Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman?

[eon]

I went in to a clinic today for a first attempt at starting a diagnostic path, and they seemed to be intentionally ambiguous with me. I shared my perception of noticing the many versions of myself getting lost in the details, never realizing the bigger picture of my traits. I shared my top goals being to complete social/emotional training so I can enhance my ability to share in important human interactions, with family, and at work. I explained how I may appear quite engaged today but it is as a result of my preparation in isolation to ensure the best possible initial mood-state, and my extreme concentration and energy to try to evaluate the cues you are generating whilst keeping good control over my own to deliver my ideas and responses articulately.

At that point they told me about how we have this big misconception about the necessity of understanding each other's cues, and the even bigger misconception that we should seek to make another person feel something or change how they feel. And that we need to look inward to ask the question of how we can give our greatest capable performance in delivering the message of our thoughts, free of the idea that the actions we take should cause a certain perception in others. It seemed only to discount my feelings that I am missing out on important components of interactions due to poor feelings-gauge. But maybe I just took some of this message too literally.

Now that I've had some time to absorb this, I don't dispute that I agreed with it in the first place- why indeed should one care so much about getting others to perceive one a certain way over just focusing on what you can do to get your message across-- but it more confused me and overwhelmed me than anything else during the conversation due to the pace. I just feel that I was being swept along and as usual out of sync with the interaction. I got behind in the start and had to spend the rest of this conversation catching up. I feel I did not have the chance to get most of my thoughts vocalized correctly, and I got the perception that they thought I was looking for some type of specific remedy to the concentration impairment portion of executive dysfunction.

They seemed to emphasize that over the fact that I felt my most important focus is my inability of knowing what to say to people, how to repair emotions or conversations, while at the same time properly understanding the signals coming from others. I had to explain that my perception of having been medicated in the past was that it made me feel even more mechanical although my decrease in errors of omission and commission would have been quantitatively, provably decreased. This entire conversation was like an assault on my attention itself.

The book Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman was recommended, also, as I tried my best to insist away from any medication type path.

Given this experience, I was looking for any opinions on this book and author as to whether you've used it or heard it suggested before. And also whether you think it would be beneficial at all for me to compile this perception in writing and bring it next time as a debrief to this first conversation to help them compare what my perception is to what they read it as during the actual interaction. I feel there's a chance here that I'm failing to send the right message of my intentions and my experiences due to the actual setting of the social face to face conversation, and because I'm concentrating so hard on engaging with them at the same rhythm, I'm being perceived as extremely "inattentive" as my speech slows and my pauses lengthen. I think it could be very valuable to them to make this comparison. If indeed being on the spectrum means that our experience internally is much further disconnected from what we are sometimes able to convey either through spoken or nonverbal communication, then I think it would be a major error to forgo this written perception debrief.

 

[eon]

Figure I'll just bump this with the revised introspective debrief I came up with later that day.

i've spent my life more or less "in therapy." i have never liked one of these therapists.

they are always assuming you can be normal if they just figure out how you can get over the trauma. they are bent on convincing you to do things their way. they never give you the listening ear they would need to actually start to understand your mind and your overall level of intelligence. they dont understand how profoundly different you feel.

you could have a hundred or a thousand important statements and they are only interested in 1 or 2. i am not good at effectively translating my thoughts into verbal and non-verbal communication in real-time. my ability to do this is significantly impaired and below the level that it will appear to be from my behavior alone.

don't you think there's a reason this social discussion environment has never worked on me after a lifetime of therapy?

End of rant, moving on to useful substance.

This person seems to think they see symptoms of hypervigilance in my social disengagement. They think I'm distracted by a compulsion to check the area for threats. this is the FIRST thing this person said to me when I entered the office ("checking out your surroundings? always like to be aware of what's nearby?"). It's obvious to me in analyzing the experience that this is their perception due to the bias they came into it with looking at my life events on the paperwork they required, and I have no doubt about this. During the conversation itself it is difficult for me to make these types of identifications about people's intent and recommunicate accordingly.

Let's take a moment to objectively consider the criteria being hypothesized - PTSD via wikipedia:

A: Exposure to a traumatic event. This must have involved both (a) loss of "physical integrity", or risk of serious injury or death, to self or others, and (b) an intense negative emotional response.

Let's say that you could put the sexual and psychological abuse I endured around age 9 and 10 immediately after losing my parent to fit this. Just while we are exploring the criteria.

B: Persistent re-experiencing. One or more of these must be present in the victim: flashback memories, recurring distressing dreams, subjective re-experiencing of the traumatic event(s), or intense negative psychological or physiological response to any objective or subjective reminder of the traumatic event(s).

The only item here is the last one. The problems are being viewed as a negative physiological response to several types of potentially threatening stimuli. Social stress is being blamed on the trauma, as a subjective reminder somehow of the events.

C: Persistent avoidance and emotional numbing. This involves a sufficient level of:
avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, such as certain thoughts or feelings, or talking about the event(s);
avoidance of behaviors, places, or people that might lead to distressing memories;
inability to recall major parts of the trauma(s), or decreased involvement in significant life activities;
decreased capacity (down to complete inability) to feel certain feelings;
an expectation that one's future will be somehow constrained in ways not normal to other people.

Ok. But the problem is that I recall and can talk about what happened with clinical precision. I can describe what was done to me and I can describe how close to death I felt when engaging in the inhalant usage. Just because I went through some extreme bullying due to my suggestibility doesn't mean that it is the reason my feelings and moods are different.

D: Persistent symptoms of increased arousal not present before. These are all physiological response issues, such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, or problems with anger, concentration, or hypervigilance.

This is not a valid explanation for my mood reactions of anger or my social disengagement.

(I left out the last 2 which basically state it has to go on for a month or more and cause a significant disruption to regular life functions.)

This is in no way based on a composite of all relevant details. It's a snap judgement after looking once at my life events and asking a couple of questions based on them, and seeing matching responses based on the hypothesis. They haven't even begun to engage me or my proposed goals. When I explained that when I feel wound up (typically as a result of social stress) I become fidgety and do repetitive physical actions involuntarily, I was flatly ignored. The only thing to do it seems is to take back this perception and attempt to disprove the hypothesis by giving detailed descriptions of the traumatic experiences.

 

[Firnafth]

I agree that therapists are rather fixated on people needing to get over trauma. I haven't even suffered real trauma but my recent therapist still occasionally tried to find ways it affected me.

It doesn't sound like your therapist understands you very well. At the very least they are failing to communicate with you in a way amenable to the way you think. I would suggest sticking it out for a little longer, and if things don't improve maybe go somewhere else? I nearly demanded a different therapist after the first meeting I had with my most recent one, but eventually she helped me understand myself a lot better. She was pretty good at listening, though.

 

[KinksFan]

I'll have to look into that book.:googlenoob

 

[eon]

Someone on another forum said that it wasn't very helpful.

I picked up one by socialthinking.com, which was recommended as a resource by the references section at the back of Tony Attwood's complete guide to asperger's syndrome. It is called Socially Curious and Curiously Social, sort of written for teenagers but so far it has my buy-in pretty solidly. It states in the intro that it seeks to spell out social thinking in a way that allows you to identify the components and then solve the "social equation". It's a book written specifically for us - "A social thinking guidebook for teens and young adults with Asperger's, ADHD, PDDNOS, NVLD, or other Murky Undiagnosed Social Learning Issues"

I'm taking it with me to the next session along with some writeups I've had the chance to put together now that it's been 2 weeks since this first session. It was only supposed to be 1 week to the 2nd session but they decided to move me due a scheduling problem.

 

[jaws]

T o join the rant about therapist:

I have a hypothesis that most (not all) therapist have a limited arsenal based on their chosen area of emphasis and their choice of educational facilities, thus they feel a need to fit all their patients into certain categories that they feel they themselves can best cope with. That is, they try to convince you that you have a certain disorder that they are familiar with so they can boost their own ego by solving a problem you never had. I agree that most of them never really take the time to listen to you in depth enough to truly identify actual needs. I have sometimes wondered if this is more of a ASD problem in that it takes us so much longer to put things into words and even longer still to analyze responses and questions.

Personally I would think it would take someone well over 6 months at 1-2hrs a week of asking me questions before we could even begin to discuss POSSIBLE areas of concern to improve on, and maybe another 3 months for me to decide if their potential concerns are actual problems I have and want to fix. But I find most therapist have labeled your needs in the first half of the first hour you meet.

 

[eon]

thanks for your comments on that, that's really useful as right now that i've got them aware of my major internal differences it seems like they really want to help me but are very lost as to how to structure it. every time i've gone, it has just felt very wandering and i'm the one sharing with them info i learned from the social thinking book to support my goals. i was hoping to be guided with a bit more experienced perspective on working with spectrum individuals on specific strategies for adapting to difficult interactions

 

[Spinning Compass]

I read it a while ago, and thought it pretty interesting. I am always on the lookout for books like that and have started to put together a small library. I also recommend Temple Grandin's Unwritten Rules of Social Behavior. I wish I'd had that book years ago. It would have saved me much grief.

I have mixed feelings about counselors. I was dragged to an awful lot of them in an attempt to cure what was wrong with me. Most of them seemed to be more interested in making me docile and obedient than helping me grow as a person who could stand on her own two feet and make her way in the world. I tried counseling a couple of times as an adult, didn't work out, probably because they didn't know how to deal with someone on the spectrum (and I didn't know that I was). I remember one counselor telling me that there was no such thing as "normal." I said to him, "Why is it, that you with your degree, cannot tell what any child in a playground knows right off: who is normal and who is not?" Please, spare me that BS. So I stopped going. Also they wanted to put me on drugs. Been there, done that, got my mind free again.