Body Language

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I'm an autistic adult and I've been working on how to understand Body Language. I'm pretty good at reading my dog's body language, but she's very simple in her responses to me and her actions seems to have a one for one code to what she wants to 'say' with her body. With human's I'm really awful at it.

So I bought a book called 'The Definitive Book of Body Language' by A and B Pease. It seemed to have good ratings on Amazon. It was an easy read but I wasn't overly impressed with it.

(1) The information given in the book gives the impression of being someone's opinions and experiences masquerading as a kind of authoratitive pseudoscience rather than real facts.
(2) There are a huge number of sexist generalisations which again are explained as facts when I suspect that they are prejudiced opinions.
(3) The whole tone of the book was more about how to use body language to get ahead, to be successful and to get a mate - rather than how to understand and communicate better.

Rather than helping me to understand body language as a way of communicating more it made it more difficult for me. So I'm wondering what kind of tips for understanding body language we could come up with as a community of people with autism and people who are sensititve to autism? Do you know any useful tips for managing and reading body language? It would be great if you could post them!

I have to get better at this body language malarky some how. The authors of the book recommended the following to me baseed on my scores for reading body language after reading their book:

Go on Youtube and look up ways to read body language. This one youtube channel I go to regularly teaches communication skills and talks a lot about body language as well. The guy on it is named Dan O'Connor, look him up good luck

Resources for artists might help? (Artists need to analyse body language in order to learn how to draw people with normal body language. The images are often exaggerated, but they can give you an idea of what to look for.) I'll see if I can find some ones on the internet.

Try "What Every Body's Saying" by FBI Profiler Joe Navarro. Worked for me.