Sometimes I just would love my mom to fark off.

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She did want advice. In fact, she specifically asked for advice. "How do I get my mom to piss off and leave me alone?" is a question asking for advice, at least when it comes from an aspie.

That particular kind of advice may not fit here exactly, but I don't think it fits much better in any other forum on this site.

And we answered it but maybe she didn't want that advice? :shrugs: That's why I said The Haven. Besides she hasn't been back here since April fools day so I hope this didn't scare her off.

Probably most of the advice was useless and a little of it was useful; that's what ordinarily happens. Hopefully she's off taking Bethie's and tracker's advice right now and it's working for her.

I think it's more likely that she was driven off, though. It's not often one sees mild mannered tracker using terms like "vitriol" to describe the responses in a thread.

I definitely listen when Tracker disagrees with me. He's EARNED that.

I take what you say seriously, too, of course.

You all know me well enough to understand that while I might mis-read a situation (rare as that is ), it doesn't mean I hold off-base assumptions.

You have prompted me to look a little more at Snivy's post history, and she was actually talking about the frustration with trying to grow up a few weeks ago in General. So, yes, now I feel totally off-base. She already KNEW what I was saying, but didn't know how to get there. Wish I had done some research before running my fingers. NO, I don't think a quick scan to see if there any other similar posts elsewhere that might flush out the situation is stalking. It's called making sure you understand what the poster is looking for. And I should have done it before taking a risk and challenging the OP.

THIS simple post reminded me that I could have missed something.

But Aspie1968 - you get no credit for this re-look at all. The way you were posting all I wanted to do was fight and fight and fight, dig in further dig in further. So, seriously, take a good look at your style, and spend less time looking at mine. You are obviously very bright, so use this experience to become a more effective poster. Being bright does not mean your psycho-analysis is accurate and, even if it were, it really has no place in a discussion forum. We don't like hearing what you think goes on in our heads.

You know what? I've had enough of this. I had another huge post prepared to rebut the last series of posts, but I'm getting nowhere. Suffice to say I still can't stand the monoperspectival attitude of certain people here, and I'm not changing my "approach and tone" at the whims of people who won't do the same in return.

this responds to the long post you just overwrote.

You know what? I've admitted over and over that I made mistakes posting in this thread and, yet, you hear none of it. Nor will your ego allow you to admit that anything you ever wrote was inappropriate. If there had been one word in that direction I would have dropped off long ago. In all the psycho babble you failed to pick that up, so you aren't as effective as you think you are. And - i DID give snivy strategies in that first ill-toned post that are highly effective in getting parents off your back. What I missed was that she already knew she wouldn't be able to act on them. In many situations it would have been the effective advice, and I've seen it work with an AS young adult. Just not, unfortunately, with this one. Yet you leave no room for that because it doesn't fit in with your idealism. Another way that all you needed to keep me from going off was one sentence.

If you can sit there and say that you don't care if you piss off every parent that comes here then you will accomplish absolutely nothing by posting. You will not make a difference for AS children. If that is what you want, to effectively kill the good things that happen on this board because you caught me in a foul mood, then I can't stop you. But remember where those angry parents are likely to go instead, and consider the lost opportunity.

I don't want you to leave, I just want you to understand.

OK, you want to keep on attacking?

Let's start with the gist of these latest attacks on me.

As far as I'm concerned, my 'tone' and 'approach' are not legitimate targets of conversation. If you want to dispute my arguments, focus on the arguments. Attacking 'tone' and 'approach' is personal attack.

I will not withhold from using the best theories I have available, because some people prefer to retain an unreflexive and asymmetrical discourse. The work of critique needs to be done. Conventional discourse needs to give way. It isn't either 'intended to provoke or belittle', nor is it a 'personal attack', any more that it is either of these things to speculate on why an autistic child had a meltdown.

I'll be gentle to NT's who have shown they want to communicate respectfully, but I will not accept random people telling me what to do. I do not accept conventional discourse as a legitimate criterion for what I can say, because conventional discourse is structurally asymmetrical.

And yes, I'll act like I've got every right to come here and piss you off if you're being abusive to someone, because I do have such a right, you just don't want to admit it.

No, you've done it over and over.

“General rule for life: almost everything has to involve give with the take” [capitalism = life]

“I sensed a conflict within the OP between expectations and reality, a desire to be treated as an adult while not demostrating the ability to act as one” [a value-judgement taken as “reality”]

“It's easy to say you want all the best parts of being an adult first, but that isn't how it works. You earn the good parts” [illocutionary statement disguised as statement of fact]

“There are times in life when the answer you need isn't the one you want” [claim to transcendental knowledge of what others “need”]



Did not apply in most of Europe until 10 or 20 years ago. Do not apply in Iran, Singapore, Greece, Korea, Afghanistan, etc because duties to relatives are inherited from one family member to another. Does not apply in the overwhelming majority of indigenous groups. Among the Guarani, it is actually forbidden to eat what one catches oneself. Does not apply in intentional communities/communes. You have taken a sweeping position that, in human life in general, there are only three possible survival strategies: commodified work, state benefits or parental support. There are dozens if not hundreds of survival strategies which are used in different parts of the world, and I daresay at least a dozen in your locale.

Actually, you are a bearer of an entire ideology which I completely disagree with and consider to be threatening to the kind of world I want to build. So why are you so angry that other people don't take this ideology for granted? You can't expect someone who sees through the discourse you're using to just sit back and let you impose it in a very blunt way on people you disagree with.



Your objections are hypocritical, because you did exactly the same to Snivy that you object to people doing to you. You inferred motives/beliefs which were not asserted. You admit that you thought these motives were 'subconscious'.

Anyway, in my circle of friends, this kind of thing is quite normal. If I made a statement vaguely similar to what you've said in this thread, I'd be called on it by pretty much anyone I know, and if it sounded like a common myth or something the media was promoting, this similarity would be pointed out and questioned. It's very widely done in critical theory, and in liberation movement consciousness-raising. It's not my fault that it hasn't reached your particular social milieu.



And here's the problem: you're fine with discussing what's going on in OUR heads (note: this is your us and them, not mine). The analysis is fine with you as long as it runs one way.

Anyway: hard luck. You think it's OK to say things to Snivy that you know Snivy doesn't like, and to say things to me that you know I'll dislike, so how can you demand that I refrain from saying things to you which you don't like?



You have no right to censor what I say. This is how I communicate. I will continue to do it, because it is no different from how everyone talks about autistic people, including other autistic people (I have seen many times on here, prolonged discussions of why someone is acting a certain way, whether something is a sensory problem or a meltdown, whether it's conscious or not etc – ESPECIALLY parents asking why their kids are doing certain things). It's only fair this this analysis apply both ways, and NTs' brains be on the table too. It's not insulting, you just choose to take offence at it. Deal with it.

Incidentally, I was talking about the discourse you were using, and not you specifically. You should also be aware that I'd have liked to say much stronger things, but haven't. I've stuck to what's wrong with your arguments. But even this is too much for you? You said things which are problematic and needed a detailed rebuttal.



Whenever a member of a dominant group finds their privilege threatened, they come up with accusations of inverse prejudice. I know for a fact that NT's have unconscious motives or are influenced unconsciously by connotations of discourses as I've seen it proven very substantially, particularly in discourse-analysis. What I said related directly to the discourse you deployed and the asymmetrical implications it carried. You seem to want to deny that there is any such thing as NT privilege at all. Now, if this is what you believe, of course anything which suggests its existence will seem biased against NT's. In the same way, someone who doesn't believe racism exists will see accusations of racism as unfair to white people. Does this mean nobody should make accusations of racism, in case someone who accepts a racist situation as just perceives the accuser as racist?



Oh, voice has to be earned now? It really bothers me how you seem to bring everything down to commodified market-relationships. It seems to me to be a very impoverished way of viewing the world.



Opinions other than your own shouldn't be allowed? Every time you post, you confirm what I thought about you after reading the initial posts. I haven't personally attacked you, I've revealed things about the inner structure of your discourse which you didn't want to hear. You aggressively attacked a new poster who was under stress and had a real problem. Instead of dealing with the fact that you might have scared off someone who was genuinely in need of advice, you now try to turn the whole issue around into attacking me for daring to stand up to your arguments.

I don't live my life around the goal of trying to seem as productive as possible to people who don't have any similar concern as to how I appear to them. If you'd been acting nice then I'd have been more gentle, but I'm not going to sugar-coat things for people who are quite prepared to attack others when they feel like it.

In my view, you should not have posted in this thread, because you did not have anything useful to contribute in addressing Snivy's original question. My intent was to make sure that your silencing of Snivy's concerns was not able to appear as an unchallenged position, and to show third parties the problems with what you were saying. It has largely worked, because you have now been forced to accept the existence of a rival position, however reluctantly.

You seem to be moving from one excuse to another as to why I need to be silenced. First it's because I'm a newbie. Then it's because you're jealous that I have too much time on my hands. Now it's the claim that my posting style offends you. In my view, you aren't playing fair. You're using ad hominem arguments as a substitute for substantive arguments, because my earlier claims have interrupted your claim to authority and self-presence.



Yes, because I challenged your beliefs in a very fundamental way, and you seem to be reacting with something akin to narcissistic rage. It's showing that, in contrast to League_Girl, I was right in how I read what you were doing all along. I spotted the aggression in the initial posts, and when I challenged it a bit, it turned into outright hatred redirected against me. It wasn't inevitable this would happen, because you could have been rational and reflexive about it like League_Girl was.

well now i feel cheated, i actually read that gigantic post before you deleted it. keep in mind that verbosity is not truly appreciated for its beauty on the internet. i doubt your posts are getting a thorough reading by most people simply because of their enormous length, and that will always hurt your ability to get your point across.

the main reason you are getting nowhere is because of your approach and tone. you have every right to refuse to alter those things, but do not expect anyone to see your point of view if you beat them about the head with it. people cannot see your view if blinded by all the little splinters you are throwing in their face.

Azurecrayon, thank you for accepting my attempt at a ceasefire. I sense nothing much is being achieved here, so really don't find it useful to keep going.

I've persuaded a lot of people with my approach/tone, and in my social milieu, my style is actually on the gentle side. There's certain kinds of people who don't like it, but it's usually the kind of people who don't like the content of what I'm saying either.

Do you want me to repost the things I said to you, so you can reply?

Ah, she re-posted it.

Aspie1968, despite the fact that I foolishly gave myself the luxury of being snippy towards you because I've got my head in a dark place, and for that I do sincerely apologize, here is something I wish you would understand: I wouldn't bother with the suggestions if I didn't believe you could be an effective force on this board. You've got the intelligence and you do have some level of instinct, but approach is a HUGE issue in getting anyone to receive that input. Just because I've messed up royally this time around doesn't mean I'm giving bad advice to you about tone and approach. I've been on this board long enough to SEE what works, to know when I have to make a 180, and to know what will keep an inquiring parent from making this board their home for advice. You lose when the parent gets frustrated and leaves, which they will 90% of the time if they get a negative response, because the alternatives don't provide what this place does, and that means the kids will miss out.

You see me as NT and bound by the rules of the NT world, but more and more people tell me they think I'm NOT NT. It seems I don't really live in either world. Yes, I've learned how to survive in the world that exists around me and until you've managed to over-throw it, it seems to me that giving advice to others on how to make their way in it is not a bad thing. I can tell you that my husband and son both think it's super cool to get little tips from me that turn into real life gold. If I was truly NT I probably couldn't do that, because I wouldn't have had to adapt as hard as I have. But, yes, I know what adaptations work for me, and which ones keep bridges from burning, and I don't see why sharing that information with someone who is struggling would ever be considered a bad thing. Few people have enough genius to get by solely on their talents, able to ignore the rules of the economy. Most people have to make a few trades along the way, and it can be done without selling out on important values, even if at times you aren't thrilled about the compromise. I'm thrilled for you that you haven't had to do that in your life, but that would make you lucky. Based on the evidence of how most people with AS get to adult life, garnered through a lot of reading at WP, most kids on this board won't be offered that lucky ticket, so being pragmatic seems like a necessity.

I try to adapt to what I think the options for the unique person are, and I don't always get it right, but at least I allow for that possibility. 3 pages in I already back-tracked in this thread, long before you threw your hat into the ring, but you seem to have missed it, and attacked me anyway.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 08 Apr 2011, 11:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

No, you misread my beliefs in a very fundamental way and then refused to see it. In an effort to prove to yourself that you hadn't misread me, it's almost like you made an effort to take advantage of the fact that I admitted my head wasn't in a good emotional space, and purposely went about trying to trigger reflexive responses that would prove your theory. That is what emotional abusers do to people, turn them into people they were not so they can justify their attacks. Been there, done that, and I don't need it on a message board (let me say that I do not honestly think it was your intent, but you were acting as reflexively as I was, and I know I did things to contribute that, for what I've already apologized). You think it was bringing out the "true" person. I say it was bringing out the person you wanted to create, so that you would have reason to ignore it. Perhaps this is the self-defense mechanism you've needed to survive in this world, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be helpful to recognize it.

Consider this: once you shared your psychological assessment, there was absolutely no way for me to defend myself against it, outside of inviting you to spend a few months sharing hundreds of conversations. Similar to the way no one can defend against being called a sock puppet. There is no way I could have acted that would have changed your mind, except perhaps by being silent and patient, which I wasn't in the emotional space to be (and there were plenty of hints to that fact). Thus, there was one road available: affirm it. Nice trap to lay for someone, isn't it? This is different than when someone invites us to speculate and its quite clear everyone is bouncing around options and speculating. It wasn't invited and I wasn't prepared to deal with it.

You were not playing fair. I'm willing to admit my part in the negative dynamic, are you willing to admit yours?

Well, I'd put it a little differently; everyone holds off-base assumptions, but you're among those who are willing to reexamine yours if approached in a way that doesn't polarize things.


I definitely agree with that. Public posts are public, and reading through someone's posting history to understand their points better is a good thing, not a bad thing - and yes, I do it too. Just because stalkers can misuse posting histories does not mean that everyone who looks at a posting history is a stalker - far from it.


Yes. When someone commented that aspie1968 had time, I was thinking about that George Bernard Shaw quote about not having enough time to write a shorter letter.

OK, so I misread some of your motives, and if I'd realised this earlier, I'd have phrased my posts more carefully. I thought you were attacking Snivy when you were trying to provide a 'nudge', and responded accordingly. Sorry for that.

Also, I hadn't realised that admitting you were having bad experiences at the moment was meant to be a peace offering/mitigation. I'd read it as playing for victim-status on your part, which evidently it wasn't. I understand now that you were trying to say you were in a bad mood because of circumstances. I should have taken that as a cue, but didn't. Sorry for that too.

I wasn't deliberately trying to provoke you, I was trying to make you / other people think about the situatedness of particular views. I was reacting because I felt silenced, I felt my way of life and those of my friends were under attack, because I felt similar to Snivy at a particular point in my past which is still raw for me, and because I was concerned that Snivy had been driven off. If it's any consolation, I've found this stressful too. I'm a bit like one of those terriers which won't let go of a bone, especially when something seems threatening.

I also want to emphasise again that nothing I said was directed at *you* personally, even if it sounded that way. I was objecting to certain things you said, or that I thought you meant. I apologise if I said anything that was, or seemed like, something personal. I think we were talking at cross-purposes partly because I was talking about *discourses* and you were talking about *motives*. I wish I'd been able to make this clearer earlier.

I really dislike posting details of my life where the world can see, and some parts of my past I still can't speak about even to close friends. I'm lucky to have supportive family members and friends around me, so the fear of having no-one to rely on is usually held at bay (misfits tend to group together and rely on each other I think). On the other hand, for reasons I'd rather not go into, I'm pretty much stuck with having to work from home, and thankfully I've found work I can do this way, but my earnings are low and I do have to push myself to the limit at peak work-times (hence why I'm defensive about interruptions when at the computer - with me, the issue was to get people to realise they couldn't interrupt me when I'm *working*). Suffice to say a few of the things you and other people said early on touched old wounds which have never healed

best wishes,
Aspie1968

no need. i already read them, and to be honest, mostly dismissed it as being inaccurate. i didnt intend to respond to a breakdown of my perceived faults, tho. i simply dont have the time or inclination. you are a free person however, and may repost them if you wish.



i find myself reacting very strongly and very negatively when anyone pulls, or i erroneously perceive them to pull, the "you are just an ignorant NT" card. it seems sometimes as if people forget that autism is genetic, our kids dont just spontaneously develop it in most cases. i know my SO is autistic, but my 5 yo autie is more affected than my SO was as a child, and he isnt even the father of my 14 yo aspie. where did that extra influence come from? *raises hand* ive talked this over several times with my SO and neither of us can say i am truly diagnosable classic autism or probably even as, but he has given me the honorary designation of "not normal."

but that just equates to a feeling of frustration, misunderstanding, and downright hurt to be accused of not being able to understand the ASD perspective simply because i am not diagnosed. neither was my SO until he was 39, did that make him NT and unable to understand before the diagnosis?

so oh well, people can call me NT if they want, but what they believe about me doesnt change who i am. i still am introverted, socially awkward, dont know how to express empathy well, logic oriented, tend to perseverate, etc.

but the autistic thinking and world is pretty black and white, you are or you aren't, NT or ASD. it sucks to come to the party without the right label.

Azurecrayon, I love your "nuerotypically confused" label for yourself and I love Denver Dave's "ANT (a-typical nuerotypical)" label for himself.

aspie1968, I should have realized I was touching on a nerve somewhere. And you were hitting mine. Good way to make explosions happen. I'm sorry for all of it, and hope we can move forward on better terms.

People seem too hung-up on the ASD/NT part of what I said. I picked up on this because of the immaturity vs disability thing, but it was the dominant-group-speak which I disliked. I might have guessed wrong which axis it was going along, but it was the most likely guess in the context; I'm not thinking it was more an included vs precariat discourse, though this is strange because your own working conditions sound fairly precarian. I've also sometimes seen what seem to me to be very anti-ASD views expressed by ASD people as well, which still surprises me when it happens. Some of them seem to be trying very, very hard to imagine they're part of the in-group, to the point of going much further with some of these positions than most NT's would.