Are there any aspies here afraid of becoming Hitler?

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I don't think it makes sense to talk about Hitler as a kind of personality, ignoring the context he was included – maybe this is result of the whole concept of leader cult from nazism. None of his evil ideals were completely alien to society norms in that time, they were just an exaggeration from this bases in a very bureaucratic form, but antisemitism and eugenics were somewhat common. It was a convenient model and ideology for that time, so don't worry about becoming a genocide leader unless you can align your hate discuss to benefit the economic power.

Also, I think evil is part of humans and how much and how it shows just depends on how much you are open to deviate and question the society's moral, and it's also a perfectly relative concept (I don't think much people do evil things consciously, probably it just seems logical and good for their world view). For me, it seems that you test boundaries on ethical values but you don't seem completely out of them – you still can understand the line on society's ethics.

I think I can identify with that on some level. I question everything, and I analyze everything. I still understand what is acceptable as right, but I still see it as relative – and I try to understand mostly how it works.

I have zero fear of becoming Hitler. In fact, I'm fearful that some else will become Hitler and force aspies into becoming test subjects or put us in chambers full of horrible toxic gas that makes our skin melt off.

Because that's what Hitler did to people with disabilities. But they never tell you that in history class. They only tell you about the Jewish victims, which of course was really horrible, but they never even mention anyone else Hitler believed was sub-human.

And even after WW2 disabled people were still experimented on for years and suffered horribly... in the United States!!

They might still be doing it and we just don't know. But it's only bad if the victims are of a different race or religion or even homosexual, but it's still soooooo acceptable if they're autistic or disabled because because it's been planted firmly in their skulls that we're nothing but a bunch of worthless r----ds and we can't feel pain and suffering, anyway.

I'm sorry for ranting, but few things push my berserk button harder than this topic.

^^^^
This.

If you're an aspie/autie it makes more sense to worry about becoming the VICTIM of a future Hitler then to worry about becoming a Hitler yourself. Hitler was all about eugenics and wiping out folks with disabilities.

But on the flip side Hitler became Hitler because his message was seductive to millions. So yes- we all have to be aware of the impulse to follow a leader like that who might persecute others. But aspies are no worse that way than NTs. Millions supported Hitler (only a minority were aspies).

So I seriously doubt that being an aspie makes you more likely (or less likely either) of "becoming Hitler", or even to becoming a brown shirted minion of a Hitler.

But being neurodiverse would make you more likely to become the victim of a Hitler.

I started at the circulation desk, but even though admin is more interaction, it's a bit less in a way. Stock phrases, stock things to do, it's very very routine. They put me here because of my very good disposition and people skills!! ! After years of catholic school and med school, I'm really good at the Stepford smile, but it's so bizarre that I'm doing this when they have a ton of people who can actually do this better than I can.

There have been 2 german efficiency jokes in the last 3 months...

Lots of people think that aspies can't learn people skills. All you need is significant pressure on you, I think. A couple of visits to a church to get special prayers to fix you, special "come to Jesus" sessions with some nuns, a mother who convinces you that you're being hunted by demons and only Jesus who is always watching will keep you alive...

I don't think we're helpless. We're smart, observant and have badass memory skills. Social skills isn't a very hard fake once you realise that there's an element of falseness to ALL social interaction. It's all expectation and presentation and some mimicry, unless you're dealing with people who are very close to you and we don't have a lot of those anyway.

But this is why I ditched out of therapy because it turned into presentation and meeting their expectations. Waiting room moments, where you blend with the "I need help, but I'm safe and I'm just like the rest of these sad people here. Help me the way you'd help one of them." Like reading a speech and leaving moments for "look sad here", "Cry here, gentle sob", "big cry here, then gradual calm down". I just wanted them to fix me to the point where I could graduate. My motivation was this - "Hey, I don't touch people ever, but give me a drug - or a cocktail - to help me take a week of med exams where all I do is touch people. Please."

I was never this kind of person who was stuck in their head thinking about everything two or three times. I had the confidence of an insane person. I casually browsed a pamphlet for med, wrote 2 sentences on my half-assed application, because I was like some kind of "king of nerds" in my head.

I wasn't the lonely outcast lost in the see of NTs when I was young. I was the superior person living in a world of lesser but tolerable people who I had to tolerate because those were the people who existed until I got to some Utopia of smart peers. I only had 2 friends in high school, but I wasn't lonely, because "How many of them do I need?"

--I literally had a conversation with a teacher who ordered me to talk to at least two people, when I literally asked "How many do I need? --

Other people were doing medicine, and I thought, "Well, anything you can do..." I wanted to go into either surgery/ortho (because I admired the efficiency or cleanliness of amputations ) or psychiatry because my family is bats**t and I know they probably need good psych people more than surgeons, but also because in my head sometimes psych is the dirty tail end of medicine. Where science goes to die. I can barely feel my own pulse on a good day - you can read a surgery text and pass the paper test on theoretical knowledge but you'll still have to go hands on at some point which is the most crucial part, and that's where I decidedly do not shine. In psychiatry I thought, well, 1 hour of listening to someone in a chair at least a foot away, some conversation and a prescription... I could do that.

So I went in, like "I have OCD, fix me." And by the time I was out, I was having seizures and missing teeth. And I still don't know how much blame I should assign to them, because on reflection, I wasn't genuine. I took off the Stepford and went in for help, but by the end, the whole thing was a big lie.

My father is a textbook anti-social person and they had his file, and we have uncommon names, and I didn't want them to think I was anyway related to him, because despite being my therapists they were also my lecturers and people I wanted to work with in the future as a peer. It's like, I evolved my Stepford smile into a stepford charm, hand shakes and everything, and I started to pretend that I didn't have OCD. My best area actually turned out to be pediatrics , because that's how much effort I put into the pretense. I would sit and console concerned parents, look sad, fake cry even. The pediatricians were the people defending me and asking for me to get second chances.

And the psych people were observing me and thinking, "Well, it's not OCD because people with OCD can't do prostate examinations with a smile. They don't deliver babies. They don't touch gangrene. They won't do TB patients with a smile..." But in my head, I was thinking, "Well, they were grading me, weren't they? I can do anything for a grade." I have had my hands inside people's wombs pulling out babies all with a smile.

For context -- my mother slipped and I didn't catch her even though I could and I didn't help her up, because I thought there'd be some moisture because she uses skin lotions.

Another therapist I saw online after I got out of med, (because I kept dreaming about the hospital and touching diabetic feet and what have you), said that I'd traumatized myself by over-exposure and going against my nature, but afterwards, we were at a point where I discovered it was in my nature to change my nature to suit the circumstances.
It came out that I was actually proud of enduring this agony. Like an internal personal badge of courage and pride, that I used to push myself further. Exaggerated displays of willpower and a dislike/intolerance/contempt for weak-willed.

I'm like a trench soldier on the inside while on the outside, people see the girl who's good with people.

I'm not as good at it as my father was. -- Just a side note on what my father was like in my childhood: With maybe ten thousand dollars in cash in his pocket after he took out his entire salary, he sat outside the bank and begged, to show me how to do it. So that I wouldn't have to ask him for money. After realizing how easily he got out of paying child support for us, he basically started earning a second income out of targeting single mothers with children and tricking them out of the child support they were getting for their own children. He'd boast about it. One day, I asked him if he didn't feel bad about the children (because I did, because he'd bought a drink for me after "getting paid" from one of these women) and to my face he said, "Hey, I don't even take care about you, I'll care about other people's children?"

I know I'm not a sociopath if I use him as a reference. I lie spontaneously in any kind of social situation, but it's more like prey camouflage that his predatory con-man thing. My defense to that it simply, "I've not hurt anyone."

I'm more of a drone worker. I don't have that kind of sick glee that my father gets when he does his thing.

But now, getting back out into the world, I'm really feeling like I'm looking down a path of deep discontent. Between my mother's deep christian ritual abuse (think Carrie's mother from Stephen King, not physical or sexual abuse) and my father's strange kind of happy, lovable but very malicious style, I went with my mother's path of goodness and doing no wrong. And I tried to "out-good" everyone.

I studied medicine because, "hey, I want to be good. If you're smart enough to do it, you have to do it if you're a good person."

And now I'm thinking, well, if you could power through that and convince a hospital full of people that you were one of them, and that was something you hated entirely, what if you applied myself to something that comes more natural?

I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm coming apart in two.

I was suicidal for so long when Med was going down the drain. I finished with no money and nothing to my name, sleeping on a mat, with seizures, teeth crumbling away in my mouth and no money for a dentist or dental insurance, and coming out of that, I have this little mantra where I keep thinking, "We're not doing this again. The next time, we'll go homicidal."

It's like all my father's "words of wisdom" came back to me and now they make sense. It's like I feel like an idiot for going along with my mother. when I was very very young, around maybe 6. Around maybe 6, he'd sit and cry for hours. And talk about destruction and how, the next time, he would get them instead. And I was terrified, but it's all making so much sense now as an adult.

Not having a capacity for cruelty doesn't make you a good person, it just makes you the victim when you into do encounter these other "Activated" people.

My father was the one who held me up over the toilet because he understood not wanting to touch the seat. He knew how to separate my food grain by grain so I could eat them separately, and that hard crushing squeezes were the only kind of tolerable hug. He'd wipe my face from invisible ants. And help me with hard-scrub cold water baths. And it wasn't like he was that kind of parent who would do research on how to deal with children like me, that was how he was. Five to six baths a day, with a hard brush that would leave scratches on him sometimes.

There's a pattern here. His file says antisocial personality disorder and schizophrenia, no mention of OCD or Aspergers or anything like that, but even now, I can remember his blistered hands from too much bleach and scrubbing and cleaning.

I don't mean to just spew out information, but I'm really starting to get concerned.

Turning the blind eye and pretending to have control over myself doesn't work. There's no total repression I can achieve. The last time I went all out on an "I am my own captain" campaign, it ended up with me talking to myself out loud like a full blown crazy person, walking in circles left by the mower lines in the middle of the hospital lawn.

Okay, I have this willpower to check myself and keep myself streamlined for long periods of time. But it is not absolute and I have limits to the pretend.

Hardworking and smart, isn't equal to being good. I can no longer trust the logic, that everything I do will be good because I'm good, and I'm good because I do things that sound good on paper. I flash back to giant wall-covering images of Jesus to keep me in check.

I decided on doing a comp sci degree because programming seems safe and it should be fun and I can get a job maybe from home or working in a cubicle... but that's "good me."

The other half of me is looking at it with complete disgust because it's a "fun degree" with minimal opportunities to get to a top notch position to have real influence.

I'm half beat down dog who just wants food and a warm place to sleep and to feel that figurative head-pat, "You done good." But I feel like I'm half dangerous dog as well. The one who will maul given the opportunity, and between the two, I feel myself wanting to be the dangerous dog.

Like my father said. "Somebody has to cry at the end of the day."

I nearly walked myself into a police station once, because I thought I was having a "This is it" week. But I also know what happens to people who do that and how they end right back up in a psych ward for a year or two, and I know that wouldn't work, because halfway through any confession, I know I'd switch it up and go back into sad girl mode instead and be met with understanding and released.

I had baby rabbits as a child and I never hurt them. I'm much better with animals than people. To the point where I got into a physical fight with my aged grandmother when she hurt a dog I had. (Low point of my family life)

I don't have a throng of friends that I've charmed to my will. Manipulation and lies come naturally, but it's not malicious and I count it as aspie compensation instead of superficial charm, because superficial charm, in my head, is a sort of a high level trick that I can't pull off.

I'm sitting at a desk right now, wondering exactly what I am. Asperger's is the best, most encompassing fit... But even looking at comp sci, I feel I'm looking at just another commitment to a path that's not *me*. I'm good at learning things, and I know that I can do literally anything, even though it might leave me with nightmares for years. Once you put your hand inside somebody and pull out a baby, OCD sort of evolved for me. I've eaten after my cat following the logic, "Well, you're never going to get more contaminated now that you were in obs and gynae."

Do you know pokemon?

I feel like a pokemon who's reached enough experience points to evolve. Except, I have a red flag up saying that I'm going to evolve into a dangerous pokemon I won't be able to master, and a blinking sign asking me to pick Yes or No right now.

I really want to talk to someone, but at this point, I'm more like Hannibal than a proper patient. I've read what they've read, I know what they think. I know what they expect me to say. It'd be horrible.

I've never met a real person who was similar to me. There was 1 single psych lecturer who told me point blank, "You got here because you're smart, but you know you don't belong here. You need to stick to your own kind." But I was the one minority in the class, and back then, I hadn't started losing it too badly as yet so I took that "Your own kind" thing a completely different way and went on the defense.

It was only last year I thought, "I destroyed myself by pretending to be one of them. I need to find my own kind." And then I was like "Oh..."

I know aspies have a a thing with masking and pretending and compensating, but all the ones I've met were actually the good, misunderstood type. Good children who needed help. I've been checking out the society groups and looking for someone who fits me. I'm not unique. That was my childish immature defensive thinking, "No, I'm this special person you'll never figure out. Do what I want you to do."

There's a pattern. People have been able to predict things that I can do and can't. The lecturer who i'd assumed was racist, knew, for example. Just off the bat one day in a counselling class, there was a suicidal, severely traumatised girl, and he told me to have a go at it. And I'd just read books on what her problem was, but put on the spot my brain blanked, I just went into robot mode and told her, "What I do is watch football. A season last 9 months. Get obsessed with looking at someone like Cristiano Ronaldo. A dynamic distracting person."

His point was that, "Hey, do you realise what your life is? Let me help." I took it then as him being unprofessional and putting me in a spot that was in no way helpful to his actual patient. I couldn't even begin to process that the problem was with me and not everyone else.

Odd person with some OCD and rigorous emphasis on order and hard abusive childhood > repressed resentful worker drone life doing what you're supposed to do > honed manipulation/compensation/blending-in skills > traumatizing life event > despair event horizon > new life purpose dedicated toward system manipulation/destruction/reconstruction that seems well-intentioned in an irrational way > moral event horizon.

My father lives on a diet of alcohol and his "harmless" second job/hobby of conning women, because that was a safe limit to set. And the alcohol, is because he doesn't want to be sober and come up with a plan.

I spent my life thinking he was the crazy evil parent, but I feel like I'm going down his path. At my age, he was doing insurance sales, because as he put it, "Plenty interaction, but it's the same thing so you can practice."

I was thinking that it was more of a narrative thing, that's how I ended up on Campbell and all that Hero's journey stuff, but there's a recurring scenario that has a psychological base. I have enough neurological symptoms to know that it's not all in my head. I've been actively working on this for the past two to three years.

I don't want to be doing that repression and restraint thing my father does where I have to shut my brain down with mindless drinking and distraction. I remember him sober when he'd gently remind us to to get him upset because it would be very cheap to kill us, and I prefer the happy drunk con-man to that, but I remember him before cubing chicken and making watery tasteless broths for me when he was a weepy mess who'd threaten to kill himself every 2-3 days.

My weepy mess days are gone. And I don't want to be a drunk.

I know I'm in word-vomit confessional mode right now, but it's like, I just got typing back. I was so far gone I couldn't read. And now I'm doing admin work, but it's like my hazard lights are on, and all I'm seeing are neon "detour signs" at the side of the road, because it's time to take the other path because we know where this one we're on right now goes and we've already been to this particular rock bottom.

I've had days when I was back in med, where I'd just phase out while driving to the hospitals and then next I knew I was miles away on the road to a beach or in a restaurant or cinema or a corner in a library archives somewhere. I'd go down any road to avoid that "losing my mind" life. That's the scariest thing ever. I'm tired of the shame, the anxiety, this sick rolling over and showing my belly.

When I say Hitler, I mean it more in the archetypal sense, not the specific crimes. My father's father was so much like me. He taught children and people liked him, but other people call him an evil sadist. He made my father stand barefoot in a sort of gravel/broken glass area he kept in the yard for people who misbehaved. One of those evil school-teachers? And my father married my mother who'd make us clean for Jesus. She didn't beat us, because that was inhumane, but you never got five minutes to forget that demons would basically kill us while we slept if the mirrors weren't clean, etc...

Where can I find people who have zero natural social skills, sensory issues, eating disorders and OCD all combined?

I've seen some anti-social personality boards but I don't think even the sober version of my father fits there. We're a long line of vaguely anti-people, pro-animal, OC, hyper-disciplined, super rigid people. On paper, Asperger's fits...

You know how we get way too deep into single interest things? This is what I've been working on for maybe 2 years... and I'm getting so frustrated now. I mean, this isn't new. Why hasn't this been solved?

I've sort of put the whole thing in a box in my head and put a post-it on it saying "Let's just wait and see..." but I feel like that's irresponsible.

At least you have the flexibility to get away from the Hitler idea. I suppose, if one cogitated enough, and not get, or absorb, input from other sources, that one could develop the "fear" that you mentioned.

You've had an interesting and complicated life. One might say Freudian in a sense. What I see here is a sort of confessional, like that found in classical Freudian psychoanalysis, and other such oriented therapy these days.

In a sense, I would have had a difficult time in medicine because of my inability, say, to distinguish the left thigh bone from the right thigh bone. If I had any religious faith (which I don't), it would have been destroyed upon seeing cadavers. I would have been squeamish about gangrene and such---but I, like you, would have been able to get "over it" through playing mind tricks with myself.

I wouldn't have succeeded in medicine--primarily because I don't have the mechanical ability of a surgeon, or the ability to improvise like an emergency room (A & E in Europe) physician, or be able to charm kids getting vaccinations like a pediatrician.

I would have okay academically, but wouldn't have made it through the practicum.

I have a trip for a mother, and a moderate sort for a father; not too much Freudian conflict there. My mother was a b***h sometimes, and I withdrew from her. My father was a benevolent sort who had his superficialities; I still esteem him, though. In a word, my upbringing wasn't as complicated as yours.

I'm glad you have been able, through sheer willpower, to climb out of the Abyss. I'm glad you haven't develop an ideology of failure, even though you were exposed to it, and you felt it "deep inside." You were able to transcend all the stuff you experienced during your deepest and darkest hours.

At least you didn't became Kafka's cockroach, in a word.