I have ASD(diagnosed) but I'm very good at reading people?

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Personally I believe aspies reading emotions in others is nothing more than a deeply necessary "survival" trait.

Between rejections (ranging from 1 to 10 in '"negative emotional strength") and bullying (a "10"?) beginning at a time before memory an aspie learns to associate the emotions in a person's face with their actions toward them. FOR EXAMPLE: If you have a mother and family that likes you and smiles a lot you can have an unconscious positive reaction toward smiling people. In the same way a series of bad or negative experiences will have a lasting affect, on aspies and NTs as well.

When I examine my arising negative thoughts about a person I've not met before, I generally see these negative thoughts are caused by a life of defensive negativity and not by reality and I also realize I may not need as many defenses as I felt I did when younger. This can be quite liberating.

Love life

denny

Ok outdated thread but omg this is exactly what i have been trying to figure out myself. Don't buy that it's imagination either that wouldn't explain why nt always confirm it correct and gotten significaly best in a nt class of understanding lord of The flies intrigues by teacher. Need to state this because i've been batteling against psychatrists Who accnowlidge it Heard of but won't accept it's consequenses. I find the book recomended intresting, does anyone recognize themselves in this being very hard to handle and surpress all the info. For me it made me devlope ptsd cuz it makes mistreatment in psychatry more intense

If sociopaths can do it, so can we. We're all emotionally cut off, at least I'd say from my own perspective. It's not so much an intuitive skill rather one that is built up, and if you really want to get good at reading people then you spend lots of time doing it and figuring out the ropes, and eventually it'll make sense. I mean, it's definitely not rocket science, everything you need is right outside your door, on sidewalks, in cities, everywhere. Just strike up a conversation and it will give you the tools you need to enhance people reading skills.

The milder one is on the spectrum, the greater the capacity to read NV clues. End of.

However, if you has a right brain orientation, or good balance of left and right as well as being on the mild side... well, your going to be even better at reading the interior world of others.

If you have all the above, plus a special interest in psychology, philosophy, your going to be almost on par with the average NT with respect to reading emotions.

However, if everything above applies to you and on top of this you have suffered serious early abuse and found healing through grieving your losses with skilled professional support... then, perhaps you would be more skilled than most NT's in understanding your interior world and thus the interior world of others.

If all the above applies to you, welcome to the club! The greatest irony of being so adaptive is that ones greatest achievements- adaptive skills - can prove a disaster with respect to getting a dx and thus receiving the
the help one so desperately needs in order to take care of oneself in a world that's so quick to judge on appearances at the expense of experience.

I wonder if when it comes to reading people in a sense we can be a bit like a left-handed sportsman. More difficult for others to read due to rarity.

Also I think the reading skills can be situational, so some things can cause difficulty whilst other things can be clear.

I can definitely read some (at least) people better as I get to know them than they can read me; particularly, I think, if they are open with me in how they express themselves. I have surprised people at times with my perceptive skills. I am not sure what to make of that.

Sorry for lack of a readily coherent structure. That's ADD for you.

Wanted to do multiple quotes but too much of a handful on the mobile. Thanks for really insightful anwser. I do find one of the sadess things how alot of ast get cut short because the nt mindset is the only one you bother to empathsize from.

I've checked closer on the links posted here earlier and stumbled on being an emotional empath in ast cases. I guess one extreme female ast could be sensory overload in absorbing others emotions, so i dont buy it's a sociopath thing for everybody. There are alot of research on ast whom have too much empathy than one can handle.

For me it's rather an emotional sensory overload thing, but due to ast I've dissociate myself act more distant. I Sort my own feelings and thoughts out so it's hard for me to reach in the moment, which is rather contra productive defence. The rational reading ppl isn't consious eihter for me it's feels like data overflowing my mind until i need to just write it down so i don't get consumed. but thanks to the posts here i suscpect it's an adaptive mechaism to make sense of my emotional overload. Does anyone else recognize themselves in The intense world theory (i think it's called?)

Intense World Theory nicely describes everything about my experience. It takes all the various symptoms and characteristics of Asperger's and brings them together in a single package that totally makes sense to me. This is something I really on heavily - making complex situations simple and understandable - so I'm very grateful that Intense World Theory came along right before I was diagnosed.

And by the way, I've observed and practiced and studied human emotions since my 20's (about 30 yrs). At this point, I can tune into emotion, by calibrating the sounds of someone's voice, the tightening and relaxing of facial muscles, the reddening of skin, the slight watering of eyes, etc... All observable sensory data. And I can encourage or discourage that person from experiencing their feeling with my own choice of words, voice, facial mannerisms, etc. With verifiable results. These are all learned skills, based on repetition and observation. Many people have said that I'm very good at what I do - and yet, I only just picked up on the watery eyes thing a few years ago. It's all very much learned. Yet there is a feeling component, what I would call a sense of intuition. It seems to be a result of associating my experience with theirs, and refining that association through ongoing feedback. Of course, this isn't something I can do all the time (!). I've just wanted it so much that I kept practicing. Other people play guitar, or learn to write software. I explore people's emotions. (And honestly, tend to collapse at the end of a very short day!)

Thanks all for being a community I can share with.