Eye Contact- How does it make you feel?

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I dont look people directly into the eyes often.

I keep thinking that they are going to tell me to stop staring at them, or i think they are going to hate me if i look into thier eyes.

I don´t really mind it, but I often forget to look into them. People seem to expect me to look at them once in a while and if I don´t, they just think that I ignore them. It sucks ,

Managed to lock in on it today. Haven't done it for a long time. Funny thing is that once I do, the other person starts evading my eyes. It's like they're way too afraid to hold it with me.

You could be staring at them too much. I find that if I can force myself into eye contact I sometimes get too caught up in the details of the other person's eyes.

You know' Scrulie, I think it is pretty similar.

BTW I like your avatar!

Is it not a wonderous thing how we share so many small and inexplicable oddities?

Eye contact is distracting more than anything. If I look at the other person's eyes, I sometimes forget what I want to say, or it's just difficult to formulate my thoughts well. So, when I'm talking about something that matters to me, and I want to sound coherent enough, I may have to look in some other direction. I think it happens at least partly because I need to imagine the things I'm talking about. To really be able to focus on the images I see in my mind, and put them into words, I have to withdraw into myself for a while - which means either shutting the other person out completely and staring at them without seeing them (which is difficult), or staring at some inanimate object instead. Eye contact, on the other hand, distracts me from what is going on in my mind and if I concentrate on it, I may not be able to think and talk as well as I would like to.

If I dislike the person I'm talking to on a gut level, and/or the situation is in some way embarrassing, then eye contact may be disturbing as well, though I have difficulty describing exactly why.

With me it's a bit different, more like some anti-gravitational force pushing me away. I try to lock my eyes with the other person's, but they keep sliding off. Like two magnets when one puts their identical poles together.

Eye contact feels like I'm being tazered! A horrible electric zap! And this feeling even extends to posing for photos!! I can't even stand to make "eye contact" with a camera!! If it's with someone I care about, I can endure it. But when it's with a stranger or acquaintance, the zap just makes me angry and then I begin to glare and hold the eye contact longer than I should! Ugh! So of course that leads to bad vibes all around. Back in high school, I got in the bad habit of staring (glaring?) directly into the other person's eyes, because I'd been told over and over that I needed to learn to make eye contact, so as not to appear "dishonest." I'm finally breaking the habit, but it's still just a miserable nuisance to have to think and worry about my eye contact when I'm trying to communicate with someone. That's a cool tip about focusing on the other person's left eye!! I'm going to give that a try.

I am told I am normal in regard to eyecontact, yet I hate it, especially with strangers on the street.

It's fine for 1-2 seconds, then my eyes feel hot, and I get nervous, then I get a sense of buzzing, of static, then it gets worse and worse until I can't do anything but look away.
Not only am I ashamed and uncomfortable, but my meager conversational abilities are, by this time, completely gone.

All of this takes no more than 4-5 seconds.

The strange thing is, is that I can stand looking at people's eyes, so long as they aren't looking at my eyes.

Did you never wonder why you should maintain eye contact? When I look into someones eyes, I just see a pair of eyeballs looking back at me! Does it mean anything? "Normal" people think this is deeply significant, but if you ask them why, they can't explain (try it!).

Try considering the possibility that your way of thinking is not wrong!

As a child, all I heard was "Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

And I was punished severely when I didn't, so I did learn to look, usually at their mouths. That kind of freaked me out, because they would become a disembodied mouth.

I think I make more normal eye contact now. I became interested in microexpressions and try to read people's faces. Sometimes I notice that their mouths' are smiling while their eyes are hard and cold. I like it when the corner's of the eyes crinkle and I know they are really friendly and not faking a smile. Looking at the eyes, if only briefly, is very important.

Appears easier for me than others here, though maintaining eye contact still takes significant effort. I can relate to many of the comments here: a noisy buzz, zap, distractive. I really must force myself to try and maintain eye contact, because the lack of can viewed as being deceitful and uncaring by others. Accessing pictures in my mind requires my eyes to wander a bit.

I tend to stare at people's eyes when having a conversation, then realize that I've probably passed the normal length of time one is supposed to look at someone's eyes then I get fixated on trying to look away in a way that is not abrupt and appears normal and I lose the ability to listen to the conversation because I'm so caught up in looking away and then whether it's now okay to look at them again - phew - it's hard work.

For me, it’s like two like poles of a magnet repelling each other, a repulsion. I look at people’s mouth when they talk rather then their eyes. So it looks as though I maintain eye contact.

I think its got to do with ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, not on a physical devlopmental level but a psychological level. Autism is a developmental delay, the social brain is less devloped.

Recapitulation_theory

Thus, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny infers that we autistics exhibit a primitive evolutionary stage of psychological development. Thus, like our gorillas and chimpanzee ancestors we find eye contact threatening. This would infer that autism is not due to faulty genes, but it is due to the absence of a few recently evolved social genes. We are not defective but are born at the wrong time. This would also explain many autistic peoples affinity for animals.

That's fascinating! I've always wondered why eye contact makes me feel so threatened, when I knew intellectually and emotionally there's no need to fear the other person. I feel a very primitive urge to jerk my eyes away from theirs, and I feel the same way when I get too physically close to someone else unexpectedly, like bumping into someone in a crowd or having to shake hands. So the tie to our lack of social evolution certainly makes sense. Thanks for sharing that!!