needed: checklist of "basic social skills"

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I have some ideas.

How about sympathy for people you trust after a disagreement, and empathy for people who get over life-threatening situations?

I have ZERO empathy and sympathy. And I'm having no luck faking it. Oh well.

define sympathy and empathy. If that means pity, then i would disagree.
A

Sympathy is feeling sorry for something someone has done wrong. Empathy is putting yourself in other people's shoes, so to speak, and understanding that they have had rough experiences.

so, does that mean relating to people who are having a rough time? I can support that as a great social skill. I just aint much of a dictionary whiz(kinda the opposite actually).
A

You are correct, Axelkat.

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Last edited by Ante on 09 Nov 2005, 3:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

absolute zero: succinctly stated! i like what you've said.

maybe i should clarify. i am not entirely sure if i will ever be able to "change" this aspect of myself. however, i am willing to cooperate with my psychiatrist. i think that the things that we see as social skills are entirely inverse to what the rest of the world does.

i accept myself, definitely, but i agree that this whole exercise seems a little bit useless.

all i have been able to find so far are extremely general ideas. there are no concrete examples of what constitutes any of these skills. thus i am having problems identifying "where" i have problems.

Absolute zero:

That's a No ? Oupss!

What's the problem with that ? I mean, the big part of the problem with social skills for me is that i observed a lot of specifics behaviour in poeple and i often tried to do the same thing. It never seemed to be well received by other ? Timming probably ?

How to know when it is ok to do X and when it is not ?

I saw on your blog that you don't have a heck of a lot of patience for smalltalk. How good are you with the normal back and forth of a conversation? Allowing one topic to flow into another even before the first topic has necessarily been resolved, finding random things in the environment to make comments about ("The clouds are gorgeous today, aren't they?"), smoothly filling the awkward silences, making sure the other person is as engaged in the conversation as you are... These may be tedious but the way I see it, they're just tools to your own ends and can be quite effective when your goals require the cooperation of other people. And they're concrete things to add to a checklist if that's what the psych wants.