A Different Way of Being Different- But Maybe Still the Same

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My situation is rather unusual. I don't have Asperger's, but I am neurologically different from most people, and all my life I've found it very difficult to make friends. I seem to have been born without a social mind. However, I have never had difficulty reading people's feelings or attitudes or nuances of expression or communication. Rather, I just couldn't understand their minds, at all, and I didn't know how to behave around them. In my youth, I had profound problems with social skills, unable to interact with others naturally-- and was extremely shy as well. Not being able to understand the human social mind was only a part of the problem, though, and it has been the easiest problem to overcome.

At this point in my life, I have very well-developed social skills, but I still have no friends and am still very lonely. I wonder if anyone else has experienced my problem, which is basically a lack of CHEMISTRY. I can relate with people fine as casual acquaintances, but we exist on different wavelengths-- we live in different mental worlds. It's very rare for me to find a person with whom I feel a connection-- someone similar to myself, with a similar enough mind to make friendship possible. The same goes for romantic relationships. This has been my experience since I was a small child.

I wonder if others in this forum have the same problem. Assuming that there were people who want to be friends with you, and you didn't have to worry about alienating them by breaking social norms or missing social cues-- could you still be HAPPY and still feel SATISFIED in relationship with those people, if you were so mentally different that there was no CHEMISTRY, and they couldn't even see who you are?

I think I'm sort of in the same boat as you. Not exactly because I have had some difficulties with reading people (or maybe that was just a part of growing up and learning how people react to what I say), but for the most part I'm quite observant of another person's facial expressions and tone of voice and all those things while still just have difficulties understanding people and making friends. Although we might not be exactly the same I'll just let you know that I know how you feel. In fact, I have the amazing luxury of getting to know NTs and becoming friends with them and then, upon having a personal conversation with some of them, realize just how badly I can't connect to some people.

I have the same problem.

Have you ever heard of the theory of positive disintegration (see wikipedia)? You may find it useful in explaining why you don't feel on the same wavelength as anyone else. I could relate to it a lot (of course you may be different, and not on my wavelength either )!

It's good to know that there are others who share the same experience and understand. It's tough to think you're the only one.

I looked up the theory, and it most certainly does apply to me and, I'm sure, others like me. Events outside of my own control set me on a path of critical examination and reevaluation of my family culture and the programming I received as a child, which led to the same sort of reevaluation of societal programming and cultural norms, values, and rules. From the age of 19 my life moved in a direction of un-learning and de-programming, and this set me on an increasingly different trajectory from "normal" people. However, I believe that I was different from the day I was born, and that I started "choking" on the "garbage in" programming that I had been fed since infancy, both from my family and the larger societal culture.

The simplest (and it is a bit of an oversimplification) way to define or summarize the manner in which I am on a different wavelength might be to say that I have an unusually high "existential intelligence." That term comes pretty close to describing that unique and unusual aptitude or mental orientation that sets me apart from most people. If "existential intelligence" is the innate aptitude, positive disintegration, or something like it, is the developmental process.