I keep hearing that this is frowned upon, but I cannot help it. After I share, I circle back and explain how and why I connected the two stories to try to recenter the other person. Is this annoying? How do you want ND people to respond in that case?
I'm NT. The reason it's considered rude is because it can feel like you're trying to compete or to make it about yourself. Usually when someone shares a story like that, they want the focus to be on them for a bit. It's fine to say, "I can relate," or, "I know how that feels," but it's usually best to save the whole story for later.
Hm, well it doesn't feel like, shallow to just get the "that must have been hard" standard issue comment after sharing something vulnerable? To me that just kinda feels dismissive, like the person saying "that must have been hard" is offput, or it would stop the conversation
it's quite shallow. NT communication is shallow generally.
Sometimes when people are feeling a lot, all they want to do is get it off the chest or just simply be heard. "Good listening" usually means "paying attention and not saying a lot in response". Allowing or helping someone to get their story out is usually the most important thing in situations like this. This is where stereotypical "therapist questions" like "How did that make you feel?" fit in.
ND here, and yeah, I'm just as surprised by that response. But fucking noted, damn. My whole life I've done that to try to connect with the person, and I never realized everyone around me thinks I'm rude. It kind of circles back to my definition of friend: an actual friend would have told me it's considered rude and why.
agreed, but thats what they want to hear. In my ND when I get a response like that I would think "oh that person wasnt listening but just putting on the auto-response".
As a fellow NT, this hits it on the head. This can be considered rude for exactly what you say: it can come off as one-upmanship or an inability to not have the conversation be about you. Obviously, the flow of conversation, relationship, tone and topic can change just what exactly this feels like, because there are situations where it can come off as empathetic or an attempt to showing common ground. Like most things in human interaction, there are not hard and fast rules. But if OP needs hard and fast rules because of having trouble parsing things like tone and flow, I would err on the side of not sharing personal story unless specifically asked.
An assumption of needing hard and fast rules because deficient parsing of tone and flow is peak NTness.
And honestly communication does come with pretty stern (unwritten) rules, the people doing them just don't necessarily notice them, because they are very automatic and given. The NT rules have a lot of aspects like face-saving that can be entirely foreign to ND people. And on the other hand the upfrontness of ND people can be very umcomfy to NT people.
The rules are only noticed when someone does not follow them and this is where people with different communication styles get into trouble.