Awkward

by Ty Tashiro

  While her parents described the scope of their child’s presenting problem, Ellie looked as if they were discussing something that she had never heard about, the look kids have at the dinner table while grown-ups discuss politics or granite countertops. I asked Ellie if she would like to explore the toy bin in the corner of my office while her parents went to the waiting room for a few minutes. She nodded her approval and after her parents left, Ellie and I sat down on the beige carpet by a bin of toys. When adults go to therapy for the first time they can feel fairly unnerved by the situation and kids are no different. I wanted Ellie to feel a sense of control and as a small gesture to show her this, I told her that she could choose the toys for us. She looked simultaneously eager and immobilized, like a kid already afraid of what she could do.

  Ellie chose the colored pencils and large sketch pad. I asked her to draw a picture of her family and she readily obliged. She was a precocious artist. She drew with dimensionality and detail that was very unusual for her age. She depicted herself wearing a pink-striped dress with her parents on either side of her. All three of them were smiling and holding hands. But then Ellie began drawing someone else to the left of her parents, which was unusual because she was an only child. The fourth person she drew looked just like another Ellie, except that she was wearing a deep purple dress and looked mad as hell. I asked her:

  Ellie, that’s a great picture, can you tell me about it?

  Um, this is my mom. This is my dad.

  They look happy. How about the two girls in the picture?

  This girl in the pink dress is Ellie.

  She looks happy too. And who is the other girl in the purple?

  That’s the Ellie no one likes.

  You don’t have to be a psychologist to see what was going on in this picture. Ellie was aware that her behavior could turn into something she hardly recognized, but my hunch was that her parents might be explaining the reasons for their displeasure in terms that Ellie did not understand. The trick was to find a way to help Ellie understand why no one seemed to like that version of Ellie.

  Do you know why no one likes the purple-dress Ellie?

  No.

  Do your parents ever say why they don’t like the purple-dress Ellie?

  They don’t like temper tantrums.

  What happens when someone has a temper tantrum?

  I don’t know.

  This confirmed my first hypothesis. Ellie’s parents scolded her for temper tantrums, but Ellie didn’t know the true meaning of temper tantrums. Her lack of comprehension was understandable when you look at the situation through the eyes of a child. Emotions are an abstract concept, a mixture of physical reactions and thoughts that we label with words like “joy,” “contentment,” or “anger.” This abstract quality can make emotions confusing for young children, who have concrete mental abilities, which is to say that they generally understand the world in terms of what they can see and touch. So how do you help someone with concrete mental abilities understand abstract concepts like emotions?

  I knew from my initial discussion with her parents that when Ellie had a temper tantrum her parents sometimes took away her television privileges as a punishment. This concrete act gave me a foothold for a line of questioning:

  Ellie, when was the last time you lost your television time?

  Last night.

  Do you remember what you were doing right before it was taken away?

  Eating ice cream.

  You get in trouble for eating ice cream?!

  (Laughing) No! I got in trouble after that. (Stops laughing) I wanted more.

  So you asked for more ice cream and then what happened?

  My mom said no.

  And then what did you do?

  I screamed.

  Can you show me the face you were making while you screamed?

  Ellie paused for a moment to set up the scene while she looked down to gather herself. When she kicked her head up she was in full character, with her brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, lips tightly pursed, and hands clenched. After I paused for a moment to appreciate this theatrical display I said, “Ellie, your face, your shaking fists . . . that’s what happens when you have a temper tantrum.”

  I felt like we had done some good work for a first session and I told her we would get to talk some more later that week. As we stood up to leave, I felt a tug on my pants leg:

  Um . . . Ty. What does your angry face look like?

  Well, Ellie . . . I guess I don’t know.

  Why not?

  That’s a good question. But I’ll be sure to find out and tell you next time . . .

  Can We Just Skip the Emotional Parts?

  EMOTIONS ARE AT once delicate and full of explosive potential. For awkward people who are prone to social clumsiness, navigating the world of emotions can feel like walking through the glassware section of a store with a large backpack. Other people can be confused by awkward people’s unemotional reactions to exciting or perilous circumstances, just as they can be, at other times, when awkward people become surprisingly emotional about seemingly minor inconveniences. Any confusion about awkward people’s emotional lives is understandable because we will see that awkward people have emotional hardware that is calibrated differently from other people’s and over time this can erode their confidence that they can appropriately handle emotional situations.

  It’s human nature to form rationalizations for why we are not good at something and one way of doing this is to convince ourselves that the thing we are not good at is unimportant. For some awkward individuals who struggle with reading and expressing emotions, it’s tempting to rationalize emotions as superfluous psychological glitter that threatens one’s ability to be a reasonable person. Ellie had a striking aloofness to her for a girl of her age, which was probably partly dispositional, but it was possible that her aloofness also became entrenched because she learned that it served a function of keeping circumstances around her low in emotional intensity.

  One intuitive approach to decreasing temper tantrums is to give the person a way to cope with reducing his or her anger, but another less intuitive approach is to think about being proactive about releasing the energy that fuels the tantrums in smaller doses. Ellie rarely looked anyone in the eye, tried her best to stifle her smiles when I said something amusing, and she spoke in a monotone voice about highly emotional events like her temper tantrums. Although Ellie’s aloofness did minimize the chances of other people becoming emotionally reactive, it did not fully prevent a buildup of emotions within her. Like anyone Ellie experienced daily inconveniences, hurts, and frustrations, but without even the slightest display of an emotional reaction, those negative emotions began to build exponentially in her mind like a nuclear chain reaction until they exploded in her tantrums.

  Empathy is defined as the ability to understand another person’s emotional state and to deliver an appropriate response. Emotions are critical to becoming socially fluent because they carry an extra layer of meaning that is inextricably woven into the fabric of verbal and nonverbal communication. Attempts to remove emotion from daily interactions does not minimize its effects, but rather amplifies consequences because other people expect certain emotional responses. The absence of expected emotional responses tends to trigger uncertainty, and when people feel uncertain their emotions can run wild.

  Numerous studies have shown that awkward individuals have more trouble empathizing with others’ emotions. Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright from Oxford University found in two studies that the ability to empathize with others’ emotional states was normally distributed in the general population, and that most people can read others’ emotions to tell if they are bored with a conversation, if someone means something different from what their words alone would indicate, and that they can avoid being overly blunt when they want to. They found that as participants’ levels of social awkwardness increased, their levels of empathy decreased, which means that awkward people have trouble with ensuring that
others are engaged in a conversation, they are susceptible to taking statements too literally, and they deliver communications in a way that can sound overly blunt or rude.

  Awkward people can improve their ability to show empathy toward others, but doing so requires some self-awareness from the awkward person about why he finds emotions difficult to read. It also helps if other people can have some empathy for well-intended awkward people who are prone to empathy malfunctions. When awkward people take the responsibility to work hard to improve their empathic capacity and others show some patience and encouragement, awkward and socially fluent people can find an unusual brand of emotional connection.

  An Intense World of Emotions

  I REALIZED THAT my emotions operated differently from most kids’ after my fourth-grade Valentine’s Day party at school. The day before the party, my parents took me to choose a box of Valentine’s Day cards at the Hallmark store. When I saw the messages printed on the cards, such as “You Are My Valentine!” or “I Love You Lots!” I felt a panic. I asked my parents to drive me around to other stores so that I could look at different cards. When my parents asked me what I was looking for, I replied, “Something less emotional.”

  I eventually settled on a pack of cards that were relatively low in emotional expressiveness, but once I started to complete the “To” and “From” blanks, I still felt uneasy with all of the feelings conveyed by the cards. Perhaps as a compulsive calming mechanism, I began to organize the cards on a continuum from those with the highest emotional intensity on the left to the least amount of emotional intensity on the right. Then I began to match classmates to the cards based on the dose of affectionate messaging I thought they could tolerate.

  Of course, most of my classmates would not have a problem with even the cards highest in emotional expressiveness. On Valentine’s Day, it’s socially expected that people will throw around words such as “love” and “Valentine” in the same way they would say words such as “like” or “buddy” the other 364 days of the year. My inability to readily adapt to this daylong shift in cultural expectations left me spinning my emotional intelligence wheels. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I picked up a permanent marker and began to strike the most disquieting verbs such as “love” and modifiers such as “lots.” Sometimes I substituted words of lower intensity, such as “like” or “quite a bit.”

  The next day, my dad asked me if I had finished addressing my cards and I told him yes, never thinking twice about telling him about my extensive edits. At school, my classmates and I dropped our cards for each person in their decorated paper bag that hung from the chalkboard. While we sipped on Capri Suns and ate Valentine’s Day sugar cookies, we opened our cards. After I had read a few of the cards given to me, I noticed that no one else had made annotations. It was one of those moments when you realize too late in the game that you have completely misread a situation. My extensive efforts to avoid being awkward were having the opposite effect. Although my classmates were gracious not to remark about my annotated Valentine cards, surely they found it odd to read, “I Love Like You Lots.”

  Socially fluent people are understandably vexed by awkward people’s emotional lives because there is this apparent paradox of awkward people being emotionally disengaged at times, but then emotionally over-reactive at other times. Awkward people can be described as robot-like because they have an aloof air about them and are less likely to show appropriate empathic responses to other people’s emotional distress or excitement. This lack of emotional congruency from awkward people makes them appear uncaring about the situations underlying other people’s emotional reactions. But awkward people can also be emotionally over-reactive to minor situations, such as their daily routine being broken or setbacks in their work that appear minor or transitory to others. How does one explain this apparent paradox of awkward people being both emotionally over- and under-reactive?

  Kamila Markram and Henry Markram at the Laboratory of Neural Microcircuits in Switzerland have developed a theory that provides a compelling explanation for awkward people’s atypical emotional lives. Their intense world theory arose from their early lab studies with rats that had been bred to display behaviors such as low social motivation, repetition, and high anxiety. When they looked at the brain activity of these rats, they found that their social deficits and repetitive behaviors corresponded to unusually high levels of activation in brain areas associated with perception, attention, and emotion.

  This led the Markrams to wonder whether the brains of these rats perceived their surroundings with greater intensity than other rats did. Maybe these rats displayed high levels of anxiety because their strong perceptual responses made their environments overstimulating. Maybe the rats showed less social behavior because they were trying to temper the intensity of their environment by engaging in repetitive behaviors that helped them avoid the intensity of social interactions. By analogy, they were like humans who opt to spend their Saturday night watching Netflix reruns or knitting a scarf instead of going out to deal with a crowded restaurant or chaotic nightclub.

  In a research review of intense world theory, the Markrams found a number of studies showed parallel findings with people who have a high level of autistic symptoms. For example, when children with social and communication deficits view emotion-rich stimuli such as faces and eyes, their brains show hyperactivity in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with emotions such as fear and anxiety. Although intense world theory has mostly been investigated with autistic subjects, the theory seems logically consistent with how awkward people process and cope with emotions.

  If you think about the vibe that characterizes your interactions with awkward people, there is often an agitated energy that underlies the interaction, which can make them appear nervous, irritated, or generally upset. But if you view the awkward person as someone who is experiencing the interaction as particularly intense, then the unusual vibe they give off starts to make more sense. For the awkward individuals, their perception of emotion is like stepping into the sunshine after having your eyes dilated.

  As a coping mechanism, awkward individuals learn to temper this intensity by avoiding things that trigger strong emotions. When awkward people do not look someone in the eye, it’s not because they are incapable of making eye contact or disinterested in the conversation. Avoiding eye contact helps them avoid the strong emotional cues conveyed by faces and especially the eye region. Awkward individuals may sidestep emotional conversations about uncomfortable situations or they might even feel overwhelmed by praise from others. All of these efforts by awkward people to dampen the emotional intensity of interactions can make them appear aloof. For awkward people who experience the world of emotions as too intense, it does not really matter whether the emotion is negative or positive; even people as young as Ellie know that any strongly felt emotion could spin out of control.

  One of the unfortunate paradoxes for awkward people is that there are few emotions more acute in intensity than the feeling of awkwardness, and this intensity can easily overwhelm the awkward person’s mind. Awkward moments feel like walking nose first into a glass door. It’s an entirely unexpected moment of disorienting alarm and this flood of emotions is the first psychological response we experience, which is to say that we feel awkward before we think about the fact that we are in an awkward situation. But awkwardness is a powerful emotion that makes it difficult for people to think clearly about what has gone wrong and how to remedy the social misstep.

  Awkward feelings do serve an adaptive function, but awkward people have to figure out what their awkward feelings are trying to tell them.

  The Function of Feeling Awkward

  CHARLES DARWIN PROVIDED some of the early scientific insights about why humans would be wired for emotions. Darwin hypothesized that in the survival of the fittest, people had to respond quickly to circumstances that threatened their safety or well-being. People did not have the luxury of conscious deliberation when they were u
nder attack from a predator or fighting for scarce resources. Emotions are reflexive and involuntary, like the kick of your leg when a doctor hits your knee with a rubber hammer. In the same reflexive way, when you feel emotions like anger your mind instantly triggers physiological reactions like an increase in blood flow and muscle tension that prepare you to respond to the threat. Strongly felt negative emotions narrow your focus on the threat, and anger catalyzes fight responses while fear catalyzes flight responses.

  Awkward feelings are also accompanied by strong physiological reactions—a pounding heart, speeded up breathing, and tensed muscles—but unlike fear and anger, which are triggered by threats to our safety or resources, feeling awkward occurs in response to small deviations from social expectations. Although undone zippers and calling your friend’s wife by his ex-wife’s name are not ideal, they are not dangerous situations or something that stem from malicious intent. So why would the relatively innocuous social faux pas incite such a strongly felt emotion?

  On some subconscious level, we know that too many violations of small social rules can lead to social exile. Our minds have an overly sensitive emotional trigger when it comes to alerting us to unmet social expectations because our need to belong is so essential to our well-being. June Price Tangney is a professor of psychology at George Mason University who has found through an extensive program of research that there is a cluster of “self-conscious emotions” that occur following social missteps and each has a different function. These self-conscious emotions include embarrassment, guilt, shame, and, I would add, feeling awkward.