The NT Box

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I am 41, recently diagnosed, male and this is my first new topic post anywhere.

Until a few months ago, I always knew I was profoundly different than others but I had no idea how or why. I have learned that advice from people I was taught to respect and trust was often drastically wrong for me.

It's as if the directions I get from NTs are relative to them. Since I am not coming from the same place they are, all the left and right turns in the directions they give me are wrong and backwards. NTs simply cannot advise me on matters where they intuit others' emotions. Their intuitive ability in some ways define them.

Since I came to the realization that I am autistic, I have found a whole world of directions and advice that is relative to me. The thoughts here are not altered by NT reliance on intuition and are therefore applicable to one who does not share in it.

Wrong planet and the knowledge that I am autistic has allowed me to think outside the NT box and replace routines that included intuitive dependencies with ones that do not.

This is having a profound impact on my relationships with others.

Thank you to Wrong Planet and to all the posters who share here. I look forward to pushing the envelope and watching it bend with you.

Regards.

And most of the advice and insights you get here will not compute for them.

Welcome to the horde.

The trouble with getting such advice from NT's is that they don't know how they operate themselves, in fact most lack any sense that there is another way to operate (or at least their awareness of that and its consequences is superficial at best). You can't explain to them that your nervous system will give you something completely different if you do exactly the same thing and there's no way of explaining it if your instincts and hierarchy of salience for needs is not in the same sequence as theirs. Even more so there's no way of explaining to them that there's no way of fixing it, that trying to do so is a cat wanting to be a dog or a Nissan Skyline wishing it were a Lotus Esprit.

Your absolutely right though - you need to understand how you tick as separate from them and then take their advice, examine it, and raid it for what scraps you believe you can apply. The rest is best left to them.