Well, what does "weird" and "annoying" mean in this case? In unmaskers I frequently see a lot of understandable social trauma playing out in, let's just say, not the most socially effective of ways at times. No longer mindreading and people pleasing and fawning is all to the good; becoming completely unfiltered while still harboring a ton of deep-seated fear of abandonment and then spilling it out all over people will understandably drive them away. No longer faking emotions and tone of voice preserves energy and helps us feel more genuine, but never putting any energy into trying to understand a friend's interests or emotions will kill a friendship.

There is a messy counterbalancing that has to occur for many unmaskers; at first we focus on never doing anything false and allowing our unbridled selves to roam free -- and then we often recognize that we will need certain self-advocacy, listening, communication, and even diplomacy skills to actually relate to other people, even while remaining true to who we are.

It's normal for the unmasking process to initially seem like it's making you harder to love, more annoying, more bizzaree -- that's a necessary corrective to having previously aimed to make yourself unremarkable or widely liked.

But if you find yourself repeatedly socially alienating even out and proud neurodivergent people, it may be worth asking whether you are taking actions that are pushing them away. Things like interrupting people when they are trying to open up to you, invalidating their feelings, seeking reassurances that no other person can provide, not interacting, self-victimizing, just generally hurtful interpersonal stuff that us traumatized folks sometimes do even in community with one another. If this is the case, you will have to work on accepting the feedback when people are kind enough to tell you that you're bothering them or disrespecting them -- it is not the end of the world, it is a habit you can notice and correct.

Or you might just still be withdrawing and inhibiting very hard, and doing self-protective things that convey to others that they should give you a wide berth. Lots of unmaskers give off really strong "dont talk to me dont come up to me i feel socially unsafe right now" vibes that are completely honest and authentic to where they are at the moment, even if they wish they could seem more welcoming. Please give yourself some grace to feel all that if that's what it is.

No one is too weird or too annoying to make friends. But you might need to find the people who are weird enough and mad enough and disabled enough for you. Alternatively, you might have some interpersonal baggage that affects how you treat others you still need to work on. Or your internalized disability stigma might just be telling you that youre being too much when youre barely taking up social space at all.

Friendships are built of repeated low-stakes interactions and returned bids for attention with slowly increasing intimacy over time.

It takes a long time to make friends as an adult. People will probably think you're weird if you just walk up and start talking to them as though you are already their friend (people think it's weird when I do this, I try not to do this) but people won't think it's weird if you're someone they've seen a few times who says "hey" and then gradually has more conversations (consisting of more words) with them.

I cheat at forming adult friendships by joining groups where people meet regularly. If you're part of a radio club that meets once a week and you just join up to talk about radios, eventually those will be your radio friends.

If there's a hiking meetup near you and you go regularly, you will eventually have hiking friends.

Deeper friendships are formed with people from those kinds of groups when you do things with them outside of the context of the original interaction; if you go camping with your radio friend, that person is probably more friend than acquaintance. If you go to the movies with a hiking friend who likes the same horror movies as you do, that is deepening the friendship.

In, like 2011 Large Bastard decided he wanted more friends to do stuff with so he started a local radio meetup. These people started as strangers who shared an interest. Now they are people who give each other rides after surgery and help each other move and have started businesses together and have gone on many radio-based camping trips and have worked on each other's cars.

Finding a meetup or starting a meetup is genuinely the cheat-code for making friends.

This is also how making friendships at schools works - you're around a group of people very regularly and eventually you get to know them better and you start figuring out who you get along with and you start spending more time with those people.

If you want to do this in the most fast and dramatic way possible, join a band.

Be where people are. This can be online or in person, but you need to be in a social space around people in the same space frequently enough that you begin to recognize and get to know people. Maybe you are in a discord server for a game and you start to get to know names and avatars; maybe you go for a walk around your neighborhood and see people at their houses; maybe you go to the library and see the people there.

Exchange greetings. You might exchange a "Hi" the first time you meet someone passing them on the street, or you may wait to see them a few times before you greet them. But the first step toward being friends is saying hello (whether that's waving to a neighbor or greeting someone when they enter the chat)

Smalltalk. Smalltalk is a social script of exchanging trivial conversation about non-personal topics in order to pass a brief period of time together. Common subjects are weather, sports, local events, holidays, etc. If you're not sure how to initiate this a simple "How's your day going" is great; if you're not sure how to respond the answer should always be some variety of "pretty good, how about you?" If the other person brings up another subject ('how about this weather' 'did you catch the game' 'holidays are crazy') you respond with a polite and somewhat upbeat response on the same topic; you can continue in that vein and wait for the other person to introduce another topic or say goodbye, or you can introduce your own low-stakes topic. These are the conversations you might have with someone you've said hello to a few times while you are both waiting on a coffee order, or to someone you've seen a couple of times at the dog park, or someone who has showed up in the comments of a fic multiple times. This sort of conversation is about figuring out whether you want to get to know each other better, so it's kind of a behavioral test. It's assessing "can I have a pleasant, brief conversation with this person?" because people usually want to know if the answer to that question is "yes" before they share more details of their lives.

Slightly more personal conversations. Once you've seen the same barista twenty times and said hi, or you've run into the same person at your gym every other day for a month, or you've played on the same team as someone in your server for a while, you can increase the intimacy of the conversation. The way that you do this without seeming creepy is that YOU share something slightly more personal than smalltalk and allow the other person to guide the conversation from there. So this could be "hey, how's it going?" "Good! I had a nice conversation with my sister today, she got a new job. How are you?" (for example) and the response could be something like "Oh hey that's great, I'm good, what kind of job" or the response could be "Great, my roses are blooming" or the response could be something like "enjoying the weather." If the person speaking responds to your sharing of personal information with a request for more information (asks about your sister) or by sharing some of their somewhat more personal information (roses are blooming) they might be interested in continuing to gradually share more information. If they respond with more smalltalk, they probably aren't interested in becoming closer friends (though you should still continue to say hi and be polite and ask them how they're doing; maybe at some point they'll share something with you and it'll be your turn to decide if you want to get to know them better).

Deepening personal conversations. Once you've seen someone several times, you will begin to know little things about them. You will find out if they have pets or a partner, learn things about their job or their parents, and they will learn things about you. If you want to become friends with them, ask them about these things and offer information in return. Start casually and don't pry for more information, and be sure to share about yourself as well. Eventually you will get to the point that you can have a comfortable conversation on topics of shared interest for at least a few minutes.

Plan a time to hang out with this person intentionally. Maybe you've been randomly crossing paths in the server with this person for a few months and like them pretty well - that's a good time to ask if they want to get together for a planned game. Maybe you've been seeing this person at the dog park on random weekends; this is a good time to say "I'm going to bring Buster to the park on Saturday at about two, are you going to be around?" If they agree to meeting up for the thing, they are interested in continuing to develop the friendship. If they don't want to meet up then continue at the same level of interaction as before and perhaps later on down they line they'll ask you if you want to plan a meetup.

Begin to meet regularly. If the initial meetup went well, do it again. Don't make it a rigid scheduled weekly thing but periodically ask if they'd be interested in meeting up specifically like you did the first time. Once you have hung out on purpose a few more times you've got two choices: set a regular meetup, or hang out elsewhere.

Setting up a regular meetup is the relatively casual option here; it keeps things in the same location and keeps the context of the friendship the same while still increasing interactions and intensifying the relationship. You can have perfectly good, if somewhat casual friends, who you see regularly in one place and rarely outside of that place.

Hanging out in a new place changes the context of the relationship; suggest a hangout in a place that makes sense for the mutual interests you've learned over the previous months of getting to know the person (perhaps you've been meeting up in the library for a weekly crafting event and you've learned you both like scifi; ask if they want to grab coffee after the event and talk about a book or movie you both like. perhaps you've been hanging out and having fun conversations in a fandom-specific server; ask if they want to hang out in a private chat and talk about a non-fandom topic).

Do this over and over forever. Eventually it stops feeling forced and scripted, and the more you do it the better you get at it.

Some tips:

Most of what people mean when they say "creepy" is "overly personal" or "social interactions happening before both parties are comfortable with it." It transgresses the normal script and it makes people uncomfortable. That's why it's worthwhile to take things slow and keep things casual as you're getting to know someone. Sometimes people are *not* going to want to get to know you better and that's okay, just don't push for more intimacy once you know the other person isn't returning that same desire for increased closeness. If they never talk to you about anything more serious than small talk or casual interests, and change the conversation when you bring up personal stuff, they don't want to get closer (maybe they will at some point, but if you keep things chill they can make that decision if they get more comfortable.)

People like to talk about themselves, and if you give them the opportunity to talk about themselves, people will largely think well of you. Pay attention to what people are saying and ask them questions based on the topics that interest them.

People don't like to *only* talk about themselves, or talk deeply about themselves with people who they feel are strangers, so there has to be some level of exchange. Share information about yourself that mirrors the level of information that people share with you; if you want to know more about someone you can *gradually* begin to share more about yourself over time but don't over-share deeply personal information if most of your conversations have been casual.

Most friendships are pretty positive for the first several months at least; bringing up negative emotions with very casual friends might cause them to turn away from you. That doesn't mean you shouldn't *have* negative emotions, or that you should never, ever talk about them, but until you know each other better it might be best to keep your negative motions at the "had a rough day at work, glad to be off, how are you" level rather than "my boss is a raging asshole who fired my coworker for something stupid" level.

It takes forever! It can be very stressful! I do seriously recommend seeing if you can become friends with people in regularly scheduled group hangouts if you can swing it because it replicates the way we form friendships as children - frequent proximity and increasing intimacy because of time shared together - instead of the "this feels like dating" feeling of trying to make friends with people you see occasionally.

In case it helps anyone else, I’m gonna try to share something I got from a book on social skills (it’s by Daniel Wendler, written by an autistic person who’s learned the rules for autistic people who haven’t yet, highly recommend!) on the flow of conversation.

If you’re like me, maybe you struggle with infodumping and talking too much and forgetting to ask questions. If people don’t share as enthusiastically as you without direct prompting, you’ll accidentally dominate a conversation. Don’t worry, I get it! I thought, I’ll share what I want to share and they’ll share what they want to share, easy—right?

As I’ve had to learn…nope. 95% of neurotypical people (and a lot of neurodivergent people too!) won’t feel comfortable sharing without being invited to.

So, that “natural” back-and-forth of neurotypical conversation goes something like this:

You talk for a little bit. The less you know this person, the shorter your individual “blocks” of conversation should likely be in most cases. So if you’re at small talk stage, you say maybe a sentence or two; if you know them better you can get away with more.

Then it’s on you to pass the ball back. Your job here is to communicate “hey, your turn, I’m interested”, and to give them a cue of what to talk about so they don’t feel stranded and like they have to “come up with” an answer.

Not giving any cues is where awkward silence comes from, and it’ll feel to them like you’re communicating “I want out of this conversation!” So if your conversations with people often awkwardly peter out, check if you’re giving them a cue every time you finish talking!

There are, broadly speaking, two types of cues:

Invitations: these are questions, or otherwise direct prompts for the other person to speak.

They’re very direct cues, and they’re the easiest for the other person to respond to. That means that the less you know someone, the more you’ll likely rely on invitations (but not exclusively! That makes people feel interrogated. 2-3 questions in a row are fine, after that you might want to throw in an inspiration or two to break it up and be less intimidating—more on that below!)

Try to always keep invitations at the same level of intimacy as the current conversation—don’t talk about the weather and then ask where this stranger grew up and what the weather was like there. These are such direct cues that it’s inherently awkward for the other person to dodge them, so make extra sure your invitations aren’t uncomfortable.

Inspiration: this is essentially referencing things that the other person can easily latch on to for their response.

These are more indirect cues, and a little trickier in my experience. Essentially, you want to make sure that you end your bit of the conversation with something that’s deliberately easy to respond to—avoid ending on something that’s very niche that people can’t relate to or that’s very unique to you. If you want to mention something like that, you can, but tack something more general on after as inspiration (or just end on a question). Inspirations are still cues, they’re still meant to give the other person an idea of what to respond with, otherwise the conversation will feel awkward and unwelcoming!

What the other post mentioned re: offering slightly more personal information of your own often falls under this category. For example, if you’re talking about the weather as in the first example, but you mention where you grew up and what the weather was like, that can be inspiration for the other person to also talk about where they’re from!

But, unlike with a question, if they don’t want to share that information they can usually dodge it without having to make it extremely obvious that that’s what they’re doing. They can ask you something else, or shift the topic, and it might not be super subtle but it allows plausible deniability, so they’re not forced to either a) answer a question they don’t want to, or b) expose their discomfort (which is personal in itself!)

The more you know someone, the more you’ll likely automatically rely on inspiration to keep conversation flowing. That’s because you two have context for each other, something you say might easily have a bunch of things they could use as inspiration just because of past conversations you’ve had or things you already know about each other—anything can be a cue if there’s context! But with people you don’t know well, you’re gonna want to be a bit more mindful of it.

Generally, every time you talk in a one-on-one conversation, you want to leave some kind of cue for the other person to respond to!

Don’t worry too much about it though—if they want to talk to you, they’ll deliberately look for inspiration. If you throw the ball badly, they’ll still try to run to catch it anyway! It doesn’t have to be perfect.

But the less you know someone, the less you’ll be willing to “run” (because hey, that’s a lot of mental effort for a stranger who hasn’t proven they’re worth it, for all you know they might be an asshole!) and the more intentional you want to be about giving cues and making the ball as easy as possible to catch.

i'm actually psychotic not currently in inpatient psychiatric care and you basically need a very dedicated support system. for safety my family has done things such as lock weapons away, installed cameras outside home, and if there's a serious issue and they're gone alert the neighbors to come check on me. my parents also know how to approach delusions and paranoia. there is actually a history of bipolar and schizophrenia in my family, so they'll even contact each other like "do you think xyz would help sivi like it does with [cousin]". community support and awareness of severe mental health issues is a good approach. of course things will not always go smoothly, but that's why you don't have just one person involved so it's not as overwhelming and people can rely on each other (my aunt has helped me in place of my mom and stepdad sometimes when things get very bad).

i'm also not opposed to use of medication but there should be more autonomy surrounding it. and with bipolar you may need to change doses or medications more often.

As our recovery progresses, we need to learn to endure these feelings. Reinterpreting the deeper meaning of these feelings is key to accomplishing this. Typically this involves epiphanies like the following. “I feel afraid now, but I am not in danger like I was as a child.” “I feel guilty not because I am guilty, but because I was intimidated into feeling guilty for expressing my opinions, my needs and my preferences.” “I feel shame because my parents rained disgust on me for being me. I say no to these toxic parental curses, and I am proud and right to see how they tried to murder my soul. I give them their shame back as disgust- the disgust any healthy adult feels when he sees a parent bullying a child with contempt, or when he sees a parent heartlessly ignoring a suffering child.”

The King is lawgiver and judge. When we are possessed by the Judge, we experience the self as an object to be judged, and we identify with the Judge and judge others.

The Judge demands obedience, allotting or withholding value according to how we meet imposed standards. In its possession, we are obsessed with questions of good and bad, right and wrong, purity and impurity. The delusion it perpetuates is that we have value when we meet the standards the Judge imposes.

Judgement implies a punishment system. The duty of the self as a subject, like the duty of a law-abiding citizen, is to act so as to avoid being punished. Judgment can imply rewards, but they are generally of lesser importance. Law codes, for example, are not written to spell out "rightdoings" and their rewards, but to list wrong doings and their punishments. For example, from the Babylonian law code of Hammurabi, c. 1800 B.C.E: "If a heirodule, a nun, who is not living in a convent, has opened (the door of) a wineshop, or has entered a wineshop for a drink, they shall burn that woman." Or, from the Bible: "He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death" (Exod. 21:12).

The weapon of the judge is punishment, inflicted upon the guilty, and the Judge determines our guilt or innocence. To be possessed by the Judge is to be possessed by guilt.

To instill guilt, immanent value must be destroyed. The body becomes a thing to despise. For value is embodied; we feel it in our physical being, in the pleasure inherent in taste and touch and movement in the erotic tides that flood us, in the simple acts that assure survival.

To restore immanent value, we can begin by affirming the body, not denying its needs or desires. Pleasure, humor, laughter, fun, art, sex, food, and beauty are our liberators. Spirit is not seen as separate from matter. When the sacred is embodied, spirituality, the means we use to connect with the sacred, takes us into the body, not away from it. Traditionally, Witches quote the Goddess as saying, "All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals."

Guilt is internalized hate of the self, instilled through fear of punishment. Guilt is the way we punish ourselves. The internalized Judge sustains the power of every coercive institution. Because punishment becomes self-administered, because it is a voice within us telling us we are bad, we are not aware of being externally controlled, and so we are helpless to challenge that control.

Guilt does not encourage us to change, to redress mistakes and act rightly; instead it paralyzes us. When we believe that mistakes are irreparable, we cannot act, for no one can grow without making mistakes. We step aside from the responsibility of taking action.

Freedom from guilt alone, however, does not necessarily mean liberation. It can become simply a license to exploit. Relationships based on exploitation destroy immanent value. If I can feel comfortable living well when someone else suffers, I value that person's life less than mine. But the moment anyone's life is subject to a rating on a scale of worth, we have all been devalued, for either each being has a value inherent to itself, or none do.

Between guilt and exploitation lies responsibility. When we know our own power-from-within, we become enabled to act. Instead of punishing ourselves we can ask the questions that lead to responsible action and constructive change.

JOURNAL MEDTATION ON GUILT

For a day, notice when you feel guilty, and about what. Ask yourself:

Who does this guilt serve?

Is there some real responsibility I need to take?

Is my guilt preventing me from taking action? How? From doing what?

What judgments am I making because of guilt? Are they sound? Unsound?

Think of a time in the past when you felt guilty.

How did you act? What did you do? What choices did you make? What responsibilities did you take? Fail to take? What happened?

If you could do it over again, how would you change what you did?

Do you know how to play? You might. Like me, lots of people grew up with the Happy Family Game and are intimately acquainted with the rules. If you're not, don't worry, I can teach you.

The objective of the Happy Family Game is to create a nuclear family unit which, either in reality or appearance, looks to outside eyes to be financially, socially, romantically, and physically successful, capable of doing their moral duty to purchase and enjoy the products and services that capitalism creates. This is "happiness" in a capitalist society.

This standardized consumer model is what "respectability" and success"— i.e., "winning"— look like in the Happy Family Game. Ideally, these families are composed of a cis-heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-middle-class monogamous couple producing children with the same characteristics. Players who don't meet these criteria (i.e., people of color, those who are poor, queer, disabled, etc.) can also try to play the game, but they start play with significant penalties.

There is only way to win the Happy Family Game: get married, have babies, buy lots of stuff, and keep smiling until you die. However, there are myriad ways to lose at it. There's also a moral implication: good, productive, socially respectable consumers belong to good, productive, socially respectable families.

All Happy Families are families, but not all Families are Happy. All Happy Families are the same, and if you're not in a Happy Family, we are told, then there's something wrong with you. —— Just as very few people are born with the correct combination of physical prowess, skill, social supports, discipline, and luck necessary to be a professional athlete, few families actually meet all the requirements necessary to be a Happy Family. That's all in the spirit of the game, though, because as long as you can make it look like you're in a Happy Family, you can receive all the social benefits of actually being one. When you're a Happy Family, you're a part of the North American dream. For women, this means that you have a biological, social, and economic role as a wife and mother, as well as a moral obligation, and it's from this defensive position that the Happy Family Game is played.

To be as successful at the game as possible, the player needs to develop two specific skills: the ability to alter their perception of reality to make it fit the reality they would prefer, and a willingness to deceive, control, and manipulate others, including themselves.

The two most important rules of the Happy Family Game are the suspension of belief and don't think, don't tell.

"i can't hold fragile things without breaking them" vs "my housemates won't let me do dishes anymore."

"i can't manage my own finances" vs "my family won't let me make my own financial decisions"

"i can't ever learn how to drive" vs "the state has decided that people with my disability cannot be allowed to drive."

also "what would need to happen for it to be possible for me to be able to do dishes?" or "what would i need if i were to ever move out?" or "what kinds of supports would i need if i did try volunteering?"

I have known for a long time that I can't process my thoughts and emotions verbally. This is what sometimes leads to me getting frustrated, "stuck," and increasingly pressurized towards my meltdown threshhold when I'm trying to express a half-formed thought or need. This is why I often choose to process my cognition in writing. It allows me to sift about in the sands of my mind, sliding to and fro, checking and rechecking, until I find what I need.

There is something to the capacity to shape my communication more freely and without the preesure that I put myself under which often leads to stammering, stuttering, aphasia, confusion, and my inability to hold something as ephemeral as language in my head long enough to manipulate it like clay with my hands. Words are not my brain's mother tongue in the first place, and it can be a welcome relief to truly take the slowed pace I need to translate my thoughts into a language others will understand.

Some others. I am well aware of who I learned my translation process from and of how that has made my translations inaccessible to some of the very people who share my brain.

The thing is, to learn to speak at all when your brain processes this slowly takes enormous effort. To learn to CHANGE your speech is back breaking. I have been trying for fifteen years.

Autistic cognitive processing pace and the disabling ramifications aren't things we talk about often. It's one reason some of us become obsessed with having back up plan upon back up plan (because we literally cannot think fast enough to keep up with the demands of our lives). It's one of the fastest paths to burnouts and meltdowns. It's part of why we are unable to keep up with the demands of social interactions, especially in large groups (too many social cues moving too quickly to be processed at pace and we drop the ball in the moment even if we realize later).

Because the pace of our cognition is chronically slowed, we are chronically disabled socially, emotionally, cognitively, etc, and we are forced to spend an incredible amount of mental and physical energy either compensating for that, recovering from it, or both. That is energy and resources neurotypical people get to spend on other things in their lives, maybe a project or hobby, a relationship, hell, just relaxing.

There can be upsides to it. This slowed cognition seems to be related to how the process of bottom-up analysis functions during cognitive processes in Autistic folks' brains. That bottom-up analysis is a really interesting cognitive processing style that seems to be responsible for increased pattern recognition! So a lot of how we're able to analyze, learn, understand, mimic, etc based on pattern recognition is thanks to this processing style. It helps us take in a holisticly detail oriented view of the things we look at, which can (with support) make us great researchers, investigative journalists, and inventers.

But while the upsides have become more discussed as we've become more willing to see Autism itself as neutral (a very good thing in my opinion), we sometimes forget the other side of the coin.

I often find myself trying to brute force my way through my processing pace. It always ends badly. And that's really the trouble. I can talk most of the time, but I can talk A LOT faster than I can process my thoughts. So most of the time my words are just. Garbage. Sounds. If you ask my to speak to you, you are asking me to fill up soundwaves because realistically my brain moves at about 25% of the speed of the conversation.

It's why as a clinician I have to be so incredibly careful what I do and say and how I hear my clients because I *truly* am processing what the tell me at auch a significant delay. It can sometimes be days later when the information truly settles into place.

The same is obviously true in my personal life! It can take me days or even weeks to figure out what a single thought or feeling means in the context of my own life because I have to process that often entirely alone or just on paper. Not because no on one WOULD help me I have people in my life who would be willing but because by the time talking to someone would be any help, I would have basically figured it out enough to just say it out loud and I don't really need their help by then. There are rare exceptions to this when I do definitely seek help but it can be so frustrating to be trapped, voiceless, in your own emotions.

The link to the paper! http://ow.ly/r40x30mZF79

The paper is Revisiting the etiological aspects of dissociative identity disorder: a biopsychosocial perspective. A very good one that I recommend to anyone interested in the causation of DID! I don't think I can do it justice if I tried to summarize the entire thing, so I'll just write down some bullet points of things I found interesting:

What is DID?: 

DID is a complex, posttraumatic, developmental disorder that is caused by trauma in childhood (usually very early childhood).

What causes DID?:

DID arises when a child’s ability to develop an ordinary sense of self in relation to others is impeded by unintegrated trauma.

Emotional neglect by parents and/or siblings is the strongest predictor of DID (and any other dissociative disorder).

More covert trauma such as dysfunctional communication in families or subtle emotional neglect can lead to milder presentations DID.

DID VS PTSD:

Switching between alters is considered to be a more elaborated version of PTSD intrusions & avoidance.

People with PTSD & DID generally experience the same amount of feeling shame, betrayal, self-blame, anger and fear.

People with DID tend to experience more feelings of alienation, loneliness, and disconnection than people with PTSD.

DID VS normal experiences:

The human mind is naturally made up of multiple interconnected “modes” that make up their whole self.

Trauma & dissociation causes modes to become decoupled and start existing in smaller, isolated pockets.

In DID, the modes have become so disconnected that individual modes start functioning as if they, independently from each other, are the whole self.

In a non-DID brain, new modes are always being created and old modes are always being updated.

Taken from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, Psy.D. A summary of the tips the book hands you on how to recognize emotionally healthy people.

They’re realistic and reliable

They work with reality rather than fighting it. They see problems and try to fix them, instead of overreacting with a fixation on how things should be.

They can feel and think at the same time. The ability to think even when upset makes an emotionally mature person someone you can reason with. They don’t lose their ability to see another perspective just because they aren’t getting what they want.

Their consistency makes them reliable. Because they have an integrated sense of self, they usually won’t surprise you with unexpected inconsistencies.

They don’t take everything personally. They can laugh at themselves and their foibles. They’re realistic enough to not feel unloved just because you made a mistake.

They’re respectful and reciprocal

They respect your boundaries. They’re looking for connection and closeness, not intrusion, control or enmeshment. They respect your individuality and that others have the final say on what their motivations are. They may tell you how they feel about what you did, but they don’t pretend to know you better than you know yourself.

They give back. They don’t like taking advantage of people, nor do they like the feeling of being used.

They are flexible and compromise well. Because collaborative, mature people don’t have an agenda to win at all costs, you won’t feel like you’re being taken advantage of. Compromise doesn’t mean mutual sacrifice; it means a mutual balancing of desires. They care about how you feel and don’t want to leave you feeling unsatisfied.

They’re even-tempered. They don’t sulk or pout for long periods of time or make you walk on eggshells. When angered, they will usually tell you what’s wrong and ask you to do things differently. They’re willing to take the initiative to bring conflict to a close.

They are willing to be influenced. They don’t feel threatened when other people see things differently, nor are they afraid of seeming weak if they don’t know something. They may not agree, but they’ll try to understand your point of view.

They’re truthful. They understand why you’re upset if they lie or give you a false impression.

They apologize and make amends. They want to be responsible for their own behavior and are willing to apologize when needed.

They’re responsive

Their empathy makes you feel safe. Along with self-awareness, empathy is the soul of emotional intelligence.

They make you feel seen and understood. Their behavior reflects their desire to really get to know you, rather than looking for you to mirror them. They aren’t afraid of your emotions and don’t tell you that you should be feeling some other way.

They like to comfort and be comforted. They are sympathetic and know how crucial friendly support can be.

They reflect on their actions and try to change. They clearly understand how people affect each other emotionally. They take you seriously if you tell them about a behavior of theirs that makes you uncomfortable. They’ll remain aware of the issue and demonstrate follow-through in their attempts to change.

They can laugh and be playful. Laughter is a form of egalitarian play between people and reflects an ability to relinquish control and follow someone else’s lead.

They’re enjoyable to be around. They aren’t always happy, but for the most part they seem able to generate their own good feelings and enjoy life.