Tips for talking in groups when you're sensitive to social rejection?

June 7, 2022 4:12 AM

So public speaking and talking 1 on 1 are fine for me, it's obvious where the focus in the conversation should be. It's when there's a group of people that I tend to have a lot of trouble, my ADHD makes it really easy for me to slip up. Do you guys have any tips or ways to practice to help me out?

Say there's three other people and we're playing bowling. 1 person is always playing and we rotate. I feel great about the first 20 minutes of hang out because I got to ask all the things I'm genuinely interested in to each of the other three.

But now as we bowl, I'm being split into groups of three as each person takes a turn, and I'm realizing now that I haven't spoken for a few rounds now, everyone else seems to know each other better.

Problems that I have include:

- Getting too quiet and feeling really unincluded
- Trying to butt into a conversation and failing to stick the landing
- Getting emotional tones wrong, laughing at wrong things
- Accidentally talking at the same time as other people
- Feeling like I'm talking too long if I get do get in
- Spiraling in getting flustered and infuriated
- Getting into "sorry" cycles
- Bowling really badly because my mood is tanking so I can't even act like I was here to bowl
- Talking to complete strangers not included in the group because I was now paying attention to them
- Should I be on my phone? I have nothing to look at
- Repeating open ended "group questions" that I asked weeks ago because this happens a lot

And then I go home feeling like a complete idiot and let it ruin the rest of my day. It's been happening so often recently, but I've always felt I've been bad at parties and social events because of this. Do you have any idea on what I should keep in mind or ways that I can practice?

posted by weewooweewoo to Human Relations (6 answers total)

It sounds like a few different things could be happening.

One could be, you just generally lack confidence in this setting. So, as you put it, you get into sorry cycles, your coordination is thrown off, etc, as soon as things don’t move according to your predetermined pattern. If you can work on your confidence, you will be less likely to feel unwelcome and less likely to stress out and better able to handle surprises and shrug off when you misspeak, moving on without wallowing. You might look into training on active listening, if you think something structured would be best for you. Build yourself up a bit so you go in thinking about how not only do you get to see your friends, but that they get to see you.

Another could be, these are crappy friends. It sounds like you come into a group, you have a chunk of time when you check in and ask them about stuff, and then… they don’t include you or ask you things? If I’m out with friends and someone is on their phone I assume they are bored and try to include them more in the conversation or ask what’s up. If a friend falls into a sorry cycle I tell them they have nothing to be sorry for. If someone tells a joke that sucks I maybe tease a little and then move on. Like, I’m not super socially adept, but these are the things I do at parties and group hangs and it doesn’t feel like I’m extra super nice or anything (by most accounts I am intimidating and then charmingly bizarre and sometimes scary.) So like, maybe the problem isn’t you, and if you can meet up with other groups of people you can get practice doing things with folks who actually include you.

A third thing that could be happening is you’re working with some processing problems. I have audio processing issues, so I regularly don’t understand something that had been said until like… a minute later at which point the conversation has moved on. Sometimes, I need someone to repeat a word a bunch of times and pronounce it really specifically, or even spell it. I hate hanging out in bars and the bowling alley specifically is nightmarish because I can’t understand a thing anyone says with all that noise. In a living room or outside I’m fine, in a coffee shop or a small party I’m good too, but some restaurants with bad acoustics are so bad I won’t eat there even if the food is amazing. It’s not that my hearing is bad, it’s that my brain doesn’t translate sounds into meaning immediately all the time, or has trouble filtering with too much noise and determining what had meaning and what should get ignored. It’s totally possible that in addition to your current adhd qualities that something like this is also affecting you. Once I noticed my pattern I became more stubborn about where I went and what I did with friends and family and I was a lot less grumpy. It might not be sound for you, but something sensory is probably making these scenarios harder for you than they need to be.

And a final thought is, you are being really hard on yourself! Everything you list are things that everyone has trouble with sometimes. Talking over someone, not landing a joke, feeling ignored, getting too quiet, overthinking… these are all just parts of existing in a group. Work on forgiving yourself. You haven’t hurt anyone by not being the life of any given party, and I promise that nobody but you is still thinking about that thing you said that one time (whatever it was, we all have some of those.) I think one thing you could do is maybe try to observe other groups of friends or just your friends while you aren’t feeling up to talking and take note when they make the same kind of missteps that you do, and how others react. Focus on how much of a blip any given one of them is, how much it doesn’t actually put a damper on things. We always notice negative things about ourselves more easily than in other people, and that can build up into this outsized feeling of rejection and being bad at stuff that everyone just muddles through. So yeah, in addition to confidence, let yourself make mistakes, and forgive yourself for making them.
posted by Mizu at 5:32 AM on June 7, 2022

Ah my friend, welcome to the Neurodivergent Experience (TM). It's not you, it's them. Find some neurodivergent friends to hang out with and your communication problems will be solved.

My knowledge of the technical details is more oriented toward the autistic experience, but in my experience ADHDers are our neurokin and have very similar experiences (and apparently significantly more painful experiences of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria). Here's a relevant journal article and more broadly the name of this phenomenon is the "double empathy problem".
posted by heatherlogan at 6:00 AM on June 7, 2022

The great thing about an activity like bowling is that it continually gives you opportunities to make conversation. Just watch your friends bowl and say something about how they're doing. Or how you're doing, for that matter.
"Nice job picking up that spare." "How do you get the ball to curve like that?" "Oh man, another gutterball." You don't have to be a master conversationalist, and indeed, that's one reason why activity-based hangouts are so much more popular than just sitting around on couches.

Everybody starts talking at the same time as somebody else eventually. It's just a thing that happens in unstructured conversation. Don't sweat that.

A lot of the other stuff does sound like your friends are not being particularly attentive or inclusive. Apart from the conversation stuff, do you feel like a third wheel? Spending time with people who actually want to spend time with you is kind of a miracle fix for these issues.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:35 AM on June 7, 2022

Riffing off the neurodivergent comment, above - one of the things I've started doing in socially uncomfortable situations is internally owning my neurodivergence. I think one of the reasons these encounters shift from awkward to excruciating is that I feel the compulsion to mask - underneath the desire to fit in is this voice screaming: PRETEND YOU'RE NORMAL PRETEND YOU'RE NORMAL YOU'RE NOT ACTING NORMAL OH MY GOD YOU'RE FUCKING IT UP NOW EVERYBODY'S GOING TO KNOW YOU'RE NOT NORMAL AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and now I just accidently flung the bowling ball into the shoe kiosk.

I'm not normal. I'm smart and have many good qualities, but I'm weird. Some people might like that, some people might not. If I try to do what feels comfortable in any given moment, staying quiet when I feel quiet, talking when I feel like talking, even if someone thinks I'm odd, well, so what, they're right. That's way better than constantly trying to gauge when a normal person would speak, or what a normal person would say, and faking it by trying to leap into conversation because I feel like it's "time" to talk, or whatever.

Social activities are optional. Show up and try to enjoy yourself first. Stop trying to do them "right" and just see if you can find a way to make them serve you.

That said, another "trick" that is the opposite of this in a social setting is to just keep an eye out for someone who looks even less comfortable than you, and try to make them feel welcome. It might not work at bowling, but it usually does at parties.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 7:01 AM on June 7, 2022

None of those social behaviours seem particularly bad to me. if you're generally a good friend and nice person I think those are all forgivable so don't be too hard on yourself

I think one thing you could work on is this: Getting too quiet and feeling really unincluded

There's nothing wrong with being quiet. You can be a valuable member of a group by being a good listener. To reinforce the fact that you are a good listener, when someone else talks, you can smile, nod, make eye contact, laugh at their jokes, ask them questions and also look around and smile at others. People will automatically like you when you give them the gift of attentiveness.

Are you actually being unincluded or is it just your social anxiety making you feel this way? When I was dealing with bad social anxiety I enrolled in a group CBT therapy class specifically designed to target social anxiety.

CBT is all about breaking patterns between feelings, beliefs/thoughts and behaviours which keep you stuck in a spiral of anxiety. In your case I would say your idea that you are being unincluded might just be a thought pattern in which you are interpreting your negative emotion (social anxiety in a group setting) as being evidence of a particular objective fact (you are being excluded because you are objectively bad at socializing). Because thoughts, feelings and behaviours can operate in a vicious or virtuous circle, those types of negative beliefs can actually increase your negative emotions. As I mentioned, based on the behaviours you mentioned, you don't seem to be objectively bad at socializing, you're simply nervous and self-conscious. I recommend looking into Thought Records and seeing how this tool can help combat negative thoughts to have more balanced, nuanced and kind thoughts towards yourself and others
posted by winterportage at 8:08 AM on June 7, 2022

Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to reply. I really appreciate it, I made the post extremely late because my anxiety was at extreme high levels- I couldn't stop muttering hatreds to myself about the past days attempts at trying to be social and reached a deep valley. I woke up in the afternoon and was still too anxious to read the replies to the post. It took awhile to just relax and unwind and open up the comments.

So yeah, I was really hard on myself, and I had really bad blinders on me. I definitely did go into those situations without realizing that "not only do you get to see your friends, but that they get to see you". I had left really early that night under the excuse that I was really tired and had completely forgotten that my friends had thanked repeatedly for coming out before I had left, but I felt so ashamed about having to leave that I remember thinking "they didn't mean it, I forced them to say that".

The double empathy problem was a huge eye opener for me. It feels obvious, but I had recently wrote down a list of everyone I knew in the city, and I took another look at it and realized that the people I felt the most comfortable with were those I perceived as not neurotypical.

The friends I was with was a group I had recently been adopted into and haven't really gotten to know, and I was uncomfortable with all of them and I'm still working on that. They did adopt me because I'm really good at bowling, so I do realize that there's a double whammy of feeling left out leading to me playing bad leading to feeling more left out and playing even worse. I gotta work on this too.

The audio processing issues- maybe not audio for me, but I do realize that when I do hang with them, there's a lot going on in the background and I am easily distractable- I miss a lot of conversation this way, I think. I also don't get into the flow of things.

I need to look into group CBT, especially because all of my usual social activies and therapy are 1 on 1. I cancelled plans today and had a day to think to myself, so I'm hoping I learned a bunch, but I haven't gone out yet so my fingers are crossed. "Enjoy myself first" is my mantra going in.
posted by weewooweewoo at 2:18 AM on June 8, 2022