My therapist thinks I can just learn social cues...

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OK thank you

I think my daughter may struggle in this area as well.

You can assure me as often as you like. Simply offering assurances isn't likely to make me agree on this point.

And anyways, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. Still allowed to disagree with you.

Persisting in referring to any expectation of self-guided therapeutic strategy as a total abandonment by the therapist, does not magically make that the reality. Indicating that the watching of videos would be ok, so long as the doctor verifies the vids first is a minor complaint at best, and still hardly constitutes "fobbing off" - and is easily remedied by simply asking the therapist if they could recommend some since you're not sure where to start - or otherwise clarifying your needs - instead of simply taking offense and firing them.

That aside...

Bee33 is correct. Social cues include physical elements like body language, but also verbal elements like tone of voice and word usage.

yes, but it can also be tone of voice, the way something is said but not explained in a conversation (hints) and other things as well. social cues are signs that let others know a certain response is expected. Many of us miss such cues/signs due to being autistic and the way we process what we see or hear.

Agreed, but the opposite problem -- overestimating either one's own or someone else's potential abilities and pouring too much time and energy into vain efforts, often to the point of causing burnout and other mental health problems -- does exist also.

Many autistic people have intrinsic difficulties, e.g. attention issues, sensory issues, and/or face-blindness, that intrinsically make it difficult to perceive -- not just difficult to learn to perceive -- at least some (though not necessarily all) kinds of social cues.

I do think it's important to work on improving one's abilities to the extent that one can. But I also think it's important to be able to identify one's exact sources of difficulty, so that one can make a realistic assessment of which specific kinds of improvements are possible and which are not.

For example, a physically blind person cannot be taught to see but can, in most cases, be taught to read Braille, navigate with a cane, and use various kinds of assistive technology.

The exact sources of most autistic people's difficulties are less obvious than physical blindness, but they are nevertheless real.

Identifying one's exact sources of difficulty makes it possible both to (1) work on improving the things one can actually improve and (2) ask other people for specific accommodations in one's areas of intrinsic difficulty.

A lovely counter-argument that completely misses the point.

It's rather difficult to know what your limits are, until you bump against them. To arbitrarily decide what your limits are, before you've even found them, is the same thing as self-defeat. Doing so is to decide the limits of your willingness, not the limits of your ability. At that point, you've decided you're not willing to try any more, regardless of whether or not you've actually hit that limit.

Autism and blindness both exist on a spectrum - but I love how autism gets compared to full black-out blindness, as though autistic people are simply incapable of learning the things they have difficulty with - another fine example of self-applied helplessness. Difficult does not mean impossible. Pardon me if I'm not terribly swayed by the "blindness" analogy.

And to be fair, if someone isn't very good with social skills, then they're also probably not very good at gauging social ability - including their own - so even if they do decide that they "can't" learn social skills, they're still hardly the "expert opinion" necessary to actually decide that. It's like saying "I don't know anything about singing, but I know I'll never be a good singer!" - they're hardly an expert on the matter, so how would they know?

If there's a reason people get burned out, it's cos they invent a thousand unnecessary rules that they've convinced themselves they have to comply with in order to "fit in" or "act normal", and try to achieve these unrealistic and ineffective goals in a matter of days or weeks, with no patience for anything that takes months or years. It's not their potential that was the issue - it was their unrealistic and ineffective strategies, implemented frantically and desperately.

Failing that, some people seem to just have a chip on their shoulder, and think that cos they've already met some imaginary misfortune-quota, they shouldn't have to suffer any further discomfort or inconvenience in life, rallying behind the battle-cry of what they feel they "shouldn't have to!" do.

I hear a lot of people say "I can't" when they really mean "I don't want to".

It is more common for females to use long complicated sentences with deliberate intonation when a guy might answer with a short "yes" or "no." This allows second class citizens to express their true feelings with sarcasm rather than explicit words. This creates something known as "plausible deniability."

I try really hard to emit cues of respect and friendliness these days. But also to seem a bit indifferent to people too. I have been in some of unfortunate mix ups where someone was offended by me not showing the proper acknowledgement. Like not realizing a person had a certain status in the workplace and not addressing them with the respect that everyone expects. Fortunately people usually get over things like that. Also learning to better respect cues from others to signal I've been talking about myself too much or inserting too many of my own ideas and opinions into the conversation instead of carrying theirs forward.

And I've found if I show too much interest in others or carry myself too openly, which I sometimes do when I'm in a good mood, certain people will be attracted to that in a bad way and will try to provoke a negative reaction from me. I've found staying neutral and giving bland responses or shifting my attention away from them mostly causes them to lose interest.

I guess at the basic level the cues are about respect, friendliness, boundaries, stuff like that. I'm sure they are relative to what you want out of the situation too. I imagine for a lot of people it is making friends and getting along well at work.

My advice Miguel, if you're still looking in: get a new therapist, pronto.

Not because he is suggesting you can learn social cues. Like others have said, as an autistic person, I can learn them. But it's always going to be a learned response. NTs know social cues instinctively. No matter how well I learn them, I'm still going to get them wrong from time to time, and identifying them in real life situations is often exhausting.

You need a new therapist purely and simply because this one isn't doing his job. Rather than offering the professional help that you need (and which probably you're also paying for), he is just sending you to YouTube. Imagine if your computer went wrong, and you paid a computer consultant $80 an hour to fix it, and he just said 'Oh, look it up on Stack Overflow' and took your money.

Rubbish - NTs absolutely DO NOT "instinctively know" social cues. ALL social cues are a learned response. Even NTs get them wrong, sometimes quite frequently. NTs get socially burnt out as well. Not sure where y'all get these ideas about NTs.



But that's not what's happening. Imagine going to a computer consultant, and you ask them to fix your computer, and also teach you how to use MS Office. They fix your computer, and help you learn Office, but suggest you watch some tutorials on Office in between sessions. They still keep trying to fix your computer, and they still try to help you learn Office, they just expect you to maybe do something on your own time as well to help facilitate the limited time y'all spend together.

Even the best teacher can't help a lazy slacker of a student who just makes excuses and won't do any work. Imagine never doing any homework or practice lessons or studying, and them blaming the TEACHER for their lack of effort...

And y'all ain't appliances that just need to be passively "fixed" with no effort or interaction on your part - y'all are human beings, who have to live, and learn, and practice, and actively engage in your own healing and repair. Y'all whine about being "fobbed off" or "turned away", but y'all are the ones shirking the necessary work for YOUR OWN maintenance and repairs.

I think we're going to have to politely agree to differ.

I think I'd rather continue to reiterate that social skills are in fact learned, that even NTs make social mistakes, and that learning social skills takes ongoing practice and experience, well-beyond what is even possible strictly during therapy sessions alone, regardless of whether you're NT, autistic, or anything else.

We do have hard wired social responses. Or at least most humans do.

I've discovered that when I interact with other people, say in a store, I'll receive and respond social clues faster than I can realize that I have done that. It is over by the time I realize what I have done.

I can process things quickly. I've accidentally pulled SPAM out of a can and caught it before it hit the floor.

No we don't. No such thing

Humans are not hardwired like that. Not even NTs. This is demonstrated extensively by the fact that feral children don't spontaneously manifest social skills once they're introduced to society, ethnicities speak sound and act like the culture they're raised by not the culture they're born from, and social cues are not universal across, among, or even within cultures or subcultures.

A fast response time is not indicative of "hardwired social responses". Merely learned responses which are executed rapidly, often via automaticity.

My doctor “prescribed” me the YouTube channel Charisma On Command.

It hasn’t been helping me learn social skills because most of the content is presented as “hacks” and “tricks”. I’m not buying into it because it feels like I’ll be dishonest/inauthentic if I do.

But maybe there is someone in this forum who would benefit from the channel?

But what if the answers to the timeless “nature vs nurture” debate are, in fact, non binary: in other words both can exist together within the same milieu? ie I posit there is both hardwiring and learned social responses contributing to the sum total of the parts.

Just cos they both coexist simultaneously doesn't mean they share the burden evenly. If you read my earlier posts, I did in fact state that we humans do possess some genetic imperatives, in addition to learned responses. Ergo, they are, in fact, non binary - things are indeed a mix of nature and nurture, not exclusively one or the other - but science has demonstrated that social behaviors aren't nearly universal enough for there to be a genetic imprint for anything terribly advanced.

Simply put, humans may very well have a genetic imperative to seek and desire social contact, but it still doesn't mean they instinctively know how to successfully engage in said contact. This has been demonstrated by the fact that feral children do not spontaneously develop social skills when reintroduced to society, ethnicities grow up with the behaviors of the culture they're raised in and not the ethnicity their genes originate from, and social behaviors are not universal across, among, or even within various social structures and cultures.

Social skills are learned. Some people may learn them faster or slower, with different degrees of difficulty, but they are still learned.