Loss of confidence following ASD diagnosis

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First of all, I haven't yet been officially diagnosed with an ASD, but it has become obvious to me and my partner that I have one and I'm planning to get a diagnosis as soon as possible.

I have noticed that my self-image and self-confidence have taken a nosedive since accepting that I'm on the spectrum. Even things I've done successfully for 10 or more years suddenly loom up as challenges (which I hope is a temporary trick of the mind).

I have gone from being "a stranger in an uncomfortable world" to being "a person with either a learning disability or a pathological inability to be with others or both".

How was it for others when you found out?

I never really remember having much confidence......I knew there was something 'wrong' with me since I was like 7 but no one else really acknowledged it and I tried to hide it quite a bit.

I went through the same thing. I started thinking I have it in late 2009.

When you're a novice at something, sometimes you don't even know enough to know how far in over your head you are, and you succeed by dumb luck. When you learn more and see how far in over your head you are, that psychs you out and your dumb-luck successes can't happen because you hesitate and start thinking instead of doing.

And of course you might not have been as successful as you think to begin with.

I'm still trying to find a balance between "accepting reality" and "pushing myself to do the best I'm capable of". And trying to get a little of my swagger back.

It was really hard for me to incorporate it into my self-image. I knew that my difficulty was mainly me focusing on illusions and my own misunderstandings, but it was hard to emotionally dismiss them.

It actually overturned my sense of self and for the first time in like ever I felt like I didn't know who I was. That period was transitory, however, and I am much more comfortable knowing that I am autistic than I was not knowing, let alone all of the things I had adopted as masking strategies but treated as part of who I was. Once I let go of those, things got a lot easier to accept.

I'm not saying everyone goes through the same process, although I have seem others state similar here.

I didn't like having AS when I found out. It meant I wasn't "normal" and I wanted to prove it wrong by trying harder. I didn't know then it was on the autism spectrum because my parents never told me. I had always known I was different ever since I was a small child. But it never occurred to me I had something, I just thought I had to try harder and I just had bad luck.

Then when I found out AS was a form of autism, I didn't believe for a while I was on the spectrum and for years I wouldn't even call AS autism or say aspies were autistic because my parents said those two were both two different things. They didn't say AS was autism, they just said it was a form of it and I wasn't autistic.

I am starting to accept autism but I still don't feel like I am because I still picture the worst cases of it.

I was actually really scared of being told I didn't have AS in my diagnosis, not that I did. For me getting a diagnosis meant that I wasn't broken, not that I was.

I felt greater confidence after I found out, because I finally had a framework for my large murky blob of confusion caused by living as an autistic person in a non-autistic world. I had never internalized anything negative about autism to begin with, because I am autistic, and I have difficulty internalizing things from others, whether positive emotional expressions or negative stigma about autism or being autistic, so your currrent issue is not one that I have experienced myself. Actually, I have a lot of difficulty empathizing with the "finding out that I or my child was autistic" problems of many people on this forum. To me, knowledge was power, because I could use the knowledge of the differences between myself and others to figure out ways to communicate with others, and I could use the knowledge of my own cognitive traits to figure out ways to make the most of them, and I could use the knowledge of my own sensory issues to figure out ways to work around them, etc, etc, etc.

Yeah, I would add that ultimately, finding out was a positive thing for me in so many ways, and so much made sense that previously I hadn't really understood.

I think if, once I went for my official diagnosis, I had been told I didn't have it, I would have ended up worse off, just from sheer confusion and possible lack of options.

I was much more happy with myself before discovering AS (before that, I had build a largely ego-syntonic self-image: my social problems were simply a result of I spending much time involved with my thoughts and my imagination, instead of loosing my time with the practical, day-to-day issues; now I know that this is a result of some innate disability).

A huge relief. But then I always had ridiculously high self confidence. If the world is different from me then the world is wrong. But something else that helped is to remember all the famous geniuses with AS-like symptoms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical ... d_autistic

Obviously most of these died before autism was even known about, and many will be just NTs with quirks, But some of them (Paul Dirac for example, one of the fathers of quantum physics) pretty clearly had something similar.

I know it can be annoying when people cite celebrity aspies, but it does help: it makes it clear that you are not worse, you are different.

Any change takes time, but knowledge is power. Now you understand your strengths and weaknesses better, so you can make better decisions than ever. It just takes time to adjust.

I had not heard of AS before I was diagnosed with it. When I found out, I was kind of sad because I thought it meant that I had a form of mental retardation. But back then, I was ignorant of the fact that autism is a spectrum and people of all intelligence levels can have it. However, to this day I still become painfully self-conscious about it if I read articles or watch specials about people who have forms of autism.

For the first two years after I was diagnosed I didn't believe it. All I knew of Autism was very LFA, and, since I can talk and do things on my own, I thought they were wrong. Now I have accepted it, and in some ways have even embraced it. Remember, Autism and Aspergers are only words. You were still Autistic before you found out, so why are things so different now?

My confidence actually improved after the diagnosis because I finally had a valid reason for all the crap in my herp-de-derp life. Now that I can laugh at myself more often (instead of getting embarrassed and shutting down), other people have noticed and seem to be friendlier toward me (or at least not as hostile).

It's like thinking that you've been driving a crappy old Buick for 50-odd years, only to be shown that you've actually been driving a fairly decent Volvo without ever knowing how to take it out of second gear!

Well, I just got the diagnosis last week, which was exactly what I've been expecting for months. Somehow it's still a bit hard to accept. I have been feeling rather down for a few days. I don't know why. I think my self-esteem was a bit low, which is unusual for me as it's always been high. I think it's partially because nothing changed. I'm still this weird me, and people aren't gonna understand me any better, and there's pretty much no help for adults anyway. I want to talk to somebody, but I'm not really sure if I really want people to know. So far only DH and people here on the forum know. I'm just afraid other people would just think it's another lame excuse for my lack of accomplishment.

I know it'll get better, though. There's no one but me to pull myself up, and change things for the better. I think many people go through a phase like this. I hope I can figure out ways to overcome difficulties and achieve more. I am smarter than most people I know and can do all sorts of useful things. (I don't mean doing smart things, I'm good at doing practical things, like fixing broken objects.) It's all because I don't socialize well plus I don't drive a car, that I never had a good job.

Meh, I was diagnosed at 3, so I never had to experience life without a diagnosis.