Social/Emotional Development
A case study
This post is about my social/emotional development this far. This is relevant context for a lot of my current writing, and I find that it is a strong attractor that pulls other stories out of narrative. So I’ll just write chronologically, giving some highlights. I’ll most likely miss vital stuff, but this should serve as a scaffold.1
Pre-teens
As I kid I lacked social & emotional awareness. I solved this by rigging the game. I rigged the game by running “the friendship club” with two of my friends. The club had two explicit rules:
You could join it if I & my friends liked you
Everyone except me and my friends was thrown out at the end of each week.
Some people complained that this was unfair. They weren’t invited to the friendship club.
Teenager/high school
“The friendship club” concept wasn’t a good fit for high school. High school was filled with more physically developed people that wanted to put snow inside of my t-shirt.2
Dude: “Hey you! We’re going to put snow inside of your t-shirt!”
Me: “Sorry, but I don’t have time right now. I’m late for English class”
Dude: “… 😂”
The dude then went and told the others to leave me alone.
I don’t really know how that worked out.3
Early 20s
After leaving my long-term partner4, I realized that my social life was a desert. I only knew two people in the same city, both from the university where I studied. I didn’t like nightclubs/bars and didnt’t find any associations5 that appealed to me.
So I rigged the game again. One of the resources at my disposal was my Mother’s house. She was ok with me throwing parties there, as long as she got prior notice, and as long as I cleaned up afterwards and paid for/replaced broken stuff.
So I announced a party and invited everyone I could think of. This included my brother’s friends, people from school I’d have brief interactions with, and other acquaintances. I encouraged everyone to invite extra guests.
Then I cleaned the house thoroughly and announced another party where I redid the same thing.6 This snowballed for a few months until I threw a barbeque with 55 people attending.
After the barbeque, I decided to narrow things down. I stopped the big parties7 and connected 1on1 with a select few of the party-goers. I was very good at enthusiastic discussions about things I was interested in and based most of my friendships on being compatible in that regard.8
Early-Mid 20s
Somewhere around this time, I read that 80% of an engineer’s salary is based on their social skills.9 I mulled this over for a bit and realized that social skills is a very versatile thing, impacting all areas of life that are about interacting/collaborating with others.10 As such I decided to get good at social skills, instead of merely rigging the game.11
I started practising smiling in the mirror and then went out giving friendly smiles to strangers in the street, happily surprised when I got smiles back. I read a ton of books where I picked up things like “stroke theory”12.
It was somewhere around here I realized that I could ask other people for help with things. Up until this point, whenever I ran into a problem, I either paid for someone to fix it or learned to solve it myself. The idea of having a social circle with different capabilities and asking for help when needed was astounding to me.
Back here, I was supremely confident in my own brilliance,13 while at the same harbouring deeply held insecurities mostly surrounding flirting & sex. I experimented with self-deprecating humor to "lower myself", taking the edge off my chafing superiority. This was a bad idea, seeing as I was CBT-ing myself to be insecure/dislike myself. In order to turn the trend, I tried to reduce the number of self-deprecating thoughts. I did this by noticing self-deprecating thoughts and then following them up with an affirmation. I still do this. When people say “Oh, why didn’t I realize that, I’m so stupid”, I say “You’re not stupid, everyone makes mistakes. I like you”.
Somewhere around here, I picked up Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a way of communicating that changed my way of being in the social world a lot. Back then I mainly used it as a way to manage conflicts, and looking back I regret that it was a bit disconnecting/manipulative. I learned how to express myself in order to get what I wanted, rather than expressing myself in ways that bring about connection.
I most likely did a ton of subtle, hard-to-track development here as well, but I can’t recall any more highlights. So let’s skip to the next chapter.
Mid-late 20s
At this point, I was quite comfortable in non-flirty social settings. I did it all in an analytical, rule-based manner. I had very little connection to my emotions, spending most of my time in a state of mild enjoyment. I had recurring bouts of existential despair and irritation mixed in, about 1-2 times a month or so.
At this point, I categorized emotions as bad and good. Good emotions were the ones that made people nice to be around, and bad emotions were the ones that made people behave in annoying ways. Anger usually made people very unreasonable, and I thus considered it bad. Happiness made people nice to be around, thus good. I tried to limit the amount of time I spent in existential despair and irritation, treating them as bad.
This changed when I moved to Gothenburg and got hippie training14. My partner asked me if I wanted to join a “cuddle party”. I said “hell no”, as any reasonable person would. Then I mulled it over a bit and asked them if I could read up on it. And it seemed safe enough, based on consent etc. So I tried it out.
It was really nice, and I connected a lot with the host. He also happened to run circling sessions and asked me if I’d be interested in joining one. This was about three years ago, and it changed my life.
When I came to the first session, I didn’t know what to expect. I was asked to feel into myself, and tell others what happened. There was a lot of “I feel calm, maybe a bit itchy on my leg”. But I was amazed. Suddenly I had access to a place where people openly shared what was going on in them, and how they related to the social context. Perfect arena for experimentation and developing social capacities! Autistic special interest overdrive.
And over time, I started noticing patterns. I started ranting when the hippies said things like “I like your vibrations”, “I’m a gemini”, or “I don’t like that person’s energy”. The rants started with me criticising their ontology and continued with me explaining that I get triggered by supernatural stuff ever since I deconverted.15
The fourth or the fifth time this happened, I realized that I could feel the anger in my body. And I realized that the anger carried information about my boundaries/triggers. This was the start of a paradigm shift. If anger can be useful, then it’s not all bad. If emotions carry information, they go from “things to manage” to “things to integrate”16.
I continued exploring and started picking up on more of my feelings, sensing my reactions through tensions and sensations in my body. Over time, this awareness got more and more direct, as I learned how to “translate” bodily sensations into the language of feelings.
As I started noticing the feelings, they got stronger. Feelings perpetuate feelings, with anxiety leading to more anxiety, infatuation leading to more infatuation, and shame leading to more shame. This was an unexpected side-effect of getting more in touch with them. Suddenly, at 27, I had to learn how to cope with anxiety, shame and fear.
All these feelings
(The heading is a reference to vildhjärta, recommended listening to this section)
My carefully constructed framework for guiding & analyzing social interactions turned into an awkwardness-inducing impossibly high bar for “appropriate social behaviour”.
I started queuing for a therapist.17 Whenever I got anxious, I sat down and wrote a stream of consciousness about the situation until I had gotten it out of me. I then read through what I had written, and wrote the empathic/encouraging reply, as if I was supporting someone else.
I did a lot of thinking about my performance anxiety, and why I felt so much shame when I thought about not meeting my unreasonably high standards.
I had gotten things to a level where it was kind of okay. Then my partner left the country to work as a goat-herder in rural Spain. Winter was coming, and I didn’t want to be alone, so I moved into a collective.
Then, covid hit.
Rough situation. But there was no retreating at this point.
I took covid quite seriously, only meeting one friend IRL. Missing the cuddle parties, I wrote to him and asked if he’d be up for 1on1 cuddling and talking about feelings.18 Luckily, he was up for it.
He was a welcome relief from my feelings of anxiety regarding the collective. I was on probation period, and went into anxiety-driven attempts to be “the perfect roommate”. Super annoying.
Inspired by Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly, I responded to shame and social anxiety by reaching out and asking my roommates for hugs and emotional support. This was super hard since the social anxiety led to thoughts like “I don’t want to be annoying”, followed by withdrawal.19
Seeing as I was kinda annoying, I got a one-month notice that I had to leave the collective by the end of my probation period. My partner was recently back from goat-herding, so I convinced them to start a new collective with me. We moved in within a month.
A lot has happened in the two years since, and I don’t really know where to start and where to end. I might take a deep dive into some of the things, but I’m losing interest in this post about now, and have to leave to meet a friend.
Ciao!
I now got the thought “Does anyone care?”. I face that line of inquiry with a “Maybe? You’re still doing this for yourself right?”
This age-old custom has many names. Mylla? Mula? Snö-pula?
I did get verbally bullied/goaded for some time though. Until I dragged the main bully to the floor and kicked him a bit. Much more effective than trying to ignore it.
We kept together for too long due to religious reasons.
If you’re Swedish and move to a new city, joining an association is a good way to get a social context started. There you’ll find other people that like chess, boardgames, environmental preservation, or socialism.
Literally rinse and repeat.
Less cleaning, yaay
I’ve expanded my social dynamic range a bit. My current friendships are based on more things. I know this because I’ve interviewed my friends about what they like about our friendships.
Can’t find anything on this from a quick google. And I doubt this is a thing that’s easy to investigate. Seems like my social skill training originated in poor epistemics.
I have a concept of “core skills”, skills that are fundamental to other skills/affects many areas of life. I’ve of course spent a lot of time practising these, expecting large cumulative payoffs. I’d put social skills here, as well as things like study technique, habit building, reading speed, introspection, analysis/decomposition, epistemics and overall rationality.
I did continue rigging the game though. Particularly in regards to salary negotiations. At one of the places I worked, I didn’t get a salary raise for two years. I asked my boss when it’d happen, and got the reply “When our new product is released”. So I asked him what salary I’d get then. After some back and forth, he gave me a number.
I picked that number and went looking for jobs. I told them I’d recently gotten a new salary offer for x amount, but still wanted to explore new opportunities. I got a job offer for more than what I got offered by my boss.
Then I went to my boss and told him “There’s a company that wants to employ me for y amount”. He came back to me a bit after that with a counteroffer.
Then I went to the new company and told them “My boss really wants to keep me and offered z amount of salary. I don’t want to haggle or anything, but it feels weird to lose money by switching jobs”.
They matched the counter-offer. That bumped my salary by roughly 7000 SEK.
Next time you’re in a social setting, notice how two-sided conversations follow a ping-pong-like structure. One person says something, then pauses for a short while. The second person responds verbally, or hums/nods (passing back the ball). This back-and-forth then continues.
Even in a social setting where one person explains something while the other listens, there will always be micro-pauses for the other person to nod, hum or in some other way indicate approval.
I still am, to some degree, but I try to be less annoying with it. I’m also humbled by looking at the global scale and seeing people that are way more developed than me in certain areas.
I’ve come to realize that being confident in my own capabilities isn’t a problem, the problem I had during my 20s was that I didn’t use those capabilities in a way that made things nicer for everyone.
I recommend getting some rationality practice in before you get involved with hippies. There is a lot of bullshit floating around. People selling distilled, good vibration water in some kind of MLM scheme. People treat “vibes” as something divorced from underlying material representations.
Hippie training contains a lot of stuff I've found valuable on a pragmatic level. But the explanations for WHY these things work are usually bogus. If you don’t have a proper “information immune system” you will get saturated with bullshit ideas about how the world works. Recommended reading (for aspiring hippies/hippies): The Scout mindset, Rationality, AI to Zombies
One of the friends from the parties was a satanist & anti-theist. We had wonderful conversations on topics I liked talking about. So when he was looking for a place to stay, I offered him a room in my apartment. The deconversion happened gradually, until one day I exclaimed “but god doesn’t exist!” and then clasped my hand over my mouth in chock. Good times.
Integrate into the dynamic information processing system that is me. New inputs, yay!
Peer review go
This is a pun ;)