Social withdrawl: learned, or born with it?

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Learned response. I was a very social child to start, apparently. It was around 4th grade when things started to go wrong. I bounced back a bit and become fairly social in high school, but these days I'm as bad as ever, if not worse.

I think I must have learned to be withdrawn.

I can't recall any significant social problems until I was approaching puberty. I remember making a few mistakes that must have been down to AS, but they were one-off things that didn't seem to put people off me. I felt good about the other kids in my class, knew all their names, talked with them without anxiety, had friends, joined in with games, listened to and told jokes, and got a reputation for being good at humour.

My self-confidence was very good when I was in my first school.......it was a fairly strict, well-ordered place, and I found I had a flair for getting the questions right..........I was practically unrivalled, so I was getting tons of praise. I don't recall it ever making the other kids dislike me for being a suit. There didn't seem to be the same "school sucks" attitude back then....maybe that's something we don't get until we're older. Anyway, I was confident academically and that probably fed back into my social confidence.

The earliest thing I can remember that suggests I was withdrawn, is when I was about 7.......I was playing alone in my sand pit, and Dad came up and asked if I didn't get lonely playing on my own like that. I said no, and meant it. So although I was clearly sociable back then, I don't seem to have been particularly anxious to be with other kids. To me, company was just another source of fun.....when my parents took me with them to visit relatives, I'd always be a lot more keen to go if there was going to be a kid or two to play with.

My antisocial side has waxed and waned a lot over the decades. The most important factor governing it seems to be confidence in my social abilities..........in my late 20s I fell in with a bunch of hippies, and believed that at long last they would give me a fair chance - indeed, in many ways they did just that - I'd come to doubt the feasibility of getting it together with mainstream people, on account of a few bad experiences I'd had with them. So with the hippies I was more social than I've ever been before or since.........I had very little privacy but that didn't concern me much, which is very unusual for me.

These days my social side is usually pathetic. I make practically no attempt to engage with people, and if it weren't for those who are prepared to suggest sharing stuff with me, I'd have no social contact at all. I usually react in a friendly way when people make overtures to me, but I don't reciprocate.

So I think my social withdrawal is mostly learned, and very dependent on how I feel about my people skills. I want friends, and I often feel lonely, but I know what people tend to be like, and I know what I'm like, and the idea of my trying to become a social animal feels about as wise as trying to do brain surgery.....it's all rather beyond my ken. But I'll probably bump into somebody halfway decent eventually, and then my hopes will be raised and I'll be a different person for a while. Not that I'm saying hardly anybody is decent. Just that I don't bump into them very often.

I always retreated to play by myself in kindergarten, and before that, too, because I liked it. I just didn't have a particular need to play with others much, but I had one friend in kindergarten who used to find me and play with me. I didn't have the need to chase her away either, so we kept playing. When the bullying started at school, I withdrew more, and for less positive reasons. So I guess withdrawal was partly congenital, and partly learned.

Mine was 100% learned. I used to be very social until I got rejected and bullied.

I am shy and not incredibly sociable, and I'd say it's learned because when I was a kid, you couldn't get me to shut up, and sometimes these days you can't either... But like over time I started to learn that people usually don't give a s**t about what I have to say, and they definitely don't like intelligent conversation, I guess because it makes them feel stupid. So, because of that, I keep to myself a lot more now than I used to. The thing is though, I don't really want to. Like, I WANT to talk to people, but it's hard to find people who want to talk about anything other than like cars, sports, celebrities, and going out to bars. Nobody seems to want any meaningful conversation whatsoever.