Eye contact

I just can’t do it.

I’ll look at your shoes and maybe your trousers. I can often remember what people were wearing on their bottom half, but hardly ever the top.

I just can’t look you in the eyes.

This phenomenon is widely known as a trait with people on the Autism Spectrum, but I’ve never seen a convincing write up of why it happens. Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising – I struggle to understand it myself.

Looking in someone elses eyes feels wrong to me. By that I mean that it feels like something I shouldn’t be doing. There’s sometimes literally a thought of  “damn – you caught me looking” in the brief fraction of a second when eyes meet.

Moreover, it feels intensely uncomfortable too. When I make myself look someone else in the eye, I find myself almost physically flinching. My eyes want to look elsewhere, and it takes real effort to stop them doing just that. More than a few seconds of enforced eye contact and my brain is screaming at me, almost in pain.

And that’s just made a connection. The feeling of something akin to pain is actually just like the feeling I get when I’m tickled, or if I hear a loud noise. It’s not a physical pain as such, but it is excruciating all the same – a sort of mental pain. The feelings it stirs in me are those of getting away from the pain. With loud noises I’ll scrunch my face up and sometimes cover my ears. With tickling I’ll push people away or run. These are all reactions that happen without me consciously thinking about them.

I suppose that eye contact has an equivalent reaction too – I’ll simply look elsewhere.

So maybe the eye contact problem is caught up with the sensory over-stimulation problem in some way.

What ever it is, I simply can’t make eye contact with anyone comfortably, and I doubt that will ever change.

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4 Responses to “Eye contact”

  1. Gavin Bollard  on May 14th, 2009  (Quote)

    I can do it fleetingly but I always have to look elsewhere for a rest. Because I am deaf, I had “look at their mouths” drummed into me from childhood and that seems to satisfy most people.

    Of course some people, get upset about that. Particularly women. If you’re looking below their eyeline, they make the wrong assumptions. So instead, I look over their shoulders.

    It’s quite common for someone talking to me to get very unnerved and start looking around, over their shoulder or on the floor or ceiling to find out what I’m looking at.

    Reply

  2. Rachel  on May 14th, 2009  (Quote)

    If you’re flinching and your brain is screaming at you to look away, you may be experiencing what my OT calls “your nervous system defending itself.” I feel very similarly. In part, it’s a sensory processing problem; I have trouble thinking and speaking while also looking at someone’s eyes. It’s too much at once, so my nervous system gives me a break by shifting my eyes away to a point over the person’s shoulder or on the floor.

    In addition, for me, eyes are very powerful. I can’t read expressions particularly well, but that may be the case because I can’t look into someone’s eyes without being completely knocked out by the soul of the other person. Who can tell whether a person is surprised or shocked or whatever when you’re looking at a whole other aspect of the person’s being?

    I definitely get the “caught me looking” feeling, almost as though I’m intruding on the other person’s inner life. My whole system feels allergic to doing that. It feels overwhelming to me and intrusive to the other person.

    Reply


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