Compliments & Passive Aggressiveness..Work to do!

[adinva]

SM, I wonder if you have ever considered the possibility that you might have some extra difficulty reading social cues that is impeding your ability to do things that the rest of us think are normal and obvious.

Clearly you're very smart, and what I'm talking about is not a sign of lack of intelligence, but a lack of emotional awareness that can actually be taught and learned. For this it would be best to have an individual professional work with you one on one to coach you to learn to read cues. I think this is why you're so lost without the instructions and the road map, tactics and research. So you'll know just how to act without actually having to know how to act...you'll be mimicking the right way to act. I hope this doesn't hurt your feelings but it's been kicking around in my mind for quite a while and I think if my hunch is correct that it's what's stopping you from being able to assimilate the help you're being offered.

For most of us, even if we need a nudge to get going, the roadmap is on the facial expressions and cues of the person we're trying to relate to.

The latest thing that caused me to go there with you is the compliment on your daughter's wardrobe. There are other times I've seen you swing wildly from one extreme to another, and here's one again. You're "trying to be sincere and compliment with increased frequency," almost like a robot trying to learn a human skill. So you compliment in an overblown way that reads as patronizing and condescending. Getting so excited over the house being clean on the 1,257th time you've experienced it was understandably odd to your wife. And seeing your D look supercute, another thing that has probably happened approaching 1,000 times now, merited a "good work" on top of a compliment.

That you couldn't realize this on your own tells me something, but that you then couldn't interpret and adjust based on the information your wife was giving, tells more. That you want to read a book and save forum posts to figure it out, tells even more. What you might have done was attempted the cute-clothes one, with the obsequious "good work" on top, gotten rebuffed, and admitted, you're right honey, I'm trying to tell you more when I notice things and I guess I'm awkward at it but I want to try anyway because I really love what you do. And then, here's the kicker, next time you adjust. Tone it down with the "good work" and "good job." Sounds like puppy training. Based on her feedback you'd pay more attention to things that you haven't already seen hundreds or thousands of times without comment. OR you recognize that you've seen them thousands of times before and yet you still get a kick out of them and wanted to say so this time.

I really hope you can see I mean this compassionately and not critically. I think you may just be wired a little differently and may benefit from a little more targeted F2F help in inter-personal skills than written, online, or telephone coaching could provide. Just wanted to put that out there, and take it as one uneducated opinion.