“Be sure to make eye contact” is a common piece of advice given to youngsters and is further ingrained into day-to-day communication. Job seekers are told to make eye contact with interviewers when they speak to showcase trust. Relationship gurus tell singles to make eye contact with their date to let them know you’re paying attention. Etiquette experts say that not making eye contact is rude. However, if a person isn’t making eye contact it might not be because they’re aloof, rude, or disinterested. It could be a response to trauma.
There are many reasons why a person doesn’t make eye contact, including but not limited to shyness, social anxiety, autism, and, yes, maybe a person is being rude. However, a good number of people instinctively avoid eye contact without being aware of it due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A person avoiding your gaze isn’t trying to be rude and may not be shy, but it’s a natural-to-them PTSD response.
While eye contact is considered natural communication that we counted on as babies when we were non-verbal, for some people a traumatic experience or broken trust can cause eye contact avoidance. There have been a number of studies that explain that making eye contact can fire up different parts of a person’s brain if they have experienced trauma or abuse, causing them to instinctively look away when you make contact with them as they perceive that as a threat rather than an invitation. Again, this isn’t a conscious choice but one the brain processes on its own due to how it was conditioned.
While it’s accepted as a day-to-day courtesy when in conversation, eye contact is still considered an intimate form of communication. How many times have you heard someone say, “When I looked into my baby’s eyes…” or “We locked eyes, and that’s when I knew it was love” or something like that? While there are folks with trauma that avoid eye contact due to feeling threatened, it might not be because they feel threatened or afraid of you. Others may feel like eye contact might expose too much of themselves too quickly. There may be something to that, as a 2020 UK study found that the pupils of people with PTSD dilated differently than those who didn’t.
Eye contact might not be as important as we’d make it out to be, and might actually be taxing to most of us whether we have PTSD or not. A 2016 study in Japan found that participants struggled to find the right verb during a language task while looking into the eyes of faces on a screen. Other evidence showed that eye contact requires a significant amount of cognitive energy that made thinking or concentrating more difficult compared to those who break eye contact in order to speak more thoughtfully and clearly. Even people in the business world are seeing eye contact as an overrated quality, as they and others see breaking eye contact before speaking as an indicator of putting thought into what was being heard and processing it while crafting a considerate reply.
So, if you notice someone shy away from your gaze, it’s probably best not to make any preconceived notions as to why and instead rely more on verbal feedback to see if your words, feelings, or instructions were fully understood. While eye contact is the preferred default, you might be making someone feel heard and be more open if you allow them to communicate in the best way that they can with the least amount of awkwardness.
