How does ADHD affect social skills? I feel like I can never talk to anyone like a normal human being, I’m super awkward around strangers and end up saying weird stuff. Is this like an ADHD thing or is it just a personality trait? thanks!
(RSD = Being particularly sensitive to rejection; a symptom of ADHD)
ADHD definitely affects our social skills in ways that NT people will think of as negative.
Because it’s hard to focus, we don’t always pick up on social cues like other people might. For example, someone might want to leave, but we might not notice because we don’t pick up on their body language as we just aren’t thinking about it.
Sometimes, though, it can go the other way, and we can read too much into body language and word choices, because our RSD finds anything that could possibly seem negative, and uses it to tell us that they don’t want to talk anymore, and that we’re boring them. Our RSD can make it hard to hold friendships with people, because we spend a lot of time anxious that we’ve done something to upset them.
Also, because we hyperfixate on things, we can be extremely passionate about one particular thing, and unable to stop ourselves from talking about it, even if we can tell that the other person isn’t really interested.
We can be awkward around strangers, because it’s something we’re not used to, and although we can enjoy meeting new people sometimes, it’s hard to start up conversations when you have no idea what this person is like, and no idea how they’re going to react to things you say.
Also, adhd comes with mild anxiety in situations where we don’t know what to do or say. So if someone asks us a question about ourselves and we’re not quite sure how to answer it, we can feel the pressure to respond and end up blurting out something that sounds weird or isn’t entirely true.
We also have a need to be liked, which is tied into our RSD. We know (or we think we know) what rejection is like, and we know that we hate it, so we can sometimes overcompensate when we meet new people, and try to impress them but end up coming across as a bit weird.
Sometimes we also aren’t very good at holding eye contact with a person we’re speaking to. It can make us uncomfortable, and then that’s all we can think about until we start focusing on the conversation again.
We have a tendency to interrupt, too. We can hear something that’s said, and our brain works fast enough that we’ve made a ton of connections between whatever the person just said, and something that seems unrelated. So then we excitably tell them about this thing, not realising we’re interrupting, or that whatever we just said needs a little more explanation because they have no clue why we said it.
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