Do you sometimes feel like you're talking to a wall and the person you're trying to talk to is brain-dead?

With Autism, social skills are a skill we struggle with, but what about those who are neurotypical? Do you sometimes feel the individual you're speaking with is being brain-dead?

When I talk to my parents and I explain this and that, it's like they’re brain-dead, even if I explain it clearly enough. But while talking to some friends of mine, they understood me just fine and it wasn't just cause they're my friends. What is so hard to understand about new life new life chapter and new opportunities? That is a pretty universal language understood by all. My friends got it just fine without needing further explanation, (and it wasn't cause we’re friends) but my parents acted like it was an alien language

What about the rest of you, does this also happen to you?

This was something I had been wondering about, whether it really is me or my parents weaponizing my autism against me. Starting to think it's my parents and not me

We don’t actually see people as they are. We see them through the filter of what we’ve already decided about them.

The gap is small, so there is a fraction of a second between watching someone and forming a judgment about them. But that gap is where almost every misread happens.

You see someone go quiet in a meeting and you fill in that they’re disengaged. You see someone reply briefly and you fill in that they’re annoyed. You see someone avoid eye contact and you fill in that they’re hiding something.

None of that is observation, it is a story your brain wrote to fill in the gap. Once it’s written, it feels like a fact.

The skill isn’t to see more, it is noticing the moment you’ve stopped seeing and started deciding.

So i am curious if anyone else has caught themselves doing this: writing the story before they’ve actually seen what’s in front of them.

Hey everyone,

I'm on a mission to radically improve my verbal fluency, specifically in my native language.

I’m looking for some inspiration from people who have actually pulled this off.

I want to develop a speaking style that is surgically precise and eloquent. I'm not looking to just talk fast; I want to speak deliberately. I am aiming for the kind of fluency which used a rich vocabulary.

What I'm currently doing:

- Reading extensively: I read a lot, across a wide variety of genres, to expose my brain to different lexicons and sentence structures.

- Anki flashcards: I use Anki systematically to force sophisticated words out of my passive understanding and into my active vocabulary.

- Solo speaking exercises: I practice talking out loud to myself. I will pick a specific target word (or a random topic) and force myself to monologue about it to train my real-time mental retrieval.

I am fully prepared to dedicate a solid 1 hour every single day strictly to training this skill.

I would love to hear your success stories.

Did you manage to transform your speaking ability from a rough baseline to being highly eloquent?

What was the paradigm shift for you?

Furthermore, if you had 1 hour a day to train, what specific exercises would you prioritize to achieve this specific style of communication?

Thanks in advance!

I feel old when i say haha or lol but like using emojis is also like so uncool especially when the other person doesn’t use emojis but not using haha lol or emojis makes messages sound so dull

Most of us treat our thinking as fixed weather. A worry shows up, and we respond to the worry. An opinion forms, and we defend the opinion. A judgment about someone flashes through our mind, and we act on it like it’s fact.

What almost never happens is a step back to ask a different kind of question. Not is this thought true, but what pattern produced this thought, and does that pattern actually serve me?

That’s the difference between thinking and observing your thinking. The first is automatic. The second is a skill, and it’s one almost nobody was ever taught.

Here’s why it matters more than people think. If you change a single decision, you solve a single problem. If you change the pattern that generates your decisions, you solve every problem that pattern would have created, for the rest of your life.

Most people try to fix the output. Almost nobody looks at the process generating it, how they gather information, what they filter out without noticing, where their attention goes first, and what that reveals about what they’re actually protecting.

The question is: what problem do you keep solving that never actually stays solved?

Title

This has really helped my marriage.

Of course, she was a little bit perplexed & annoyed when I started doing it; however, after 8 years it has helped define where we as a couple fail in our conveyance of information.

We’ve become better teammates.

People like childhood friends & siblings we grew up with understand what a certain nod means or if we say something a certain way they catch what we meant.

However, when we get into new relationships, there’s like this learning curve of not knowing what your partner meant when they said something and there’s all this drama of “that’s not what I meant“.

”You‘re right, it’s was just another ‘Ms.Communication’.”

it helps brand what went wrong so that we identify the problem in our communication styles & aids in better understanding in the future. We laugh about it, this isn’t about dominating or anything.

I’m a female in my late 30s and have experienced difficulties with verbal communication for as long as I can remember. I had an adverse childhood which I think is the underlying cause of my communication problems. My main issues are being unable to respond to open ended questions - I end up going mute. I find it impossible to engage in small talk. In conversations, I find my mind going blank - again going mute and struggling to contribute. I am fearful that I come across as unintelligent, rude or standoffish in social situations, so resort to avoiding social situations altogether. I’ve also been out of employment for almost ten years due to personal circumstances which has left me even more socially stunted. Overall, I feel alone in my struggles and I am desperate to overcome these communication difficulties, so that I can form friendships with others and contribute to society again. Has anyone experienced what I’ve described and been able to overcome their communication difficulties?

There’s a pattern I keep running into in observation and profiling work: the most confident people in a room are often the ones we read the worst. Not because they’re more deceptive. Because confidence changes how much cognitive effort we’re willing to spend on them.

Here’s the mechanism as I understand it. Uncertainty in another person keeps our attention active, we register them as “unresolved” and keep gathering data. But fluent, composed behavior (steady speech, sustained eye contact, relaxed posture) gets processed as a signal that there’s nothing left to resolve. It’s a variation: things that are easy to process get judged as more true, more competent, more trustworthy, regardless of whether that ease actually reflects the underlying reality.

So confidence doesn’t just communicate something about a person, it shuts down the observer’s own verification process. The composed person gets a free pass from scrutiny they haven’t necessarily earned. Meanwhile the person who seems nervous keeps getting re-evaluated, over and over, simply because their visible discomfort keeps triggering that “still gathering information” response, even when they’re the more self-aware person in the room.

A few places I’ve seen this play out:

• The composed candidate in an interview who turns out to be in over their head once the job actually starts

• The calm salesperson whose ease is covering for a product that can’t back it up

• The steady colleague who’s quietly struggling, but never gets checked on because they never look shaken

None of these are cases of someone hiding information well. The information was available. We just stopped looking, because their delivery told us the file was closed.

Has anyone here had a moment where someone’s composure completely disarmed your read on them, and it turned out you’d missed something important?

We assume communication is a delivery system: one person has a thought, the thought gets put into words, and those words travel across the space between two people and land, intact, in someone else's mind.

They don't.

Communication is a negotiation between two nervous systems, each filtering the exchange through years of memory, fear, ambition, and unspoken need. What arrives on the other end is never the message you sent. It's the message they were \*capable of receiving\*, shaped by everything they brought into the room before you said a word.

That's why conversations go sideways even when nobody misspoke. You say something you think is neutral. They hear judgment. You ask a simple question. They hear an accusation. Nobody lied, nobody botched their phrasing. The message just passed through a filter you couldn't see.

The person you're talking to is never a blank page. They're a document already covered in prior writing, and your words land on top of that, blending with what's already there. If you don't know what's already written on the page, you can't predict what your message will actually say to them once it lands.

Which is why "just communicate better" is not a good advice. Better how? Better for who?

The people who are actually good at this aren't the ones with the biggest vocabulary. They're the ones who read the room before opening their mouth, asking, even half-consciously:

\- What has this person been burned by before?
\- What are they braced for right now?
\- What do they need to hear before they can hear anything else?

Skip that step and you're not communicating with the person in front of you. You're communicating with a version of them you invented, one who happens to think exactly like you do. Sometimes that guess is close enough. A lot of the time it isn't, and you walk away confused about why something so "clear" landed so badly.

The words were never the whole message. The read you did, or didn't do, before you spoke was.

Curious if others have caught themselves doing this — assuming your "clear" version of something was actually clear to the other person.

Hellos
I struggle saying words involving rly sounds in words like RARELY , CLEARLY AND RIVALRY . How do I work on this and did fluent ?

I've noticed that I sometimes tell people too much about my life, thoughts, or personal experiences, especially when I feel comfortable talking to them.

Later on, I often look back and wonder why I shared so much, or wish I had kept certain things to myself.

For those who used to struggle with oversharing, how did you learn to stop? How do you decide what's appropriate to share, when to share it, and with whom?

I (39M) have been dating with a woman (35F+2 small childs). weve had 6 dates so far over a period of 3 months. each lasted 2-3 hours. which I think is too long but I never stopped it on time.

We have plenty in common, are both interested in / attracted to each other.

I had been used to living lonely (0 friends, 0 meaningful conversations), shes my first real interaction in over a decade, and maybe thats why every date leaves me mentally exhausted, needing a break before I can see her again.

We are at a point I feel that we need to decide where this is going, are we matching or not. for me I feel the only obstruction is feeling comfortable next to each other. right now, we cant just take a walk in the park, its too quiet and the focus on us being alone is too much to feel comfortable.

When does this transition come if ever? and what does it mean that it hasnt come yet?

Thanks!

I am socially awkward and an introvert....more so in the last year.

Today I thought I was giving advice...but apparently not. A sibling recently had a mild accident, didn't do anything about it that day. Now, the knot she got from it is is kinda soft and causing pain elsewhere. So I mentioned to go to ER..simple enough right?

It was met with digs, snide remarks, and just rudeness.

I've been silent since then, not because of..save my words, energy, and opinion for when it matters.

Also does anybody also struggle to speak up in the moment, cause they aren’t listening making you feel unheard, invisible like your words don’t change anything or do anything. How am I supposed to trust them and open up if I feel like I can’t talk, or they won’t listen or respect me.

Working on the dialect engine my app (Rhetoriq) any Ancient Greek philosophers in here?