Self-Directed Socialization Training

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If I don't have Asperger's than it could definitely be said I have Aspie traits. I remember that growing up, I would be hit sometimes with the sudden realization that I was not portraying myself the way I intended to socially, and being a bit of a perfectionist, that made me really determined to figure out what I was doing wrong and how I could correct it.

I remember watching people interact with each other and trying to pick up on the social subtleties that I was missing - facial expressions, intentions, etc. I watched a lot of television and movies and paid a lot of attention to how the actors were expressing the subtleties of the plot in their body language and things.

I got really good at recognizing patterns in social interactions, although a lot of rules and boundaries are still completely incomprehensible to me. A lot of people would not know that I ever struggled with any of these things at all. I definitely pass for NT. It seems that for me, careful study and practice, the way I deal with any other challenge, worked.

I was wondering if anyone else tried anything like this growing up, or if I was just, as usual, the overreaching, overachieving child.

I got pretty good at faking it too. However, I never really gained the pack mentality. Most people had thier cliques that they belonged to, but I was still a loner who just learned to blend in. Friends would come and go based on activities I was involved in, and still do.

Forming a deep connection was a threshold I could never cross.

Did you just "walk a mile in my shoes" ?
Between the two of you, you've prettymuch summed up a good deal of my life.

It worked so well for me that two weeks ago I didn't know what Asperger was (the funny thing was, I always said I was on the wrong planet), I succeed to make deep connections only with people having problems in a specific time of their life. When they got over their problems I started to feel distant or even betrayed.

That's interesting because I seem to forge close bonds with people having problems which put them way on the outside of things socially - to the point where they aren't even classified as "misfits", they're simply ignored by people. Since I live in the South, sometimes that could just be religious or racial intolerance working against them. Since I live in the suburbs, sometimes financial class was a major factor, too. A lot of the times they were very anxious and depressed.

I could "fit in" to a group to some extent, blend, but for some reason I was always very much separate. People usually liked me and respected me and often came to me for advice/wisdom/consolation, but, I was sorta like the shaman/witch doctor among my peers - I had an essential role in the group, and yet, I was not a part of it. I lived a very isolated life nonetheless, even if I had people literally falling me around, constantly surrounding me. I just wasn't "one of them" no matter what. They were Lincoln Logs, and I was like a crazy Lego roof piece or something.

I remember feeling being ultimately out of the group when all but me seemed to deeply experiment the exact same feeling and I was not.
- When a sudden burst of enthusiasm took the group
- When the group was judging someone else
- When the group is not caring for every bound that exists within, in the idea to keep it healthy and last long (inner fights)

And here, it seems to me lies the paradox of the aspie that hurts so bad:
It was not the others that excluded me from the group in the first place,
It was me, I was getting more annoyed and loose patience and incentive to remain part of the group, the cloak sled slowly (that is the part of "faking" I feel from the OP)
It was not reasonable and consistent to be part of the group anymore, and MY behavior changed and it broke the sense of completeness
But I didn't care any more about the consequences, reason and logic were on my side, going against it would be too expensive compared to the benefits of remaining with the group, and it was hurting
And it repeats over and over and over

(The brain has a funny feature: it does not uses the same parts depending on your degree of confidence of who you are interacting with, it seems aspies can slide from the confident working part to the distrustful one pretty easily, this was my shaman parenthesis)

Over the years I have hardened to the point that only logic remains, studying people, groups of people many other things and not caring for the lack of social interactions. I thought I was just an over-rational being that thought dropping the rationality (witch always led to catastrophic consequences) was at the same time:
- Loosing a set of my qualities
- Betraying myself
- Lying to myself
- Harming other people unintentionally

And it happens that there are many people like me, you cannot imagine how I am glad to be here and to see and to talk what I feel for the very first time of my life

I don't think I experienced anything like a lack of empathy or anything - however, I often had trouble understand the priorities of my peers and why certain things impacted them so much emotionally. Fads were difficult for me to understand as well - when I was 10, all the girls started getting their ears pierced, and begged me to do the same, and I said I had no interest in that OVER AND OVER AGAIN until they gave up. They were so desperate to get me to conform. I couldn't understand their investment.

I didn't feel like I was being untrue to myself trying to socialize, either. I saw it as becoming a more functional, efficient human being, since socialization seems quite helpful in accomplishing my goals.

It is being untrue to your self, and to other people. However, you are right about how efficient socialization can be in reaping the benefits of society. It's all about what's more important to you. Who you are, or what you want.

For me, I find myself going in cycles. When I feel lonely and bored I'm fine with sacrificing my own comfort to socialize and gain a more exciting life. But after a while, the constant attention takes its toll and all of a sudden, my own needs to be myself dominate. Been riding this roller-coaster for the last 15 years.

This is exactly how I see it. Many people, both on and off the spectrum, assume that because I'm good at so-called "faking" my social skills that I am a) being dishonest with myself and b) that I don't have Asperger's. The truth is, I felt that I needed certain skills to be able to get along with other people in order to feel more accepted and to have a place in the world, so I spent most of my childhood and teenage years developing these skills to the point where my deficits aren't that noticeable. I am not doing this to betray my individuality, but simply to make interactions and connections in this world smoother for me to establish.

I'm not just talking about in terms of friendships, but also in terms of work relationships and in everyday situations where interactions with others are required. I used to give off a very timid, standoffish vibe towards people as a kid, and this led to a lot of people staying away from me and distrusting me: which was exactly what I didn't want. I wanted people to have a sense of comfort around me, so I trained myself to be open, friendly and geuinely interested in other people.

Although I have my social skills down pat, I go through te motions on a very concious level, reminding myself constantly on how to make it better instead of instinctively knowing. For example, when their is a pause in the conversation, I have to explicitly tell myself in my head to bring up a new topic, often about the other person to pique their attention.

Exactly. In my developmental psychology class, we started talking about the stage of development in which children start thinking more representationally/symbolically and playing more make-believe games and thinking of objects both as the objects themselves and as symbols they can use to represent other things. This is supposed to happen in the 2-7 year old age range.

I was struck with the memory of how I initially responded to my peers when they started to display this skill - I was just shocked. I couldn't figure out if they were delusional, stupid, or lying - that chair was NOT a mountain and that stuffed animal did NOT want to be fed, because it did not want anything, because it was a stuffed animal. It took me some trial-and-error to realize that I was not supposed to respond to my peers' make-believe games that way, but instead play along, even though no matter how hard I tried, I could not see the world around me as anything other than it realistically was; I had to learn how to structurally follow their scenarios in my head. I am a very creative and imaginative person, and now I'm great at playing make-believe games with children, but that didn't come naturally to me.

Training myself and forcing myself to do things that I naturally struggle with is not being untrue to myself - it's just not accepting any deficiency. I'm kind of proud of that tendency that I have.

I agree completely, I went through this path and I enjoyed it. But in the end, despite my long and hard work and the acceptance by the others, things did not improve or even made sense to me, I came to the conclusion that I was not the problem, that the others did not make the effort. (remember I knew nothing about Asperger) Only at that moment I decided to cut most of the bridges to humanity, keeping only the essential ones.

So yes, I talk about the weather, bits of politics, I'm faking it. I have done everything to avoid interacting with people for a long long time now (witch is quite hard to do in Greece btw)

Since I know, I am reading whatever I can, I try to connect the dots. It is too early to act, I wait for the sedimentation of what I learned in order to decide. I have not made my introduction post in "Getting to know each other" because I didn't what and how to say it

Nevertheless, I feel full of joy, like if somebody has given me a map of a city I spent years to try to know by walking in every single street

I've often been drawn to people who found themselves suddenly 'outside' because of a life problem, and needed more than standard platitudes. I'm not sure why it happens, perhaps when people are in genuine distress they are easier to 'see', even if the distress isn't apparent to others. But I did find it common for them to say that when they really needed their friends, they were no longer there.

The connection was only about their problem, and once they were themselves again, they went back to their previous selves. That didn't bother me, I was content to 'do my bit', it was my choice, I wasn't trying to make friends; but I did find it strange how they easily forgot their criticisms of the people who hadn't been there to help them.