Books to 'teach' you social skills?

[Hannah]

Hi
I am new to this forum. I am looking for help for my partner who has Aspergers.

He has quite good social skills and maintains eye contact at least 75% of the time. He doesn't have many problems talking to family members or myself, although he frequently struggles to understand sarcastic or dry comments/jokes.

His main problems are at 'work'. He is just finishing studying at university and starting to apply for jobs. He has no friends. He either does stuff on his own (which he is quite happy to do) or with me. He has worked in an office with other people for 4yrs but never wanted to see them 'out of hours'.
He has struggled with meetings with his tutors - he has misunderstood what they have said and consequently not done his work correctly. He nearly got asked to leave his course because it got so bad (this was rectified by getting an autism mentor).
Every fri at 11am is 'cake morning'. Staff and students meet for cake and coffee and have a chit chat about academic stuff related to them. My partner has tried to go to these, but he finds them so stressful he just can't face it.

He suffers from anxiety, which i think is mainly related to his aspergers. Apart from the obvious communication problems, he is also hyper-sensitive to be touched. He can't tolerate people brushing against him, bumping him or touching him on the arm (He is fine if he initiates the touch). It actually hurts if people touch him. This makes social situations more difficult because he is scared that he will be bumped into.

He has said himself that he wishes he could 'be normal' and questions 'why does he find it so difficult to talk to other people'. He didnt really know anything about aspergers until a few years ago, despite being diagnosed when he was 11. (He is 38 now). I would like to help him 'learn' the social skills that he is missing, or at least help him understand why he finds things difficult and improve his confidence.
I am wondering if there is a book that anyone can reccomend that has a lot of information about developing communication skills? thanks

 

[Ylva]

Anything by Alan Pease. "Signals" was a good one.

"Never be lied to again" by one Dr. Lieberman.

Possibly "The Sourcebook of Magic" (NLP) by Michael Hall.

That's all I got. Sorry.

 

[Dragon's Tooth]

I just wanted to point out that not wanting to socialise outside of work is understandable. I'm like that. I don't like to mix work and social lives. I also find it really stressful as its a different dynamic to the relationship and once I have a working relationship with someone its hard for me to change that to a social one as well. And stressful. It also didn't help in my last job that my attempts to be social were knocked back. I was pulled aside by a mentor so to speak and he told me they were inappropriate. He did so to help me but it actually made life worse for me because I then had to try and figure out what was appropriate all over again.

I'm reading an aspie book cognitive behaviour therapy for adult asperger syndrome by Valerie l gaus. That might help.

 

[fjord]

What Men with Asperger Syndrome Want to Know About Women, Dating and Relationships by Maxine Aston is pretty good. It goes into the different ways NTs and Aspies think in different situations and how they might conflict because of that - and also how to work through the differences. This will help an aspie to understand how they might be coming across to other people, as well as what the NTs might be thinking or expecting, which wouldn't occur to the aspie.

You might look into books about conversation and other social interactions, even if they're not geared toward the autism subject. I like The Art of Civilized Conversation by Margaret Shepherd.

I've found books on "boundaries" to be extremely helpful in understanding healthy interactions (after all, NTs don't necessarily have the corner on the market when it comes to healthy interaction - so blindly mimicking NT behavior can be unhelpful sometimes, too). Henry Cloud and John Townsend have written a series of Boundaries books that are really good (these are Christian books). A quick look on Amazon showed books by other authors on the same topic.