Raised by Aspergers parent

Post Reply New Topic

What help? I remember seeing a documentary about autism, from Australia. They interviewed an autistic woman. She said after her own diagnosis she realized her mother had been on the spectrum. At one point, her mother had a massive meltdown, and was carted off to a mental institution, where she was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia and medicated into a catatonic state for the rest of her life.

Seeking help might have made things much worse for your parents and your family. I don't know how old your parents are, but they must have feared that if anyone ever knew, they'd lose their child(ren).

Good point! Yes we live in a different world, now.

Hmm. No my parents don't have circular reasoning conversations. They are quite matter of fact. They don't say something if they don't mean it.

My Mum definitely thinks people are against her. Not just don't like her, but that they are the enemy.

It's black and white thinking I guess. People are only good or bad to her it seems.

I feel like being the only aspie in my family including close and distant relatives, is worse than being NT in a aspergers family, least u have the chance they will treat u with respect and not discriminate like mine have

I understand that was hard for you.

I still had issues with them not understanding my aspieness. Like they couldn't understand why I didn't have friends as a teenager.

My Mum told me that my sister would get married before me because of how I am.

My whole damn family is undiagnosed or diagnosed Aspie, for better or for worse, and few are NT... if there is such a thing. There's also a lot of diagnosed bipolar and schizophrenia and depression and ADHD and PTSD in my family.

I get the feeling that, regardless of what side of the AS/NT divide one and one's parents fall on, what really hurts is feeling rejected and belittled. The lack of acceptance, the lack of an attempt to understand each other.

God I hope I don't do that to my kids. I know my (AS) grandfather did, and my (NT) grandmother kind of did too. I know that both of them had a lot of anxiety; based on stories remembered from my mother (NT) and told by my aunt (pretty safely presumed AS), most of the problems came more from shoving their anxieties down their daughters' throats than from the AS itself. I know I (AS) experienced two very different people being raised by them for 10 years than their children did (they'd had a lot of therapy, and Grandpa was taking Xanax three times a day, by the time they were raising me). I really hope I don't/haven't done that to my kids. Because, for the last probably 10 years and definitely for the last 7, anxiety has been a major player in our household too.

I know they've been treated to a fair bit of inconsistency. Not just "Everyone loses their s**t sometimes," but fluctuating rules and expectations (you know, the bad kind of inconsistency). I know I haven't had as much energy to engage in their world as consistently as I did before anxiety became the driving factor in my life.

Well, I guess I still have time. What could your parents have done for you to help remediate their failures??

[quote]What could your parents have done for you to help remediate their failures??{/quote]

In my family we were pretty functional. One thing I do think is important is to understand each other's point of view. I'm coming at things from a view I've never really seen articulated except just a little bit by BuyerBeware, but I'm a maybe-aspie, Dad is an aspie in all likelihood, and Mum isn't, and it was actually my Mum who had most trouble understanding me, and it showed sometimes. Dad was always the understanding parent, lol.

I do think for people who are aware that they see the world differently, talking about things might be the way to go ?????? That is, Mum and I are at a place where we can talk about our differences. In the past there was a bit of mutual misunderstanding - she just didn't get why I didn't have friends, didn't know how to talk to people, or never asked anybody's name when I did [i][/i] talk to them. On my side, I didn't realize that she had very high expectations of me, academically speaking, because she fully believed I was capable of them (and she was absolutely right). It didn't help that she had limited patience and I took everything personally until I was like seventeen. I think realizing that we were different helped a lot, and it didn't hurt that we got a few laughs about it.

Having said that, I have had (and might still have) anxiety, brought on by stuff like academic stress, feeling that I had to be 'perfect' (my definition of perfect - AS is fine, but a lot of other stuff isn't), the less structured nature of a university, and a pretty bad case of a chronic guilt-by-association episode. It was so bad I barely left my flat for a month. Intrusive thoughts happen a lot less these days, but I still get half-hearted suicidal ideations. I don't have any children, and I've never had a parent in a situation that bad. What I HAVE had is a Dad nearly dying of cancer, or more accurately of chemotherapy, with Mum having an ensuing short fuse. At the time she was trying to personally coach me for important exams, no less. During that time, Mum just put her nose to the grindstone and blazed through as best he could. Dad couldn't work at the time and was going in and out of hospital and if he wasn't doing that, he was in bed or trying to get a nutrition drink down. What he DID do, with me at least, was play to what strengths he had at the time by explaining why my Mum was so short-tempered at the time, calming me down himself (I was eleven years old and a ball of anger), and NOT freaking out over every practice paper which came back with a bad score, which was all of them. Mum did her best.

Of course that time didn't last forever, but even when Mum and I were strained, I never doubted that she didn't love me. I never blamed Dad and his cancer for anything, and I understood that Mum wanted me to take Grammar School Exams for my future. It didn't make it easier when she told me about everything I got wrong in all my practice papers (so that I could learn from my mistakes), but I understood why we were doing it, which made me a lot more willing to try.

I hope this helps????? Sorry for the waffle.

I’m 15 years old and my dad has Aspergers. I personally find it extremely difficult growing up with a parent with Aspergers. I’ve found that my dad doesn’t seem to realise that he and I are on different levels (parent and child) so he talks about all his extreme life problems in front of me and seems to expect me to solve them which has largely impacted on my anxiety. I remember when I was six, I had to pull him away from the edge of a bridge because he was going jump. I understand suicidal ideation and all as I am suicidal myself but recently I’ve been realising that most parents, no matter how suicidal, wouldn’t do it in front of their children and expect them to pick up the pieces. I feel like he hates me and thinks I’m an awful daughter because I don’t obey his every command. I’m a good kid, I get good grades, I’ve never done anything illegal, I stay out of trouble, so I get really depressed because I feel like no matter what I do it’s never going to be good enough for him

I feel like I never learned how to have friends because my parents didn't have friends. I still don't really know what is expected of me. If I mimick what other people do, well, that's nothing... I mean literally nothing. People don't really bother to get in touch with me. No one drops by. I have no idea what friends do. I have some acquaintances, but we've never gotten past awkward social niceties. I met up with a friend I've known for years, and still our conversation wasn't natural and easy. We never confide in each other. We are just acquaintances who meet from time to time.

Hello greysgirl and welcome to wrong planet. I'm sorry you're having such a hard time with your Dad. My biggest fear at 15 was that I would come home to find my Dad had killed himself, my Mum had left and he went through a hard time. He is actually NT and I'm the Asperger, but I think either way this is all really difficult for a 15 year old to cope with and I recommend you get some support for your own feelings, such as counseling. No, your Father should not be relying on you to be the strong one, it isn't fair. I think it's most likely that he is doing this because is wrongly assumes you can cope. He may be oblivious to your struggles and problems, he may not recognise unhappiness from your expressions for example. I recommend making them very clear to him, in words, not hints, no subtlety, be obvious.

I think it's unlikely he hates you. I am not selfish, but like a lot of Asperger's I am self-obsessed and often need other peoples problems and difficulties pointed out to me. Explanations of how I can help are good too. He expects you to obey him always even though you are 15, that is unrealistic of him and may be to do with not liking change, as in you are growing up, and a loss of control, which is also inevitable as you grow up. That said, you are going to grow up whether he likes it or not.

At the end of the day, you are the child and he is the parent and you are not responsible for him.

This is all completely on point.

My concern is, how are you going to talk to your father about these issues in a way that will be effective for both of you? If you have a counselor or therapist that understands ASD, it may be good to develop a discussion plan with them over a series of sessions, and then invite your father to join a session. At the session you would walk through the discussion plan and try to get him to understand how things have been for you.

If you do not have such resources, we might be able to help you develop a discussion plan here.

Don't bother yourself with your parents' problems. Their problems are not your responsibility. Focus on your own life and getting yourself to where you want to be in the world. You are 15 and adulthood might seem far away but you are currently on the runway to adulthood and now is the time to start getting things in order for college and your career.

I wish I could have back all the time I spent trying to please my dad. All the time I spent trying to connect with him. If I could have back the childhood I lost. My childhood was shadowed by my dad's ghostlike, hovering presence. I didn't understand him, and I don't think he understod me.

I was adopted at an early age. My dad worked a lot, so I spent most of time with my mom. She was loving but slightly absent. In retrospect she seemed bothered and anxious, but she was always there. I could be myself around her. She didn't fully understand this child that came from another mother, but she tried her best.

When my dad came home, things were strained. He was always exhausted after work, much more than normal people. When he would talk to me, it was like he was acting. He was playing "good dad", and he was a crappy actor. He had his script in his head of how things would unfold, and if you didn't answer his questions the way he expected, the mask would crack. He would be frustrated and hurt. It was always heartbreaking for me, because I wanted to be loved by daddy. And it was always my fault.

A couple of hours later he would act as if nothing had happened, never mentioning the incident again. I was sad and scared, and thought I'd better try harder next time to be a good boy.

And that is how things have been ever since. That dynamic has had an enormous impact on how my life evolved, and without having to go into details, it's been very negative and I have ended up in abusive relationships.
What I learnt eventually, is that his approval was not an indication of success in the real world. I got an education, a job and made good money. But since it wasn't what he expected (he had very specific plans for me), he can't seem to handle it. The day I got accepted at unversity he was happy for me, but 25 years later he still has to ask me what it was that I studied, and what I'm doing at work. And he talks about how good things would have been if I had followed his advice in life.

My dad has two modes in his life.
- Staring absently at the tv, half asleep. Communicating with him is this state, he seems surprised to be spoken too, and lost for words to reply with.
- Lecturing. He'll tell you about something he knows all about. In his case it's church history and the people who lived on his street when he was a kid.
He will switch between those two, with very little in between. Either he was there, or he was not. And one thing that really made my life miserable was his tendency to either demanding control of your life (despite knowing nothing about it), or to simply not give a f*ck. You'd never know which of these two was on the menu. It was simply different from day to day.

I have learnt about Aspergers and autism in the last couple of years, and realized my dad must be on the spectrum. Now I have great sympathy for him, but that's it. I love my mother very much.

I think my dad's story is very sad. He showed great promise in school (good with words and maths), and the family life and the jobs he was expected to deal with was way beyond his capacity. In his late 40s, he was spent both physically and mentally. He developed chronic pain, and due to lacking social skills and lacking flexibility, he lost his job. He never applied for another. He has a little basement where he has a little repair shop that has never turned a profit, and my mother supports him financially.

I know he tries, but he can't be like us. When I visit with my daughter, he showers her with love and affection (a little bit on theatrical side to be honest). But then he gets impatient and unpleasant because she eats a sandwhich the wrong way. It's one of those things. In my world, you are nice to the ones you love. Your allies get special treatment. You accept their flaws. That's how I show love. And when my dad does this, it limits the time I allow my daughter to get exposed to him, because what was hurtful to me as a kid is probably hurtful to her too. I know he can't help it, but that's sorts of his problem really.

My stomach's always been a mess, and I had my first heart attack at 46. I have a hard time not connecting that to the fear and unpredicability I grew up with.

My dad couldn't be all the things he was expected to be. He took on a load of responsibility that he couldn't carry. In many ways, he (and me in turns) was a victim of the notion that we're all the same, and if just shape up and get our s**t together. We're not. We're different.

This seems to have been a very active older thread that I didn't know about until now. I'm going to be reviewing it in greater detail because as an AS parent, from the little I did read, it scares me.

But as someone wrote in another thread, children who didn't have a problem with their aspie parent aren't likely to post about it the internet. Personally, I think awareness of who you are and what you are like, is the key to being a good parent. It wasn't nearly as easy back then (I grew up in the 70s and 80s), especially if you were high functioning.