Worst Experiences From AS?

Post Reply New Topic

Being committed to a psychiatric hospital and having a battery of electroconvulsive treatments (shock therapy) when I was 11 years old (back in 1967). That was at a time when, at least in the U.S., all children on the spectrum were diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. There was no separate autism category in the DSM-I (or DSM-II).

I'm quite incompetent when it comes to "getting" subtle tones of voice and subtle body language, often causing me to needlessly get angry at people because I misinterpret certain tones of voice as being condescending or belittling. Also, I often take certain comments literally if the tone is too subtle and it is not a common figure of speech.

My mother was never diagnosed with Aspergers unlike me , I'm lucky at least now I know and understand who I am, but my mother was wrongly diagnosed with metal disorders and had quite a few electroconvulsive treatments over the years, so had to deal with her many suicide attempts and having an unavailable mother who always felt like she never belonged and consequent of this, she was never happy in this world.

I was diagnosed at an early age (somewhere between 5 and 7, and was originally pdd-nos diagnosed shortly after birth), and my parents exposed me to facts of AS early on... so I've lived my entire life knowing about what was going on...

I suspect that my father has Asperger's. He is now 88 and in an assisted living community. However, he never received treatment. In my case, the problem was that the Asperger's was, when I was a child, compounded by bad comorbid OCD.

My worst experience has been the crap that I'm living through now. My ex husband used me getting my almost 16 year old son diagnosed with AS as an excuse to get custody. He's called me crazy, told me that I have Munchausen's, and convinced the judge that I was only out to get more money from him. He uses our AS against both of us and creates a stressful environment that neither of us can cope with. Court sucks for me. I have no lawyer to temper the stress reactions in court, so I often look like a raving lunatic, I'm sure. It's horribly unfair.

It's especially awful because my whole world is accommodations and in court, I have no way to make those accommodations for myself.

I don't know about you, but in a world that goes round and round on the turn of a car wheel, don't you think 34 is pretty old to just learn to drive? I tried to learn from 17 onward, couldn't do it, I could always pass the written part, never the driving part and I must have taken it 20 times over the years.
Not being able to learn to drive, even though I tried so hard with everything I had for so many years, is just one AS thing that affected my life, and that particular test---to drive 9 hours away--was one I failed, when it really counted. Does this explain it for you any better or were just being obtuse on purpose?

I learn to drive and pass a test in 3 months but still can not, do not like to drive - but this is due to my associated condition dyspraxia NOT aspergers.

There is help with this www.dyspraxia.org.nz

Quite often aspergers / autism gets blamed for everything, when quite often its the associated condition thats the problem..

Perhaps you didn't understand when i said that i had only realised that i had Aspergers this last summer, or that the trail of destruction, waste, and mistakes that i described was from BEFORE discovering about ASD?
Or you thought that i had had lots of unwanted sex, an abortion, drink problems, become a mother, and wrecked jobs and wasted studies in the space of a few months?

I said " throughout my life" :!
I want an apology because at the moment not only does your use of my post as a purported example of "living up to a dx" not hold up at all, BUT makes it look as if my bad experiences (over at least 30 years )were all some sort of,( unconscious or deliberate), acting out ( of a diagnosis i hadn't got yet).
I DID NOT EVEN KNOW ABOUT ASPERGERS UNTIL ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, AND ONLY UNDERSTOOD THAT IT MIGHT APPLY TO ME THIS SUMMER!! !! !!


If you wanted to talk about YOUR own experiences of having done this, FINE, but why drag ME, and MY experiences of the worst of ASD, into it? Why mention MY post at ALL ? What did it have to do with your own experiences of having acted out etc?

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Dec 2007, 8:03 am, edited 5 times in total.

Go fish.

My worst experience would have to be people disregarding what I say as irrelevant, just because of AS!
They think that because of the "label" I am saying things that do not mean a thing. It's kind of hard to explain, so I will give an example of what happened.

I was at my course one day, in which everyday I walked home for lunch. It was 10 minutes from lunch time and it looked like it there was going to be a thundershower, possible thunderstorm. Now, weather is my "obsession" and I know quite a bit about it. I tried to tell mt tutor before I left that there was going to be a storm, so turn off their computers.
She said..."Yes, ok then we will do,".

I walked home, half way home it started to storm, then it turned into quite a terrible storm with thunder, lightning, rain and winds more than 100 kmph. My mother dropped me back off at course after lunch, when I walked in the door, there was someone trying to get their computer to go. I said..."What happened?".
The manager replied..."The computer shorted out on the storm,".

They didn't turn the computers off in the storm like I said so!

Now...that is just a classic example of people NOT taking what I say seriously. They disregard things that I say all of the time. This is just one of many examples.

It's ok, i have realised that you simply mistakenly leapt on my post as evidence of someone else having done the same as you. I know i do the same, literally misreading something because of what i have experienced myself. It's a classic. It contributes to serious lack of judgement in aspies, ( this constant referral to laboriously constructed interpretation of own experience to "evaluate"/check data), because own perspective is already so unreliable, and it leads to repeated mistakes/misinterpretations of events.
As i described.

It explains it to me fine, thank you. I'm sorry if I seemed rude.

worst....hmmmm maybe my restaint experienses

You were restrained? How? Why?

I'm still isolated from society.

I can't pick up on voice or body language, I'm slow at understanding comments and the meanings behind them, and so forth. Not having social skills in general.