Explain the social problems

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So yeah. I have tried to understand aspergers syndrome, but the social aspect seems pretty unclear to me. So far i have got these:

Act inappropriate/say the "wrong" thing/dont express their emotions in an appropriate way
Dont understand the social rules (wich i guess makes them bad at following them)
Rigid social behaviour (dont understand this one well)
Inability to read nonverbal cues
Bad "theory of mind"/cognitive empathy
Lack of reciprocity (onesided conversation, controlling the rules, only seeing ones own needs and interesset. Is that the right interpretation?)
Difficulty making friends and making a bond
Bad conversation skills (dont understand this one well)

When you say they have bad social skills is these all they mean or what exactly is meant by that?

I dont really understand the idea of social skills. We are just humans walking around. We have toughts and feelings and we can express them to oneanother and we do that just for fun. So it is just going up to a person and say what you think, then the other person says what he thinks and so on. I dont understand were the "skills" part is.

Should i understand it this way: we sometimes need to behave in certain ways to not irritate and harm others. social skills is the abillty to
understand how to behave with other people and adapt to them and the lack of it is a person acting inappropriate all the time and thats an aspie?? In other words an aspies is a social "problem child"?

And this question: does aspies suffer from all kinds of lacking social skills or is it only certain types?

Conversation: It sounds ridiculous to say someone have bad conversation skills. How much you talk (meaning how much conversation you do)
is determined by how much you are a loudmouth or how passive and calm you are in regards to expressing what you think. Like me. In elementary school some were shocked of how quiet i was and commented it. At a time i wished i was mute, so there was no pressure to talk at all (that would have been a relief). So apparently, in groups, i have a severe lack of socalled "conversation skills". Except with friends. Then i am loud, outgoing and constantly talking (i fluctuate between introverted and extroverted mode and inbetween). But i dont have any wierd aspie symptoms. I can't see what's the skill part of being lesser able to shut up. OR: Should it be understanded in a whole nother way. Like knowing what is the right things to say and such. Please explain what it is about.

So when an aspie tells that he sucks in social situations, i dont really understand what that means. What's the problem. Is it:

You act the wrong way in many situations and unable to adapt to other people properly (for eksampel having inappropriate behaviour), because you lack the understanding.

You get really nervous and anxiouss and act wierd beacuse of this. (but thats another diagnosis: social anxiety disorder. or to a milder deegree "shyness")

By suck you mean: you are too passive in social situations (but that is introversion. not a disorder. just means you are calm and gentle the opposite of a person who cant shut up, you could say. i know such a person. he could benifit from getting a bit more introverted. get some "not talking, when people get annoyed"-skills. maybe thats a social skill )

What is the essens of autistics social problems? What's it about? It is so easy to say someone is "socially impaired", but whats the real practical problems in the daily life? Thats what i want to know. Tell me what the PRACTICAL problems are (what you do wrong. wich situations). Thanks. And is it every kind of social skill or only certain types?

The essence is that autistics think and feel and see and hear differently from NTs, and these differences cause communication clashes or misses during socialization, if the autistic person recognizes socialization and communication as activities that exist to begin with.

When interacting with autistics, NTs also lack social skills, because what is "right" or "wrong" to do depends on who is viewing the doing.

Since when did nonautistics say what they were thinking? There's your misunderstanding right there.

Which is why you're having a hard time understanding Aspie social difficulties. You say "we," but that "we" you speak of above is not us (those who have Autism).

"We" (those who DO have Autism), do NOT express our thoughts and feelings "just for fun." For Aspies, expression of thought, and especially expression of feelings, is a very serious business.

Banter, or what is known as "volleying" (taken from the tennis term), conversationally, is something that for the "we" you speak of, comes naturally. It doesn't for us. WE have to LEARN how to do it. And, you being neurotypical yourself, you probably are thinking (as many NT's do), "Well, everybody has to learn how to do that!"

Well, yes, everyone does, but for us it is different. For us, it is much harder, takes far longer, and many of us never match the level of NT's the same age as ourselves.

None of that stuff (conversational volley, reading body language, guessing how others are thinking, etc) comes naturally to us. We have to learn to process it all very intellectually, with logic. It's as if every gesture, expression, vocal inflection, has meaning, and each subtle thing (of which there are infinite variations that NT's can pick up on and interpret even though many of them they've never even seen before), for us has to be "stored" in a mental file so we can retrieve it and look up the stored definition for what it means.

Because we have to perform a tremendous amount of processing of all these things that come so much more naturally to you, whenever we find ourselves in social situations with non-Autistics, there is a LOT going on that goes straight over our heads. We miss so much of what's happening and being communicated, we feel left out, and of course, extremely uncomfortable. Thus we tend to avoid social gatherings, because it often feels pointless to be there. Why bother if more than half of what's going in during them, we totally miss?

We also don't think as much in terms of social hierarchies, if at all.

What's a social hierarchy?

Whatever it is, the fact that I even have to ask probably gives away that I must agree with you.

Seriously though, I don't know what you mean by it.

Resistance is futile.

I think social hierarchies are like alphas and betas in wolfpacks.

Another difference between autistics and NTs is that resistance is less futile, meaning that social pressures to conform are not as strong in general for autistics as they are for NTs.

It is also more difficult for autistics to be accepted into and belong to a social group, i.e. assimilation into a collective, because autistics are not projecting the standard set of NT non-verbal cues or outlouding the standard set of verbalizations. This is because this standard is not felt to be normal by autistics, and indeed it is difficult to distinguish what is normal for NTs from what is not normal for NTs, so all this nonormality will blockade normal behavior according to NT normality.

You really think so? I don't. My experience personally, and that of my three boys has been just the opposite. FAR more pressure.

Maybe you mean "expectations?" We've all gotten tremendous pressures to conform, but even so it has always appeared that people are satisfied with less conformation. Pressure is off once satisfied, but before that? Hell.

I think that autistics do generally feel less social pressure to conform. Your kids might be socially adept enough to recognize what there is to conform TO. When I was little, I had no idea that there was something to conform to and felt no social pressure at all.

I didn't realize that there was something to conform to until my diagnosis.

Powerwindow, I don't think you can really understand any of this aside knowing a few folks with Asperger's Syndrome.

My godson has AS and I noticed myself becoming impatient with him as he became a teen with better communication skills. I realized the paradox in this; me more impatient with him as he improved. I wondered whether I was being unfair to him and this led me to investigate by reading here at Wrong Planet.

Here I learned terms for what I was experiencing with him; reading nonverbal cues, theory of mind, executive function, etc.

I realized that as my godson's vocabulary increased and a linguistic prowess emerged, I expected him to become virtually neurotypical. Well, he's not, he's a linguistically gifted teen with Asperger's Syndrome who still has poor theory of mind, misses nonverbal cues, has poor executive function and more. His mind is wired differently from most other folks and because he is learning and maturing, I expect that he will continue to gain skills. But, none of it will ever be as natural, fluid or easy as it is for me and my biological children. Functioning in mainstreamed classes in high-school is stressful and exhausting for him because he thinks through so much of what is instinctive & fliud for the other kids.

Subsequently, I have changed workplaces and now relate with three coworkers who are on the spectrum. Experiencing theory of mind, for instance, play out in conversation yields a much higher understanding than reading about ToM. It's the difference between reading about driving and actually driving a car.

It's more than difficult to get a grasp on the difference between AS and neurotypical without seeing and hearing it in a real person. Why try so hard to parse through the myriad complex differences except for being in relationship?

Wow. I don't know what to do say to that. I wasn't diagnosed until I was 49. I felt tremendous pressure to conform all of my life. I didn't recognize it as such until my teens really. Before that it just felt like everyone wanted me to be something I wasn't, and couldn't be. Still feels like that, but I've recognized it as conformity for a very long time, and my kids recognized it even earlier, but for them it was mostly because I've taught them that's what it is.

I think that younger people diagnosed in childhood are finding out about conformity and social norms and social pressure earlier than older people not diagnosed in childhood, since they are being explicitly taught it.

I actually feel nostalgia for the days of my more severely autistic childhood, when I was completely free from the "social prison".

I wish I could say the same. But then, I do actually feel much freer today than I ever did as a child. Childhood for me was a social prison. But I can say my Autism wasn't "severe." I've always been pretty aware of all the crap going on around me (as well as a lot of the better things). I was Aspie, for sure, but not totally isolated, though there was a long time I wished I was, so I get why, if you were, you would long for it's return. I much prefer being who I am today, as aware of the BS as I was then, but better equipped to deal with it.