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Are there resources for learning social skills?
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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One possibility is that it's how you phrase things? Everything seems fine here but people tend to write and speak differently, so just throwing out a possibility here.
I used to say essentially "not my fault" a lot as a kid (it was a kind of deflection that I resorted to instead of actually dealing with stuff), and my mom called me out on it once, which caused a huge shift in how i thought about communication from then on. See, sometimes it was my fault, and other times it wasn't, but that doesn't really matter a lot in a conversation, so I started kinda taking a mental step back to consider what I was about to say would actually accomplish in the conversation, or how it might be perceived by others, and it became clear to me that I had some other bad conversational habits as well that escalated situations when they didn't need to.
It might not be easy to detect all of them at once, but just getting into the mindset of thinking about this stuff might help. Hopefully this technique isn't why I'm anxious these days :P
Edit: Also some subjects are sore as you experienced with your unemployed friend, so having this habit of taking a step back might have helped with realizing that in advance. It's not always doable of course, you can't know everything.
Maybe? I feel like I try too hard to be polite sometimes. My last therapist told me I was allowed to ask my friends for better ways to phrase things, but they got mad and said I was putting them on the spot.
Last time I explicitly said, "sorry, that was my fault," and explained what I did wrong, and my friend still took it as me calling him stupid.
I'm beginning to think it's just too complex for anyone to explain to me how to be nice
What do you do when you accidentally bring up a sore subject? Last time, I apologized and said I should have realized (I should have), and my friend and I got into a two-day argument about whether it was a sincere apology or not. I finally asked what I did to deserve being accused of lying and he just said "well if I had said that I'd mean it manipulatively, so I assumed you did". So apologizing in that scenario is taken as manipulative, right?
I mean... I think you did the right thing here. Hard to say without any context, but your friends kinda sound like dicks, like really taking offense at small things that really don't matter that much.
Sorry, not sure what you should do with this take, just that maybe the problem is not entirely you.
I considered this, but the fact that it's been two different friends plus my sister made me think I was the one being a dick.
Maybe we're all dicks
Its certainly harder to explain over text since we can't hear your tone. Do you put in a lot of effort when you speak ? Does talking come naturally, or do you spend a lot of energy trying to be polite ?
Without knowing exactly what you said its hard to know if this reflects more on your friend than you. Apologizing should be fine, so the issue is either how you apologized or your friend. Also a two day argument is a long argument. Who kept it going? Who would bring it up first?
Edit: I see in one comment that you are autistic. Have you talked to your friends and family about what this means in a conversation ? At some point its on them, honestly.
It definitely takes a lot of energy. Using the right tone, making the correct amount of eye contact, listening to what the other person is saying, and not talking so long to come up with a reply that they get mad at me, feels like multitasking. I really try, though.
I guess we both kept it going. I should have dropped it but I hated leaving the conversation with him thinking I was lying. That's another problem I know I need to work on.
I've talked about autism before, but two of my friends are autistic and the other has a TBI, so they told me it wasn't really fair for me to expect them to hold my hand and explain everything I was doing wrong, which I think is fair. As for my family, there's no talking about psych stuff with them.
Either way I'd rather learn social skills than ask everyone I meet to let me be rude since I'm autistic. No one's going to want to put up with that.