Trouble with others misreading your tone

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I was thinking the same thing. It's like you're implying that they're fat and could do without the extra calories.
My ex was mentally abusive. Once when I was eating some chips (which I rarely did at the time), he asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with him, and then said "work off those chips you just ate". But he always said he didn't think I was fat. Yeah right.

What if you were thin and someone said that? Then that is your excuse?

Oh well that just shows how aspies aren't always literal. We're human.

I just asked my husband and he also thought the same. Damn.

I don't need to go around after all asking about this to see if any of them would interpret it the same way because I trust my husband. And the thing is he never pointed this out to me when I was talking to him about my ex when I was thinking he may have been a narc and listed my reasons why until I asked him.

League_Girl, I have trouble with figuring out why people get offended at something I've said too, thinking they're the ones with the problem because no one will explain it to me. I wish people would tell me up front and right there instead of letting me think I was right.

I was thinking about a couple other threads, about expressions and about validation, and it stands to reason that has a lot to do with people misinterpreting my tone in person, because my face doesn't convey what they would expect from my words and so they think I mean something else. Body language can be so confusing in humans. I can read animal body language so easy and I almost never misread their tone.

I still wonder why no one told me about the mac and cheese thing until two people pointed it out here in this thread. My husband always says things to me like "You can burn off your dinner" when he wants to have sex. But no way do I think he is calling me fat and he says to me all the time how skinny I am and I used to feel I was fat but he kept telling me I was thin and so skinny and I am healthy and perfect, too thin is unattractive to him. He will also tell me I can work off my whatever I had just eaten when he encourages me to go for a walk because I am so worried about my weight sometimes and feel like I am getting fat. I also talk this way too all the time about less calories or saying at the autism groups "At least we won't have all those calories to consume." but I guess I called everyone there fat including myself

My ex was aware of my weight issues and my low self body image and he would tell me what a toothpick I am and he didn't think I was fat either but I felt fat. Sometimes he would make a big deal about what I ate and made a big deal how little I ate at a restaurant and complained to the worker there about it because he didn't want to pay full adult price for me. I sort of felt bad like I had wasted his money and felt maybe I should stay home when he wants to go out if it's going to be going out to eat.

I wonder why no one told me about this so I assumed it was one of his abuse tactics and I did read online that abusers will take what you say out of context and get mad at you about it and convince you you did something wrong which is a form of gaslighting. You also feel you can never say anything right because they are hyper sensitive to everything. My mom says he was just crazy. Maybe that part was genuine and I wouldn't know because he did this s**t all the time so I wouldn't know when something is just a innocent thing on their part.

I get it all the time.

Maybe because there's nothing objectively wrong with what you said in that situation? I certainly didn't take it as offensive; it didn't even occur to me that you were commenting on your exs weight.

What people need to recognize is that there is a group of people whose primary mode of engagement with life is emotional (because of natural temperament, or, as you posted earlier, effects of past trauma). When they hear (or read) things from others, their first instinct is to read into it for the emotional undertones; if no such undertones are clearly present, they will effectively invent them and project that onto the people who spoke (or posted) as intent. People who do not have this worldview do this as well sometimes, but probably less often.

This reading into things can work well with people who are intimately known, because familiarity with personality and communication style gives one reasonable assurance of correctly inferring meaning. However, in social situations marked by personal unfamiliarity (such as most online forums), this interaction style can be disastrous.

The other side of the coin is people who project intellectual meaning onto what others' say/post. In their narrow imaginations, one idea is always or necessarily connected with another, so they project the second idea onto someone who has merely expressed the first. For example, anyone who opposes lesbian and gay marriage must be a fundamentalist Christian; anyone who doesn't want a job is a lazy, self-centered, unproductive moocher; anyone who questions their opinions must be disagreeing with them; anyone who eats healthily is miserable/on a fad diet/struggling to maintain their eating habits and would prefer to have junk food.

These two types of people also cause themselves to be misunderstood via their deficient communication styles. The emotional projectors don't say exactly what they mean, expecting other people to infer their emotional state from factual (or otherwise not-explicitly emotional) statements, as they themselves habitually do (again, this can work to an extent in real life because body language, an additional and sometimes more reliable index of feelings, is visible in that case, but this is a poor communication strategy online).

The intellectual projectors give you one fact or opinion, expecting people to automatically connect it with another (for example, hoping people will infer that they aren't racists by saying that they are friends with a Chinese person or married to a Native American). In these situations, the two types are basically projecting their whole communication style onto other people.

Then there are the people who misinterpret due to missing crucial details (such as due to skimming posts). Missing details also exacerbates the misunderstandings of both the emotional projectors and the intellectual projectors. For example, someone posts about other people saying rude things, and someone reading it thinks the poster herself says those rude things and becomes upset.

I wasn't. He got upset he got some in the sink so I said that to make him feel better but he took it in negative light. He mentioned his weight, I didn't. I guess that was projection? He maybe feels bad about himself and his weight so he took it as such while I wouldn't take it as such if it's said to me and people have talked that way to me and I take no offense to it. They will say things like "burn off those calories" or tell me "this has calories" '"you can burn off your dinner you just had." All I saw was them talking about calories and burning them off, not about my weight. I guess that shows how literal I am. If someone wants to comment on my weight but only mention calories and not say anything about my weight, I wouldn't even guess.

It was like I could never say anything right because he always took things in negative light and it depressed me so I felt like an a**hole and someone who can never talk right without meaning anything else. I think that was due to his low self esteem and I also think he did that to make me feel bad and to drag me down to make himself feel better because of his low self esteem and that is one of the reasons why some people do abuse. They feel so bad and insecured they take it out on others by making them feel bad so they will feel good inside so I am dragged down to their level.

He also used to tell me "You make it sound like you're saying..." when I would make a post online or say something. I just thought he was being helpful then but all it did was it showed me how people don't take what I say literal and how bad I am with communication but now I realize he may have been projecting because that is how he would have interpreted it, not that other people would. He also told me if I look in the toy aisle or listen to kid songs or watch kid shows, people will think I am a pedophile so I told him that was so stupid that they would assume that and how do they know I am not shopping for a kid and he also said if I buy kid things, people and the cashier would think I was a pedophile and I told him if anyone thinks that because I am buying a My Little Pony set let's say, then they are stupid because how do they know I am not buying it for my own child or for my friend's kid because it's their birthday. I realized years later those may have been his actual opinions and that he thinks that way about other people, so he was projecting so basically I had insulted him calling him an idiot even though it was unintentional because I didn't know then. I think now he was insulting me to get me to change but was doing it in a passive aggressive way so I will grow up and be mature enough for him because he got me believing that is what people would think. He also compensated so he over did it. He was also worried about thinking people thinking he is a pedo so he held himself back from doing things he thought were too immature so he had to drag me down for it.

He had problems and I think he had mental issues that needed to be worked out through a therapist before getting into a relationship. When I think this way about him, I don't feel so much anger inside and not as much hatred so I end up feeling better about it.