Attuning to Social Cues Can Be Empowering!
How observation, patience, and even *negative* feedback can boost your confidence and soothe your soul.
There, Motion Has Not Yet Ceased (1945), Yves Tanguy
Being a thoughtful, sensitive human in a callous, chaotic world isn’t easy. Even if you grew up in pastoral wonderland and were raised by nurturing, attentive bunny rabbits, the hyper-competitive capitalist dystopia outside your front door is bound to erode your inner peace sooner or later. And one of the most challenging and insecurity-inducing dimensions of entering the so-called real world is learning to read social cues.
Social cues are surprisingly difficult for every single one of us. For some of us, social cues are absolutely illegible. We grew up on another planet and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with other people. For others, social cues are far too legible. We can tell from the slightest twinge at the corner of someone’s mouth that they dislike us on sight. Our childhoods with difficult or narcissistic or controlling or abusive parents rendered us hyper-aware of the moods and attitudes of others. We had to carefully read social cues and calibrate our own behaviors and demeanors in order to survive.
If you were traumatized by an intimidating, intense, or manipulative parent or sibling or friend or lover at some point in your life, your nervous system may have adaptively transformed into a delicate seismograph of other people’s thoughts and feelings. Social cues might make you so anxious and over-accommodating that you eventually need to block them out in order to just relax and live your life. But by powering down your seismograph in order to block out incoming data, you may eventually damage your ability to connect with others.
Here’s what’s crazy: Many of us work hard to shut out social cues without even noticing that’s what we’re doing. And when we live that way for long enough, we wake up one day and think:
SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE. I’m not doing this right anymore. I am out of sync with the people around me. Something isn’t working.
I’m probably an extreme case. As the youngest girl in a brutal family system, I was hyper-attuned to my parents’ needs and their ever-shifting moods, and I took it as my personal duty to entertain and charm everyone in my family in order to defuse the explosive atmosphere. When I forged out on my own, I could make people laugh but I didn’t always understand how conversations among adults typically unfold. I was hypersensitive and anxious but rendered myself cavalier and avoidant in order to proceed with bluster. I made and lost friends easily. I drank too much. I told persuasive stories for years about how I was always right and other people were always wrong.
You require a lot of defensive mechanisms as a soft little bunny rabbit raised by wolves. You tend to grow into a quivering, dramatic cartoon bunny with a vest full of hand grenades strapped to your chest. As a young adult, you get hurt and feel angry and cause trouble everywhere you go. You’re more powerful than you understand and this does damage to others without you knowing it. You’re more sensitive than you understand so life hurts you deeply. And even when you work hard using your usual bag of tricks, sometimes you just can’t get the balance right. It feels like you’re constantly fucking up — which makes you self-involved, because, of course! You’re just trying to fix this mess, but you’re making more messes instead!
IT IS NOT EASY. Even if you’re just a regular, healthy human, there are so many social cues in this fucked up world that you might not want to be aware of. The vicious and unkind prejudices many people hold, the stupid attitudes and aggressive behaviors they indulge, make it tempting for many of us to turn down the volume on social feedback as low as it will go.
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Now let’s take a deep breath and show some respect for our wide and diverse range of experiences. Many of us are confused by others. Many of us are traumatized. Many of us have been trying and failing to get this shit right for decades now. Many of us are bogged down by so many protective, defensive stories — forged from truly terrible experiences! — that we can’t imagine going out into the world again looking for connection. We can’t picture finding NEW companions and friends and lovers and soulmates and buddies. We just can’t fathom intimacy or closeness without misunderstandings and pain.
From this bewildering mire, I want to offer this gentle suggestion:
Attuning yourself to social cues, particularly when you’ve worked hard to block them out or discount them for years, can be extremely empowering. Because, even though you might believe that most people just HATE YOUR PERSONALITY (you have proof!), the truth might be much simpler than that. A lot of people might love you but dislike the way you move through social situations. Many people might dearly want to signal to you to just TONE IT DOWN A TINY BIT or LISTEN MORE CLOSELY or BE MORE RECIPROCAL but they don’t feel they can because your defenses are always up. You make it clear that you don’t want to know.
You might not know this precisely because you really don’t want to know this! Your shame is too big to try this idea on for size!
But you stand to gain a lot from opening your mind to the possibility that you aren’t unlovable or annoying — you’ve merely been ignoring social cues for too long without realizing it. You can change that. The key is to pay more attention to social dynamics without OVERTHINKING and OVERANALYZING and INTERNALIZING what you observe. The key is to simply say to yourself, “This might not be to my liking, but I’m going to take it into account so that I can better honor my unique spirit and my whimsical soul, even under duress.”
Here’s an example from my own recent experience:
I discovered a few years ago that I had a weird habit of shutting out feedback when I socialized in big groups. I will admit that this behavior was aided by some light recreational pouring of hard alcohol down my throat. I was not the heaviest drinker at the time, but the buzz had a hand in how I steered my ship. And the sad truth was that I was steering my ship onto the jagged rocks REGULARLY.
I was in a defensive crouch and I didn’t even know it. I was broadcasting the way I used to when I was very young. Suddenly, my job was to charm the whole room, and my attitude was that if someone couldn’t be charmed, there was something dull or overly polite about them.
Now, this sounds extreme, and I think my friends would protest and say, “WHATEVER, YOU ARE LOVABLE AND NORMAL, YOUR VIEW IS WARPED.” But my friends like pushy weirdos like me. I mean, look, that’s important, too! The goal is not to calibrate the FUN and BOLDNESS out of your whole damn personality!
The point is, for a while there I was misaligned with my values. I didn’t want to know if people liked me or not. I was rendered anxious by social feedback. I grew jittery in the company of other people without really realizing it. So my goal at that time (SUBCONSCIOUSLY!) was to block out social norms completely.
I didn’t follow the flow of conversation. I talked too much. I interrupted a little too much. I also pushed my own agenda conversationally. I felt like it was my job to make every conversation MORE INTENSE and MORE INTERESTING. This is not often something that works. And it can feel very obnoxious when you’re just trying to fucking connect with other people, and one person is acting like some kind of CONDUCTOR or HERDING DOG. (I am such a herding dog!)
When I first realized that I behaved this way, I was knocked over by a giant wave of shame. I felt defensive and upset. I was anxious and sad.
Then I started to observe myself, while reassuring myself that it was okay, I should learn and grow from these observations instead of getting depressed about them. I started to slow my roll and listen much more. I started to see how careful other skilled socializers were at smoothly asking questions and staying present to the energy in the room. It wasn’t a performance, either — they were doing their best to support the group! I started to differentiate between anxious broadcasters and patient, attentive, charismatic presences.
Patiently observing changed everything, and the benefits are too countless to list: My social anxiety decreased and then pretty much disappeared. I improved my existing friendships and cultivated new ones without fear. I became more patient and attuned to others. I enjoyed moving through public spaces much, much more.
But beyond than that, I started to understand the world around me much better. Instead of living inside very old, deeply buried stories about how people would never understand or accept me (which were ruling my life more than I realized), I was living in the present, where I am actually pretty easy to understand and accept. I suddenly found it so much easier to understand and accept others, too. I could still recognize incompatibilities and areas of conflict but these things didn’t frustrate me as much because I didn’t feel as DEEPLY REJECTED by difference itself. I didn’t take the world as personally. I didn’t navigate through a jittery haze. I allowed the truth to reach me, even when it hurt a little.
When you’ve built up a willful or subconscious resistance to social cues (or you just have trouble reading them), it’s easy for socializing to feel nerve-wracking and shame-inducing. It’s natural to become allergic to stepping into environments that are bewildering and exhausting. It’s normal to not want to notice what’s happening around you socially when your nervous system is an oversensitive ALARM SYSTEM that tells you your job is to FIX something, CHANGE something, PLEASE people more, KEEP them interested. After a lifetime of misreading or blocking out social cues, you might feel like paying any attention at all is destined to make you feel worse.
So there’s a lot of fear in the mix. The most important first step, particularly for a hypersensitive people pleaser, is to notice that you can UNDERPERFORM, DO LESS, SAY LESS, FIX NOTHING, SURRENDER, RECEDE, GO LIMP, and it’s perfectly fine. No one minds.
Those of us who do way too much, say way too much, and take personal responsibility for other people’s fun are almost always a million times more relaxed when we resolve to do much less. Sometimes on the way to a party, I’ll say to my husband (who has a habit of flipping into Storytelling Party Robot mode after one glass of wine), “When in doubt, do less.” In other words, if you’re feeling jittery or you have a buzz or the mood in the room seems uncertain? If your shame just kicked in or you’re trying a little too hard or you’re hyperaware of someone’s bad attitude about you? It’s time to relax and observe. Watch what everyone else is doing, how they handle the turns in the conversation. Calm down and get quiet. Breathe and learn something new.
Naturally, there are downsides to attuning yourself to the room and to any particular person’s social cues. You notice when people interrupt you, or when they aren’t super interested in what you have to say. You can see the differences between you and others more clearly than you did back when you chose booze over clarity, broadcasting over conversing. You notice when someone else is the life of the party. You recognize when you are truly just another body in the room. As a grown adult, it is easy to feel shame over what you observe, and easy to wonder why it took so goddamn long for you to land here.
But in time, you accept this and forgive yourself. You realize that everyone has their challenges and obstacles. Slowly, your social role shifts and your enjoyment increases. You can ride in the backseat and enjoy the view more. You don’t have to work as hard, and you can take much more delight in the weirdness and eccentricities of others. More than anything else, when you don’t take PERSONAL responsibility for keeping other people happy, you take everything less PERSONALLY.
BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE! YOU ARE NOT CONFUSED! That feels good, even when you’re not that special or sparkly. It feels good to be just another body in the room, actually.
That’s the strange thing about attuning yourself to social cues: You’d think it would make you more reactive and jittery, but it’s actually relaxing in the long run. You’re living in reality, attuned to the present moment without fear. You’re one fish in a small pond full of fish and you really can swim along without getting eaten alive. You can notice without overreacting or overthinking. You can observe without trying to change what’s going on. You can watch and listen and go with the flow without fear.
Attuning yourself to social cues is a confidence booster and a form of soothing meditation wrapped into one. It’s a way of learning to relax and savor being with other people instead of allowing your overactive, sensitive, bossy brain and jumpy, jittery nervous system trick you into thinking that THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING WRONG AND IT’S UP TO YOU TO FIX IT. When you pay close attention to the flow of conversation between others and you support that flow instead of disrupting it, you better understand your place in each social picture. When you talk, you don’t feel unwelcome. When you’re quiet, you don’t feel irrelevant. You are an important part of the big picture.
And quite honestly, people end up liking you more.
I think a lot of us struggle with the question of WHY other people don’t seem to like us as much as we like ourselves! And a lot of times, people just don’t feel safe or comfortable around a person who’s made it a lifelong habit of doing things their own way at any cost. Even though we all celebrate this way of life around here — embracing exactly what makes you unique and weird and stubbornly distinct from others! — it’s much easier to recognize HOW MANY people love you for who you are when you’re flexible and open and amenable to feedback.
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No one is saying it’s easy or simple or it works every time. Taking in feedback is so hard for people with trauma, who’ve withstood neglect, abuse, and repeated rejections. It’s so hard not to be deathly afraid that the slightest whiff of criticism will lead to isolation and helplessness, the way it always did in the past. But I’ve witnessed over and over how being a little brave and letting in new information can transform your whole life.
It’s very hard to admit that the way you move in the world might be fucking with other people at levels you don’t recognize. What could make a sensitive, kind person feel more ashamed than that? But that’s exactly why we avoid feedback. We can’t stand to learn that we might be screwing something up without knowing it. We don’t want to know!
To grow in this life, you have to know things you don’t want to know.
You have to learn things you don’t want to learn.
You have to open your eyes to your greatest fears and your deepest wells of sadness. This is where maturity comes from! You blossom into a full, balanced, happy adult when you dare to reckon with yourself as an organism among other organisms, and you dare to attune yourself to how you feel inside and how the world feels around you.
It feels surprisingly great to be a small fish in a school of fish. It feels great to share what you have without sharing too much. It’s a superpower to know where the gas and the brakes are, socially! It’s a superpower to take off your vest full of grenades and hop out into the world as the soft, loving bunny rabbit you are!
Some days, it’s very scary. But many days, the world becomes a pastoral wonderland, bursting with rainbows and hearts and sparkly unicorns. It’s fucked up, frankly, how good life gets when you don’t mind learning brand new, terrible things about your bad personality and your bad habits!
We are all fucked up freaks to the core, once you strip away our normie disguises, and we all screw up absolutely everything with clock-like regularity. The only option is to open our eyes and learn. We can celebrate our original, bizarre selves and ALSO learn. We are that good.
Send this column to everyone you know immediately, and let’s all grow the fuck up and get out of our overactive heads so we can spread more love and compassion through the world. I know it’s hard. Keep the faith, motherfuckers! Life gets better when you dare to believe in your ability to grow and feel joy even when everything is falling apart. Ask Polly is allllll about joy in the face of outrageous pain and I am here for you and you and you and you and every goddamn last one of you. xoxox
Beautiful read - thank you. 🌻