One possibility is that it’s how you phrase things? Everything seems fine here but people tend to write and speak differently, so just throwing out a possibility here.
Maybe? I feel like I try too hard to be polite sometimes. My last therapist told me I was allowed to ask my friends for better ways to phrase things, but they got mad and said I was putting them on the spot.
Last time I explicitly said, “sorry, that was my fault,” and explained what I did wrong, and my friend still took it as me calling him stupid.
I’m beginning to think it’s just too complex for anyone to explain to me how to be nice
Also some subjects are sore as you experienced with your unemployed friend, so having this habit of taking a step back might have helped with realizing that in advance. It’s not always doable of course, you can’t know everything.
What do you do when you accidentally bring up a sore subject? Last time, I apologized and said I should have realized (I should have), and my friend and I got into a two-day argument about whether it was a sincere apology or not. I finally asked what I did to deserve being accused of lying and he just said “well if I had said that I’d mean it manipulatively, so I assumed you did”. So apologizing in that scenario is taken as manipulative, right?
Eh, I’ve gotten that feedback from two different friends, plus my sister. And I know I’m autistic. So at some point I have to accept that I’m sending messages I really don’t mean to.