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reeses
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30 Nov 2005, 8:41 pm

I don't know if this is the right section to post this, but here goes. I don't have asperger's, but I'm pretty sure a friend of mine does. I'm 17, in my senior year at school. A teacher recently confided in me that my friend may have asperger's. He's also 17. His diagnosis has never been confirmed. My friend, Tom, hardly ever does anything social. The last few weeks I've been attempting to get him to hang out a bit more. He has come out some, and he seems to enjoy it, but I'm not really sure, he doesn't talk to me much. he's closer to my other friend.

Anyway, my question is...is there anything I could do to make him feel more comfortable socially? If anyone has any imput I'd be really happy to hear it. Thanks!

reeses



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30 Nov 2005, 9:23 pm

I don't know your friend, so I can't tell you what to do. So much depends on personality.

If he really wants to be more social, then of course you should help him. The hardest part is probably figuring out what other people are thinking (e.g. reading body language and other cues). I'm not really sure what else you should do - I was like this once and if I could do it all over again, I'm still not really sure what I'd have wanted my friends to do for me.

If you could subtly introduce him to what AS is, he'll probably come to the conclusion (and an unofficial diagnosis) on his own (as well as seek out resources to help him).



reeses
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30 Nov 2005, 10:10 pm

thanks. i don't know how comfortable I am with bringing up AS, even if it is subtly, just because I dont want to offend him in any way. I wish I knew him better, but it's really hard to get to know someone who doesn't do anything social. i guess i'm just frustrated because he's the funniest kid and he's extremley smart and I feel like he's wasting away at home. Thanks again for replying, i guess it's something i'll try to figure out on my own.



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30 Nov 2005, 10:21 pm

If he is happy "wasting away at home" like I am, then don't bother. Instead, be happy for him. Many people with AS don't feel as strong a need to socialize. You won't be able to "help" him unless he want to be different.

This is why I feel that knowing about AS is going to be very important for him. It will allow him to make informed (well, slightly more informed) decisions about his life. The topic is understandably difficult to bring up. The key is to avoid accusing him of having it, but to just get him to read about it (especially the symptoms).

I'm willing to bet that he'll be easier to socialize once he accepts that he has AS, and a good friend who wants to help him adjust to get along with NTs.



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30 Nov 2005, 10:28 pm

Talking to him about AS would be appropriate. He might either not know about it or might be afraid to talk about it for fear of rejection.

I would be very cautious about pressuring him into doing things. You may be assuming that because he's not behaving like you do when you're happy, then he must be sad and in need of help. That's not necessarily the case. Some of the situations you find appealing, especially those involving small talk, may be very stressful for him. It's certainly not great to sit at home and do nothing, but to be forced into uncomfortable situations could cause him to withdraw further and become depressed. I'd suggest trying to find things that interest him and getting involved in those rather than pushing him towards things you're interested in.

I despise "hanging out". It just seems pointless and I have trouble spending all that time talking about nothing. I prefer activities that involve actually doing something like building things, outdoor activities, etc.



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01 Dec 2005, 5:46 am

reeses wrote:
thanks. i don't know how comfortable I am with bringing up AS, even if it is subtly, just because I dont want to offend him in any way. I wish I knew him better, but it's really hard to get to know someone who doesn't do anything social. i guess i'm just frustrated because he's the funniest kid and he's extremley smart and I feel like he's wasting away at home. Thanks again for replying, i guess it's something i'll try to figure out on my own.
If he's Aspie, then your best bet for establishing good communication is to talk to him in plain English. Like most Aspies, I'm hopeless at interpreting someone's intent from their posture or tone of voice and tend to take things somewhat literally, so I just want to hear it straight. I hate it when people try to save me from embarassment by hinting at things - they get frustrated and I get confused. For example, a coworker used to offer me gum all the time rather than saying "dude, your lunch was full of garlic and your breath smells". I would turn down the gum because I wasn't interested and he'd suffer in silence and wonder why I was so clueless. If he'd said what was bothering him then we'd both have been better off. BTW, make sure you're trying to get through to him because you like him, and not just because he's "wasting away at home". Nobody wants pity.


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GhostsInTheWallpaper
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01 Dec 2005, 11:10 am

Hmm. I say, if he's an introvert or even shy, there's not much point trying to pull him out; just try to be someone he can enjoy hanging around, so that if he wants to hang out with you, he'll take your offers. This is regardless of whether he has AS or not. Whether he'd be offended by attempts to get him to be more sociable, I don't know, but he may simply resist them.

You can try bringing up AS, perhaps in the guise of "well, it's an interesting subject."

What's funny is that my friend with AS, in the days shortly after I met him when I was hanging out with him a lot, is more outgoing than I am. He actually thought that I might be a fellow Aspie since I reminded him of himself when he was younger and more introverted, and he also thought that I would want to be more outgoing or benefit from it and so was giving me advice on how to meet people. Basically, he was imagining that I was the younger version of him, and that he was the older version sent from the future to give me advice on how to find happiness. He is happier being more outgoing and having more "real" friends, so he thought I would be too. But, I tend not to take advice from other people unless I was thinking along those lines; otherwise I file it away as just a possibility, one that I might think of trying later on. So while I might have seen him as a mentor a little bit in a mostly subconscious way before he'd brought it up, and I envied him and looked up to him for being or appearing to be "smarter than I am," I wasn't prepared to believe his reassurances of my intelligence or take his advice.

But I wasn't offended by any of it either. I knew I probably wasn't on the autistic spectrum because I didn't have any of the distinctive qualities like sensory quirks and spinning obsessions, and I actually would have thought it kind of cool if I were. I had been struggling with the sense of not being smart enough since I was a child, so none of that was his fault; I stubbornly claim it as "my own issue" to give myself some ego-gratifying half-wit illusion of power over it. And I wasn't bothered by his suggestions that I get more of an offline social life; I'm not ashamed of my introversion, and I simply don't take advice given by others, I don't get mad at them for thinking that I needed the advice.

The moral of the story is: talk to him, hang out with him or offer to let him hang out with you, tell him about AS if you want to, but don't try to change him if he doesn't want to change, because at best it simply won't work. He may not be wasting away at home. Not everyone is happier being more outgoing and sociable, regardless of whether they have AS, and even if they would be, then you still can't make them change if they don't want to.


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MindOfOrderedChaos
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01 Dec 2005, 8:19 pm

GhostsInTheWallpaper wrote:
What's funny is that my friend with AS, in the days shortly after I met him when I was hanging out with him a lot, is more outgoing than I am. He actually thought that I might be a fellow Aspie since I reminded him of himself when he was younger and more introverted, and he also thought that I would want to be more outgoing or benefit from it and so was giving me advice on how to meet people. Basically, he was imagining that I was the younger version of him, and that he was the older version sent from the future to give me advice on how to find happiness. He is happier being more outgoing and having more "real" friends, so he thought I would be too.


Your friend sounds like me. I also take the I am a future version of you approach to introverts I think are aspies.


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GhostsInTheWallpaper
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01 Dec 2005, 8:37 pm

MindOfOrderedChaos wrote:
Your friend sounds like me. I also take the I am a future version of you approach to introverts I think are aspies.

Ah, so there are other folks here from the backwards parallel universe where Aspies and NTs do the opposite of what they're supposed to do. :wink:

My "real" take on it is that all people are, metaphorically speaking, their own worlds, so that normal and weird kind of lose their meanings. No need for backwards parallel universes, as there is no "backwards" in space.


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01 Dec 2005, 10:18 pm

GhostsInTheWallpaper wrote:
MindOfOrderedChaos wrote:
Your friend sounds like me. I also take the I am a future version of you approach to introverts I think are aspies.

Ah, so there are other folks here from the backwards parallel universe where Aspies and NTs do the opposite of what they're supposed to do. :wink:

My "real" take on it is that all people are, metaphorically speaking, their own worlds, so that normal and weird kind of lose their meanings. No need for backwards parallel universes, as there is no "backwards" in space.


Wow -- I do the same thing as well, and I'm a self-diagnosed Aspie. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it's a case of mindblindness (everyone shy must be like me etc.)


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reeses
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02 Dec 2005, 9:37 pm

hey thanks for all the replies. I don't want to force him out, and I would stop asking him to do things if I thought he really didn't want to participate. It seems like he does like to go out, it's just that I don't want to be overwhelming and scare him off. I don't pity him at all, I just want to be his friend if he's ok with it. I'm pretty much new to the whole Asperger's thing, but I'm wondering if, and this is obviously going to vary with each person, you became social on your own or if you were pushed into social interaction. Did parents/teachers etc. try to get you to become more social when you were young? If any of my questions are annoying or invasive I'm sorry. I'm just trying to understand things a little better.



HenryKrinkle
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03 Dec 2005, 6:31 pm

reeses wrote:
Did parents/teachers etc. try to get you to become more social when you were young? If any of my questions are annoying or invasive I'm sorry. I'm just trying to understand things a little better.

I wasn't diagnosed until recently so people probably just thought I was quiet/shy/introverted/stupid/stuck-up etc.. Comments I've had when I was younger would seem to confirm this.

I've never been very social. As I've gotten older I've wanted to do it more but when I try it tends to hit me how much I suck at it and I generally find it stresses me out. I persevere though. I still don't find the need to do it half as much as a "normal" person would though. Only 1 of my friends knows I have AS (and he doesn't really know anything about it) and sometimes I worry that they think that I don't like them much or am an as*hole or something.