Aspergers Syndrome
Social Skills Training
continued

Social skills training

Skilled social interaction is not a thought out, planned interaction. It is brainstem, reflexive responding to another person, like dancing. Social skills training is generally ineffective and can actually confound social performance because it teaches cognitively guided, planful social interaction. This shifts the Aspergers child away from doing the reflexive social dance. Thus they can never get beyond the dance instructors 1-2-3, and 1-2-3. And, that is exactly what their social interaction looks like It is logically directed  through a fog of emotion. They have all the pieces but it is clumsy because they cannot dance it.

Each time they are forced into social situations by well meaning helpers, the more negative social conditioning can occur. This sets up more negative experiences which can make things worse, not better. It does no good to push these children into socialization experiences if they are not going to to be positive. More failure experiences do not make for enhanced social skills and comfort.

Because of repeated failure experiences in social situations, it is often more comfortable to reject others before they can be rejected. There are a wide variety of rationalizations that they create to disguise (for themselves and others) the real reasons for their rejecting others. It may be that others are “stupid”,  "don’t like doing that kind of stuff”, “ don’t want to … anyway”.

Socialization  is an approach avoidance problem for them. They desperately want to relate to others, but when they actually approach the situation, it is emotionally upsetting