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Cayenne comments on Mitigating Social Awkwardness - Less Wrong
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I have trouble with this one. In general, what I'm doing with my body is largely determined by my efforts to maintain physical comfort and has little (albeit not quite zero) relationship with the interactions I'm having/emotions I'm experiencing.
My face also makes expressions without my permission that often have no obvious relationship with what I'm thinking or feeling, and I can't tell without looking in a mirror. (I can make deliberate expressions, too, but this is effortful. Also some of them seem to be wrong: I have been told that my attempt at "attentive" is more "terrified".)
My tone of voice is not quite as unruly, but sometimes misbehaves. And I'm not good at tracking when it's doing that if I'm using my own words in real time and therefore have to compose them while I speak. On top of all this I have an undiagnosed breathing disorder that makes me yawn, sigh, and gasp a lot when the semantic content of these sounds is inappropriate.
Is there anything I can do to make people pay less attention to these cues, short of demanding that people only interact with me via text? I tell people these things but, except for the breathing thing, they often outright don't believe me, and even the ones who claim to believe me seem to forget.
You can try to practice in front of a mirror. I don't know how much that will help, but it may.
Voice control is hard for some people. Singing with pop music, and just using your voice more in general perhaps will help.
In either case, you're running into some serious difficulties. I wish I could offer better advice or help.
I'm atypical of people on this board, as some of you might know. I found it through my son, who fits the demographics much more. I'm a clinical social worker/ child therapist- thus my name "play therapist". What I didn't see mentioned, which I think is probably a more common problem than people not using the right body language to convey what they mean to, is not picking up on the body language, tone of facial expressions and tone of voice of people you are speaking to. I don't have any easy answers about how to learn to read them, it's something that is intuitive for most people. If you can learn to read people that way, though, it will be a huge help in social interactions. For example, when you say something and there is no response, there will usually be non-verbal cues as to whether you were heard.
Perhaps watching people taking acting lessons might help? Those people are trying to learn body language, vocalization, and effective communication, so seeing what they do when they get it right may help with learning how to read others.
I think watching people taking acting lessons must be a very good way to learn how to read others. Unfortunately, it's not something that's very convenient for most people to do. I think focusing in on the facial expressions and body language of good actresses and actors while watching movies, t.v., etc. would help, too.