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I thought everyone else was doing the same and that it was some failure of intelligence that my models failed... often spectacularly.
Throughout college I suffered a very painful series of increasingly hideous social disasters. For example, I was asked to leave college twice, basically for telling people what I thought in grotesquely inappropriate situations and then stubbornly allowing the resulting arguments to escalate.
I eventually recognized that much of people's behavior and responses to any given social situation was innate to them. The weren't pretending to enjoy social situations, they actually enjoyed social situations. Most people simply knew how to respond to other people in the social situations ordinarily encountered every day without thinking about it much. It was automatic. There were no intense calculations of what was "normal" or expected, of what should be said and what should be left unsaid. It wasn't some wretched and unnatural chore for people to be social. When asked the academic equivalent of "Do you think this dress makes me look fat?" they weren't inclined to answer as I was, "You are fat. It's all that junk food you eat and your pop-culture diet plan is bogus."
The stress of maintaining a facade of normalcy made me crazy. I'd go for long distance runs day or night, anywhere, sometimes until my feet were bleeding. I'd let my intellectual obsessions overwhelm me.
It took too much energy to live like this and I kept crashing and burning until I threw away the models and social calculations. One of the things that has become most apparent to me is that the "Golden Rule" is crap. You don't treat other people the way you'd want to be treated because we are all different. Instead you treat people with love and kindness and after that you treat them as they expect to be treated, within those parameters of love and kindness. The only time you violate another person's expectations is if they expect to be treated like crap by you. Truly mean people, say the tiny minority of telephone debt collectors who actually enjoy being cruel to people, racists, misogynists, bullies, clique leaders... will shrivel up and blow away when you refuse to partake of their poisons.
I'm still a huge screw up. I just got into yet another fight with my wife last night, a fight that is always the same fight because I miss social cues and I "don't listen." But at the start of these fights it's often my perception that I'm facing an entirely novel situation. I never see the same old fight coming and I always want to bang my head against the wall in frustration when it happens.
As others here in this group I have weekly therapy because I have a couple of other mental health issues. Without modern meds, without my friends, family, and professional counseling, I'd simply drift away into some sort of amicable homelessness. I've been in that place before; living in my car, living in tiny shacks, sofa surfing, haunting university libraries, wandering around in the desert... and I don't want to go back to that life if I can help it.
So I guess I'd say there is no treatment, only the acceptance of who you are and the setting of realistic goals for yourself. If a person is born colorblind no force of will is going to make them perceive colors in the same way most people see colors. In a similar way my perceptions of social situations will always be outside the norm. There are however some advantages to be found here: In the same way that some colorblind people can be more aware of patterns than those who are not colorblind, perhaps I can see patterns in human social behavior that are masked by those innate social skills other people posses.
My life got a lot better when I stopped trying so hard to figure out the complex rules of the social calculus. Self-acceptance and self assurance is an attractive quality in people.
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