I don’t know the original source of this. Someone posted these images in a Discord server and I immediately saved them because they are exactly the kind of information I need to learn. Social skills are mostly mysterious to me. For instances, there’s a couple of things in here that i have figured out on my own over the years, though they are still really hard for me to do consistently.

Number 1 is hard for me. It feels disingenuous and trite and I hate it when people say things like this to me, so it’s really hard for me to feel like I’m doing the right thing if I respond to someone like this.

Well, this one is obvious at least.

This is another one that can feel trite, though not as much as number 1.

I have always done this, but it’s taken me decades to learn how to do it in a way that people don’t interpret as “making excuses”. I always want to explain why I did or said the things I did because that’s information I’d want someone else to give me when they apologize for something, so it was a hard lesson to learn that other people actually get angry over me doing that

This one is almost impossible for me. My emotions are not under my control, so I really don’t know how to do this. It might have something to do with my bipolar disorder. My emotions can get really strong and dark for no aparent reason.

This is another thing that it took me a long time to learn and that I struggle with still.

This makes perfect sense, but again, the phrases suggested seem trite. My usual course of action is to say nothing because I can’t thing of anything truly positive to say.

Not depend on my mood? My patience shouldn’t fluctuate? I’m bipolar. Everything depends on my mood and my patience always fluctuates.

This feels exactly like numbher 4 to me.

This is not intuitive for me. My natural inclination is to assume that if nothing is said, then nothing has changed.

Here’s another one where it’s taken decades to learn this and I still struggle with it. When someone tells me something, good or bad, my natural response is to try and relate it to something in my own life, because that’s the only way to understand things – to have experienced something similar. When I say “that reminds me of when I …” it doesn’t mean I’m trying to make things about myself. It means I’m trying to understand what the other person is going through as completely as I can and by expressing my own experience I’m really asking for confirmation or denial that my understanding is correct.

Of course, I’m talking here mostly about situation where someone is sharing something negative, not positive, but the principle is the same.

This is actually a completely new thought to me.