eye contact

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i try and try to give proper eye contact but i keep giving off this overbearing stare i think just wierds people out. i am really starting to think there is absolutely no way to develop a understanding for eye contact i sometimes wonder would it look more normal if i just avoided it all together like i did before i became conscience of my AS. anyone else find eye contact this tiring and frustrating?

Yeah. I usually try to make eye contact with people, but whenever I try, it feels bad. But once in a while, I stare at the face without really "seeing" it. I think we just need to find a middle ground.

My friends are used to that and I'm happy.
The way I see it, anyone who's going to discriminate against me for not making eye-contact, is not worth being friends with anyway.

The downside is it makes job-searching a real pain.
I need to practice faking it.

I do it when I feel like its necessary and don't when I don't. Forcing it doesn't help. Worrying about it only makes you fear doing it. In the end it's just another psychological trap, the insidious kind, where the solution is to not care.

I can force eye contact, but I feel like I’m acting and not being myself.

i learned faking eye-contact at an early age, and as such, faking it became second nature for me.
my fakes are as of now almost undetectable, unless the NT in question knows i'm faking and stares at me for a long time at short distance (i know, i've asked and tried that a few times)

Gedrene wrote

Yeah I totally agree with this, but because nt's are wired differently from us, what seems like a natural degree of eye contact to us, still looks strange to nt's, and they can still misinterpret us as being dishonest or whatever.

So it is easy to fall into this psychological trap because all the misunderstandings create the worry. But falling into this trap just makes it worse.

I'm not horrible at it, I'll give eye contact to people when it's necessary. It's just a matter of speaking.

I've had lots of people who thought that I was lying. I've also had someone who told me I was ignoring her. I think it might have been from the eye contact.


Same. That's probably one reason it's so hard for us to make new friends.


How does that solve it?

Aye, I'm fairly bad with eye contact. I have to really think about it and tell myself to do it. I know some people have thought I was being rude or ignoring them.

I've found the best faking methods for me are looking at someone's forehead and looking over someone's shoulder.

I don't think I will ever be any good at eye contact, I try to do it but most of the time it just comes across as weird.