First step in diagnostic path- debrief

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I went in to a clinic today for a first attempt at starting a diagnostic path, and they seemed to be intentionally ambiguous with me. I shared my perception of noticing the many versions of myself getting lost in the details, never realizing the bigger picture of my traits. I shared my top goals being to complete social/emotional training so I can enhance my ability to share in important human interactions, with family, and at work. I explained how I may appear quite engaged today but it is as a result of my preparation in isolation to ensure the best possible initial mood-state, and my extreme concentration and energy to try to evaluate the cues you are generating whilst keeping good control over my own to deliver my ideas and responses articulately.

At that point they told me about how we have this big misconception about the necessity of understanding each other's cues, and the even bigger misconception that we should seek to make another person feel something or change how they feel. And that we need to look inward to ask the question of how we can give our greatest capable performance in delivering the message of our thoughts, free of the idea that the actions we take should cause a certain perception in others. It seemed only to discount my feelings that I am missing out on important components of interactions due to poor feelings-gauge. But maybe I just took some of this message too literally.

Now that I've had some time to absorb this, I don't dispute that I agreed with it in the first place- why indeed should one care so much about getting others to perceive one a certain way over just focusing on what you can do to get your message across-- but it more confused me and overwhelmed me than anything else during the conversation due to the pace. I just feel that I was being swept along and as usual out of sync with the interaction. I got behind in the start and had to spend the rest of this conversation catching up. I feel I did not have the chance to get most of my thoughts vocalized correctly, and I got the perception that they thought I was looking for some type of specific remedy to the concentration impairment portion of executive dysfunction.

They seemed to emphasize that over the fact that I felt my most important focus is my inability of knowing what to say to people, how to repair emotions or conversations, while at the same time properly understanding the signals coming from others. I had to explain that my perception of having been medicated in the past was that it made me feel even more mechanical although my decrease in errors of omission and commission would have been quantitatively, provably decreased. This entire conversation was like an assault on my attention itself.

The book Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman was recommended, also, as I tried my best to insist away from any medication type path.

Given this experience, I was looking for any opinions on this book and author as to whether you've used it or heard it suggested before. And also whether you think it would be beneficial at all for me to compile this perception in writing and bring it next time as a debrief to this first conversation to help them compare what my perception is to what they read it as during the actual interaction. I feel there's a chance here that I'm failing to send the right message of my intentions and my experiences due to the actual setting of the social face to face conversation, and because I'm concentrating so hard on engaging with them at the same rhythm, I'm being perceived as extremely "inattentive" as my speech slows and my pauses lengthen. I think it could be very valuable to them to make this comparison. If indeed being on the spectrum means that our experience internally is much further disconnected from what we are sometimes able to convey either through spoken or nonverbal communication, then I think it would be a major error to forgo this written perception debrief.

I read the book. Don't bother. It's written for NTs, by an NT, and has only a brief mention of us.

And they're absolutely wrong. You need to know what other people are thinking because this influences when you should talk, what words you should choose, etc.

Can't speak to your last question.