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Obsession - I don't think of it that way. If something interests me, I find out all about it. I immerse myself in the topic/experience. As opposed to NTs, who seem to skitter quickly over the surface of topics, not landing on any one topic - like those bugs that skim across the surface of water. We're more like scuba divers. I don't think it's developmental. It hasn't changed since I first read Moby Dick in 1964. (A great year - Moby Dick and Beatlemania!)

Yes. I'm pretty sure it's that NTs are wired to have people as a special interest, and simply don't have the energy/mental space left over to use for worthwhile things after they exhaust all their time and cognitive resources thinking about PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE. We lack that wiring, to greater or lesser degrees, so we have vastly more cognitive space to use on important things than an NT with the same total "thinking power." Of course, part of having people as a special interest is being attuned to those things, so it probably is ALSO cultural.

And speak for yourself about being oblivious to cultural pressures. I'm aware enough to know who I am is not an acceptable person to be in this society.



No.



That's a ridiculous thing to say.
1. Emotional maturity =/= intellectual maturity =/= years of experience
2. Why couldn't a nine-year-old master those things? It seems to me unlikely but plausible for an intelligent nine-year-old to do so.
3. "Emotional maturity" isn't some single thing that goes up at some rate so that it reaches precisely the same level in all NT nine-year-olds.



What's the difference between someone who's emotionally 29 and someone who's emotionally 32? What's the difference between 50 and 55? Between 70 and 80?



As we speak I'm spending my teenage years being not normal. I cope by remembering that normal teenage girls get date-raped, get pregnant, angst over boys, commit suicide, waste their lives with friends who'll never mean anything and don't do half the interesting things I do. Sometimes I still wish I knew what it was like, but what I'm doing with myself can't be that much worse.



My brain is wired differently, so there are things I'm really good at and things I'm really bad at. I don't use body language and stuff the same way most people do, so social stuff is really hard for me. I tend to focus a lot on one thing, and I can seem creepy-obsessed, but I end up knowing more about it and getting better at it than most people ever get to be at anything. Just trust the literal meaning of my words and treat me like a robot with no common sense and you'll find I'm a fun person.

1. I think people on the spectrum become obsessed with things because they appeal to us on an intellectual, sensory and/or emotional level. Our obsessions bring us great comfort and joy, so we keep wanting more and more of them, almost like a legal high. As for the subject matter of the obsessions - well, that is highly dependent on the person's personal preferences and what they find fascinating, and perhaps age and level of functioning come into play as well.

2. Yes, I do agree that part of having AS is having a stunted emotional development. My biological age is 20, but I've been told that I function at about the level of a 14 to 16 year old. I can go out with friends, put on makeup/dress up, cook my own food and clean the house. Back when my biological age was around 14 - 16, I functioned at around the level of a 10 or 11 year old (no friends, watching cartoons, wearing childish clothing, couldn't cook or clean, couldn't be left unattended). It's taken me a long time to get to where I am now. I just hope that I don't regress.

3. I sometimes feel sad that I never enjoyed my teenage years to their fullest. But it was hard to enjoy it because so many things were working against me, such as having mental illnesses, getting bullied in school and eventually dropping out, financial difficulties of my family, sharing a house with people I didn't like, hormones driving me crazy, etc. So I console myself by saying that I'm at a better, happier place in my life right now, and I should focus on enjoying this time in my life because it's not going to last forever.

4. I've had to explain Asperger's to people before. I just tell them the basics - problems with social interactions/communication, intense & narrow interests and rigid routines. But something I've learned is that it's hard for people to "get" it unless they live with you, and even then understanding isn't always guaranteed.

1. I don't really have special interests, though I've been obsessed with one band for about 16 years, but the way I understand special interests is not just that they provide relief. I think that's an effect rather than a cause. I think that people with AS tend to be more focused and an interst just kind of takes over.

2. I think I definitely have emotional immaturity, but that has nothing to do with being able to do non-emotional adult things like paying bill sor having a job (though I don't have a job). Emotionally, I feel like a 12 year old in the sense that I am easily wounded by other people's bad acts and have this naive expectation that people will have integrity or be interested in the truth.

3. I don't cope. Now that I'm 46 it seems harder than ever to overcome the relative isolation (I do have a few friends and a nice family) and lack of accomplishments, and I worry about what I will do and what will become of me in the future. I think there is some truth to what others have said that at 40 you get to a point where you sort of have things figured out, but I don't know how that will help me, personally.

4. I'm not the best person to answer this, but I did sum it up for someone once by saying I am eligible to join Mensa (which is to say I have above average intelligence but I am no genius) but I am emotionally a 12 year old.

1. For my part, it seems like my mind gets "stuck" on things, like a record player skipping and playing the same few notes over and over.

2. Yes, I have always felt younger than I was. When I was 16-18, I still wanted to do stuff a 12-14 year old would do, and my best friend was that age. At 30, I'm only now feeling like I can settle into a somewhat normal adult life, but I still have many many childlike qualities.

3. I look at how other people are. They have spouses, houses, children, mortgages, but none of them seem to be happier than me. In fact, lots of people would be jealous of the freedom I have to do what I want without having to worry about debts, kids, etc.

4. Socializing for us is like driving on an icy road. Every turn is either too much or not enough. We weave about constantly trying to compensate for our mistakes and avoid catastrophe. We can't go fast; we have to pay attention and concentrate; just driving a short distance can be exhausting. The ice only exists for us, though. We watch the people around us whiz by without a moment's pause. Sometimes we slow them down so they honk and complain. Still, we do the best we can with everyone around us whizzing by.

I haven't the foggiest. And when I don't know something, I try really hard not to invent an answer.



I don't think emotional underdevelopment is a necessary feature of being autistic. For some people it's part of it, and for other people it's not. But when that underdevelopment happens, I don't think it's accurate to fix an age onto it like that. It feels like.. I don't know the word. I'll try to describe it though.

People with developmental disabilities have been stereotyped as "children in adult bodies" and the like, and that sort of thinking is where the entire concept of a "mental age" came from, and from "mental age" came "emotional age" and so forth. This was used, and continues to be used, to oppress people. We're seen as not "real" adults just because some aspect of our cognitive skills resembles (in a very superficial way) the average cognitive skill of someone younger than us. From that comes the idea that we're not fit to have sexual or romantic relationships, drive cars, marry, vote, own our own belongings, live on our own, etc.

I've spent my entire adult life fighting for the right to be considered an adult so I could have the basic rights given to adults. When I was right around my 19th birthday (where I live legal adulthood starts at 18 ), my psychologist told me that even though I was chronologically an adult I wasn't a "real" adult. He said that this gave him the right to make major life decisions for me. He said that because I had been in the system, I was not technically an adult. Looking back, I think he was lying to me in order to keep me dependent on him and obedient to him. It must have looked like it was easier to simply convince me I was not an adult, rather than have to go through an entire legal hearing to convince someone else that I needed a guardian. So he just pretended that I legally wasn't an adult and hoped that I wouldn't ask too many questions of the wrong people. And even after I got wise to him and broke away from him later that year, I have had people try really hard to deny me the rights given to adults. I once had a medical professional, in front of me, describe me as having (direct quote) "the cognitive functioning of an infant".

Anyway. So, I feel like to assign myself a mental or emotional age younger than I am... it would be feeding into the same belief system that denies people like me or others I know basic rights given to adults. I know that people don't always mean it that way, but the whole idea that people even have a mental or emotional age is intimately tied to the idea that people with a low mental or emotional age aren't "real" adults and don't deserve "real" adult rights.

And in addition to that sort of ethical consideration, it just doesn't make sense to me. The idea of being emotionally older or younger than one's age just doesn't... how to describe. You have reality on the one hand, and then this "emotional age" thing on the other, and if you put one in front of the other they don't match up. It's an oversimplification, and one I'm not comfortable with using. My emotions are the emotions of me-at-30-years-old. They are not the emotions of someone else at a different age entirely. If you look at it from outside of the standard framework, the idea of it making sense just disintegrates rapidly.



I didn't have what's seen as a normal adolescence either. I spent much of it in the psych and special ed systems, including a lot of time isolated from "normal" experiences either in institutions or stuck at home being 'supervised' by my parents.

But the thing is, most people in the world don't have what's considered a "normal" childhood, adolescence, or any other phase of life. That "normal experience" we're all supposed to desire, is one restricted to reasonably well-off people in specific parts of the world. Most of the world doesn't fit that description. It's not even close to a tragedy that we don't all resemble the prototypical well-off white Western person.

Here is a blog post I wrote about this entire topic. It's mostly about how people complain that having a disabled relative "robbed them of" a childhood/adolescence/whatever, but it can just as easily be applied to have some disabled people complain of the same thing. How do I cope with this? By realizing that lacking a "normal childhood" or "normal adolescence" puts me right in there with the vast majority of people in the world and that this is nothing to complain about. Some of the experiences I did have are something to complain about (because they involved injustice and ableism), but not because they somehow robbed me of this mythical "normal" childhood experience. But anyway, the quote goes into more detail, although from a slightly different perspective (it focuses on nondisabled people who claim not to have had "a real childhood" and the like just because disabled people happened to exist around them



The only way I could explain it in general terms would use such broad generalities that it would be nearly useless as an explanation. Something like "Autistic people differ from the norm in terms of our perceptions of the world, our thoughts, and our actions and responses to those thoughts and perceptions."

The only way I can easily be more specific than that is to describe the experiences of a particular subgroup of autistic people. In the case of people like me:

I experience the world more directly and intensely than most people do. It is as if I am swimming in a sea of sensations of all kinds, all swirled together. Rather than thinking in ideas, symbols, words, or abstractions, I mostly think in terms of direct sensory experiences of the world and the patterns that form between those experiences. I often process this information in a very physical sort of manner, where my body (without my meaning to do it) moves in an unusual manner that helps me understand what I am perceiving and helps me feel connected to the world around me. These odd movements can also be how my body helps me avoid overload or do many other things. I also have vast differences between doing something deliberately and voluntarily (which I find difficult to impossible), and doing something involuntary (without meaning to or being able to stop it), nonvoluntary (not started on purpose, but sometimes possible to suppress), or triggered (set off in response to some sort of cue or event), all of which I find much more easy and sometimes am quite proficient at. This affects postures, actions, language, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and memories, and can manifest as trouble starting, stopping, executing, continuing, combining, or switching.

(That list of things in the last sentence comes from this page here on movement differences which got it from a particular book. It's a very concise way of summing up that particular set of difficulties.)

Of course, that paragraph describing the traits that get me called autistic describes only my traits and the traits of those most like me. I can't concisely describe autism in general without it becoming far too general a set of descriptions. I could probably explain other people's autistic traits if I knew them well enough too. You'll notice that in that list of traits, I don't mention many of the things that professionals deem as "central" to autism, such as social skills. That's because my social differences are all products of these much more core differences in perception, thought, and action. A friend of mine made the excellent point that there are really three sets of traits having to do with autistic people. Here's an image of a chart she drew up about it:

[img][800:1056]http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/6549/autconceptchart.png[/img]

(From her post Conceptualizing Autism.)

Note that she divides autistic characteristics into three parts. There are the neurological differences in the brain itself (part 1), which she notes are not outwardly visible. There are the cognitive and perceptual styles that characterize the experience of being autistic (part 2), which she notes are also not outwardly visible. And then there are the observable traits and behavior that usually get a person recognized as autistic (part 3), which she notes are outwardly visible. What I did above is describe what part 2 is for me. (Most of which is actually the same as for the woman who wrote the post and made the graphic above, but that's not too relevant.) I agree with her that it's unfortunate that ideas of autism too often see as "central" the outwardly observable differences, which are really only manifestations of the other two, and at that they are manifestations in a particular environment and society. Here is a quote from her that sums up my beliefs as well:

The orange column on the right of the diagram summarizes what most people probably think of as "autism" -- that is, the externally-visible things that generally get people suspected of being, or identified as being, autistic in the first place.

This is where we see such things as diagnostic checklists, observations about a person's developmental milestones (and when/if they meet certain expected ones), outward actions, language use, body language, tone of voice, social/educational/occupational success (or lack thereof) in the absence of modifying factors, etc.

What is interesting, and perhaps a bit unnerving, is that this category is at once the one people tend to put the most stock in (in terms of identifying autistics, in terms of determining what educational supports we might need, etc.) and the one most subject to cultural biases, personal biases, misinformation, and the ever-changing social lens through which different kinds of people are generally viewed.

So, I'm far more interested in part 2, the middle column, which is all about our actual experiences of the world. And that is what I use to define what autism means to me. I should also note that I don't see autism as a thing. It's not a thing. There is no "autism" that exists separately from autistic people. Autistic people are concrete and real, autism is an abstraction based on our (real or purported) similarities as observed by certain professionals usually. Each autistic person has a slightly (or majorly) different set of inner traits that result in us being recognized as autistic. So when I talk about my "type of autism," I'm really not talking about a thing called autism. I'm talking about a set of inner experiences that result in outward actions that cause people at this point in history to regard me as autistic. It's important to keep that in mind when looking at what autism means. It means something different for each one of us, because each one of us has different inner experiences that lead to the outer actions that get us seen as autistic. (And just as the outer behavior can result from different inner experiences, two inner experiences that are quite similar can result in very different outward behavior. The author of that article on conceptualizing autism has nearly the same inner experiences I do, but her outward behavior differs at least enough to cause us to have been diagnosed as on two different points on the spectrum, when really inwardly we're ridiculously close in our experiences of the world.)

IdahoRose – If it’s any consolation, you sound much more emotionally mature than I was at your age and, as I said earlier, I’m now essentially ‘normal’, so you have every reason to be optimistic I believe.

bee33 – Your fourth answer reinforces what I’m now pretty certain of – that Autistics are often underdeveloped and overdeveloped (possibly because the brain tries to compensate?). Many of us are ‘Rain Men’ basically, though not as extreme.

Zur-Darkstar – I agree with your third answer to a degree, but surely life is meaningless if you don’t do something with it, other than just chilling out. And doing something with life usually necessitates having responsibilities.

Anbuend – Thanks for that very interesting response. I’m sorry to hear that you went through such a tough time. I don’t know when this was, but I found psychologists to be a bit clueless about Aspergers (though I haven’t seen one in a while). However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to compare an Autistic person’s emotional age, as a gauge of their condition, with the emotional age of their peers. The bottom line is that to function as adults we have to fit in to wider society. If nothing else we need money to survive. I’m not saying your psychologist was right to say what he did I hasten to add.

I agree with you that the vast majority of people worldwide don’t have idyllic teenage lives, but it’s frustrating knowing that the ONLY thing keeping many of us from having a great teenage life is Aspergers.

I’m becoming more convinced that Autism is a very wide umbrella term that essentially encompasses varying forms of brain underdevelopment. In fact, pretty much anyone could be classified as Autistic if their brain is underdeveloped in a way that compromises their ability to function, without compromising their intelligence or rendering them physically disabled, i.e. it’s basically non-intellectual mental disability. In addition I believe that many (but not all) Autistics acquire some sort of ‘gift’ as a compensation for what they lose. I don’t mean a ‘gift’ from a higher being, I simply mean that the brain tries to compensate for underdevelopment in one area by overdeveloping another area. Maybe this explains obsessions – the overdeveloped part of brain needs a greater degree of stimulation than NT brains. I also believe there are huge numbers of people with VERY mild Autism/Aspergers that are never diagnosed, i.e. their brain is ever so slightly underdeveloped in certain areas (and overdeveloped in others), but not enough to prevent them from living an essentially ‘normal’ life, with a successful career, marriage, etc (Bill Gates and Richard Nixon might be in this category, for example).

All those are completely different things. Human development isn't linear and one-dimensional. There's tons of different skills that develop at each their pace in any direction, influencing the development of other skills in any way. The brain is more like an ecosystem than a machine. Assuming that because someone can do x they can / can't do y is harmful. It leads to "high functioning" people not getting the help they need and starving / living in appalling conditions, while "low functioning" people are assumed to be sub-human and don't get to do things they could do.

What kept me from having a good teenage life was trying to be something I wasn't. I think the entire notion that there's just one life, one set of experiences, that you must have had to have lived a good life to be silly. A good life is one that's good for you, not for some imaginary normal person.

Or just say that it develops DIFFERENTLY, which can lead to both good and bad things. Claiming that the good and the bad are somehow separate doesn't make sense. Being tall leads to being more likely to hit your head on stuff (bad), but makes it easier to reach things on high shelves (good). You can't remove the bad results of tallness without removing the good ones too.

Thank you. I hope that my emotional development continues. I'm already a lot better at passing for "normal" than I was before. Some of my friends have even told me that they couldn't tell I was autistic until I told them I was!