happened very differently. You're dealing with a total skeptic here.