Eye Contact

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I know that problems with eye contact seems to be a common aspie trait, both from reading and personal experience, but when I do look people in the eyes, I can only look them in one eye.

It just seems impossible to look at both and I focus in on one.

Anyone else have this problem, or something similar?

for me, looking in the eyes is always a challange to fight

Welcome!!

you wll find that most of us can't even look at the screen thinking that what we read is somewhat personal....

...some of us can't even look at ourselves in the mirror... but we are all learning!

Yes.

I am like that aswell.

I will look in one eye for a few seconds, then i will look in the other one, and hope the person does not notice what i am doing.

I agree...I find it hard to look myself in the eye...

When I look at others I go from one eye to the other. Recently though, I have discovered that I can look at the part of the nose that is between both eyes. It seems to give the illusion of looking at them without seeing someones eyes and if I blur my peripheral vision, I don't even see their eyes.

As a teacher I need to look at others frequently and although it is extremely difficult I have learnt a few tricks. Another is that most times we are in conversation about something that is in front of us so i look at that while talking about it.

Blurring my eyes so i can't focus on eyeballs is my most common strategy though.

Probably why Indians put dots on thier heads .... it's the Tantric Target!

The deeper i look into someone's eyes the more affected i get. If I look someone in the eye it is a quick glance and I then look away before the other person looks too close at me or a superficial but longer lasting look at the eyes (this doesn't occur too often) when I gaze or stare with unfocused eyes. This means I never really make proper eye contact.

One time i forced myself to stand about 15cm (6in) away from the mirror and stare into my own eyes. I got really anxious and after a minute i felt extreemely dizzy.

[quote="Erlyrisa]=

...some of us can't even look at ourselves in the mirror... but we are all learning![/quote]

And some of us love it. I actually spent a good deal of tonight, getting high on eyes (listen to harvester of eyes - BOC). Dancing, and playing. It's good, but it's a drug, like any other.

I agree, when I make a glance at somebody I usually look in one eye.
How can people look in both eyes?

Either it requires them to look at both eyes at the same time, which must be impossible if not painfull. Or it requires the person to constantly keep track of both eyes by moving the eye contact constantly from left to right at lightening speed.

As for eyecontact, I tend to avoid this altogether. I hate it when the other person is looking at me while I am trying to avoid looking at them, I wish they could understand that I don't see the point in eye contact and at the same time why they do need eye contact. How complex is non verbal communication, can a person read a bible to another person without uttering a word and by just using their eyes?

It's so funny now when I look back at things I've said. I work in an environment where the project teams are spread all over the world and very NT people have a terrible time with that because they can't "see" the person. They feel like they don't know what's really going on. (You know, the feeling we have all the time.) I remember the times they've mistakenly shoved my groups in with Training. Trainers really have issues with this because typically their personalities are geared to pick up on non-verbal cues (saves them time in class when not everyone has to state if they are falling behind), anyway they get all upset and say things like I HAVE to see them. I can't tell if I can trust them unless I see them. I would always respond, why do you care if you see them? Eyes don't tell you anything and if they do, it's usually a lie. The funny thing is that although I knew I was different from them, I thought it was all in their heads that they could read non-verbal. I'm still not convinced. They didn't seem to pick up very many facts. They were mostly picking up unsubstantiated feelings based on their own feelings that later proved completely wrong. Still, it's amusing to think that back then I was telling them there was no point in looking at eyes for clues.

When i was at school somebody once said why are you staring at the top of my head. I did not know i had Aspergers way back then.

I guess it was a subconscious way of avoiding eye contact,even now i have terrible problems with it, i generally sit to the side of people i am going to talk to, if someone is directly opposite me i feel very uncomfortable and look at wall's e.t.c. this makes the person talking to me move there head to my eye line.

All in all the longer i have to stand there the more obvious it is to the other person that there is something wierd about me.

Since diagnosis i may just explain to people before hand that i have AS and this is one of the traits.

i don't know how this will be received but i did read long ago that in places like japan and china they like to maintain eye-cotnact all the time- but the way they do it for themselves ISN'T by looking the person in the eye. They focus at the central point on the bridge of the nose- it APPEARS like their maintaining eye-contact, and allows them to feel comfortable in the fact that they DON'T have to look someone in the eye but they are being received as they are....

i odn't know if anyone else has heard this before but maybe it'll help!

Nope not me.

I've taught myself to look into peoples eyes but I can only maintain eye contact for a few secs before I become tempted to look elsewhere. it gets creepy after a while especially if you look into the eyes of people with lighter irises (i.e green, blue, almond, etc...)
No offence to anyone whose eyes happen to be coloured in that way

That's what we were taught to do and what I do, but I still get told I have a weird, penetrating stare when I think I'm being normal. When I practice in the mirror, I can't see that it looks weird or penetrating and I can't look into eyes for long without being freaked out (think horror movie type of freaking out). So, I can do it, but it appears strange to people anyway. I just tell them my brain can't process the expressions people try to give off with their eyes so not to let it bother them when I can't look or look away. I tell them that it unnerves me that I don't know what people are trying to tell me with their eyes. Then, they kind of freak out because they try to imagine what it would be like not to understand eyes when they are so dependent on them. I usually get, "Wow. I would hate that. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't read eyes." That seems to allow them to understand why I don't do it and relax. If I don't do that, they either feel like I think they are lying (because of the penetrating stare) or they think I am lying because I look away. It's just easier for me to explain, let it weird them out and get it over with. Sometimes they even tell me what people's eyes mean after that. LOL That's pretty cute when they do that.

Mostly I work with techno geeks. None of them care. None of us belongs to the group. LOL

trained myself to look into their eyes; an attempt to fit in I guess, but i find a lot of people don't want to look at me, like they are afraid or something

I've always found eye contact extremely difficult. I've read that autistics can find eye contact actually "painful", but I wouldn't call it physically "painful", per se. It's just extremely uncomfortable, and like someone else said, creepy. I couldn't look at my own eyes in a mirror until well into my teens, maybe even a bit later. I couldn't even look into the eyes of a person in a photograph if they were looking straight at the camera when the picture was taken. I've gotten much better at this now.

I can't look people in the eye for more than a second at a time, unless they are people I know very well and have learned to tolerate their eyes. I have had to force myself to maintain eye contact during job interviews, and I sort of compensate by blinking a lot or, if I'm listening to them speak, nodding a lot. I must look like such a ret*d. Fortunately I have a job (even though I absolutely despise it), and won't be going on any job interviews again anytime soon.