How to Lose Friends and Alienate Yourself | Aspie Tips

hi everyone welcome back to asperger's from the inside you're here with paul today we're looking at how to lose friends and alienate yourself so some of you might already be fairly good at this and so maybe i'm not going to be teaching you anything that you haven't already figured out for yourself in your own life but um a lot of what i'll be sharing today is both from my personal experience and my professional experience for for lack of a better word of a lifetime of um learning about emotional intelligence um and and how it affects other people um to to now be teaching emotional intelligence um and working as a relationship coach and seeing these uh patterns play out every day um so if we're thinking about the the question of how to lose friends and alienate yourself there's essentially one key component that is essential and if you have this one key component then you are guaranteed to lose friends and alienate yourself so uh today i'll be going through three kind of three steps of three ways that you can make this happen for yourself um of course if you'd like to you could take the opposite advice and try not to lose friends and alienate people but you know each to their own um so the the first one is to go against the grain of the people around you so the uh a metaphor for this or an analogy for this is like if you're if you're patting a pet like let's say there's a cat in front of you you pat it one way and everything's good and if you go against the grain and pat it the way the fur doesn't want to go we're not going to have a happy kitty so mismatching emotions are is a big reason that people react badly to your presence so i don't know if you've had the experience where you might say something and someone gets angry or you might try to empathize with someone and they it actually has the opposite effect so um to give some examples of this let's say there's a um the the mood of the whole room is really sad maybe there's been some terrible news on the tv or maybe there's been a some personal drama and people around you are in a sad mood if you're in a chirpy happy mood it's going to rub up against them in the in a wrong way and they're not going to appreciate your presence and not going to appreciate how you make them feel another really stereotypical example of this is when someone is sad or anxious and you tell them to come you know someone is angry you tell them to calm down someone is sad you tell them to cheer up someone is anxious and you tell them there's nothing to worry about maybe you've had the experience of other people doing this to you and it just doesn't feel good when someone goes against your emotion and rubs your emotion in the wrong way another personal example of this for me is that very often i find myself accidentally being the odd one out in a group of people so maybe everyone else will have energy and want to do something like i don't know go to the pub or go out dancing or something i don't know and i will be the only one who thinks uh actually i don't really feel like doing that i'm a bit tired maybe i'll go to bed now or maybe i'll have a power nap or something else that is just completely different to the people around me and at the same time i am a big fan of uh really energetic music lots of metal and really high energy stuff and i also wake up very easily in the morning some people take a very long time to wake up i can wake up very quickly so something that i really enjoy and i really enjoy sharing this with the very very very few other people who also enjoy it with me is something i call metal in the morning and i remember at a university orientation camp there were about two or three of us who were really enthusiastic about metal in the morning so everyone else had stayed out until you know 3 a.m 4 a.m only just getting to bed as the sun rises and then we're getting up at 7 a.m turning on the speakers again and having a really good loud energetic time when everyone else would prefer us to be matching their mood and to be asleep and unconscious because they've just wasted all their energy you know staying out partying till three or four in the morning so that's an example of going against the grain being the odd one out emotionally and and when you do that it um has a negative effect on the emotions of the people around you so that is number one uh the first great way to lose friends and alienate yourself uh the second way that i'll share with you today is telling the truth especially telling the truth when people don't want to hear it this is a fantastic way to lose friends piss people off and alienate yourself and my analogy for this one it's a little bit like if someone has a bruise and they don't want to acknowledge the bruise and you say hey look there's a bruise here you you're really sensitive to this thing and they say no i'm not like look i'm poking it does it hurt i'm sure it hurts because i'm poking it and it's a bruise why don't you acknowledge that it's here um yes you are correct what you're saying is probably true it may even be objectively true however the the person that you're telling it to or the group of people that you're telling it to first for one reason or another do not want to acknowledge the truth of the situation and when you pour salt on the wound when you push the bruise even more just to prove that it's there it makes people very upset because they desperately want to try and ignore this fact that you're putting up in front of their face saying look you can't ignore it it's true look here it is um it's it's worth noting and this can be really frustrating and i've been on both ends of this um but when you want to acknowledge something and people around you don't want to acknowledge it it can be really frustrating especially because it feels like they are negating reality and i know from my own from my own personal experience i just want everyone to agree on the reality of the situation it makes me feel more secure when everyone can see the same thing and we're not sort of living in some kind of pretend make-believe world world on the other hand something that has helped me significantly when i don't want to do this is recognizing that they already know i'm not telling them something that they don't know i'm telling them something that they don't want to acknowledge i'm telling them something that they don't want to look at at the moment and they do not want to talk about at the moment for various reasons and often it's because it's a very sensitive pain point that they don't want to really go go into at the moment so if someone does not want to hear the truth telling them the truth forcing them to see something that they don't want to see or trying to show it to them is a brilliant way to lose friends and alienate yourself number three is doing things that other people want you to do and what do i what do i mean by that um it's it's a fairly obvious if you're faking a certain attitude or doing something for the sole reason that other people want you to do it um it's a little bit like wearing a mask that is so obvious that other people can see that it's not really you and when you do that what happens is it makes it difficult slash impossible for people to build trust with you so it's a great way uh to lose friends and alienate yourself because it destroys the the trust that you have in a relationship very often what happens when we do try to mask and we try to do the things that other people expect of us is that maybe we can do it 90 of the time even 95 of the time but every once in a while we'll slip up because it's not natural maybe i will try to make eye contact and maybe i'll do a reasonable job most of the time but sometimes i won't do a good job so if i try to pretend that that is me the message that i'm going to give to everyone else is i am pretending and i am not being honest i'm not being genuine um there is a concept called congruence which means that your behaviors words actions match how you feel they match your your inside matches your outside and when that happens it builds trust because you can see that the person is doing what comes naturally to them they are being themselves they are being genuine they are being authentic and their words and actions are congruent with their um their actual selves and their internal state um and i've just been reading a book recently uh by carl rogers um who is uh one of the founders of the of a humanistic approach to to psychology and and client centered therapy and things like that and he puts it really really well he basically says that acting as if you're accepting when you're not really accepting for example actually harms the relationship because it's not authentic and the other person can see through it my own personal phrase that i use a lot in my emotional intelligence training is that emotions leak so when we're really angry angry if we try to be calm the anger will leak and other people will see that we're actually really angry a great example of this is passive aggressive behavior if you've ever said something or witnessed something that's extremely passive aggressive the words themselves are not mean but the intention behind them and the emotion behind them are extremely violent and extremely aggressive in a passive way so when we slip up when we let those emotions leak that we've been trying to hold in when we don't acknowledge how we're actually feeling and show it to people on the outside we end up coming across as not genuine and not trustworthy and the kind of person that you can't really build a relationship with so again this is a great way to lose friends and alienate yourself by pretending to be normal basically pretending to do things that other people want you to do even when it doesn't feel right for you at the moment so what do all of these three things have in common what they have in common is that they all disregard and disrespect the emotion the emotions and the emotional state of the other person so if someone is sad and i'm really chipper and make them you know and i bring a different energy i'm kind of steamrolling their emotions a little bit and i'm not my response is not sensitive to the emotional state of the other person when i tell the truth to somebody who does not want to hear the truth in that moment i'm not being sensitive to the effect of my actions on the other person so am even triggering them to be angry and instead of being sensitive to the fact that they don't want to talk about this thing at the moment for various reasons um and then finally that with the congruence um i am not letting the other person feel safe around me because i'm not allowing myself to be genuine in this situation so there's a really fundamental lesson in emotional intelligence especially around relationship building which basically says that how you make others feel and you actually have a huge influence on how others feel around you makes the biggest difference in my opinion um to the the relationship that you're that you're able to form if someone gets in the habit of feeling good around you they will end up liking you if someone gets in the habit of knowing that when they talk to you you'll say something offensive or you will make them feel awkward or you'll make them feel anxious or you make them feel unsure then it's unlikely that that person is going to want to spend time with you or relate to you in any way so a great way to lose friends and alienate yourself is to make sure that whenever someone has an interaction with you you either offen uh say something that is insensitive make them feel awkward or anxious um or do something that challenges them in you know pushes them to do something that they don't want to do like talking about a subject that they're not comfortable talking about so making people uncomfortable is another great way um so that's been my reflections on how to lose friends and alienate yourself i'd be interested to hear if any of that resonated for you i know i drew a lot of these experiences from my own personal life of accidentally falling down this path of losing friends and alienating myself so obviously the the counter message is if you would like to stop doing that in any with any particular person then it's really important to learn the emotional intelligence skill and it is a skill and you can learn it if you're taught in the right way that suits your own learning style to manage the emotions of the people around you to make them have uh make them feel comfortable and that is essentially how we make relationships with people so i hope you've enjoyed this video and i'll be back again next week bye

Channel: Aspergers from the Inside

Views: 16,427

Rating: 4.9469318 out of 5

Keywords: asperger syndrome (disease or medical condition), real life aspergers, coping strategies aspergers, aspergers emotional intelligence, autism emotional intelligence, autism communication, paul micallef, paul micallef autism, autism friends, aspergers friends, autism friendship, autism communication strategies, aspie tips, making friends, losing friends, how to lose friends

Id: 5c-2O-GbVCU

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020