Have you been shut out of group work (at seminars etc.)?

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Narcissistic extrovert bullies are remarkably good at turning the tables when cornered/confronted for bullying. Your brothers tried at least.

She made most of my school life a misery. I think she had issues of her own and wasn't exactly well-liked, but she hid her insecurities by seeming bitchy towards me and it made her feel good that there was a kid less worthy than her. It would have been better if she'd just made friends with me instead but I was too shameful for her to be seen with, so she chose to hate me instead and influence the other girls to do the same, as they seemed scared of her. I wasn't scared of her though. She was nothing to be afraid of. If all the girls just stuck together and showed disdain towards her rather than leaving me out to keep her happy, she would have been nothing and would have had no power at all.

Yep, true this... a lot of NT females are basically the opposite of Asperger's (so-named at the time), it's like we're a militant INTJ personality type (Myers-Briggs), and they're like ESFP.

So, to quote Malcolm Gladwell's famous book Blink, they just "know without knowing" when something feels out of place. As others have pointed out on WP, we may have some glazed facial expression, or irregular tone when speaking, or misinterpreted an "obvious" expectation or nuance of ToM early on...or innocently interjected in a conversation with a non-sequitur...and that sets off their visceral radar of "mental illness alert - MUST AVOID".

You're right that a part of it has to do with groupthink; there's a hive-mind mentality that conjures up a certain archetype, which they probably talk and laugh about at parties and such, e.g. "This one guy / girl who was really weird and just seemed like an alien, they said this and did that...ha-ha-ha! You know what I mean??" other girl: "Oh yeah, totally, I know the type!! It's like they're really smart but they're not all there, they have no social skills..."

But it's also that "sixth sense" you're talking about, too. One could tie that in with notions of natural selection inhibiting the spread of ASD traits - while I am married now with daughters, I had it rough in my 20s with a constant trial-and-error process of dating and dance club conversations. I had double-dates with an NT friend and they'd hit it off, whereas we'd be distant and things got uncomfortable. Emotionally painful, but I persevered and things got better.

Yeah, those covert narcissists (who are on the anti-social personality spectrum) are the worst...! They can shamelessly lie and concoct an alternative reality that YOU were the aggressor, and especially if they know they've got an entourage who are afraid of being ostracized, and so they'll kowtow to their every whim...

I still remember years ago when I had a housemate who was a covert narcissist (but a man, not a woman) - very manipulative, and would passive-aggressively torment me...and he wasn't big and intimidating either, far from it. When I angrily called him out on it one time, he told me that I could go ahead and punch him in the face if I wanted, but he'd get the cops involved and I'd lose everything. I believed him: I knew that he'd put on an act with the cops that I was completely mentally ill and attacked him for no reason, so I did what any street-smart Aspie would do: I left and moved elsewhere.

I can remember getting to a certain age and I just didn't hit my milestones so I got left behind

I mean there was bullying back and forth but I'd put my being left out as more of a being "left behind" type thing

Also because of my background a lot of my friends parents stopped them from having anything to do with me so there was that

There was a lot of reasons for my social exclusion

Things changed for me drastically when I was about 6 years old and my stepparents were going thr a messy divorce and my dad kicked her out and she came and kidnapped me from the street where I was playing and I was taken somewhere where there was a lot of stuff going on where I was exposed to a lot of stuff that probably most adults wouldn't have to deal with and so when I went back to my dad I wasn't the same person

That's when I sort of got separated from people I knew

It's kind of sad I suppose
Idk

Anyway duck fat

I'm really sorry all this happened to you both

It seems we all have a story to tell. You went through a lot too.
It's sometimes our past that can shape who we are today, which is why autism affects us all differently. To some it might be a blessing or even just a "meh" thing, but to others (like myself) it's been a bad experience. Having a diagnosis marred my social life at school, because before I got the diagnosis I was actually very well-accepted among my peers and the narcissist was actually my best friend. She was a bit strange and would often creep up from behind you and squeeze your butt hard and then giggle. She'd do it to others, not just me, and I don't think she was doing it maliciously. She was only little then. But I was almost 9 when I got diagnosed, and was 10 when it got blabbed out to the rest of the class by a girl in my class (not the narcissist) who already knew about my diagnosis as her mum was good friends with my mum and she had a brother with autism. And from then on the narcissist hated me and maybe thought Asperger's was another word for Leprosy or something. She somehow had an influence over the rest of the girls and, well, you know the rest.

Yeah I know and that's horrible that she was your friend before all of this
It must have hurt you a lot

It did, the way she actively excluded me from the group, often told me to go away, and anything I said was met with a sarcastic reply. This went on from around age 10 to about age 15 when I had finally managed to bring myself to walk away from her group and find some other friends. I don't know why I latched on to her and her group for the first 3 years of high school, I knew how excluded I was (I wasn't blind to non-verbal social signals) but I just stuck with them anyway because they all hung about together so I was like "why shouldn't I?" and didn't really think that hanging about with people from other classes was another option lol.
Originally the other girls probably would have been more friendlier towards me if this b***h hadn't of been there.

Yeah I know and it's so easy to torture yourself on top of what this person did to you as well

Wouldn't it be easy if we could just leave these things in the past where they belong

Yeah.

I've not been shut out of things at work per see but I've been left out of the loop at times. For example if something happened I don't find out about it until weeks later.

Examples- " Where's Dave?" " Oh didn't you hear? he quit 3 weeks ago" " Don't you remember, they said we were going to start doing it this way last week"

I mean, someone could have given me a heads up.

things like that happen to me too
I usually have to have a person who I can trust to bring me important information because it completely escapes me

Ohhh can I ever identify with THIS!! Back in my workplace in the 2000s, there were several times like that where there'd be a significant going-on with someone in my team, and I'd be the last to know... one time this woman who'd been with us for two years had accepted a lateral post in another unit, and I only found out when they were circulating the well-wishing card for signatures and I was like WHAAAATTT???

The really perverse thing is, they probably gossiped about YOU being clueless, when they were the ones who chose to exclude you!! !

Yeah, I can relate to that too, also if you ask you feel like you're being nosy, even though you're not really, you're just interested because you care and if everyone else knows then it isn't exactly top secret. I always like to know what goes on at work, just out of curiosity.

At a volunteer job I used to do I did get called nosy for wanting to know what goes on among the place, as cliques did form there. One time a woman had been off for 3 weeks because she had had an accident in the volunteering work place. I didn't know anything about this until I heard people talking about it, and noticing the woman's absence for a period of time I just asked the others who were talking about it what had happened. I saw them exchange looks then one of them told me that she had fallen down the stairs here and broke her ankle. Then a few days later I found out that look they'd exchanged when I had asked actually meant ''she's so nosy!'' But I wasn't really, as they were talking about it and also I realised that everybody but me knew about it, so it wasn't exactly top secret. And I think I had the right to ask, as anyone else would have done the same thing in that situation.

I hate the exclusionism thing. I saw this policewoman walk up to two policemen and ask "what's the situation?" and they just ignored her. It's like McCarthyism where you suddenly find you can't get a job and nobody will tell you why.

An Iranian bloke I knew went after a job in Iran, some time before the war, and the interviewer was very happy with him till he asked his religion and he said he was a Bahai. The interviewer suddenly looked very uncomfortable, but didn't say what was wrong. My friend just didn't get the job.

I think that's the kind of thing Aspies often have to put up with with just because we're a bit unusual, and we often want to be more genuine and open about problems, and when we start out we expect everybody else to be the same, and find all this behind-the-scenes stuff really ugly. I certainly do.