To preface this, I am pretty autistic so please understand I am asking help learning the basics and I understand a lot of this is hard to explain!
So most of my life, I have internalized the social rejection I received and continue to receive. My method of combating this negative internal belief is to practice meditation and self compassion, which has helped a ton. My only issue is now, this self work has allowed me to be more comfortable in attempting conversations with others but I don’t know how to healthily approach learning social skills.
In my perspective, learning social skills isn’t a neat cause and effect feedback system. Especially for neurodivergent people, people tend to be very unforgiving when we violate basic social etiquette. However, I am having trouble budgeting my focus on improving non verbal cues and seeing feedback versus the actual conversation. For example, I have been trying to focus on smiling and making eye contact, and I notice that my focus on these two basic things have distracted me from the actual conversation and caused me to overthink.
So to others who had to walk this tight rope of a learning process, I am interested to hear what method helped you to healthily learn social skills :)!
1 comment
I think you can compare social rejection to meditation: When you’re meditating, the general idea is to use a conscious activity (breathing, repeating a mantra, etc) to ground your mind so that you can recognize distractions from that conscious activity, and in doing so you’re training your mind to remain grounded in a sea of stimulation. You’re not meant to judge intrusive thoughts, you’re meant to recognize them and let them go.
So now you’re walking down the aisle at the grocery and someone’s coming your way. You smile at the person but they look away and keep walking. Were you just rejected? Doesn’t matter, it’s just your mind wandering and you recognize it for that and you come back to your breathing or your mantra.
The corner stones of social skills are (in my mind) self-awareness, vulnerability and empathy. You need to be true to yourself and at the same time you must be willing to risk some of yourself to experience a connection. The other person (or people) must do the same. In this model, the person who didn’t smile at you didn’t reject you (even though it felt like it), they rejected themselves.