Being Very Hard On Yourself

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Is being very hard on yourself have to do with Aspergers? I can be very hard on myself. I been very upset at something, feeling I want to die, I want to give up, life is getting too hard, I’m not responsible enough, it’s can be very scary. My friend been helping me clean my apartment & doing other stuff too, she took a 3 week break, I know it not her fault that she bought back old feelings that make me very hard on myself. I cannot help it how I feel. As I’m writing this I’m crying too.

Aw, I hear that you are stressed and frustrated, and I don't have any kind of "Do this to fix that" to offer while having insomnia here at 01:22am on a Monday morning.

You need sleep support pills, they helping me sleep.

I think if you know you're prone to making mistakes and struggle to do things because of aspergers you can be very hard on yourself Kitty. Try to be kinder to yourself and think of the positives.

I think some of this being hard on oneself is sort of feedback/reflection from things said to us over time and we are biased to critical comments toward ourselves because we absorbed so much of our self image from the way we have been treated. I hated myself all my life, felt I was wrong, bad, stupid, mean, and all the other things I had been told I was, and I believed it all inside myself , but still felt desperately misunderstood and could not understand that although I never felt that way about others or tried to make trouble, it must be so..... until I discovered how my autism had worked in the background all along without my knowing.

Autism had a lot to do with my understanding or lack of understanding the communication and motivations of others, autism had a lot to do with my lack of performance, failure to succeed at many things, etc. It was autism, and everything after all was not "all my fault". It was such a relief! I could forgive myself for not understanding, for failing, for so many struggles and misunderstandings, and I could finally forgive others because they had not known about the autism either.

Over the past 6 years I have been able to look at so many painful things of the past 68 years ( I am now 71) before I knew of the autism of not only my own but also my mother's. That gave me a different perspective and understanding, and as I go through those old painful experiences I can finally see how they happened, how nobody knew, and let go of the self punishment for never being good enough, etc that my family and my self carried on with.

maybe take a look at how much of your self criticism is habit formed from input of others from long ago, perhaps you can begin to forgive yourself.

I can think I’m no good, I don’t deserve good things, I don’t deserve a boyfriend, I deserve bad things to happen to me, I don’t know why, but I was feeling like this for decades. When I moved on my own in 2007, my mom checked in on me ALOT (we really didn’t get along, we were fighting & stuff, but we slowly made up ) She was my safetynet, my protector, she helped me ALOT, buying me stuff for my apartment, paying for my rent & bills, buying me food. When she died, I called my grandmother alot, she my mom mother, she checked in on me too when I didn’t call her for a month, but I couldn’t tell her what is wrong & about me & my sister not really getting along & not wanting to talk to each other. My grandmother was overprotective & she can worry about me tooooo much. She died last year in June, the same month that my mom died, it will be 10 years in June that my mom been gone Now I have nobody checking in on me. I feel alone, nobody to help me, very scared cuz I feel like a child in an adult body. Some people in my town been helping me, I had cleaning ladies to clean my apartment in the past, they quit cuz of misunderstanding with my Aspergers. When I had help from a lady to get me on In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) Program, when she quit cuz she couldn’t handle taking care of me & her children, she had alot of children. I had a very hard time when she quit without telling me. I felt alone, abandoned, helpless, nobody like me, I should die, I felt like a little girl, I felt very weak & I was so sad. I still feel like I’m worthless

I think these days it's mostly because I know what's at stake with what I do. That said I have days where I do roast myself probably worse than I could ever imagine myself roasting anyone (and sometimes I'm still floored at some of the things I do say to myself and even cross my fingers because it worries me), at the same time when the stress is over I have a way of reminding myself that I don't hate myself but I do think nature wants to cut my throat and drink and sometimes that kind of self-treatment, sadly, is almost compelled.

I have to wonder how much of us being brutal on ourselves comes from not having a lot of 'padding' in the sense that our lives aren't particularly forgiving, nor our social circumstances, so it can feel like we're holding on by our fingernails even when we're at our best.

Very much this. In hindsight, I wear this ridiculously heavy Albatross around my neck, and I'm more than half your age!

Though I was diagnosed at a younger age, knowing that my Autism feeds into my Mental Health issues ironically exacerbates the whole situation in my head.

A few days ago, I had a complete breakdown, because I grew frustrated that I still cannot fold bed sheets, despite being shown and practicing multiple times. Something about the co-ordination, or what my fingers decide to do completely throws me off. This breakdown however, was the straw that broke the Camel's back, growing from other similar grievances that I failed to quash. The woes and worries of my day-to-day build, and I become angry that I cannot deal with the stress properly, or that I subconsciously retreat to this self-loathing mindset.



This reminds me of when I would often attempt to sabotage bullies at my Secondary School. I'd essentially "roast myself" in front of them if it meant they'd stay quiet, because what annoyed me the most, was that they were trying to get a rise out of me. "Why are you wasting your time with me?" would often cross my mind, and these days, my self-deprecation comes across as very acerbic to my nearest and dearest. The fact that I am even more cruel to myself than those bullies ever were to me, adds to this landfill of irony.



I can imagine quite a lot of the time, it's that mixture of nature and nurture. I'm blessed to have grown-up in a loving and caring family. Having to learn other people aren't on the same page as me (in more ways than one!) was a bitter pill to swallow as a teenager. Juggling this with getting my head around Autism became fuel for the fire of an inevitable breakdown that led to a suicide attempt.



It can be easier said than done to fight through this mindset. The fact that my mind still holds on to all the negativity, can often make me susceptible to shutdowns and depressive episodes such as the one I mentioned.

It's great you have that friend there to help you out, despite them unintentionally re-opening old wounds.

What's also easier said than done is that self-forgiveness autisticelders has mentioned.

I suppose that, because we're so used to carrying our own metaphorical unbearable weights of self-loating and guilt, we're almost not used to a life of no weight being there at all. Almost as if it's (again irony) the only thing that's holding us up.

Either way, I'm sorry to read you're going through a hard time with it all, and hope you persevere.

Best answer ever.

I was treated like crap all through my childhood and adolescence.

The best thing to do....is to try to not let yourself be treated like crap when you're a legal adult.

Some reactions on your part might be a reflection of the fact of being treated like crap throughout your life. I've had these sorts of reactions, and they never worked to my advantage.

The key is to not let people know that you are offended by something....and always seek to take the high road, rather than engage in arguments with people.

I used to react to people treating me like crap. The reactions were very funny to my tormentors. This is why they continued to torment me.

It may be an indirect result of Aspergers, e.g. getting frustrated over your inability to adapt. But it's not necessary to be hard on yourself. You can change that.

When I say I'm stupid it may sound like I'm being hard on myself. But it's more like I accepted stupidity as a part of being human (similar to what Einstein said about stupidity). I typically don't get upset over my own stupidity, unless I produced a severe mess because of it.

I've had extra reason to be in the past week.

Did something with a program I was working on that ended up with overnight runs sending all of the customers faux late fees, erroneous payment draws, and I had to fix that over the weekend only to find out that there've been errors in the TransUnion reporting as well for a given slice of the customers for several months.

It's like... I can do as well with my work as most people, most of the time, plenty of times I'll have all kinds of novel insights other people wouldn't, but when I f--- up it tends to go big, and sadly most often it's stuck in a zone where it's very difficult to sort overwork from just having had the bad luck of being on the wrong project, whether my own brain and nervous system really do a king-sellout on me every few years in a way that reminds me that there's something wrong with me, it's something about my life that generally neither gets much better or worse (in high school I failed out of putting books back at the library, and since I'm numerate it could have been the meds I was on at the time but it's a bit more like a reliable rolling distortion of some kind in my 'present moment' that screws me up at competitive sports and forces me to live in my long-term memory and 'overview' or 'scout' mode in life). All of that makes me both blessing and liability all at once and the liability side, in most places, isn't acceptable.

I've also come to realize a lot of beating on yourself isn't about just trying to wring out performance, it's also about knowing your place when you've seen reliable patterns that are life long and show no sign of shifting. That and when you're high-low intelligence or whatever the case may be and you have a few good days you forget you have a disability and find some new way to step in it.