Behind a glass wall

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Well, I didn't mean to sound like you could change your personality either. It is more like building a bridge and changing some behavior. All relationships are work. I'm not sure if any of them are natural. I think that is a misperception. From all the books I've read about relationships, none of them are easy and most of them seem overly complex.

I don't think an Aspie woman would be happy with a very extroverted, social guy. But there are plenty of introverted men who would like a more rational relationship. Men are easy to relate to on a rational level. But you must be willing to work at solutions to problems as they arise and that may mean focusing on another's needs when they're needy. That can be hard to do, but at the same time, it is very liberating.

I've been reading some horribly negative things about being married to an aspie and think most of it is psychobabble crap stirred up by marriage counselors trying to get aspie spouses to "validate" emotions, when they probably don't even realize there are emotions even to validate. Why not have them just talk to each other?

No one really knows each other to the core. There is always some hidden part. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many books written about how to understand men or understand women. It doesn't seem that different from the ugly and messy NT relationships I've known about.

In my particular case I think that's an important question for me to ask myself - am I trying to change myself because of someone else's needs, or am I doing it because I'm seeing something in myself that I don't like? If I'm trying to improve myself because of a specific issue with another person (their need) then I can usually pull it off pretty well... The problem starts when I'm trying to change myself just because *I* think there's a problem. In that case I end up with way too much self-awareness - self-consciousness and anxiety set in and I start acting pretty weird and scaring people away. Those are the situations I was thinking of when I said that it's better to just be happy with yourself/at peace with who you are.

I understand that it is very important to accept and love your “self.” That doesn't preclude bridge building. You are not really changing yourself in bridge building, but just changing behaviors, which are separate from self. I've been thinking about this and I've concluded that aspies are not the ones behind a wall. It is everyone else. They don't have any desire for the unvarnished truth about another person. Their empathy of emotions is nothing but an analogy of emotions. We feel emotions too strongly so we must back away from them lest we be consumed. The only solution to this quandary is to mentalize the emotion when you hear your partner talk about something emotional. We have great imaginations and can mentalize instead of letting ourselves feel strong - and often out-of-control - emotions. It requires work. Just like learning social conversation is work.

We need to connect because we ARE social creatures. Isolation brings us to despair and we try to rationalize it in all kinds of self-defeating ways. We need a small group of others in order to feel alive. Too many "others" in our lives is mentally exhausting, like running too many database queries simultaneously. For most of us, I believe, we need a corps of people we can trust. In order to gather the corps about us, we have to be prepared to listen to emotional criticism from others about our behavior (which is NOT ourselves) and keep the emotions in a box (my mental construct) locked tight and process their emotional speech rationally while validating (this is really important to NTs) their emotions. They basically want you to repeat their emotional states back to them. They don't really understand our intense emotions since they can only feel them as a shadow of emotion. Our emotions are too idiosyncratic for anyone to really understand and we need to accept that about ourselves. We can share joy and happiness with others, but cannot share dark emotions, as they are too overwhelming.

Your behavior is not you. When someone who cares about you criticizes your behavior he is not criticizing you. You can change the behavior in order to accommodate others, to make THEM feel more comfortable. It says nothing about you except that you are a caring and sensitive person. YOU are really the strong one in the relationship. When an NT person feels emotions as strongly as we do, they become psychotic and cannot function. The fact we function at all is truly amazing. We have to work on controlling our emotions since we have diminished Executive Function and they can take over and distort reality.

We have to let out our negative emotions, but we must find a way to do that is not self- destructive. I find writing very helpful because in the process of releasing the emotions, I have to call on my cerebral cortex, which finally regains control and puts things back into perspective. Trying to talk through emotions - the traditional psychoanalytic approach - just doesn't work because speech can access the emotions without using the analytical part of the brain. It always ends badly. Because you are sensitive and caring, we have to let our partners know this. Some don't have the analytical power to understand this. But as women, we have an advantage over aspie men because analytical NT men are much more common than analytical NT women.

On the other hand, we have a great capacity for positive emotion, but we are conditioned not to show it. We can become very enthusiastic and that enthusiasm can be channeled for good purposes. We can share our happiness with out partners. If we lock up all our emotions, then we may as well be a robot.. Happy emotions can also be freely shared if we can keep ourselves from becoming too swept away and obsessive. We can let ourselves feel other people's happy emotions too and need to keep looking for clues that they are experiencing them so we can connect to them in a real emotional level. Other people CAN make you happy, but you cannot depend on them to make you happy. That is an easy trap to fall into and I've done it many times. Both NTs and Aspies are both happy and not happy. We have to accept that and try not to force the other one into a happy state so we can get a happy fix of emotion. It doesn't work as the other person feels that they are being manipulated and may ascribe all sorts of motives to your behavior.

The other pitfall in relationships is becoming dependant because our NT partners can act as social buffers in relating to people necessary for daily living. We can also depend too easily on their better Executive Function ability to organize things properly. We must resist that temptation because eventually it will diminish you in their eyes. You begin to function in a role which is more of a child than a partner. You must force yourself to take care of mundane issues with people and organizational problems just as you did when you were single. Do not allow yourself to become a dependant child, as this will kill your relationship.

There are two obstacles to connecting: lack of emotional control and dependency. You can either choose to accept these problems and work on them or you can hide behind a false construct of a wall. All relationships are work and I’ve listened to women for over 30 years talk about them. They have as little insight into their relationships as we do. They experience many failed relationships and learn from them. The BIG difference is that they don't accept the responsibility for the failure. They had a part in it of course. But they don't think they are simply a defective person and can't have a relationship. They have lots of help and books to guide them. We don't have these support systems. But we are not defective; we just need to take a different route and look at problems logically (our strength) instead of emotionally (our weakness).

I've known that I was an aspie for about 12 years when my son's psychologist suggested it. I've had a lot of time to ruminate about it, slice and dice it, puree it, reconstitute it in my mind. I think we go through stages of self-awareness:

Denial (sometimes)
Relief
Questioning (am I really one?)
Denial (sometimes, depends on the person)
Despair
Acceptance
Adaptation

When you get to acceptance, there is a tendency to expect other people to accept you and understand you as an aspie. That's a pipe dream, really. It is just not going to happen the way you want it to. People cannot understand what they've never experienced. Empathy is just an analogy. There is nothing in their databanks like this. So we have to adapt in order to function and be happy. Remember, YOU are the strong one. You have gone through hell and back just to grow up. You can adapt if you accept yourself and others for who they are.

If you are seeing issues where there are none, then that is self destructive. If you're in a relationship where you can talk to your partner/husband, then talk about it. Be frank that you won't see the clues. I don't. He has to tell me. Thankfully, he's intellectual and rational so he does it because he knows it will go right over my head, he sees it happen all the time in my dealings with everyone. If your partner is really emotional about it, that's going to be difficult because they take it personally when there's nothing personal about it. That's the only way you could ever separate what is just in your head from what is real.

With the outside world, if you have friends or co-workers you can trust, you can always ask them if something is wrong that you should be worried about. I do that because I won't ever figure it out on my own. I don't know how many times I've thought I was finally reading people right only to find out they were all angry with me about something and saying nothing to me. I haven't had that many problems finding people to help me do that. Most of them are just relieved to find out I'm aware that I have no clue what's going on around me and I'm not just being insensitive.

You just have to figure out your own ability level and go from there. Everyone is different.

Amy, luckily right now I'm not really in a relationship and I'm kind of starting to understand how bunk they kinda are (I may well find someone some day but I realize I need to be really picky, take my time, and even be a bit up on myself or cocky just for the sake of my future and for the sake of having a good handle on that). Overall with your struggles on that muzzled feeling which we've talked about so much, I think of it like this - that's the physiological feeling behind knowing what you want to do but not having the means to do it. For the longest time I thought it was physical nervous system block (to a point it may have been), I was always gnawing and clenching my jaw because it felt like something of that wast telecast up through my head and when I felt that way it felt as if I was gnawing through all that or delivering the blood flow (I've come to find that it probably doesn't do much on its own but I think the act does focus me and feeling that sensation has me feeling like 'yeah, I am putting my due diligence in here').

I think the fact that you've been as serious about finding the answer to these things for years and that you won't rest easy until you find them actually doesn't put you in such a bad place. Like we'd kind of joked about before, you'll tend to get what you want just a good 4 or 5 years after you really felt like it was do or die time. The funniest thing is yeah, part of it is trying to discipline and control your nervous system but the other part which you yourself can't fully deliver on is life experiences and having enough of the right ones to really reshape and iron out whatever wrinkles your perception of reality still has in it (for me trying to emotionally and point-of-view retag my world has worked a lot but again, just like I do have success I do have to give ground to some of the more gestalt based stuff which I can only help in terms of my more overt actions). After a certain point though the progress does take a bit of a j-curve upward, you do have more times where you notice the acceleration and you do stand back like "Damn...I really have made some things happen haven't I...". With the...what... 7 or so years that I've been pushing this specific issue with myself and trying a lot of what I just mentioned I've noticed how much its helped me stabilize - ie. I also no longer feel quite as much of the rollercoaster in my functioning from where my energy or brain chemistry is at when I first wake up or what have you.

Overall I'll leave you with this - I have faith in you, for as long as I've known you I can tell you get it but its really just about trying to get your emotions around it the right way. Just keep trying and every time that odd feeling hits you like your seeing more into NT or his/their (Josh, your family & friends) perspective and actually feeling an emotion more toward what they'd feel than you had before seriously - entertain it, analyze it, and try to fill yourself with it as much as you can to where you feel like you can more easily radiate it around them. Getting your core in sync with everyone elses is much harder than any sort of social script or cheap social prescription someone might try to give, moreover like you know practice makes easier so the fact that you keep chipping away at this it tends to mean you'll be spending less and less every day to get the same amount if not better out of yourself.

I don't think she's precluding that so much as it feels like what she's fighting is all physical. That's a struggle I used to have a lot moreso and it seemed like her and I were about the only people who were able to identify on it. Its like you have all the desire, all the willpower, have tried every trick in the book to overcome that wall which keeps you from projecting your emotions outward accurately but with whatever means you feel like you have its as if your powerless. It might sound like anxiety but it doesn't really seem to be tied to the same sort of mechanism at all and I think the only real variance we noticed was how much mental energy we had to go around in terms of being able to just jam our thoughts and willpower through the bottleneck and just force it to be. If you see either one of us photographed as well you should see what we look like when we've had time to ourselves to sort of charge up and face the day and then what we look like when we've put ourselves through the grinder - its almost like seeing someone who looks normal and then seeing someone who has Parkinson's or Multiple Sclerosis (our eyes are bugged out, the color and nuance kinda leaves our faces, and yeah - it definitely messes with a lot of people's heads when they see it which means you have to be that much more clever with your words to try and mitigate the damage). I know your shooting more for the emotional advice which is cool, points all well taken, though I think her first post didn't really communicate all that she meant to fill you in on.

Matt I guess I didn't communicate very well, did I? Thanks for helping me clarify, it's all exactly right. And SeriousGirl, thanks for your posts too. Definitely food for thought.

As for the physical vs neurological, I've been thinking about that a lot today (after being reminded of how helpful stimulants can be). I think it's both - there's two things going on. It starts out as a neurological issue - our wiring is such that it takes a lot of effort and energy (compared to what it would take for an NT) to pull off socialization, communication, outwardly projecting our real personalities, etc. That leads to/causes the physical issue - lack of energy. We get drained and that's what ends up stopping us from doing what we want. I think NT's at least can still function on low energy (within reason), but because it takes more fuel for us to do certain things, we hit a wall sooner and more noticably when the energy runs low. I think another ingredient in this whole thing, too, is our sensory filters - we're trying to process so much stuff that should be getting filtered out, that drains us too. The only thing though - I think there must be more to it than just this stuff, otherwise more people on the spectrum would be able to identify with what a couple of us are describing. It's a piece of the puzzle at least, not that I should be analyzing it so much anyway - it would be wiser to save that energy for more important things...

Yeah, definitely. The times when we do succeed at doing something the way we'd really like, not only does that give you the confidence and assurance that it IS possible, you can take that and use it as a learning experience to help you out in the future. The more it happens, the easier it gets, which in turn causes it to happen more often... and on it goes.