I’m 30 and horrible at keeping friends. I don’t know if it’s the unschooling or the autism, but I’m told I come across as hostile when I think I’m being nice.
I know the basics. I make eye contact but not too much, I ask people about themselves and their interests to show I’m interested, I don’t dominate conversations with myself and my own interests. I try to be a nice person people might want to keep around, too— I give money when someone’s in a pinch, I remember birthdays, I help move, et cetera.
Eventually people either people tell me I’m being a dick in ways I never realized, or more likely, they just eventually stop messaging me back.
The one thing I’m sure I struggle with is body language. I’ve read a lot that you need to mirror the other person’s body language, but I don’t know how to do that. Especially since I normally meet people at work and we’re usually pushing big carts around and moving products and I’m just not thinking about my body as something expressive, just practical.
I’m sure I have many more blind spots that I’m not even aware of.
So like… are there classes for this? Some kind of specialized therapy? I don’t really want to try anymore unless I can stop being a dick
Is there a reason you were called a dick? You kind of skimmed over that.
Here’s some go tos:
I wasn’t directly called a dick, but I get told I “clearly” mean something I didn’t mean a lot. Like once I was complaining that my siblings (all late 20s to early 30s) didn’t work and expected my mom to pay for everything, and a friend came in with “I know you’re just mad at me for being unemployed” when I wasn’t talking to or about him. Another time, I was venting (with permission) and said I was scared I was a bad person, and this friend took it to mean he was a bad judge of character, and even after I apologized he kept talking about what a bad judge of character he is.
I thought it was just this friend projecting his insecurities, but recently I was arguing with another friend and I apologized and said it was my fault for not explaining myself clearly, and he took it to mean I thought he was too stupid to have serious conversations with. He said I look down on him for being disabled and stopped talking to me.
My sister has also gotten mad at me without warning during casual conversations and I have to pry an explanation out of her and it’s always “your tone of voice made it sound like you were picking a fight”.
Also multiple instances where I was repeatedly told my apologies weren’t genuine and I was lying.
So no one’s straight up called me a dick, but I think a person who says or thinks the things I’m communicating would be a dick. Whether I mean to be or not, the person I’m presenting to the world is a dick. I make people feel awful about themselves, and I want to not do that.
Anyway, thanks for the tips. I try to do all those, but now that I think about it, I’m probably bad at the last one. I’ve definitely been yelled at for not shutting up before.
Going to come back to this to reflect in more detail to your original post and to this comment, but wanted to quickly float the idea that perhaps these people view you as particularly sound, so when they lay things on you or are just more emotional or intense in front of you, and you seem unphased - neither rushing to condemn them nor scrambling to reassure - they interpret that as disapproval from someone whom they find sound. And that because they value your judgement & integrity, they get sheepish and awkward in the absence of a strong outward reaction, which in turn you interpret as them thinking ill of you.
Only suggesting this because have seen quite a bit of this between people, and experienced mild versions of both ends of that dynamic.
Not that it helps, if it even resonates, or provides guidance.
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?
If you’re being perceived a different way than you intend, I find it’s best to simply apologise, explain that what your intention was and clarify what you mean.
It’s not just you that can mistakenly imply, others can mistakenly infer things too; such is the nature of human to human communication. (Considering we’re just a mess of electrical impluses it’s a miracle we can communicate ideas at all tbh)
Just be yourself, apologise and clarify if it comes across incorrectly, learn from the immediate feedback and I feel critically; don’t be trying to keep to guidelines of how you need to behave in a conversation. Be yourself, be in the moment. If you’re trying to micromanage your behaviour in the moment, people will sense that and it’ll put them off.
Just try to lean towards replies that hear the other person and show them kindness, but don’t overthink it on a day to day