I built the thing I couldn't find.
Briana Steelman, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA
Peopleing is hard.
I was the one sitting in my car crying.
I'd gone to a dance class. I wanted to be there. I just couldn't work out how a person walks into a room where everybody already knows each other and starts talking. So some nights I left early, sat in the parking lot, and cried about it, because I wanted to stay and couldn't.
It didn't get better after one visit. It didn't get better after two.
Then somebody talked to me. They introduced me to a few people. That was it. That was the whole thing.
Three years later I still go every week. I've got acquaintances there, I've got friends, and I've got a best friend I never would have met. That hobby turned into a second hobby, which turned into a wider circle of people. Somewhere in there I stopped worrying about what a room full of strangers thinks of me, because I have My People.
I'm also raising a teenager who gets anxious in rooms she doesn't know. She'll talk if somebody starts it. Starting it herself is the hard part. What she wants is one person there who's into what she's into and is a little weird in the same direction.
Eighteen years, and most of that time I worked with autistic students. I've been a special education teacher, an autism specialist, an RBT, and a board certified behavior analyst, in classrooms from prekindergarten through high school. I watched the same thing start early and never get solved: teens learning about friendship in rooms with nobody in them to practice on. The instruction was fine. The setting was the problem.
"Mrs. Steelman saw the gaps in my social abilities too and helped not just correct but also refine my ability to pick up on social cues and communicate effectively, a skill that has taken me further than any course I ever took."
So I built the setting.
Social Connections is small groups where teens do something they actually care about, with a professional in the room, and the social part happens inside the activity instead of being assigned. Somebody does the introducing, so no teen has to walk up cold.