The non-verbal

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I'd like to discuss the non-verbal, I don't have a specific question, just generally wanting to hear people's thoughts / stories / opinions / questions / advice / experiences / etc. on the subject...

I can't understand Your point, really... What is what You want to talk about?

She means non-verbal communication, and our opinions on it, or troubles we experience with it. Things like gestures, eye contact, facial expressions, stance... We usually have more trouble picking up on non-verbal cues when we interact with others than non-autistics have...

I wish I'd have anything to say about it, but today, I wouldn't know what to say. Partly because I'm so utterly blind to non-verbal cues that I find it hard to talk about them, and partly because my well seems to be running dry. Usually, I'd share my experiences and impressions, though.

When I was your age I didn't even know that there was a sub-text that I wasn't getting. In fact, I only became aware of it in my early forties!

When I was being assessed for AS, I was telling the doctor about how much I value words. To me, they are sacred, and they are my anchors. My husband was in the room for the assessment. The doctor said to me, "What you don't understand are the meanings that flow beneath the words. For instance, when I shrugged a minute ago, your husband knew what I was saying, but you didn't, because you asked me to clarify. When I pause, it may be that I'm waiting for a response, or it may be that I have the floor and want to continue speaking. Your husband can read that. You can't."

He was 100% correct.

I also repeat myself a lot. I will say the same thing several times in several different ways until the person I'm talking to either interrupts me or says "I understand." I can't read the non-verbal cues regarding whether I'm being understood. I can't read eyes, facial expressions, body language, etc. So I keep going and going.

One of the things I'm beginning to cherish is being alone. Now that I know why I can't be part of a social group, I feel freed to enjoy my solitude. I like the quiet--the break from words. There is nothing to interpret but the task at hand, and that is a great relief.

I can't read non-verbal communication worth a damn. I've read books and watched videos on the subject and I still don't get it.

I spent my whole teenage years contemplating NonVerbal communication in the wrong way, by trying to analyze it too much and writing nonsense about it.
Later I started learning it and I'm still learning it. I believe that it is learnable.
At this moment I don't "know" what I've learned enough to share it.

All I can remember is that the first most important thing I had to learn was how to make eye contact, because by not even looking I definitely wasn't seeing ANY non-verbal signs.

NV is partly learned sign language I guess, and partly "natural" (for NT) extended emoticon beyond the face and into the whole body. In order to learn to do it myself I needed to extend my self-expression not just from my brain and face but ... well I think it involved changing my sense of self from being a brain behind my eyes to being a whole body. I needed to ...
-watch other people and figure out what they were communicating and practice the NV expressions with a mirror
-get feedback from my friend, therapist, other people (about whether it looked natural, spontaneous, and "normal")
-get some training about how to coordinate my whole body (dance, karate, acting, etc)
-etc.

I said before NV is like a sign language. I think that deaf people who sign and read lips probably have no problem reading non-verbal cues.

Some of NV seems more natural after learning it than before. For example, a woman might adjust her hair and glance at a man if she's interested because she wants to be noticed and be a little bit more attractive at the moment she gets noticed.

I'm definitely no expert about NV and I'm still trying to figure it out.

Oh, I get it. Sorry, but I'm not that intelligent

Welll I have mostly problems with understanding people's intentions... And I always take their words very literally... I can't understand the "silence", as I call those eye&body signals they tend to be sending to eachother, or to myself. I have to be told everything straight, without me having to working things out or guessing their intentions...

What if, by making eye contact, you distract yourself so much that you can't catch the words?

If eye contact is so crucial, why do people do fine without it in cultures where it's prohibited?

I don't think Í was ever bad at reading body language. The kind of non verbal that I've no clue about is figuring what the other person's intentions are when they're hiding them out of malice or out of phoniness.

Eg: if someone insists I'm welcome into their home but then disappear into the kitchen leaving me to sip my tea alone in the living-room, I used to believe their words (that I'm welcome) rather than notice the behavior.

Reading thru this thread, there's something I want to mention. I am reminded of it and chuckle to myself over it now. Since I'm reminded, I have this compulsion to share it because it's kind of funny to me in retrospect.
Throughout my growing up years, I was like GreenTea and everyone else who is peacefully oblivious to the non verbal. I had no clue and didn't realize I had no clue unless someone was obvious. I was happy that way too. I didn't need to know, lol. If someone left me in the living room to drink my tea alone, I would have followed them into the kitchen and would have been practically glued to their side until they told me explicity to get lost. Then my feelings would be doubly hurt and I would have had a rush of feelings, gloominess, self pity, resentment, that "left out" feeling. This used to happen to me a lot. Once they told me to get lost, I was one hundred percent sure they didn't want me around and I felt the sting of their rejection quite accutely. Before actually telling me, I would have not realized a subtle hint was involved. People who knew me really noticed this trait in me before I was diagnosed AS. In fact, it was sooooo obvious to everyone who knew me. My inability to read social cues, kind of, defined me, no one could miss that about me.
So, anyway, I had this one friend and I am guessing she thought it was her duty as a good friend to point out the oblivious. She had to inform me step by step, look by look, gesture by gesture, what everything meant.
SUDDENLY I was aware of so much I hadn't been aware of before. I laugh over it now but at the time, it was sooooo weird hearing all this negative stuff and realizing just how unwanted I was by everyone.
I wonder if I would have been better off if no one would have ever pointed anything out to me?

As an NT male in a currently dificult phase of a relationship I have really started to 'analyse' just how heavily NTs rely on non verbal, how that impacts on a relationship - and how little we actually understand it ourselves - it is purely instinctive.

It allows us to correctly pick out the correct meaning out of an ambigous sentence (most of the time) - and then go on to the 2nd and 3rd sentences without pausing - whilst my poor partner is still trying to decipher the 1st one!

Also, if you remove the non verbal input to a conversation ( i.e e-mail or MSN) it sems to break the natural cadence of our conversation automatically. i find myself spending a lot of time trying to construct more precise statements in an effort to remove as many ambiguties as possible.

Ana, I would've followed them to the kitchen too. Or felt angry and blame myself for the anger, not realizing that I was right to feel angry at the phoniness.

What did your friend tell you? I'm very curious!

Davros, thank you very much for your input. That's my experience too. I don't even know how much I'm not getting from an interaction with someone. They say 75% is non verbal... I must be getting 50% of the communication, more or less.

I become desperate trying to read what I'm blind to, what comes instinctively to others. It's useless, but Í'm so desperate not to lose my job and other important interactions that I try and try, even though I know I won't succeed in deciphering anything till it's too late and I've already alienated the people invoived and all their friends.

Greentea, my friend excelled at pointing out all my social inadequacies which explains why I stopped answering the phone when she called. I couldn't handle the constant scrutiny of my social skills.
She would point out all my blunders and it made me so anxious. One time a guy wanted to shake my hand at a concert and I shrank back some, she got mad at me for that. She chewed me out for it! She chewed me out all the time for not being as gregarious as her. I started feeling totally self conscious. Second guessing myself all the time and unsure of nearly everything that involved other people.
Another time she got annoyed because she said I was frowning at someone, lol. This same friend was the one who tried to talk me into doing dumb stunts on occasion. She thought I was gullible and there for her personal amusement. something of a joke to her. Much like the Napolean in Rags in the Dylan song Like A Rolling Stone.

Communication involves language, paralinguistics (signalling attitude or emotion e.g. intonation, stress, rate of delivery, pauses, hesitation), nonlinguistics (body language e.g. gestures, body posture, facial expression, eye contact, head and body movement, physical distance, proxemics) and metalinguistics (analyzing language - involves cognitive skills). I have sometimes had problems with body language, because my relationship with my body was poor in the past, but in general:

I'm better in writing than in person or on the phone, so clearly I'm better at the language aspects than the other aspects of communication

I'm better in person than on the phone, so clearly I do rely heavily on nonverbals (paralinguistics and body language) to figure out what is going on in a conversation, and I think I use them a great deal to communicate back again myself.

Where I go wrong the most is lack of experience and difficulty following what is going on in real time (a coordination issue more than anything).

Also, I find that often what people say does not make any sense without much more detail than more people seem to need. Without an extensive back story, information just floats around in my head without connecting in any way. Most people do not seem to need this detail or notice the lack of it. Plus often they do not have a clue about what I am talking about unless I provide background detail so that my points make sense. Very tiring to coordinate all that information.