New Insight on Eye Contact???

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Fellow Aspies, please help me with an issue regarding eye contact. I want to know if this experience is common or if I'm an abnormality (ok, BESIDES being an Aspie...):

There are VERY few people I consider myself close to, those being my wife, kids, mother, and one other person. I refer to them as being inside my "bubble." There have been other people inside my bubble at different times of my life, but they've all moved away or died. I think the maximum number of people I've had in this bubble at any given time is six or so.

That's probably a pretty big bubble for most Aspies.

So anyway, like the rest of you I have problems maintaining eye contact with people. Every time I make eye contact with another person it inflicts huge amounts of anxiety. The way I describe it to my NT friends is that it compares to standing in the open door of an airplane, getting ready to jump out with a parachute -- I know I'll come out fine, but I'm exceedingly anxious anyway.

So anyway, like some people on here have experienced, I do not feel that type of anxiety with very small children (say, age 5 or younger). I don't know why that is, but I recall others on here commenting the same thing.

Tonight I spent about 3 1/2 hours talking to the "one other person" in my bubble. I had never really held her eye contact very much throughout our friendship...probably out of habit more than anything. You see, I only recently realized she had made it into my bubble. As it tends to be a rare occurrence and we haven't been friends for very long, it rather took me by surprise.

So tonight I spent the entire 3 1/2 hours making prolonged eye contact with her as we carried on our conversation. Here's the kicker: There was NO ANXIETY WHATSOEVER! It felt very natural to me. Although I'm sure my prolongued eye contact felt unnatural to her (because I don't really understand how NTs do it...when to break the eye contact, how long to hold it, when to re-establish it, etc.), she is a kind and understanding person who easily (it seems) looks past my oddities as an Aspie. It didn't seem to bother her at all, and when I mentioned it she told me she had noticed I was doing it.

For me, personally, I have found that the closer I am to a person, the easier it is to hold eye contact with them. Is this true for the rest of you, as well? Inquiring minds want to know.

that is eactlyl so... with me. eith friend im fine.... i know what you mean with dhildren.. i could stare in stare in their eyes for ours but i would be put on a list

The same is true for me. The more comfortable I am with someone the better I am at eye contact. I've always thought there was a psychological component to it, even though the discomfort was sensory. Actually I think most of my discomfort is the awareness that the other person is looking at me and I feel exposed and vulnerable like a crab without it's shell. I used to be so bad I would literally turn my head to the side.

I don't recall having any difficulties with eye contact until I suffered a severe psychological trauma aged fourteen. After that I was baffled to find that I could not look at children my own age, or speak to them. I was fine with children up to about age 7 (and interestingly up to age 10 if they were more childish than the typical 8-year-old). I was also fine with many adults, and I could not understand who was going to be okay and who not. It felt like being hit in the eyes.

It still happens sometimes, but more rarely. I think sometimes normal people talk about not being able to look people in the face, usually for shame or fear. Something that might be related: I have always been able to manage children just by looking at them into their eyes. Sometimes a child will turn their eyes away so I cannot look at them, or they say "I'm not listening", while covering their eyes with their hands.

The closest I ever got to understanding what was happening was that if I saw someone looking at me, it seemed like they had control over me like I do over children. If someone criticised me with their eyes, I stopped what I was doing. Dealing with the eye contact was not just about making myself look at the person's nose or eyebrows, it was also about holding my own self, holding onto my feelings, quite trivial feelings like whether I was going to drink tea or coca cola. Although that does sound trivial, life becomes impractical if you keep changing your mind over such little things.

Most of my schoolfriends were incredibly kind and gentle, so over about four years I learned to look at their eyes and hang onto my own feelings, up to a point. These days I can do the eye contact but when people criticise me or even comment on something I am planning to do, it takes me an unfeasibly long time to reconsider my decision. I'm thinking of deliberately reducing eye contact and see if that helps.

Hope this helps you, because you have just helped me figure that out.

Actually the more I think about it I think the psychological discomfort is the realization that someone has entered the " bubble" of my detachment. I don't know if anyone else experiences this but I've always felt the disconnect with the rest of the world. I'm better than before but I'm so much more an observer than a participator that it's a shock to realize that someone is aware of me. I'm sure that sounds weird but it's what I do.

I find it hard work making eye contact with most people. It might be difficult with my parents because I think my dad also has AS, but sometimes I even feel awkward making eye contact with my Mum (who has traits of AS) and my sister (who is basically NT).

It's not so bad whilst I am listening to another person but I can't control my eyes and speak at the same time so mostly I have no idea what I'm doing with my eye's whilst I'm speaking. I deliberately break eye-contact a lot by closing/opening my eyes because I feel uncomfortable staring at the other person.

Truthfully, I think eye-contact has more to do with my own mood rather than the other person. Some days it's easier than others for no reason.

Also, when someone enters my bubble, I would tend to make less eye-contact with them rather than more.

Crab without a shell is a good analogy!

Marsian wrote:

Yes. I go to different peoples houses to work. On one job I had another guy help me. The woman who was one of the owners of the house told my partner that he didn’t like the way I was looking at her. At the time I was completely baffled by this comment. I wasn’t even in the slightest interested in her, in fact she wasn’t even my type. Thinking back on it I think the fact that I WASN’T making eye contact may have given her the impression that I was interested in her. How ironic is that?

I have poor eyecontact. There are only a few people I have descent eyecontact with and most are family.

I've had males think that Im flirting with them, because I don't maintain eyecontact and I look nervous. I was at a restaurant years ago and I heard this young waitress whisper I was looking at her legs! I was stunned, because all I try to do is get through most social interatactions without having PAs or jumping up and go running out the door.

NTs they make no sense

lol, yeah, I've been told that I flirt with everyone before as well.

NTs, grr.

Wow, veeeeerrrry interesting!

I just thought it worth mentioning that not all Aspies feel uncomfortable with eye contact. Some stare too much. I am kind of in the middle somewhere usually, I have learned to lower my eyes when appropriate sometimes, but at other times I look too directly at people -- and I have very large eyes -- so, often, men think I find them romantically attractive when actually I am just looking because I am trying to show that I am attentive to what they are saying! I have even had guys get all shy and look away from my gaze because they feel overwhelmed.

I'm not good with eye contact. I just naturally avoid it subconsciously. I can do it but it'll be an intimidating serial killer gaze or at least that's how I feel it looks.(which can be useful) I'm better with people I'm comfortable with but I don't really even notice doing it. Sometimes I'll avoid it all together and look in another direction or just short glances before fidgeting or looking at something else.

Thanks for your replies so far. I'd like to get a lot of responses so I could get a good feel for how this affects different aspies.

Someone said NOT making eye contact is sometimes seen as flirtatious. That's true. Lowering one's eyes is sometimes seen as a sign of being coy, i.e. "Ooh, I like you, but I can't look at you because then you would realise I like you, because I would blush; so I am looking down."

That happens to me sometimes too -- sometimes I act shy and girlish, because I don't want to seem too forward, and because I am trying to convey all the correct social signals of femininity, and then that comes over as flirty. In reality I am not very shy, though.

When speaking to Black men with a traditional Xhosa upbringing, I usually lower my eyes because it is the correct social protocol for a woman to do that in that culture.

for mammals in general eye contact is mostly tied in with dominance, I wonder if thats what the problem is, I havn't had much problems with it, so I can't be sure myself.

I can make eye contact,... if I have to,..... I guess. The problem is it's very uncomfortable if I'm not "connecting" with someone, and since I rarely "connect" the emotional feeling I get is extrordinarily distracting to maintaining a train of thought.