Soo far, ive read dale carnegie's how to make friends and influence people and a body language book that's only printed in brazil. They were great reads and i feel both of them made some subtle things explicit to me. However, i still struggle a lot with reading the room and not bothering others, breaking unspoken social rules that i have never heard about.
For example, yesterday i went to the doctor where an old woman bothered my mother to not end, and apparently everyone else in the room. I observed some discomfort in people, but my mother, who never read a single book about body language, dissected the most minor of details on the actions and pointed out a lot of rule breaking actions that said woman was doing that i had no idea at all were disrespectful. Furthermore, she picked out the least noticeable feelings of the people there, knowing exactly what each one felt.
What are some books that would help on that regard? Something that helps me reading the room or shows me tools on how to deduce if a certain action is bad or not.
by Lonely-Poetry-3621
3 Comments
Apologies for the armchair diagnosis, but it sounds like you might have autistic traits too – they do sometimes go hand in hand with ADHD.
Pierre Novellie wrote Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? following his autism diagnosis and it touches on similar themes so I think you might find it useful.
In terms of general social cues – your therapist might be able to recommend some specific guides, but unfortunately social interaction doesn’t have the hard rules of ‘you can talk for x% about trains and that’s okay, but Y% is bad.’
Sadly so much of that level of comprehension is intuition-based and would be difficult to teach or quantify. But, one thing that can really help with emotional & interpersonal intelligence is just reading fiction (and nonfiction more along the lines of memoirs vs just subject matter experts, if that makes sense). Just understanding other people’s experiences better can help better understand how a behavior does or might make them feel.
Also, tbh, most people are not analyzing these interactions as thoroughly as your mom is, roughly 90% of the people in that room were probably just like “that lady was weird/annoying, oh well!” And never thought about her again. This is not a criticism of your mom, more that I just wanted to reassure you that you don’t need to live every moment of your life as if it’s going to be broken down into a PowerPoint if someone found you slightly off putting 😜 if you just try to be a nice person and treat people right, most of the time you’ll be fine
I would recommend brain talk by Dr. David Schnarch. It’s about mapping out people’s minds. As far as relating to other people, I think the book the charisma myth might be a good one. It’s about slowing down and being present with others