Yes, and many typical social situations by their very nature are spontaneous, unpredictable and can commonly be emotionally charged: all things that introverts tend to be less inclined towards (at least when immersed in a group of people).
Question for Introverts
- Thread starter Riker'sMailbox
- Start date
When I was young (about 12-14) I started smiling a lot, unconsciously. Some people called me "Smiley" (usually with affection). I think that was my method of letting them know that not talking to them did not mean I didn't like them. I don't smile as much any more, but I can when I need to. Eventually, I substituted various facial expressions for a smile. I've got (i) the "raised-eyebrow" ; my tribute to start trek, (ii) the "double raised eyebrows", for a look of surprised interest, (iii) "the wink", which is easy because I have a lazy left eye (which gets me in trouble sometimes), and (iv) "the furrowed-forehead" to show a concerned attention to the matter.
Last edited:
I think one thing about introverts is when they do speak in public is they are less likely to be open with their feelings with others. It's one thing to be able to exchange casual pleasantries and talk about job related stuff. It's another thing to be able to bear your soul to another human being. I think being introverted isn't just about being shy which I think that is the case in many situations. It's also about the feeling they need to keep part of themselves, private. Which I think can be a good thing but I have never felt that way personally because it seems to come more from fear of what others think than any other emotion.
Jason
Jason
That seems correct to me, but if any introverts feel this does not apply them I would like to hear about it because I've always wondered if it was true in general.
I dunno, it irks me when people ask things like "How are you doing?" when they just mean it as a casual pleasantry, but that may be because I'm an introvert, it may be because I have a touch of Asperger's, it may be because I tend to be a literalist when I speak, or it may be because I don't believe in saying things you don't mean.
^ The one thing that always threw me in England was people coming up and asking, "Are you all right?" when what they meant was, "Hello." I kept thinking, "How horrible do I look that people keep asking if I'm all right?" 
I consider myself to be mostly an introvert. I need to have alone/quiet time often and I am very private. I have 3 close friends. I have worked with them and known them all for more than 20 years. We get together for lunch or dinner every week or so. None of them have ever been inside my house. Ever. I don't like Welcome mats that actually say Welcome, because people might get the wrong idea...
^ The one thing that always threw me in England was people coming up and asking, "Are you all right?" when what they meant was, "Hello." I kept thinking, "How horrible do I look that people keep asking if I'm all right?"
Huh. I visited England in '07 and don't recall that, but I was with a friend so maybe they figured I was all taken care of.
So, today 3 longtime mommy friends that I met on a birth month board when we were all due with our babies in September 2011 met up in the city for our annual day drinking/ messy mommas day. So much fun.
There was a girl at the table next to us that was solo. We thought maybe she was stood up or something so we invited her to sit with us, or at the very least buy her a drink. She declined. My friend said it was an open invite if she decided to join us. She replied that she was enjoying herself and that she was not meeting anyone there. Just enjoying the hot NYC day. None of us expected this response. She wound up reading a book and drinking several fun cocktails by herself.
I think this was kind of good for me to see. As long as my kid is content, I am not going to push anything.
There was a girl at the table next to us that was solo. We thought maybe she was stood up or something so we invited her to sit with us, or at the very least buy her a drink. She declined. My friend said it was an open invite if she decided to join us. She replied that she was enjoying herself and that she was not meeting anyone there. Just enjoying the hot NYC day. None of us expected this response. She wound up reading a book and drinking several fun cocktails by herself.
I think this was kind of good for me to see. As long as my kid is content, I am not going to push anything.
But would these people be open to these people in a public setting? Maybe in the privacy of your home and even then I assume their are limits. Though that may be just normal privacy issues. I doubt even many outgoing people would sit and talk about their sexual fantasies with their mom and dad as a example.
Jason
I see you have taken to Odo's advice to Worf. "Never let them feel welcome. It encourges follow up visits."
Jason
I feel like you're painting things with a binary brush here. Beyond introverts and extroverts there are certainly degrees of introversion and extroversion.Doubtless some will be more open than others.
Bell curve. Most people in the middle. And, of course degrees of difference on both ends. As to sharing feelings, we often are very comfortable sharing feelings and thoughts. Especially with a close friend. It's that damned chitchat and small talk that's so annoying!
I've always been kind of the opposite. I can sort of do chitchat with the only problem is I always run out of things to say real fast. I don't want to go with the cliche "What do you think about the weather" but I know most people are proably not going to be fascinated by the question of which universe "Discovery" takes place. It the more personal feelings I always have a harder time dealing with. Also my sense of manners. Always afraid of saying something that will offend someone or hurt their feelings yet that also goes against my feelings of not having a problem with more raw types of humor. They do come into conflict at times.
Jason
That's funny. I don't like entertaining but when in a situation I manage well enough. You share your life, your home with other people and you often have to adjust.
Inside the mind of every person, there is an individual and unique....'universe', if you will. It might even be a literal fact. Out on the far frontier of the quantum, researchers are just beginning to suspect that each individual might exist in a separate universe, with superficial similarities that only seem 'identical' from one person to the next because of the limitations of human sensory perception. Questions are beginning to be raised in cases where a person experiences repeated instances of another person claiming to have said something that the first person claims was never said and/ or the first person claiming that the second did say something which the second claims they did not. Rather than a very poor memory at work, the suggestion is that two superficially similar universes are somewhat out of sync. On the flip side, certain instances of 'mind reading' that can not be explained by any heretofore conventional means are being considered as examples of two universes being more in sync with each other than what could be called 'usual'.
People go about their daily lives without realizing that there are multiple 'layers' that make up existence because, for the most part, they are generally unable to perceive anything deeper than the top layer.
No two people are inside each others' minds, so even the most intimate relationships, in any sense of the word, are really only fragmentary. We get snippets of each other. We get impressions, we make assumptions, we make judgments, we come to conclusions....but they may be wildly inaccurate, because they are based on our limited perceptions. A quite limited amount of information, and further limited due to the means by which it is perceived and processed.
It's rather ironic that some psychologists can be quite lacking in objectivity. I have to file for SSI in the very near future, due to physical health problems. Mental health is routinely checked at the same time, to see if that affects a case in any way. I went for an evaluation a couple of months ago. The female psychologist seemed to be in her early 60s, so it would be reasonable to hypothesize that she was not new to her profession. I felt that the evaluation went just fine. When I received a copy of the report, a few weeks ago, I was amazed by her 'findings'. I even laughed out loud when I read some of what she had written. Going in, I had not been feeling very well, due to physical issues that had been exacerbated by the trip to get there. It had nothing to do with emotional apprehension, or anything of that nature. As time went on, I started to feel better. She wrote that I was "initially anxious" and "then became euthymic". That term is mostly used to describe the state that people with bi-polar disorder are in when they are experiencing a period of equilibrium that does not qualify as 'normal'. There was no pre-existing diagnosis of bi-polar disorder in my medical history, so her use of "euthymic" was unjustified. Her assumption of anxiety followed by her assumption of a euthymic state caused her to mark me as abnormal in that box on the checklist. Next was my seating position. I had my chair rotated 90 degrees. Because I was not sitting straight in front of her, she marked me down for "abnormal affect". I was sitting that way in order to ease the pain in my back due to degenerative disc disease. The next 'abnormality' was my failure to maintain eye contact at all times during the evaluation. The only times when I did not maintain eye contact were those in which she asked me questions involving memory to a degree that I had to take a moment to attempt to accurately recall something. In those times I looked at the ceiling. It's a simple point of focus, nothing more. Some people close their eyes when deeply concentrating, others may stare at an object, some look at the ceiling. It's a shifting of attention from the immediate surroundings in order to eliminate distractions. Another 'abnormality' that she listed was "long and rambling explanations". I have always felt that when something of significance needs to be conveyed, background and details are very important to facilitate understanding. With this woman, I suspect that if I had given shorter answers it's quite likely that she would have had just as much of a problem with that. The 'finding' would probably have been "is reticent and fails to be forthcoming with details". The biggest laugh for me came when I read that she wrote that my voice was "loud and booming"....another abnormality. What a gross exaggeration. You can not express the smallest amount of enthusiasm or passion for one of your interests in life or this woman thinks you have a mental abnormality. I could bat the ball right back into her court and say that her 'affect' was flat-lined, because her tone was more than a little reminiscent of HAL from 2001.
Introverts are not abnormal or disassociated....we are just deeper thinkers.
People go about their daily lives without realizing that there are multiple 'layers' that make up existence because, for the most part, they are generally unable to perceive anything deeper than the top layer.
No two people are inside each others' minds, so even the most intimate relationships, in any sense of the word, are really only fragmentary. We get snippets of each other. We get impressions, we make assumptions, we make judgments, we come to conclusions....but they may be wildly inaccurate, because they are based on our limited perceptions. A quite limited amount of information, and further limited due to the means by which it is perceived and processed.
It's rather ironic that some psychologists can be quite lacking in objectivity. I have to file for SSI in the very near future, due to physical health problems. Mental health is routinely checked at the same time, to see if that affects a case in any way. I went for an evaluation a couple of months ago. The female psychologist seemed to be in her early 60s, so it would be reasonable to hypothesize that she was not new to her profession. I felt that the evaluation went just fine. When I received a copy of the report, a few weeks ago, I was amazed by her 'findings'. I even laughed out loud when I read some of what she had written. Going in, I had not been feeling very well, due to physical issues that had been exacerbated by the trip to get there. It had nothing to do with emotional apprehension, or anything of that nature. As time went on, I started to feel better. She wrote that I was "initially anxious" and "then became euthymic". That term is mostly used to describe the state that people with bi-polar disorder are in when they are experiencing a period of equilibrium that does not qualify as 'normal'. There was no pre-existing diagnosis of bi-polar disorder in my medical history, so her use of "euthymic" was unjustified. Her assumption of anxiety followed by her assumption of a euthymic state caused her to mark me as abnormal in that box on the checklist. Next was my seating position. I had my chair rotated 90 degrees. Because I was not sitting straight in front of her, she marked me down for "abnormal affect". I was sitting that way in order to ease the pain in my back due to degenerative disc disease. The next 'abnormality' was my failure to maintain eye contact at all times during the evaluation. The only times when I did not maintain eye contact were those in which she asked me questions involving memory to a degree that I had to take a moment to attempt to accurately recall something. In those times I looked at the ceiling. It's a simple point of focus, nothing more. Some people close their eyes when deeply concentrating, others may stare at an object, some look at the ceiling. It's a shifting of attention from the immediate surroundings in order to eliminate distractions. Another 'abnormality' that she listed was "long and rambling explanations". I have always felt that when something of significance needs to be conveyed, background and details are very important to facilitate understanding. With this woman, I suspect that if I had given shorter answers it's quite likely that she would have had just as much of a problem with that. The 'finding' would probably have been "is reticent and fails to be forthcoming with details". The biggest laugh for me came when I read that she wrote that my voice was "loud and booming"....another abnormality. What a gross exaggeration. You can not express the smallest amount of enthusiasm or passion for one of your interests in life or this woman thinks you have a mental abnormality. I could bat the ball right back into her court and say that her 'affect' was flat-lined, because her tone was more than a little reminiscent of HAL from 2001.
Introverts are not abnormal or disassociated....we are just deeper thinkers.
Last edited:
And if they sent you to a mechanic, he would have said, " you need a new carburetor and a break job". No one from either of these professions ever said, "hey you are good to go, no charge." If you are there they assume there is a problem, and they are going to find something.
Nonsense I've been to see a Doctor because I thought I was ill, had a few checks and was told more or less nothing wrong with you.
Doctor yes me too. Psychologist?
Also, obviously I'm exagerating.
Also, obviously I'm exagerating.
Similar threads
