I Wish Social Skills were Black & White

Mikal Britt, Behaviorist for 10+ years

Teaching social skills is challenging because of all the subtleties and grey zones; because social skills are all about nuance and abstract assumptions which are sometimes difficult to explain or verbalize.

For example, I worked with a client about hugging.  More specifically, not hugging.  Because he wanted to hug everyone, teachers and students alike, male and female.  He was not a threatening person.  In fact, quite the opposite; he is charming and charismatic and radiates joy.  So his attempts to hug people were generally met with warmth and happiness, even when the greeting is surprising or inappropriate.  He learned a few things about hugging like – that “side hugs” are the only appropriate hug for teachers and he can only hug people he knows.  But then how do you define “knowing a person”?  I thought to define it by saying you know a person when you have met them 3 times and you both know each other’s names.  But of course that definition doesn’t always fit every situation.

It’s also difficult to teach “not hugging” in a high school, where kids are hugging each other all over the place.  Even further, we are surrounded by kids who are doing many “inappropriate” behaviors.

In general, I am a big supporter of touch therapy as a very healing thing.  Yet I also understand that sometimes a simple hug can be wildly inappropriate and misread.  If a client is really groping or being overtly sexual, then the problem is clear.  But when the hug is innocent and no one is offended, it makes it difficult to create a black and white rule like “NO HUGGING“.  Being so strict in this situation doesn’t feel natural or normal.  So how do you teach the grey zone, the subtlety, without stripping the entire humanity? I don’t know the answer for this.  I just know to keep trying, keep re-enforcing, and don’t give up.  Keep on correcting, keep on practicing, keep on having “do overs”.

I taught this client many replacements to hugs.  “Side hugs” (as mentioned before) became the most popular.  I’ve also tried to teach my client how to do the “male hug” – when two guys do that shoulder to shoulder, one arm back tap thing.  It’s hard to explain… but we’ve all seen it.  It requires some finesse to make these types of male hugs non-awkward.  I’m not on the spectrum and I struggle with this kind of weird social etiquette.  There is also the peace sign, handshakes, fist bump…  we even came up with “the finger hug” and the air five (a high five without touching).  While these can be also be appropriate behaviors, sometimes they seem more obtuse and strange than a normal, caring hug.

Sometimes it was too much and he would try to get a hug. Trying to get a hug (instead of giving) looked like reaching out one arm and asking, “do you want a hug?” or stating, “you look like you need a hug.”  While appropriate and charming, still, it was not always the more soically acceptable approach… so we were back again, how do we teach that grey zone? How do you teach when is it not even appropriate to ask?

The main concern here is that one day this boy will be a 6-ft tall young adult and he’ll still crave a hug.  At that point, if he inappropriately hugs the wrong person at the wrong time, we know that it is a different story – it’s percieved differently by society, and even authortities may get involved.  In trying to teach my client about the danger of hugging strangers, about the possibility of police getting involved, all we did was create a fear of police and the idea that police might arrest you for hugging – something that took more time to reverse that to try to teach in the first place. This is the problem with trying to teach social skills in a black and white way.  Any rule we try to teach will have holes in it, will have little tricks and exceptions.

We kept fine-tuning and kept on rehearsing and I kept on allowing my client opportunities to fail or succeed to help him learn about this mysterious grey zone. He will continue to learn the grey zone, and that social interactions like hugging just cannot be black & white.  On a personal note, it was difficult for me to work on curbing this behavior – in a world of intense political correctness, it’s a shame we must limit love and warmth.  But this is the world we live in and since I can’t change it, I just need to be ready to react to it… and I need to teach my clients to do the same.