Awkward

by Ty Tashiro

  Figure 6.1 Genetic, family, and non-familial effects for boys’ and girls’ social ability

  Awkward Impulses Versus Social Expectations

  IN 1905, SIGMUND Freud presented a revolutionary theory of psychological development in the book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Through the early 1900s, the prevailing belief had been that infants were incapable of purposeful thought. The general advice was that parents needed to meet their infants’ basic physical needs, but did not have to worry much about children’s psychological needs until after infancy. Freud challenged this notion and proposed that the way parents interacted with their infants had long-lasting psychological implications for their psychological health. He saw infancy as a formative time for personality, a time of struggle between infants’ natural impulses and caregivers’ attempts to impose social expectations.

  Freud called the infant’s natural drive for pleasure the Id and the mechanism, driven by a caregiver’s pressure, to adopt social rules the Superego. In the middle was the Ego, an arbitrator of the desirous Id, which says “I want,” and the controlled superego, which says “I should.” He elaborated on these basic conflicts with detailed examples of stages that caregivers and children progress through, and that’s when things started to get weird.

  Freud proposed that from the time an infant is born until about eighteen months, its main motivation is to nurse. When an infant is hungry and his mother feeds him, it is a gratifying experience, or what Freud called a pleasurable experience. He proposed that mothers need to properly regulate the child’s desire for pleasure and this began with breastfeeding. Mothers who nursed too much or too little made their infants orally fixated. The orally fixated infant who nursed too little would grow up to have a passive personality, whereas the infant who was indulged in too much breastfeeding would develop a manipulative personality. Freud suggested that one tangible sign of this underlying psychological neurosis was a tendency to chew on pencils, bite nails, or other orally oriented behaviors.

  After the oral stage, Freud postulated that the basic parent-child conflict shifted from whether an infant was breastfed too much or too little to a showdown over toilet training. Infants in diapers do not have to “hold it’ until they find a restroom; they have the luxury to let things go whenever they want and it feels good, even pleasurable, to relieve themselves. This unrestricted expulsion is all fun and games until caregivers come around with their Superego ideas. They impose expectations about when and where children should relieve themselves, which is atop an enormous porcelain hole in the ground. To infants, this looks like an instrument that might be capable of whirling all kinds of things into an unknown abyss. If you put yourself in a child’s mind, then you can imagine not wanting to buy into any of this ridiculous social expectation. Children wage a battle against these restrictions with one of two strategies: withhold or expel.

  Anally retentive children sit on the toilet, look their parents in the eye, and do . . . nothing. Anally retentive kids will sit there for hours in willful disobedience. By comparison, anally expulsive children look their parent in the eye while they soil themselves. They are daring their parents to stop them from doing what they want, when they want. Both tactics are remarkably effective ways to agitate parents. Freud thought that the anally retentive child grew up to become overly controlled, a sort of obsessive-compulsive type of adult. Conversely, the anally expulsive child developed a loosely controlled personality, a risk-taking type of adult who would let bad decisions flow freely in the face of cultural norms that prescribed constraint.

  I like to imagine Freud in the starched air of Victorian-era modesty. I imagine him at elegant dinner parties in downtown Vienna where the other guests would politely try to engage in small talk with him, asking Dr. Freud what he did for work. I imagine Freud engaging in uncensored discourse about his theory of psychosexual pleasures and elaborating upon how infants’ frustrated psychosexual pleasures might result in oral fixation or anal expulsion. The awkwardness in those salons, stuffy with Superego, must have been priceless to observe. A collective self-consciousness must have infiltrated the remainder of the evening as guests privately wondered how to deal with the bratwurst on their plates or their after-dinner smokes.

  Although some of the specific examples Freud gave about the oral and anal stages seem absurd, his core ideas were a revolutionary way of thinking about child development. Researchers have found little support for Freud’s proposed link between nursing and oral fixations, or toilet training and orderliness, but they have found support for Freud’s core idea, which was that there could be long-lasting psychological effects from how early parent-child conflicts were handled.

  Take the oral stage as an example. Infants are without language or mobility, which means that they are completely reliant upon their caregivers to meet their needs. Consider what happens when infants cry because they are hungry, but learn that they cannot rely upon their caregivers to respond. Conversely, a parent who is smothering, who does not allow a child enough independence, could also negatively influence the child’s development. Kids need their parents to strike this balance between attentiveness and freedom throughout their lives, whether the context is nursing during infancy, summer camp as a kid, or a child’s setting off to college as a young adult.

  An anal stage of development sounds absurd now, but once again Freud’s core idea is useful. Anyone who has tried to toilet train an infant or watched others try to do so can tell you that the process can be a real struggle. There are many struggles for power between child and parent besides toilet training that take place on a daily basis, such as those around a parent’s exhortations not to hit, to be gentle, not to kick, to be nice, not to eat your snot. But these are only a few among hundreds, if not thousands, of expectations parents try to impose. Kids need to learn to say please, wait for their turn, and resist their impulse to throw a fit when they don’t get their way. Most parents push these social expectations upon their kids as soon as possible because they know that their children’s ability to meet these expectations will be critical to their children being seen as a team player and a valued group member.

  This battle between parents trying to build the children’s Superego and kids who would prefer to indulge their Id can be awkward at times in all families, but some families are more awkward than others. We will see that awkward children present some unique challenges to parents because they have hyperactive Ids, or supercharged Superegos, or both, which leaves these children’s Egos overwhelmed by a world that feels very intense. Despite these challenges, the underlying story line in awkward families is the same as that of any other family: parents are searching for a way to help their children pursue their natural interests while also giving their kids the structure necessary to play well with others.

  The Pleasure in Being Awkward

  BEFORE I LEARNED about Mr. Z’s childhood, I had felt my resentment growing with every passing detention. I began to notice little things about him that annoyed me and that I took as further evidence that he was worthy of nemesis status. I seethed while he solved chemistry problems on the chalkboard because he could not help but grin in a way that suggested he was delighted by doing the work. Smiling! I couldn’t believe that someone would take pleasure in such a torturous endeavor.

  Before Mr. Z proudly self-proclaimed that he was a nerd, most of us suspected that he was an awkward guy. The dead giveaway was his inability to hide this intrinsic joy he experienced while doing chemistry problems. When awkward people turn their spotlighted attention to their interests, they become fully absorbed. If you catch awkward people while they are unaware that anyone else is watching, while the bookworm reads an engrossing book or a virtuoso practices her violin, you will see the childlike joy of those lost in doing what they love.

  When awkward people are fully absorbed in something and it results in high performance, it’s a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, which is like being “in the zone” or “on fire.”
A runner in a state of flow flies effortlessly through the twenty-fifth mile as other runners move with a heavy stride, or a ballerina in flow moves through the most difficult parts of her performance with remarkable strength and grace. When athletes or performers get into a state of flow and are asked afterward what was going through their minds, they say, “Nothing.” When people are in flow they do not have to think about the mechanics of their craft or devote effortful thought about what they have to do. They act on instinct or impulse.

  When most people think of someone who is driven by his impulses, someone with a hyperactive Id, they envision the archetypal rock star who indulges in too much drinking, ill-advised sex, and dangerous drugs. Although some awkward people are at risk for overindulging in these traditional vices, they tend to lean toward different types of nonsocial excesses. They might play video games until their fingers blister, read about mythical creatures until the early morning hours, or tinker obsessively with inventions like the personal computer in their garages.

  Just as people with a genetic disposition toward nicotine or alcohol dependence experience more pleasure when they smoke or take a few drinks, awkward people seem to get an unusually strong sense of pleasure from engaging in their nonsocial interests. This fixation comes with an opportunity cost, which is that they are less likely to pay attention to important social expectations.

  For example, all of us know the feeling of having a lot on our minds and how this can distract us from giving people the full attention they deserve. When the awkward child is working on a project or daydreaming about an idea, his impulse is to remain fixated and absorbed on that task or idea. If someone begins a spontaneous conversation during these moments of intense focus, awkward people have trouble shifting gears into social mode. This difficulty means that they are more likely than non-awkward people to continue following their impulse to finish the project or finish their thought. To achieve this, awkward people might subconsciously send social cues that others clearly perceive as signs of disinterest or annoyance. This can leave the well-intentioned person looking to engage in some small talk feeling hurt or offended, and he or she has every right to feel that way.

  Caregivers who see their awkward children blow off people in this manner are usually appalled by their behavior and try to correct it, but it’s just one of many specific examples of awkward kids having a hard time controlling their impulses. Awkward children’s impulses manifest in other unusual ways, whether it’s correcting people’s grammar or pointing out other shortcomings that are better left unsaid. Awkward kids tend to be overly blunt. They are more likely to see social situations in concrete terms rather than as relational transactions that require letting some things pass or delicate phrasing of sensitive topics. That’s why they tell their teenage babysitter that her face has really broken out or tell the pastor at communion that Mommy uses much larger cups to consume her wine. Awkward kids are slower than non-awkward kids to realize that factual comments can be hurtful or get other people in trouble; for them, it’s just reporting the facts.

  Of course, awkward children cannot expect a free pass to disregard social graces just because social graces do not come naturally to them. The solution for parents is not to ask for special treatment for their awkward child’s social missteps. The most helpful thing a parent can do is to let his or her children suffer the natural consequences from their missteps, then explain in concrete terms why an interaction went poorly and provide coaching about how to handle it better in the future. If awkward children do not learn to control their impulses and follow important social expectations, then they will likely pay a significant social price as they get older. Caregivers faced with helping their awkward children develop a less porous mental filter have to sell them on the notion that they need to follow seemingly arbitrary societal expectations and refrain from saying or doing things that others perceive as overly blunt or harsh.

  During moments of frustration, caregivers have an impulse to admonish their awkward child: “Control yourself!” But they have to be careful what they wish for.

  A Supercharged Superego

  MR. Z HAD an unusual number of classroom rules that were strictly enforced. You had to staple your papers at a 45-degree angle because that ensured neatly folding pages. Your book needed to be open to the proper page before class started because he did not want to hear the “grating sound” of papers rustling during class. You were not to lean your head against the back wall because he didn’t want another head lice outbreak like the one in ’89. These precise rules along with many others were enforced with a military-like vigilance that struck many of us as odd.

  Mr. Z also imposed a number of strict rules upon himself. The few times I saw Mr. Z in less formal settings, once at a baseball game on a hot afternoon, another time at the grocery store on a Saturday, he was always wearing the same thing: sweater-vest, pressed shirt, and polished brown shoes. Every morning, Mr. Z arrived at school precisely two and one-half hours before the first bell, to push through his regimented triathlon training, which he meticulously tracked in a graph-papered notebook. When he solved chemistry problems at the chalkboard, he was precise with every step, and took care to show each operation on separate lines, even though he probably knew the answer just by glancing at the problem.

  The rule I consistently broke in Mr. Z’s classroom, which bothered him more than rustling papers or papers not stapled at 45 degrees, was my stubborn refusal to show all the steps of my work. I didn’t see the point in showing every step because I thought the final answer was all that mattered. I have to admit that if I had been less stubborn and took a few extra minutes to do each step of my homework problems, I would have spent a lot less time after school working on problems that had been marked down for “vague process.” A few years later, when I became a professor and began grading students’ papers, I realized that Mr. Z had to grade every step, of every homework problem, for every student in the class. It must have been an extraordinarily tedious task and I wondered, “What kind of person would impose that kind of task upon himself?”

  Awkward people love rules and systems. Their routines are usually built around specific times, locations, and meticulously defined methods. Although most people have a preference for their daily routines, awkward people are unusually precise and inflexible about their own. Try to interrupt or change a few details about an awkward person’s routine and you will see someone who has become extremely agitated and uncomfortable. When awkward individuals cannot rely upon their routines, they are like smokers who have run out of smokes.

  Freud may have observed that awkward people are inflexible about their routines because they are anal-retentive, but I think that is an overly pessimistic view. Awkward people’s routines and rules can be a positive quality in the right contexts. For example, many awkward people thrive in fields that require systematic procedures and persistent pursuit of repetitive tasks that would quickly bore most people. With the requisite talent, awkward individuals’ methodical nature can be especially helpful in fields like computer science, finance, and chemistry, in which rigorous adherence to a set of rules and systems is essential to mastery and avoiding costly errors. Mr. Z understood his systematic nature and it helped him channel his impulsive energy through well-thought-out routines and mental rules, which was an adaptive skill he applied to everything in life and that helped him succeed as a great student, military officer, engineer, and chemistry teacher.

  Instead of thinking about awkward individuals’ obsession with routines as a neurosis, a more helpful perspective is that this obsession comes from their strong tendency to look for rules that govern systems. This love for linear order and logical rules is what Professor Baron-Cohen calls systemizing. It’s the mental process of looking for what is predictable in a situation and establishing rules about how things work. In the simplest form, these rules follow the script, “If A occurs, then B will occur.” When you understand awkward individuals’ systemizing nature, then their interests and the
pleasure they derive from their interests make more sense. “If I run 5.5 miles today, then tomorrow I will run 6.0 miles”; “If I press 1–1–1 on the microwave instead of 1–0–0, then I can be more efficient about programming the cooking time”: these might not sound like immensely pleasurable thoughts to the non-awkward person, but to the awkward person this kind of systematic ordering feels strangely gratifying.

  Although systemizing can help an awkward person persist through triathlon training or save him 1.5 seconds when he programs the microwave, highly systematic thinking is not as well matched to figuring out phenomena that are less systematic and predictable. When awkward people’s minds work in highly systematic ways, what one might call hyper-systemization, then it can be difficult for them to deal with situations that are not easily corralled with linear rules. To people with a hyper-systemizing view of the world, there are few things more variable than other human beings and seemingly less systematic than social interactions. Why do people eat something loud like popcorn in movie theaters, where people are trying to listen to a dialogue-driven movie? Why do people fall in love with partners who treat them poorly? Why do people tell each other “sweet dreams” if people cannot control their dreams? These are the types of situations that flummox the awkward person’s systemizing mind.

  Awkward people have a harder time seeing the systematic patterns in social information and for that reason, social situations can feel like a hot, unpredictable mess. But the reality is that common social situations follow relatively predictable scripts. Cognitive psychologists like Mark Baldwin at McGill University and others have found that people develop “if-then” scripts in their minds to make sense of social information. Some of these scripts are situational, such as, “If you are a man, then you should not lecture women about how to conduct their lives,” or “If you are a man on the subway, then you should not indulge your impulse to spread yourself out across two seats.” When people follow these socially accepted “if-then” scripts, it prevents them from engaging in socially undesirable mansplaining or manspreading.