Mimicking People

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Do you mimic or copy people? What I mean is do you end up copying the way people act or speak, their peculiarities? I do. I find that if I interact with someone long enough I end up like them...a bit. A couple examples: this guy would snap his fingers weirdly and now I sometimes snap my fingers. I say some of the same things my stepfather says. I kind of talk/make same expressions like my old mentor/math teacher. I think I do this because I don't know how to act and I subconsciously/consciously copy people to fit in. Anyone relate?

i totally lack that talent, in fact i fairly envy people with the ability to copy other people verbatim.

I can completely understand where you are coming from - that was one of the major factors of why I went seeking a diagnosis regarding my Asperger’s (I just didn’t know what it was at the time!).

It got to a point where I was totally weirded out by how often I copied and then re-played other people’s style of humour/jokes, tag lines and if they gestured when they spoke etc. I couldn’t believe that without even trying to copy them I would suddenly find myself doing “other people’s things” all the time. I had used these sub-conscience tactics to try and connect with people my entire life but never really stopped and took any notice of it until this year.

This has its uses though – when I travelled overseas and spent quite a bit of time in Germany I picked up “real” German pretty quickly, which means my intonation and speed is really “natural” and my accent is more German than most foreigners. Well… maybe that isn’t completely “useful” but it did get me good grades in High School ! !

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Yes! After speaking with someone for just a few minutes I begin to talk how they do! This is tied I think to my identity issues/no sense of self because I'm always in flux according to who I interact with.

y'all have these traits in common with professional actors.

Yeah all the time I will impersonate people and copy what they say a lot and will quite what they say over and over at times sometimes randomly when I am alone while I am talking to myself at times.

Since I don't interact much with people in-person, I've mostly picked this up on rpgs and the like. It's embarrassing, because I very, very often want to use so many of the same words that were already used by the last few people that wrote something.

When it comes to IMing and emailing, I'm ALWAYS the one to adjust my way of writing to mimic theirs. I'm always the one to drop my emoticons, internet lingo, and the like in order to match the other person's style. I think this is more of a submissiveness thing and fear of rejection.

When I'm with someone in person, I often want to use phrases or words that I've heard others say. However, I can't; they sound too foreign to me when I imagine saying them myself. So then I force myself to come up with different words that I've spoken before and am comfortable with. This just slows my speech down, since I want to use all of these other phrases but can't.

There have been times I've caught myself fiddling with an object in the exact same way as the person I was having a conversation with. I was never sure who was copying who, but I always thought copying was a very non-autistic thing to do.

My son copies other kids all the time, the things they say, the games they play. I think it's a good way for him to socialise and make friends but on the other hand I feel like that's not who he is. He tells me that sometimes his friend tells him to stop copying him.

I used to when I was younger. I often mimicked adults I liked. The way they talked, walked etc.

Yes, I used to do this all the time as a child even though I was very much not like the other children. Evolutionarily this is a very important skill as attatchment to a group is essential for safety, if you can look and behave like the others then you are less likely to be noticed by a predator. It is a developmental milestone for children, it's just like everything else, I took it to extremes...it was very useful because I did a lot of acting as a child and so mimicking was a really useful tool (as is rote memory), it also meant I was good with accents. It was however fairly embarrassing for my Mum and Dad given that I would adopt whatever accent of the people we were with. I think for me a large part of it was never being able to belong to groups of people and never fitting in. It was almost a trade for the fact that I had vastly underdeveloped social skills.
As an adult I've got a lot better at being concious of when I am doing it, getting to know who I am has been key because I am better at seperating myself from other people. However, through my teens it meant that the minute I had to be verbal and be with people I found it very difficult to 'be myself'. It felt safer to 'be the other person'. It also meant I was pretty vulnerable as a teen and when I had to be with people I was pretty easily led because I could only be another person. Donna Williams wrote about something similar in 'Exposure Anxiety- The invisible Cage' which I am reading at the moment.

Mimic frequently. I've been so special interested in Van Halen, I'll probably do the tapping fingers with arena grimace the rest of my life. I try to be careful with movies, the dialogue often sticks for months. If not years.