From ages 19-25 I was incapacitated by schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and I struggled with friendships. For several years after I still struggled with socialization and interpersonal relationships. I had been isolated for so many years that I had lost all my social skills.
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For my recovery the most difficult but also most important part of working was constantly being forced to socialize.
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Regaining those social skills started with putting myself into social situations. I worked eleven different jobs before I found a job I was able to keep. I was originally planning on staying at my current job temporarily until I found something better but I wound up liking it and I still work there today. For my recovery the most difficult but also most important part of working at a butchery was constantly being forced to socialize. Whether I was with other co-workers or I was helping customers I was forced to talk. Initially I was a walking faux-pas and I unintentionally caused a lot of strife. I didn’t understand the rules and regulations of socialization.
It was initially painful and difficult to have to go through a number of social situations I had no understanding of but after time I improved with them. After a day of work I would go home and self-reflect on the things I did well while socializing and also the situations that didn’t work out well. With my doctor I also talked a lot about these situations and how to improve in them. Part of the issue was just relearning what to do and what to say in certain situations which came with experience. Another issue was having social delusions from episodes that hindered my thinking. The hindrance of my thinking caused social ineptitude. As I progressed in therapy I improved at socialization.
Being someone that always said what he meant, I didn’t understand that sometimes others say things that they don’t mean. I learned when they are doing this, and to not take things personally. This was helpful because it helped me to understand that people say meaningful and meaningless things, just as they have meaningful and meaningless thoughts. This problem originated from not wanting anything meaningless in my life. While I was younger I felt meaningless and during episodes I developed an adherence to only say meaningful things and to never say anything meaningless. Later on I learned that it’s good to have a balance between meaningful and meaningless words spoken as well as thoughts thought. Once I learned this it was extremely liberating for my mind and also my social interactions.
In prior years I suffered from social anxiety that was crippling to the point where I wasn’t able to speak many times throughout the day. After my episodes I had psychosis which hindered my speaking abilities. In order to help myself speak I told myself things like “be nice to people about their social skills and speaking ability”. Being nice to others about their social abilities allowed me to be nice to myself about my own. This helped completely eliminate thought-blocking and racing thoughts. I learned that thought-blocking and racing thoughts were a result of self-judgments. Those self-judgments were also judgments I had towards others so lifting the judgments I had upon others lifted them off myself. I figured if I was treating others well with regards to their social skills then I deserved to treat myself well. A lot of those judgments probably stemmed from jealousy and envy for people who were eloquent and able to speak fluently, as I struggled to do this for the first 25 years of my life.
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Being someone that always said what he meant, I didn’t understand that sometimes others say things that they don’t mean.
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Another issue I had with socialization was with sarcasm. My mind was so literal that I didn’t always understand when people were being sarcastic. I was sometimes asked if I had Asperger’s syndrome. The difficulty I faced was not understanding or even registering people’s emotional cues which were indicating that they were being sarcastic. When I was younger I knew when people were joking but after my episodes I couldn’t tell the difference. The sarcastic jokes people made sounded the same as if they were being serious. This has been an ongoing problem but I’ve developed a strategy with it. The thing that helps me is that I’m usually able to figure out afterwards that someone is being sarcastic by their reaction to my reaction. If I react seriously to a joke or there’s an awkward pause after my reaction this tells me they were probably kidding. Other times they have said they were just kidding. That’s when I’ll let them know I just don’t do well with sarcasm and they understand this. With my friends they know this from the start and it’s become a fun thing that we joke about a lot. They like to see what they can get by me and afterwards we get a few laughs.
One of the more salient issues I had with sarcasm is when people say whatever they want and hide behind saying that they were just kidding. I was picked on a lot growing up and this was a typical cop-out when someone did not want to be responsible for their words. From having been hurt by this I learned to take responsibility for every word I spoke and this was actually a great thing for me. I realized if I’m going to be responsible for my words this means I should only say things that I am willing to stand by. Sometimes I make mistakes and I apologize but this apology is still a form of responsibility. It’s a way of being conscious of other people’s feelings. Of course there are good times to joke but in general this made me more thoughtful before I spoke. It also helped me to say more respectful and positive things about others which improved social interactions.
Photo by J Stimp
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