Question for aspies who can blend in as NT

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Kay, so there are a few differences between how males and females deal with AS. I was typical in the sense that I had other friends around me try to help me fit in. I also observed people ALL THE TIME since I was little. It was not normal and sometimes I would be called out for staring. I still like to people watch when I am in public. It's kind of compulsive. I was just interested by people and how they acted, then I would have a repertoire of ways to mimic people to act normally in social settings.

Also, growing up, my family wasn't there for me as much as most families. I felt like I had to seek out friends at a young age to just have people who cared about me. I was also poor and experienced many problems that I had to solve. So I was already used to that mindset, and social life was just another area where I could try to solve my own problems. I learned a lot by trial and error.

You've seen my other thread summing up what I did. As for clumsiness, I was a clumsy child too, but I don't stim. I took acting classes, but I also did a lot of performing, and even performed speeches. So that helped me not get nervous when I was talking to people. I'm also regularly physically active. I've learned about muscles and have tried to exercise the main muscles. That's helped me the most as it helps my body move comfortably. It also gives me self esteem.

I don't imitate others' body language. I've just gotten used to showing my emotions as a way of communicating and self-expression. It may help to have someone point it out to you, or just watch for a confused face when you say something and don't show emotions. Then try it again by showing emotions. I have someone who is really close to me who I talk to all the time, and I've just gotten used to communicating so NTs can understand.

As for voice, well that really changed after I stopped being depressed. I guess it was a self-esteem thing for me, and when I realised that people wanted to hear me, I've added a song-like prosody. I also loved to sing and loved music from a young age, so I was happy to give my voice inflection.

Like Kjas, I was also interested in psychology, But it more so came as second nature to me. By the time that I actually took a psych course, I could kind of predict NT behaviour. The way my mom was, I had to be aware of her needs and wants. I kind of acted as a caregiver to a lot of people, so naturally, I was used to being quite aware of people's needs, even more so than most NTs. I also listened to radio shows that helped people and read books on my interests in behaviour.

I wonder, then, deltafunction, if not having the opportunity to have friends until my 18th birthday (due to family isolation) is what set me way behind. I was too screwed up and stubborn for 3 years thereafter to likely even be capable of help (and I didn't want to fit in), but then I matured to the point of getting rid of off-putting behaviors and gradually developed a strong desire to fit in. Maybe, by then, it was simply too late? At several points since, I've had people try to help me as well, but it's not been a consistent thing. Is asking for help after making an initial connection perhaps a way to get around this?

But the question is how do you get to the point where you have friends who care enough about you to help you fit in? To get there, don't you have to already be skilled socially on some level? It's like a Catch-22, or is it maybe easier when you are younger?

For you, too, was observing something you were able to do naturally, or is it something you had to learn to do as well?

Now, all this exists in spite of not having an unusually difficult time reading body language. Until I learned about the prosody issue from experts, I just didn't know WHY people were confused or irritated when I opened my mouth, though I knew they were, so I just learned to shut up and withdraw.

And for all of you, what is some advice to be able to develop the ability to observe anything in a visual environment for someone who has the natural autistic tendency not to be able to do this (visual memory in the 6th percentile, no peripheral vision, etc.)? Is this something that brain regeneration drugs or stem cell therapy could help with, or are their behavior things you can do to build this skill?

I would think that not having the opportunity to make friends until you're 18 would set you back. No one's born with perfect social skills and even NTs have to learn. So I would think that the earlier you try, the less you have to catch up. But don't let that discourage you, you can still learn.

I've been inconsistently helped as well. But asking just annoys people because they think that you get it just as much as they do. I've learned to pick up on the subtle cues that I'm doing something unusual, then I've tried to guess what it could be. Because as you get to be an adult, people don't tell you anymore, they just assume that you know or send these cues. Sometimes I will apologize or joke about my tendencies, then people become more comfortable to point out your mistakes if they know that you are self-aware.

My boyfriend's the one who has helped me the most. He is my best friend and my closest friend. But he's still not telling me what to do, all he did was explain people's actions to me. I'd say "I don't understand why..." about someone and he would tell me that they are insane kind of thing. He also helped me have fun and be happy. That's all that you can really do to make friends. People want to hang around others who don't take themselves so seriously. You can fake it. Just act like you don't care about what people think about you and act like you're having a great time . Especially when you are first meeting people.

I've always observed people naturally. I like to watch TV shows too and see what they do. I also became immensely interested in plays and scripts, then even wrote my own. I guess now I just say a script in my head. I had tried improv a while back and that has helped me to think on the spot instead of scripting, but then I went back to scripting, just faster. Now it's more natural.

Feel free to PM me if you ever want to. I'd love to talk about this stuff some more and help people if I can.

I have a tendency to study people, as if they were puzzles - mental puzzles, not the put-together-on-a-table kind. I'll get on the bus or sit in a restaurant and watch, see what peope are doing and try to figure out why. Combine that with a very good drama teacher in HS, and I have a good basis for 'acting' normal - until I'm too tired to focus anyway. That said, I still misinterpret constantly, and have discovered to my dismay that most social cues seem to vary from area to area - I got to the point where I seemed relatively normal, if geeky, where I grew up, left for college in a new state, and discovered that everyone in the new area considered me very rude. It's a problem.

Before I begin, there are a few things I should mention. The first is that I have a fairly mild case of Asperger’s. The second is that, I am more primarily affected by the acoustic environment, rather than the visual, although colors and patterns can catch my eye easier than many NTs. The third thing I need to state is that my environment is a dorm at a specialty college that focuses on my interest. This last fact is important because, as everyone I’ve discussed my Asperger’s with there not only knows what it is but have family members or friends whom also have it, my perceived ability to interact socially may be the result, in part, of people simply recognizing and accepting that I am different.

For learning body language, I have been unable to find a better approach for understanding other people than you have. As far as acting out with body language, if I want to get a specific emotion across, I try to think of something that makes feel that way because I know that I can’t fake the motions well at all. For example, when I smile for a picture, if I’ve had a good day, I will reflect on that or, if not, I will think of something funny, like a puppy trying to carry a stick through a dog door, only to be stopped because the stick is too long to fit. Whenever I don’t do something this, it is obvious that my smile is fake.

For my vocal skills, I learned through a combination of self-teaching and help from friends and family. Amongst the hardest lessons that I’ve had to learn is how to prevent myself from speaking too loud. After many reminders from family members, I started thinking about how loudly I spoke. To this day, I need to think about how I loud I am speaking in order to keep my voice under control, which has often proven to be an issue when I get really excited or very happy.

Blending in has more to it than just applying what you have observed in order to learn how to act, though. Having some support can be a major help. I don’t think I could have ever really blended in at all without some help. I often depended on my family members to tell me if I made a social blunder and what it was that made my actions so incorrect when I was younger. I would take their advice into account and apply it to future situations. Now, in college, if the appropriate opportunity comes up in a conversation, I will sometimes tell people that I have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Another tip I have is to try avoiding situations that cause you stress as often as possible. It is much easiest to fit in when you are calm. One of my worst breaks with NT blending behavior, aside from my meltdowns, occurred at a winter concert that both my sister and brother were in. The middle school band was assigned a piece that involved cowbells. The noise caused me to clamp my hands over my ears and curl in on myself. I would have run out left the room if my brother’s chorus wasn’t going to come on stage immediately after this “music.”

I hope that my advice is helpful. I have never taken a class for coping with Asperger’s in any way, so I don’t know how they compare to my methods for improving my social skills.

Yes, your visual processing problems are probably the reason you didn't start observing other people's ways of moving until relatively late. I don't think everybody on the spectrum has your visual problems, in fact I only know of one (she describes it as being unable to distinguish "figure" from "ground".)

If you unconsciously tense and hunch over when there are people moving around, perhaps this is where you need to retrain yourself. The tense posture does not do anything to block out the sensory stimulation, does it? In fact, it probably makes it hurt worse. When you are in those situations, you can remind yourself consciously to straighten the spine, breathe deeply, relax your eyes and ears and stay in the moment. Remind yourself again every few minutes, and move your shoulders down and back, lift your head, deepen your breath... It will never become your first instinct to relax around people, but it will become your first conscious action if you do it often enough to make it a habit.

I have to agree with this Tyrion.

While movement and motion catches my eye - it causes a completely different reaction in me than it does in you.
Your reaction to movement seems to be one of fear and anxiety, causing you to tense up and shy away.
Mine tends to be one of curiosity, and my reaction tends to be to watch or observe more closely.

SO the question becomes, despite the visual issues which will likely always be there, do you think it's possible to change your reaction to the visual issues?

I don't know. I won't clutter up the thread with everything I'm trying to do to change the visual issues themselves (which includes professional vision therapy), some things of which have already made significant positive changes.

I think some of the things you suggested, such as dancing, could help with the visual issues themselves. I don't think I could simply change my reactions without remedying the underlying issues since I've already been trying to do this for 8 years. But I do think it's possible that I could mitigate the underlying issues, which would allow me to adopt the imitative strategies discussed here.

I can't really explain on how to act NT on a forum, it's more something you have to learn through trial and error. The only other advice I have would be to act calm, don't be paranoid, generally NTs don't care if you break a few folkways and don't make yourself the center of attention unless that is what your aiming for. Oh and if you sound like you know what your talking about then no one is going to care if your wrong.

I have worked very hard before to act like a NT, and I think I got pretty good at it before I quit. You can make up for any sort of mental deficiency with brains and effort. When I first started trying to learn how to do it, it exhausted me and I ended up spending 12+ hours a day sleeping and breaking down in tears at the end of the day, until I had a nervous break down and had to stop (I got back at it after resting a few days).

I was very bad the first few hundred times I tried in a methodical way to act like NT, so I started practicing on people I never thought I'd see again, which meant talking to a lot of people that I had no interest in forming long term relationships with (LTR here meaning in both the platonic and romantic way). I'm thinking about trying to mimic facial expressions and voice intonation here. Somehow a lot of people never seem to forgive you if you ever make a nonverbal grammatical mistake.

I quit after I got rather good at pretending to be NT because I found that it did not make me happy. However I have noticed that since then I seem to have continued to improve slowly without trying to. Maybe you just need a minimum level of understanding before your skills can start to develop naturally.

Personally, I have found that it is easier to learn to go without intimate connections than to work hard to make them. All the relationships that have ever meant a lot to me got started by random chance. I never work on anything anymore as hard as I worked on nearly everything when I was a few years younger. It never seems to pay off. And by that I mean that I don't work myself to nervous breakdowns. It is still good to have some sort of activity in life.

My son does this - he is pretty good at it, too

I've taught myself body language and forced myself to use inflection in my voice. I still slip up in most conversations and my voice can sound really childish sometimes. Especially soon as I get comfortable around others my forced normality goes out the window, but to be honest, i suspect people see right through it anyway. It's pretty much the same for body language too, but I think my voice is the most obvious. I also suck at expressing body language or being aware of how my own body language might come off.

This too. I mimic fictional people to create a "personality", I say that because I've been described by others as lacking one.

Most of it just comes naturally to me. Yes, some Aspies do have these skills instinctively. Being Aspie does not always mean having literally 0 social skills.

I am aware of my body language out in public. Sometimes I probably give off nervous body language when I'm feeling anxious, because I have social anxiety. But it's nothing that stands out.
I'm aware of my posture too. As a teenager I used to walk with hunched shoulders, but that isn't that uncommon among teenagers anyway. And as I became an adult I got into the habit of walking with my shoulders back.

So it all comes natural to me. I don't pace oddly or flap my hands on anything like that, well I don't anyway when not in public. You wouldn't think I'm Aspie just by walking past me. I just look like an ordinary 20-something woman.

Interesting question! 1) I do think being a girl helps sometimes because other girls will often mother you...at least for a little while... 2) Being around people can be helpful...I have 4 brothers and sisters....whom I love...but it definitely "pushed" me socially! 3) I think it is just a fantastic idea to try to enjoy and soak up all the wonderful things there are to learn and experience in the world! They help make you more balanced as a person....dancing, art, sing, music, languages, etc. All of those things have helped me with voice, body movement, etc. 4) One of my tricks that usually works well is while many people on the spectrum have what they call a "flat affect" I have a smile glued to my face! This makes me more approachable and I think likable....unless some has died or something....then it makes me look insensitive! Incidentally I studied Psychology in school (because I find people interesting), and I found out very quickly that I would make a terrible counselor partly because of my glued on smile!! 5) I also tend to act rather bouncy and hyper around other people....I think it's because of the stimulation....for a little while I get overly excited and then I get overloaded if it goes on for too long. I am definitely one of those sensory seekers! 6) I have some natural ability I think but some of it was learned as far as observing behavior goes. I spent my entire childhood trying to mimic the behaviors of others because I had no accommodations in my private school growing up and everyone thought I had ADHD and not Aspergers so I was told to "just work harder." I am so good at picking up tiny changes in other people's behavior now that I can tell when an NT friend of mine has something going on...even if she is trying to hide it!! She has told me that it really takes her off guard because she prides herself in being able to hide how she feels sometimes. However, I can NOT tell you what the difference MEANS! I have learned to say "You ok?" when I notice these changes and hope that they explain it!!

Ok, that's all I can think of right now

I don't have a flat voice, but a very singsong one. I wonder if that has to do with years of choir and singing lessons, although I've never been tone deaf. Singing helps you with body posture and breathing habits as well as making you aware of tonality and rythm.

Yoga is useful for breathing and body posture.

That said, stressful situations can make you forget everything you've learnt. I try to avoid socializing in large groups.