Social skills

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What do you think it prevents you from having normal social skills?

I think what makes me struggle to understand someone socially is being unable to understand another person's context in sufficient time to properly understand their communication. I have to work it out from the clues I can see and first principles. For me everything in the universe is relevant all the time, but most people have much more limited context to their communication.

I think I come off as standoffish a lot of the time. My social anxiety holds me back from speaking out more, and also I am slow to think of a response to jokes, other than laugh. Also I tend to mumble or speak quietly, and I speak in an unclear cockney slur, although I'm rather country.
I am on the ball with picking up on subtle social cues, but responding to some of them I am about 5 seconds behind. So people just think I am awkward or boring.

ToM

I'm very direct & straightforward & also in my own head a lot.

My issue is what I've seen termed as "mind blindness." If I understand it, I assume everyone does. If I think it's interesting, so must everyone else. If I think it's funny, I'm putting my money on it being a crowd pleaser. Except my brand of funny comes out of my own little bizarre world that I live in, which is kind of like Eddie Izzard going on about elephants on skiis, only he has much better delivery and overall a better shtick.

So there I am, don't know anything about what they're bonding over, so I'm blathering on trying to interest them with my interests and make them laugh with my odd humor, and all the while I'm really just talking at them while utterly oblivious to how receptive they are (or have long ceased to be).

Mostly I have trouble imagining how other people think. By the time I get a clue about what is going on, the situation has moved on anyway.

I have trouble telling how my facial expressions and body language are coming off, so when I behave in a way I think is normal, often someone around me (usually my parents) will comment after the fact that I looked or sounded odd.

I also struggle to read facial expressions, partly due to an inability to look at the faces of people I've only just met, and partly because when I do look at the faces of people I'm comfortable around, it takes me a long time to decipher what their face is saying, like being partially fluent in a foreign language. It literally feels to me like they're wearing a mask, and all I have to go on to guess their emotional state is the sound of their voice (which is also tricky) and the words they use.

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding people because they talk faster than my brain can process their words, and before I've interpreted one sentence, they've moved on to the next, and the words just become a jumbled mess in my head. I have trouble expressing myself in a way others understand too. I'll say things that make perfect sense to me, but my friends or co-workers will be confused, or have to rephrase what I said in an effort to make sure they understood me, and to make things worse, I often have trouble understanding the way they rephrased it, so I can't tell if they understood my meaning or not.

I recently realized that while I seldom look at eyes, and don't study faces, I'm pretty sensitive to body language. Even the stick-figure cartoons of XKCD convey a lot of information. In traffic, I don't look at the drivers; I watch for lane drift, etc.
I can sure relate to not being fast enough to follow speech, though. I had an ESL roommate who thought that a final "e" was always silent. It was years later that I finally understood some of his sentences, and they had been uselessly using up brain power ever since we split. My wife had a habit of slipping in a false assumption for the foundation of a big explanation about the people around us, and it would take me weeks or months to dig it out by re-playing the conversation.

its basically our DNA that prevents the social skills to kick in (at least for Aspergers)

Yes, very similar to me.
Except I can sometimes sense other people's emotions, strongly in fact, but without knowing how to interpret what they mean or how to react in a socially acceptable manner.
And I also probably miss a lot of body language cues.

Preoccupation for me.

And social anxiety caused by being ridiculed a LOT when young and having some terrible things said about me due to my autism diagnosis and traits. I believed a lot of that stuff about me. Stuff said by books, by my own mother, by "professionals" (including one, Eric Fombonne, who's on Wikipedia) who thought their stereotypes of what autism was ought to win them a Nobel prize, but really they had no clue.

This made me think of a memory of I was 14 that imprinted on me and my social skills. I had this "frienemy" (a friend who is really your enemy) who was also 14. She was crying over a boy, openly, at a church function. All us girls were supposed to be crowding around her helping her (I didn't really care because I hated her, but I was standing around). So she was crying and her face was red. Her hair was done perfectly, her makeup was still perfect even though she was crying, and she was dressed expensively.

Adults kept coming by, I guess noticing that she was crying, and asking how she was. She would instantly change her face into a smiling mask and say, "Oh I'm great Sister So-and-So, how are you doing?" Her face and eyes were still red, she wasn't wiping her face, but her expression was happy and glad to see them. As soon as they walked away, she dropped the expression and resumed crying and complaining.

I was thunderstruck that it worked. The adults accepted her mask and walked on. They were distracted by it and forgot the redness of her face and the tears. Her expression, which was mechanical, commanded them to pay attention to THAT and not to the things she couldn't control.

I will sometimes do this myself if I'm walking or moving funny (because of my neurological disease). I'll look at someone in the face and start talking to them about themselves. They'll stop noticing the stuff I can't control.

Maybe the next time you think someone is about to get after about the way you do/don't react to things, you could mechanically do a facial expression and ask them about themselves? Distract them- train them to stop focusing on you.

Gosh. I've got same troubles. Especially everytime when people think I am mumbling but for me I am actually trying to interact and I was thinking that it is normal. Then people would laugh. How lame is it. I'm also usually the last person to understand what is the group talking about, so I often appear lost and deaf. Oftentimes, to pile these insufficiencies, I sulk in with my deep depression causing me isolation and displeasure in socializing. Thinking that I'm a student nurse, I guess, I just come off as a Dory in the world of scary ocean of people.

Not good at adapting quickly verbally. I can understand people quite well on a deeper level, like the things they want, but reading their cues in the moment is very hard.