I first noticed that my father had trouble with eye contact when I was about ten years old. It was a Sunday, and my grandparents were visiting us. I was practicing a sonata on the piano, and my parents and grandparents had come over to the doorway to listen. I was well aware of their presence, and I felt proud that I had learned the piece so well.
When I was done, I looked over at my family. My mother and my grandparents were looking right at me, applauding and giving me compliments. My father, however, was looking everywhere except at me. He was shifting his stance, too, as though he were uncomfortable. He looked very much like a little boy who had been dropped into our livingroom and couldn’t figure out where he was or how to get home.
Of course, as a child, I took his responses very personally. I interpreted his lack of eye contact to mean that he didn’t care about my music. His shifting around seemed to mean that he was impatient to get away from me. I became very sad and discouraged. How could I reach him? I didn’t know.
Soon after, I saw that my father wasn’t making eye contact at the dinner table. I was excited about something at school and wanted to tell him all about it, but he didn’t look at me or give me any sort of response. It was almost as though he were defending against me. It’s possible that he had always been this way and that I hadn’t noticed it before, but once I saw it, my heart sank. I couldn’t stand feeling so much happiness and enthusiasm without being able to share it with him.
All of this happened 40 years ago, before anyone had the words to talk about what was going on, and before Asperger’s was a diagnosis. I now realize that, like me, my father was an Aspie. But back then, my relationship with him deteriorated. For many years, in my anger and hurt, I tried to be different from him in every respect. But like my father, I have my own problems with eye contact. I can hold eye contact better than he could, but I never know how long I’m supposed to do it. And while I’m looking into someone’s eyes, it’s nearly impossible for me to articulate my thoughts or to listen to what the person is saying. I have to look away in order to think and to speak.
There is also something about being seen, about being held in someone’s gaze, that is deeply upsetting to me. Perhaps it’s the legacy of trying to appear normal all my life. The anxiety that someone might actually see my strange, awkward, eccentric self has always been profound. So I look away, thinking that somehow, I will become opaque—very much like a child who closes her eyes and thinks that other people can’t see her. Do I really think I’m hiding by looking at the ground? Perhaps. On the other hand, I am always upset when people can’t see me properly—when they think badly of me for no reason, or when they ignore me altogether. I’ve lived most of my life in this strange double bind—wanting desperately to be seen properly and wanting desperately to be invisible.
Unlike my father, I have no trouble holding eye contact with close family members. I can look into my husband’s eyes and into my daughter’s eyes, and listen to them at the same time. But I shy away from eye contact with most people, rather in the same way that I shy away from looking directly into the sun. I’m not just afraid of being seen. In fact, as I come out to more and more people about being an Aspie, I feel much less afraid of being seen.
What really terrifies me, more than anything else, is to look into the eyes of another human being and see that person’s soul. When I look into a person’s eyes, I have such a profound empathic experience of the person that it’s overwhelming. It’s not that I read the person’s individual emotions. It’s as though the person’s whole being is coming at me.
I’d never given this kind of experience much thought until I read a book called Love, Loss and Healing: A Woman’s Guide to Transforming Grief by Susan T. De Lone. The author had lost her husband of 27 years to cancer, and she wrote about watching him die. When he passed, she felt his soul all around her in his hospital room. His soul was so vast that it filled the room, but could not be contained by it. She saw in that moment how difficult it is to have a vast soul in a limited, human body.
This vastness of soul comes at me through a person’s eyes. It is never the vastness of a generic, undifferentiated soul but of a unique, complex, multi-layered soul with pain, with fear, with love, with everything that it means to be a human being. To look into a person’s eyes for a few seconds, and then to look elsewhere, is often the best I can do. Averting my eyes is my neurological, spiritual, and psychological shield.
I envy people who don’t need this kind of shield. Sometimes, I’d like to do what others do so easily. But I don’t consider my way of seeing to be a deficit. It’s simply a different kind of sight. In the social world, it doesn’t do me much good, but the universe, like the soul, is vast. I try to keep my eye on the big picture. It helps to keep things in perspective.
© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
That’s really a fascinating take on eye contact avoidance. Like you, I don’t have much difficulty with my husband or children. With others though, I struggle quite a bit.
i look at my ex’ s teeth and my son’s nose and teeth. the eyes are too hard. i look at the lower half of peoples’ faces and when i was younger i averted my gaze. the lower half face technique works well for me these days.
i am overwhelmed by eyes. they make me feel frightened and nauseous and give me a kind of vertigo sensation that is far too overwhelming.
Rachel, you write beautiful, moving, poetic prose. You should use these posts as a basis for a book- a memoir of living with AS.
I too have trouble with eye contact. I have been trained to do it, so I do, but I try not to think about it too much when I am doing it, because it’s painful. I can’t articulate why; it just is. I prefer to look down, or look away when I talk, but I don’t because I now know the effect it has on others. When I enter a room, rather than focus on the person or people, I prefer to orient myself first. I want to see the context; take in the decor, the tchotchkes, and most importantly the books on the shelves (the latter says a lot about a person). But I don’t do that anymore. I have to live in an NT world and impersonate someone who is normal to survive socially. But it comes with a price.
Rachel, this is beautifully written. Thank you for being so open, for being willing to be so raw. Your honesty is powerful and compelling. Don’t be envious because others don’t need the shields you may need – you experience something other people can’t fathom, and that’s a gift.
we all need to encourage rachel to turn her blog into a book eventually. i have been secretly emailing her and making suggestions about this. glad to see others are encouraging her also.
so rachel, i will not stop haranguing you on this issue until you say YES.
(the book you sent is great also.)
warmth and friendship from your australian AS penpal. xx
Thank you all for your beautiful comments. I will meditate on the book idea.
Hi Rachel, your feelings seem to be very similar to mine, I have terrible trouble with eye contact. I have to conciously ignore all the feelings of empathy that I feel for people. When I was a child, I observed carefully how to make eye contact and learned how to make enough to seem normal. Most NT people seem to have the idea that lack of eye contact is shyness, rudeness,inattention or lack of empathy, when for me it is just the opposite. Concentrating on content is so difficult for me when I can see into this rich and overwhelming thing. I hear the prosody and music of speech and see into the depths of peoples being, so much that what I wish to say to them would be completely inappropriate. This vision cuts through the stupidity of everyday constructs.I become terribly afraid that not only will they see me, and know how much I am hiding, but also use me as a kind of mirror and accidently see themselves, which might terrify them. Most people seem to be not ready to know what they actually look like without all the filters that people seem to have, or construct, to make conciousness bearable. I am afraid of hurting people just by being able to see them, so like a silent ghost I tread very carefully. In this way I get by but it is so exhausting.
eye contact has long been a major pitfall of mine. I can look at my wife’s eyes for short periods, but I have to make a conscious effort to do so. Anyone else, and it just hurts. Even just a brief glance. I am, however, well acquainted with may people’s foreheads.