Aspergers and "shock therapy" - a myth and a lie

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No, I'm not talking about the electric shock kind...

I'm talking about a few unenlightened people who seem to think (or use the pretext for abuse) that by deliberately overstimulating an Aspie with cues and nuances will force them to "read between the lines" with people. In the past, when I've told people that I'm kind of "dyslexic" when it comes to reading cues and nuances with people, and need info told me directly, they've usually been accommodating, or they continue as normal (after a comment like "oh, I never really noticed you had THAT...you seem normal").

It's the people who take the other extreme, and increase the amount of nonverbal cues, that I find distasteful, and spiteful. One time, I had a former boss to whom I disclosed my ASD after she repeatedly noticed certain tendencies of me to not see things from others point of view and infer their true meaning. (We were both since laid off in a downsizing, I've moved on to better things )

So, the first time I told her about my ASD, she seemed taken aback but appeared to accept it. A few days after, she told me that she was going to increase the amount of nonverbal cuing and subtleties in her communication to me, because then I would, presumably, snap out of it and be "cured". One time after telling me some cryptic instruction, she said "so, I'm going to leave you to figure out what I mean by X, and I expect you to take that into consideration in this revised file you're sending me." Predictably, what I did in that file was not to her satisfaction, and this pattern continued; I inferred that this was just psychological abuse.

This reminds me of the brother of a good friend of mine, who suffers from claustrophobia. When he was a little kid, his dad would shove him under the cupboard or in a closet claiming that it was to "cure" his condition through shock therapy of increasing the "dosage" of what he was repelled by. The reality was it was just a pretext for abuse, to satisfy his warped sense of pleasure - pretty much the same as what this so-called manager did with me back when. Thankfully I have not received this treatment from others since...I guess some folks are just hypersensitive to our differences, and religiously insist on driving out those "evil Aspie spirits" from us with their unenlightened ways.

Lol your boss thought she could treat autism? What a ret*d.

Don't let anyone do that to you again. Be assertive!

OP: Inform you boss that unless she she is licensed by the state to practice psychotherapy she needs to stop. You can file a complaint over this.