Anyone ever visit a Social Skills Training?

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I have had social skills training on two different occasions in my life. Both times, they were not very impressive, and yielded only little results, if any at all. The first time was a series of sessions when I was in primary school. I was in a special school, so some students were selected to participate in this social skills training course. Basically, it was quite a patronizing experience, and it involved a lot of role play which I had the greatest trouble relating to at all. I typically scored low on the different areas of evaluation.

The second time, it wasn't so much a social skills training, as much as it was an ASD help guide in 10 sessions; anything that was said in the 4 sessions I ended up attending, or in the remainder of the folder with lessons that we were given, were things I had already learned by myself through literature and the internet, as well as life experience, and it ended up adding very little to my life, while it did cost slightly over a hundred euros.

So what have been your experience with social skills training programs? I hope they were better and more useful than mine.

In elementary school my mum signed me up for social skills groups at the LDAO (Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario). At that time I had a specific learning disorder diagnosis but not the Asperger's one yet. A recommendation made for me by the school and doctors was social skills training. The first session that I attended ,my end evaluation of social skills was very poor. They had a check-list like "understands and responds to non-verbal cues appropriately" , "plays appropriately with other children", "understands material discussed in the session" ect. and "not developed to appropriate level" was checked off for almost everything in my case. At the end of my last session at LDAO almost everything was checked off as "developed to appropriate level". Even though I "passed with flying colours" I was still having major social problems in school. I couldn't generalize the rules properly to real life situations somehow. I was still bullied and did not get along with people and did strange things. Then I had a social skills group in middle school and one in high school that were like what you described, OP, where it was an initiative of the school and students were just picked out who had social problems. They didn't seem that helpful. I understood most of the social rules cognitively and at one point was really motivated to learn because I wanted friends but real time social interaction is too fast and the rules don't always apply in every situation, context is important. However by the middle of high school my social awareness and social skills had improved a lot and my mum and psychologist speculate that all the social skills training and counselling (I was always seeing different doctors and was diagnosed with AS at 13 , almost 14) actually did help a lot even though it did not seem that useful to me. I still meet the criteria for ASD and a specific learning disorder and anxiety disorders (OCD and GAD) , so I have problems but I got a LOT BETTER.

There is no such thing like Social Skills Training in my country, but even if there was, I don't belive it would help much. Individual discussions with a trusted NT on the other hand proved to be most effective so far.

It would be a complete waste of time considering I still couldn't socialise in many normal situations, due to sensory issues.

i have attended a few social skills trainings that were aimed at NTs.
obviously, the tricks they tought didn't work for me all that well, but it did give me insight in the workings of NTs, which allowed me to come up with my own methods

Tell me more about how the people who diagnosed you as abnormal don't know what normal social skills are.