EYE CONTACT!! !

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Hello everyone. I have just made an account here, and was wondering if you could tell me about your difficulties with eye contact and talking to people. I find it hard to keep eye contact with anyone, even people I know well, and if I do I do it for too long so the person thinks I'm staring at them! Which is rude [so I'm told]. I was talking to a guy tonight who I've met about three times, and every time he spoke to me my eyes kept watering as I tried to reply without looking away, which became worse when I realised how stupid I must look and sound as I tried to respond. I find it much much easier to talk to people whilst wearing sunglasses, even though my eyes do water a bit still, I dont feel so embarrassed as I know no one can see my eyes. I'd like to know your thoughts on this and if I am alone in this problem? [Doesn't sound like it from information I've found online!]
Thankyou everyone!
Also if anyone has any questions for me please ask away, I have a some experience with moderate autism too

Yeah, sunglasses help a lot. That way I can just do what feels natural and not give a crap either way. Plus, sunglasses are cool.

I tend to wear sunglasses when out in public and only make eye contact as needed with family. I will willingly make eye contact with some close friends and a few family members. But its usually (like 90+% of the time) more difficult for me to focus on what a person is saying while looking at them.

You guys replied fast! Wasnt expecting that, but thankyou.
So sunglasses help, what about sensitivity to light? If you leave the house in the morning and it is bright light out, do you have a hard time not sneezing and keeping your eyes open, even if you have slept well?

Hi Gazinator1990,

I have difficulty with people's opinions about my eye contact with them "not being quite right". I either make too direct and too long eye contact, or too brief and too fleeting eye contact, or no eye contact at all.

I lived in a multi-cultural county in New Mexico during the early 1960's, and for some of the social cultures then and there, eye contact was often taken as a bad sign of contempt or aggression to a possible challenger. Today, many wealthy, powerful, and famous people take informal eye contact as an invasion of their privacy, to the extent that they will terminate their domestic employees if eye contact is made. This is near totally opposite what psychologists and counselors are propouding.

My first lectures about eye contact involved stage acting and television broadcasting, and at that time, the subject of eye contact in informal social situations was seldom discussed or mentioned, other than the talk about the latest movies and John Wayne's power to see who was telling the truth by making people look him in the eye.

Eye contact took off as a popular fad in the early 1970's, rocket-powered by the book "Body Language" by Julius Fast (1970), and everyone trying to apply "How Our Movements and Posture Reveal Our Secret Selves" for their own advantages. The burst of expensive Seminars to learn Body Language soon followed, and the use of "Eye Contact" was a major element for the supposed newly discovered Social Language. "Eye Contact" became so popular of a fad that now poor eye contact is regarded as an element of many psychological disorders by amateurs and professionals, even without their having any certificate of completion of a Body Language Seminar.

Ngrams-dot-google gives an example of the explosion of the fad "eye contact", with very, very, few usages of the phrase prior to 1970:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?cont ... moothing=3

The citations in most of the Ngram dated books in the searches prior to 1970 seem most awkward now. I tried to be a better actor while learning acting skills using "eye contact", but when reality deviates from the repertoire, nothing works out very good.

Tadzio

There's got to be a balance. You can't have no eye contact but then again you're not supposed to have constant eye contact either. There's a formula to it but I don't know what it is. I just try to vary it a bit. Eye contact is very uncomfortable for me so it's not going to come naturally in any case.

Thing is we do not have the instinct to know what that balance is, and when to break eye contact or to make it. It's not just about frequency, it's about the RIGHT times. I don't really know when to look and look away. So I just don't try.

Have you ever looked into someone's eyes for too long and then the eyes are all you see, you see all the details, every little vein, the sliminess of them, the way the color of the iris is not uniform and follows more or less complex patterns, the size of the pupil and how pitch black it is. It's no more a part of a person, it's an isolated organic, pulsating piece of flesh that is sorta fascinating.

Probably if that happens, the person who's eyes your fixated on will be weirded out some.

It helps, I think, if you look up and to the sides rather than down if you need to look away. Looking up and to the side seems to indicate deep thought, whereas looking down can indicate fear or shame. If you are able to shift your body position in time with your eyes, it seems to enhance the impression that you are looking away to think, rather than because you cannot tell eye-contact duration. I think a short meet every few sentences suffices, but its hard to tell, right?

When listening, if looking directly in the eye is hostile, alternate between directly into their eyes and down to the right (possibly with a hand to the chin). You must try and keep an upright posture, or else you could again seem to be afraid.

-_-' Keeping it straight is not fun, but practicing talking to yourself in a mirror helps. You can see your posture, and how often you 'droop' and in which direction your eyes tend to wander.

I wear prescription glasses, but my eyes are photosensitive. So when I can get glass lenses (rare these days) on new prescriptions, I ask for Photogrey lenses. Otherwise (plastic), Transitions. So in the daytime I tend to "get a pass" on eye contact issues.

Otherwise, I apparently freak people out all the time by intensely staring at them without meaning to.

Seems that I tend to be a little better at eye contact..or at least facial contact (lol)..when someone is talking to me, as opposed to when I'm the one speaking, in that case it's markedly more difficult.

I have a heck of a time with eye contact. It's bad. Luckily very few people ask about it at work, but my first girlfriend cried because I couldn't look her in the eye. Usually, the more anxious I am about a conversation the harder it is to make eye contact. When I'm telling a joke I can usually do it. When I have to enforce a policy with a customer I can do it. It doesn't last, though. First meetings usually consist of looking over the person's shoulder or down to the left. I look to the left a lot... Always trying to remember things.

It's taken me years to get the right balance with eye contact.

I've been called weird for staring at people and weird for not looking at people

As I'm getting on a bit now, I've had a few years of practice. I guess I must have hit the right balance, because I've not been criticised for a long time.

When I was first going to interviews for jobs, I actually had to get books out on body language, to work out how long was appropriate to look at people in each glance. That sort of got me through the "set pieces" but I still don't find it particularly natural.

Strangest thing is that I'm still better communicating with people face-to-face than by phone. That seems common in AS as well, but seems really odd, as you'd have thought it would be easier if you didn't have the problem of eye contact and bady language - I've never figured this one out.

Yeah, the contact thing...and then I always get thrown off by which eye should I stare into? The right one or the left one? You can't stare into both of them at the same time. Then while I'm trying to decide if I should stare into the left or right eye, I loose the train of the conversation.

I got so sick of worrying about people thinking that I'm weird or rude or both because I never make eye contact, that I now actually bring it up in conversation. Also, when someone tries to engage me in small talk, I admit to them that I have no idea what to say. People are amazingly forgiving when you just come right out with it like that.

And the people who are not forgiving are not worth your time. Screw 'em.
It's better to not think about it and just communicate the way that's most comfortable to you.
I mean it's not like NTs are fumbling over themselves to accommodate us. All that small pointless talk... geez.
And by the way the small talk IS pointless, the real point is to fill in the void/time while they try and send you non-verbal
signals. Works great between NTs, but when it's directed at us it just sounds incredibly boring/confusing.
They don't know we're not receiving the non-verbal information, matter of fact, they assume we ARE receiving it.
And so, when we just stay stoic, looking bored, they take offense!
And since most NTs are very black and white when it comes to discerning between friend or foe, they
automatically dump you into the foe/enemy bin. Has this ever happened to you, where someone
starts acting mean and unfriendly, and you have done NOTHING whatsoever to provoke them.
(like a coworker, a classmate, someone you have to see a lot that's not one of your close friends)