None-of-your-business attitude

Post Reply New Topic

Today I was talking to my mother about when I learned to read. I told her I remember be able to read on my own before I started Kindergarten and even at 3 years old I was obsessed with and comforted by books. Again I asked her if she could remember when I started reading and she told me that she knew I could read before I was 5 but that I was so a secretive child that she suspects I never told anybody I could read. She said I had probably learned to read years before she noticed.

This led into a conversation about what she called a "none-of-your-business" attitude. She said I was such a quiet child and kept everything to myself because (she thought) I didn't believe it was anybody's business. And she was correct. I remember keeping so many things secret, both big things and little things, because I felt it was nobody's business. If I was angry or sad or upset I never told anybody. If I was in pain I never told anybody. If I was sick I never told anybody. If somebody was annoying me I never told anybody. I just didn't think it was important or anybody's business except my own.

My parents used to joke around that I could be accepted to Harvard and not tell anybody until the day I left. And that's true. I applied to college and didn't tell anybody for almost two months and they only found out by accident. Same with applying for jobs and the same with moving. This is also why therapy annoyed me. They always wanted to know stuff that I thought was none of their business and it made me angry.

I don't think there is anybody in this whole world that knows everything there is to know about me. Even my best friends only know a limited amount of information about me. If I deem something unimportant to tell somebody I simply won't tell them. Is/was anybody else like this?

Yep. I tell my friends some stuff and I tell my family even less than what I tell my friends. I prefer keeping most things to myself. That's why I don't enjoy therapy that much. It's life and my business, and I should only tell people what I want them to know.

Exactly.

Life taught me that knowledge is power, and that reduced exposure meant fewer things got yanked by others. Leaves me with a bit of an obsession about keeping secrets.

I was just saying in another thread, I pretty much either tell everything, or tell nothing. With most people I tell them nothing. It is hard for me to find a middle ground where I can share some things and not others.

There were lots of things I never told anyone as a child, like age 7 I was totally convinced I had a brain tumor, and I never told anyone that.

I definitely do the same thing. I have to force myself to tell people things... otherwise they aren't ever gonna find out. Some things make the "news" and I will talk about them. Other things, well, not so much... I can totally imagine myself getting into Harvard, too, and never telling anyone about it. Haha.

That's none of your concern.

I am somewhat like that. I was taken to many psych docs and therapists as a child. This was not effective for me, as I kept most stuff to myself. Long before I could put it into words, I felt it was an intrusive violation of my personal and private "space", so I just wouldn't tell these people everything. I would tell them bits and pieces to keep from telling everything, and let them just think I was shy and possessed of communications problems, which I was. Once or twice, I just completely rejected having anything to do with new therapists or psych docs. There wasn't anything wrong with these people, I just hated therapy so much, and on those particular occasions, I wasn't able to handle it at all, so I rejected them.

I was always very aware that people felt I was defective, and if they only tried hard enough they could "fix" me. Some things, like Asperger's Syndrome, can't be fixed. You just have to develop your own coping mechanisms, and in some cases drug therapy helps also. However, as a child, it was very hard to deal with the fact that everyone around me felt I was defective. Knowing that nobody is perfect doesn't help when NTs feel that you are a lot more imperfect than they are, and let you know it.

I did try therapy again a few years ago (I'm in my early 50s now.), but it was only so I could qualify for Medicaid. They considered my depression more important than my other health problems, even though my other health problems cause me more problems than the depression did. Now that I live alone my depression is under better control. Living with relatives drove us all crazy. They didn't want to give me Medicaid for my other stuff without depression in the mix. It was so stupid.

My opinion is that you should just reveal what you want to about yourself, and when you want. If being private with yourself bugs other people, so what. It's your life, and your personal stuff. They only have a right to what you are willing to share.

Remember, we on the spectrum are all:

A Different Drummer

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
Perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears,
However measured or far away.

--Henry David Thoreau

I've told my family mostly everything about my life. They're my support system, and you'd be surprised at how they might react sometimes.

My parents were continually frustrated with me as a child because I wouldn't want to talk to them about anything having to do with me. "How was your day?" or "What did you do today?" were met with the most evasive answers possible. My dad, a social worker, even brought home an emotions list he used with schizophrenia patients to try to get me to say what I was feeling. It never worked.

Actually, I still do this today. Someone asked me over the weekend why I'm a vegetarian, a simple question with a simple answer, and I told them "magic." They laughed, tried again, but saw that I wouldn't budge and stopped trying. I don't even know why I didn't want to explain, but I think it has to do with not wanting to lose control. Like if I explain myself, other people then have a way to argue with me about my choices. It's a little irrational, and I'm usually quite rational and not easily flustered.

I think if I didn't feel judged by my family from the time I was little, I would also find comfort in revealing to them my thoughts. But my trust is definitely the hardest thing for others to gain. I know my parents and friends like it when I explain what's happening in my life so I make an effort for them. Then they comment about how it relates to them or how I can "fix" my situation and it seems like I got more than I bargained for.

I shared very little about everything I did too, although it wasn't because I thought that it was no one's business. The idea of telling my parents what I did or thought just didn't occur to me regularly until my late teens or was it twenties. I wasn't being secretive on purpose, but it probably looked that way. I tell my parents things about myself now though.

This exactly. Nothing was off-limits in my family for criticism. I sort of got trained that people questioning you was putting the subject up for debate, and I refused to engage with them at all for fear they would do some other irrational thing.

I tell people lots of things. I don't have a ''none of your business'' attitude. If I don't want to tell someone something, it's mostly because it might involve too much explanation and it's very rare that I'm talking more than the other person. So often I keep things short and sweet, and try to avoid telling big life stories.

Mostly this.^^^



And a little this. ^^^

I often neglect to share things with friends and family because it just doesn't occur to me. I tend to associate people with certain subjects and that's what we talk about. The longer or more intensely I know someone, the more subjects I associate them with. I think that's fairly normal. It's just that other people seem to spontaneously offer their interests more often than I do. I don't consider this a problem, except when meeting new people in a setting that doesn't allow me to associate them with a subject I know.

There are some subjects that I choose not to bring up unless I've developed a high level of trust. That's just prudent though.

Maybe this is just me seeing all this from narrow personal perspective, but the idea of keeping things so secret (or as they say in poker, "keeping your cards close to your chest"), doesn't seem to me to be an Autistic trait. I do think Autism can cause a trait like that to be more pronounced that it otherwise might be, but I don't see how it's an Autistic trait in and of itself.

Like I said though, I'm looking at this from my own personal perspective. I have AS, and all three of my boys are on spectrum. All four of us are exactly the opposite. There is virtually nothing my kids won't tell me about what's going on with them, and I was the same as a child. I still am.

Because that's been my experience, I wonder if something else is causing the secretiveness. There were SOME things I kept to myself, but not many really. What I do remember keeping to myself were traumatic experiences. I have one son who did the same thing. He had a very traumatic experience that took him a year to tell us about, but even with that, he couldn't hold it in. He told a friend, who made him come and talk to us about it.

Since that is the light under which I'm reading all this I wonder if something more is going on. I have to wonder if something traumatic happened, or overall childhood experiences may have caused some of you guys to loose faith and trust in those close to you.

I'm not sure I want to ask though, because it's...

well...

none of my business!

Not asking anyone to answer. Just saying compared to what I've actually experienced with AS, this seems really odd (no offense) to me.

EDIT: THIS is what I'm more used to, and tends to be what I see more often posted: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt184363.html