Anyone learned emotional reciprocity?
I can imitate body language very well, but like some things in my social repetoire, it's a VERY concious process. I often mentally remind myself to uncross my legs and have an open posture towards the other person I'm talking to. Before I knew this, I'd be very bunched up with my arms and legs crossed.
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Given a “tentative” diagnosis as a child as I needed services at school for what was later correctly discovered to be a major anxiety disorder.
This misdiagnosis caused me significant stress, which lessened upon finding out the truth about myself from my current and past long-term therapists - that I am an anxious and highly sensitive person but do not have an autism spectrum disorder.
My diagnoses - social anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I’m no longer involved with the ASD world.
Wow. Please tell me how did you learn it! It is the only thing stopping me from fully becoming a pseudo-NT.
I hope you are talking about the same thing as me, though. I learned to understand body language (generalized from some common patterns) and I can do stuff with my own body language, and while it is mostly conscious, it's also effortless, painless, and probably sustainable for unlimited periods of time. It is a habit for me to improvize my body language for the situation, although I'm not sure if I ever had to use non-open body language, I do always adapt according to what I believe should be signalling. However, there's a difference between signalling what one believes he should be signalling, and mimicking someone - not completely imitating them, but acting in a reciprocal manner, I don't know how to explain this. I am oblivious to when someone is in a moment of his speech when it's appropriate to interrupt - so when I try to interrupt people (it's often necessary when I ask a question, to stop them from going on for several minutes, repeating things I know), they ignore me and go on. This also makes group conversations very difficult for me.
I feel I learned social reciprocity by a willingness to be exposed to a variety of ideas- food, culture, well many things, and well, f*****g up infinite times too. I somehow realized that not everything I did was always my fault, and being old enough to be able to walk away from things or create my own "solutions" to problems without bothering others has helped a lot. I still wouldn't say I have a lot of friends and maybe not even any really good friends right now, but at least I know where I stand. Now, there's too many things that I want to do to really care right now, as long as I have enough connections to help me for certain things in times of need as I would try to do the same for others too.
This reminds me of how it can be frustrating when I don't get along with other aspies due to interests, their quirks and/or mine, and/or their behavior.
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