The poorly socialized unsocial misanthropic introvert and "social skills"

[cimorene]

I hate being in social situations and they make me anxious for various reasons which are not the same as the reasons of people with Social Anxiety type disorders. I've kind of always hated social situations. For the last couple of years I've been trying to force myself to practice them.

And the thing is, I have definitely gotten better. I've gotten more able to cope with them, with less anxiety before and during, and less exhaustion after, and I've also gotten more practiced at it, which makes the social interactions themselves more easy, although not more desired.

So like... I think my social skills have improved?

The thing is, it doesn't feel like my social skills have improved; it just feels like I'm getting better at faking it. What I'm faking is not actually skill, though: I'm faking being social, e.g. interest in other people, feelings other than extreme dislike for group activities and parties, etc.

So even though I've been completely aware of that struggle and the above increasing easiness the whole time, it literally never occurred to me until therapy today that what's improving are my actual social skills. I'm so completely accustomed to thinking of myself as a person without social skills (and being obnoxiously and contrarianly proud of same perhaps?) that I just thought of myself as getting better at pretending to be a person with social skills.

(Usually I do this by asking myself things like "What would bexless do?", "What would Sara Munro do?", "What would Miss Manners recommend?", and "What would the charismatic pagan minister of my Unitarian Universalist congregation from when I was a kid say?") (I also ridiculously often ask myself "What pose/facial expression would Natasha Romanoff adopt?")

Mind: blown.

I'm going to continue to refer to myself as a person without social skills, however. It's not like they're actually GOOD ones.

Comments

[alafaye]

And I don't think extroverts quite get it, you know? How difficult it is to be social; for them it comes naturally. They're used to saying hello and asking someone how they're doing and making small talk. They don't even have to think about it. (I recognize that for a few of them it doesn't come easy, but for the most part...)

I discovered the years I spent as a child with one of my grandmother's, just nodding and making appropriate noises and words at certain points (which is all she wanted, really; to this day, she continues to like seeing me because then no one thinks she's crazy, just talking aloud to no one! I love her, but I definitely know where my crazy came from ;), served my social skills well. Kind of; I mean it's great that I can do this and make social situations better, but I probably should be making more of an effort. (But so long as no one thinks I'm being rude, then that's brilliant.)

[cimorene]

Smalltalk Lessons should be mandatory... somewhere. For small children. So many people's lives would be so much easier...

[jamjar]

It's the difference between being socially competent and socially comfortable, I think.

The thing is, social skills are just that-- they're a skill. They can come pretty close to being an art form, but they're not a... well, they're not a mood, they're not a feeling, you know? Being able to fake them is exactly the same as having them. Wanting to use them, being comfortable in those situations- motivation and social orientation, I guess- that's a separate thing entirely. It's just that people treat them the same because those circles in the venn diagram often overlap.

[cimorene]

I feel like 'competent' is a more imaginable goal to reach for than 'comfortable', which for an anxious person can sound like a personality transplant. Obviously, I would like to be less uncomfortable, and that is often possible, but realizing it's not necessary is an eye-opener.