Teaching Social Skills vs Trying to Change You

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If a social skill is a legitimate application of courtesy designed to convey with honesty respect for the dignity of others, it is both a beautiful art form and a duty that society is entitled to expect of all of us.
But all too often, when someone who is in a position of power over our lives is "doing us a favor" by teaching "social skills," it had nothing to do with teaching us how to treat others and everything to do with scolding and bullying us into changing into something we are not so that we will get along better in the world at all costs. Typically it consists of teaching us to walk on egg shells in public, suffering utmost intimidation at arbitrary an illogical customs of etiquette that, as Virgil would describe with the words, "ex anvm extractvm," requiring us to live in constant terror that we might offend by not knowing impossible to predict offense at anything that is not perfectly hyper-conventional.
I am temporarily as a visiting mathematics professor and I am working for a supervisor who graduated with me in 2009 under the same dissertation supervisor. He and the supervisor know that I am autistic and they both think they are doing me a big favor by teaching me "social Skills," for instance, when I was waiting to meet them at a hotel, there was no place to eat that did not serve exclusively junk food such as potato chips and cheeseburgers with Coke. In case of this, I brought some meal replacement protein powder, a cup, and a spoon and went to the water fountain to mix my lunch of protein drink at the water fountain. I sat in the lobby and drank my lunch when they came in, having seen me prepare it at the fountain, and raised hell at how strange it looks for someone to do something like this. They further scolded me that I should have drunk it outside, something I could not do because there were people smoking outside, but I should have been less selfish about my dislike of cigarette smoke and my having been unwilling to compromise and eat the way everybody else eats because what I was doing because it looks too eccentric and the sight of it might make people uncomfortable.
They are horrified that I cross the street to get away from anyone carrying a lit cigarette because smokers notice it and it hurts their feelings; I am not showing empathy to the emotional needs of the smoker not to be shamed in this way and everybody knows that autistic people are incapable of empathy the way Africans are supposed to be frivolous and whatever racist stereotypes racists invent against Africans, or the separate race of autistic humans.
They raised hell because at an apartment party where I was staying I took a piece of raw vegetable from the food tray in my hand and ate it and the proper thing to do was to put it on a paper plate, something that was not logical because it wasted paper because the use of the paper plate was not necessary.
Here, social skill training takes the attitude that autistic people are like wild horses that need to be broken for their own good as an act of charity and love because they are uncivilized. To them, autism is a sickness that needs to be cured and autistic people who cannot be cured need to be sterilized because they are so offensive to proper society that they are life unworthy of life. We see this in Autism Speaks wanting research to identify autistic people before they are born so that they can be aborted. It is no different from the Canadian Indian experiment when children of native children were removed from their villages and put in Christian government run schools to break them of their savage ways so that they could be seamlessly integrated into society. If they spoke their native language they were beaten, they were not allowed to dress the way they did at home, some who ran away were captured and raped as punishment for rebelling.
I do not mind someone showing me how to make someone more comfortable by making reasonable accommodation to their customs, for instance, I put on clothes whenever a stranger comes to visit my house because I understand that most people are not accustomed to nudity, but I expect demands for social skills to be reasonable and logical and anyone who bullies people like us and pretends to be "teaching us social skills" had better be at least as near perfect in the ethics of what they demand. These "charitable" friends for whom I only have to work for one more academic year and good riddance, drive over the speed limit and get mad at me when I don't drive over the speed limit because that is the normal thing to do will park in a handicapped parking space "Only for a minute because there are no other convenient places to park," and expect credibility in their endless rules that are more eloquent in chicken s**t than anything reason or logic could possibly conceive possible.
Therefore, anybody wanting to teach "social skills" had better earn credibility and prove that the social skill is reasonable and not designed to break us of altogether harmless eccentricities, that the social skill does not abuse real rules, such as speed limit laws that have earned the right to be respected, and are not designed to impose their questionable cultural values.
We, as human beings have every right to question conventions that are defined as social skills and if they do not survive challenge to their logic, how dare society demand compliance.

I wish I had a solution to these types of friends, aside from just thanking them for their advice and moving on, or sometimes responding with an opinion the way you do here. The first two examples seem like individual freedom to me. The third, I think I'd just take the plate and pick my battles. Maybe it was about making a mess or something.

I read the whole thing and got to the end where THEIR misdeeds were revealed! The BEST and ONLY advice I can give the OP is to tell those hypocritical jack@$$<$ to STFU!

And THEN proceed to question THEIR behavior!

Do I tell you how FAST to drive?
Do I tell YOU how WRONG it is to park in a HANDICAPPED space?

You might conclude with GET THE HELL OUTTA MY FACE WITH THAT!

Make CERTAIN that you speak LOUDLY and draw attention to yourself AND them! For dramatic effect, you MIGHT try clapping your hands in their faces while you're yelling! Then when they ask you what's wrong with you, tell 'em you had a MELTDOWN! Well...it COULD be classified as such!

my question is, why should we show empathy to smokers? they are purposefully destroying their body, why should we compensate to allow them to not feel weird about it? they should, because it is weird, it is a terrible habit.

if smokers want to not feel bad or self conscious about it, then they should stop doing it, easy as that.

also i feel a little sick.....like a lot sick. ive never known much about autism speaks, but my high school that i went to (it was a catholic one) actually put up a lot of stuff for supporting autism speaks, i didn't realise what that was, they want to abort autistic people before they are born? what the hell? im kind of glad my parents are sane so wouldn't have done this to me if this was possible. ew, i just lost a LOT of respect for my old high school.


to be honest i think we need to be our own people, i mean, we don't try to change people's personalities do we? so why change people to be exactly the same as everyone else? its like the world is forgetting what individuality is like and trying to end it.

Yes, it is really a crime to park in a handicapped spot if you don't need it--even for a minute. Take care of a disabled person for a day and see how little inconveniences add up.

They are telling you these things because they assume you want to fit in with everybody else and not look or seem weird or out of place. Whether you, me, or Joe Blow down the street likes it, certain behaviors, harmless though they may be,come across as weird and it makes people not want to approach or get to know you. They are telling you this so you can refrain from doing them in public if you choose, and can fit in better. The same was done for me when I was young before I was diagnosed, and I appreciated it and heeded their advice.

If Laurent interested just tell them "thanks, but I have no interest in changing something that isn't directly offending or harming others". But be prepared for people to think you're weird if you don't. It's a trade off and nothing can be done about it. It's just human nature and nobody really knows why such small arbitrary things matter, but they do. If they are so insignificant then it doesn't matter to change them, but it will matter to others if you don't. People deal with a few eccentricities but if you have a lot of them you're considered weird, so if you want to fit in you should choose which things are important enough to you to keep and which to change. It's not changing your personality, only particular actions in public.

Also, I smoke and it doesn't offend me at all if people don't want to be around smoke. I refrain from smoking around nonsmokers and will even go outside to smoke in my own home when I have a guest who doesn't smoke. their not liking smoke isn't a judgment about me, it's a preference and has to do with their sense of smell. Unless you recoil in horror and go completely over the top when someone is smoking outside in the open air, and only then if you don't have a severe reaction to the very brief and minute amount you would be exposed to while walking past a smoker, then most smokers wouldn't have a problem with your dislike of the smell. Either your friends are going overboard about that particular issue or your reaction might look more extreme than you're aware of. That can happen too, because without seeing ourselves on video we don't normally know what we look like.

Either way, small stupid s**t matters to people and we can either try to fit in and put up with what we may consider silly or we can continue with our own preferences and stay on the outside of social interaction and not be included in many things. It's a trade off and a judgment call but one that is totally up to each person. So, pick your battles and decide what's most important to you, because even the most social of NTs have to compromise on things too.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com

Great post, OliveOilMom. Since this thread isn't as crowded as lots of others on here, I figured there'd be room to appreciate how you phrased it.