"Autistic people can't realize they are autistic."

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If that were the case, how come there are so many people on here who are autistic, know loads about it and know what makes them different from the average person? Even my 5yr old gets it, without me saying a word about it to her. She wrote in a letter to the teacher she'll be getting next term, 'Dear Teacher, I am different, cos my brain works different and works slow'. (I hasten to add that although her brain appears to work slow, she always gets the right answer.)

It is provably not the case, but it seems to be a common belief. I just wish I knew where that belief originated.

Well it is true in my case. I DO know I have Asperger syndrome, but as far as I am concerned it only affects me SOCIALLY, period. But other people assume I cant take care of myself when they look at the way my dress is messy. They are wrong. But they dont knwo they are wrong so they probably assume I am the one who doesnt realize full extend of my disorder.

For me there is a huge difference in understanding something myself and communicating the understanding to people (verbally is most difficult).

Years ago I was in therapy with the goal to realize what my problem was.
I figured by observing and comparison that my brain worked different.
I remember me saying literally "my head is wired differently".
Nobody in the therapy group, nor any psychologist ever understood what I meant to say back then ( >10 years ago).

I learnt about autism last year and I think I was not that wrong with my understanding in the therapy group years ago.

So then I did not know what autism was, yet I did understand that I had it (I could describe the phenomenon and its implications) and I had zero success explaining any of it to psychologists or fellow therapy-people.

So my opinion is that many autistic people realize that they are autistic (the concept).
Yet there is no way of proving that, because it requires something the very characteristic impedes.

Each of us knows what autism feels like, from the inside. What we're forever barred from knowing is what it feels like not to be like that.

There's a similar paradigm in play for the normals. While it's possible for them to imagine being us, they're severely handicapped when it comes to being right about what they're imagining.

I never knew I was different until someone told me I was. Also, I learned about ASDs in college and never thought twice about it. It took my best friend outlining (in writing) how each criterion applied to me for me to see that it fit.

I never knew. Rejected the notion when my Mother told me years ago and again when my daughter suggested it to me years ago. When the shrink told me I again rejected the idea. It took months before I agreed there was a possibility. Even now I struggle that everyone doesn't think what I think or know what I know. I honestly have a very hard time grasping it.

I had no idea that I thought differently from other people until my mid 20's. And even then, I chalked it up to 'personality'. I didn't realize that other people didn't really struggle with social issues the way I did until my 30's - and even then I clung to my 'personality'. I just assumed everyone had 'challenges' in life - I never realized that mine were significantly greater than others until I had my daughter in my mid 30's.

Even after my daughter was initially given a PDD-NOS label and started interventions I never made the connection. When I seriously started trying to figure out what was gonig on with her and started reading everything - the children's dx for Asperger's didn't sound anything like me... When I started expanding my knowledge - looking ahead into her future and started reading blogs and websites and forums with adults with Asperger's it kind of hit me in the face. Hard.

All the things I chalked up to the 'creative mind which had more control over me than I did' actually has a name. All the differences from other people I categorized as 'creatrive mind' and 'uncreative minds' - is effectively Asperger's and NT. I applied my own labels and discerned the differences pretty clearly on my own. Now I just have the proper titles for them. In someways, its just a minor change of perspective. In others, it could be life altering because i very well may have a disorder than cen be improved upon far beyond my own meager life attempts. It's like being left handed and teaching yourself to play a right handed guitar upside down. You might get good at it but you will never play quite like someone who's been taught properly.

the day the word aspergers was said to me the realised a few hours later how it fit me like a sock.

great discussion between verdandi and ana, very interesting.

Well, people who say stuff like this should ask themselves, is it actually one case in which the autistic is so low-functioning that they truly can't imagine what being autistic is like, or is it just that the autistic person knows they're autistic, but is unable or unwilling to express that knowledge verbally? Maybe those people think that the only way autism can manifest itself is like what the parents at Autism Speaks say that autism is.

And what if the autistic person has never been introduced to the concept of autism before? How many Aspies are there out there right now that have no clue what the disorder is and would never think to consider themselves 'disordered'? If you have never been given reason to consider autism I'm not sure why one would just assume that they are anything other than normal with a few personality quirks not shared by many others. The only real reason people think they are 'not normal' is when someone else points it out. Different, yes - I think alot of people figure out that they are 'different' but 'disordered different', not so much.

That's a good point. If the person is in an environment where their behaviors and mannerisms aren't considered to be abnormal, they wouldn't know. They might seem a little eccentric, but perhaps they wouldn't even need to go researching and pondering to themselves if they were autistic or not. Then again, would you even consider the person who has functioned reasonably well in society (lives on their own, has a friend or two or none, can communicate their needs) autistic just because they may show a few autistic traits? Doesn't everyone show very mild autistic traits in their lives?

Right, I had a lot of trouble with the idea that I was different, and didn't really realize I was different like that until I had gone through a lot of processing and discussion with people who know me. I had encountered the idea of being autistic before and usually either didn't think it applied to me, or realized some behavior applied, but still didn't think it applied to me. And I still have trouble with the idea that there's anything different about how I think compared to everyone else. This is why I spend so much time trying to work out things like social attribution tasks and compare NT responses to ASD responses to my own responses, to maintain some kind of baseline ideas of how my thought processes differ. At first - when I first started posting here - it was difficult for me to grasp the idea that I was autistic and quite so different from other people. I can't say that I have it perfectly now, either.

I've been trying to understand, looking for every point of difference I can find with other people, although I find some points of difference pretty hard to believe (like the aforementioned social attribution), and I've been trying to work through a lot of these differences in therapy, which can be hit or miss.

It wasn't an instant process, since I first knew I was most likely autistic three and a half years ago (when I was under a lot of stress - my grandmother died, my routines were constantly changing, people were coming and going unannounced and at high speed) and yet at the time I didn't really hold onto that knowledge because I had no context in which to place these things in contrast with other autistic or neurotypical people, and so I defaulted back to "I'm not really different from other people" until I was stressed again (constant auditory overload, with resulting lower capacity before shutdown) and forced to consider it on my own. It just so happened that at roughly the same time that my shutdowns were escalating, Pensieve was talking about shutdowns in explicit detail on another forum we both read. If she hadn't, I do not know if I would have started trying to work it out. At the time I already knew my difficulties went beyond ADHD, but didn't know how.

But I think there is a difference between not being able to understand that one is autistic, and not realizing that one is autistic until presented with enough evidence to see that one is autistic. And what I was asking about is the former - it's never possible to understand that one is autistic - rather than the latter, which is that realization that one is different prior to diagnosis or discovery is not consistent (not everyone knows they're different at a young age. or even into adulthood).



Yes. although this applies to a lot of conditions. People are never introduced to the concept of ADHD (or at least an accurate concept), fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, etc. and so never have any framework for understanding what is going on with them until it's pointed out to them. I know multiple people now who didn't even realize their pain had a central, singular cause until told. Prior to that point it was just a series of unconnected, random, aches and pains. This element is not unique to autistic spectrum disorders, although it may be that it's harder for some of us to work through it.

I did not know I had Asperger's syndrome until I watched a doctors daytime tv show where they disccussed the autism spectrum. I never heard the word Aspergers before watching that tv show then they described the traits of Aspergers and it sounded like they were describing me. They also mentioned people who grew up in the 70's and 80's were misdiagnosed as having ADHD then it really struck a cord with me so I went in for evaluation where they found I had Asperger syndrome and did not have ADHD.

Sorry but I think this is all BS that is REALLY pissing me off. My whole life I knew I was different and I could not get one f*****g single person to believe me yet they continue to crap on me for my differences instead of thinking that maybe I have autism. It's been almost ten years since I've been diagnosed and I can't get one single person to believe that I actually have autism. Not even my own family will believe what I've already been diagnosed with. This makes me angry that NTs would have the nerve to think we aren't capable of realizing our autism when I've been trying to get believe to realize I was neurogically different my whole f*****g life!! !

I am pissed now!! !!

I had no idea that I had a developmental disorder until I was diagnosed, I thought I had social anxiety 2 yrs before my diagnosis. Which I do but thats not the whole picture. This was mostly cause my mom told me my entire life I was just shy and even after I got my diagnosis she didnt accept until I went away to college and completely crashed. People went around commonly faulting me for not consciously doing things correct. It did feed into my lack of self-esteem. I felt I was just messed up as opposed to actually having a disability. My mom didnt understand aspergers till recently, after reading 10 billion self-help books and me explaining it to her for hrs she finally is starting to understand. When all the people around u think your simply a flawed up NT, u believe it. U keep comparing yourself to other NTs which doesnt work a lot of the times. For most its hard to see a disability in someone thats so mild and I think that can apply to other mild autistics on the spectrum.