Aspergers and victim complex

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I can see how it might be pretty hard to alter your diet if you get diabetes, so I am thinking in some cases its more likely the person is having trouble with that rather than flat out refusing....though if someone with diabetes wanted to self harm refusing to eat right would do that, or if they are suicidal and just don't care anymore they could refuse to eat right. I guess all I am saying is there are too many variables in any given senerio to make the assumption someone is just willfully flat out refusing to do anything to help themselves so people will feel sorry for them over the internet unless the person explicitly words it like that.

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Last edited by marshall on 02 May 2014, 5:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Poor listeners make bad advisers, and there are a whole bunch of them out there on the Internet, who care not a whit to support you, but only to advise you, to direct you, to be known in their communities as the fonts of wisdom for all members, while being completely unaware of what ignoramuses they are.

Marshall: That's what we should do to the Bullies!

Absolutely nobody here is advocating kicking people when they are down. That would be an asinine notion--and it would make that person a bully, worthy of getting his teeth knocked in.

There comes a time when a person just has to say "stop!--I've been harassed, bullied, stomped upon , etc. too long now! My mind and my body are my temple!" I'm not saying this attitude will reap immediate results; I'm saying, with assiduous application to that philosophy, that results will come.

I absolutely agree there are many victims who are in situations which are beyond their control (at the present moment). The key is to make the attempt to change the situation, create control in one's life.

Making fine distinctions between various concepts does not get the job done. Proving your thesis correct does not get the job done. It doesn't matter if a person suffers from a "victim complex" or is under some other psychological disorder/concept. What matters is that progress must be made. We who are within the Spectrum have to right not to be victims. We must assert that right.

I don't think her intention was to kick people when they are down. I think she's talking about people who actually do have options and the ability to change their circumstances even a little but refuse to because they are just eat up with the "I can't" mentality. An example is a poster that used to come on here who talked about his inability to get a girlfriend for several reasons and one of them was his lack of hygiene. Everybody advised him to shower but he just wouldn't because he has AS and he hates the sensation of it. Every time someone would give him a suggestion he had a reason why what they said wouldn't work. Showering is a simple thing to do, and as much as I literally hate to shower, I do it because if I don't I look terrible and smell bad. It takes ten minutes and can make a huge difference, but this guy just refused to do it and then kept on complaining because girls wouldn't talk to him.

Another example is a small faction of guys on here who feel like they are entitled to having a girlfriend. They will post about it and then get so angry about other people having relationships and keep complaining that it isn't fair, yet they refuse to take any advice about what they could do to be more attractive to women. They seem to completely overlook the fact that while yes, some guys have girls falling all over them and don't do anything to cause that, other guys have to work really hard at improving themselves and by doing so, they end up meeting a girl that becomes their girlfriend. I fully understand that they can't become Mr Suave Don Juan, but they seem to refuse to do anything at all to help themselves. Then they decide they are a victim of society or AS or women or whatever they want to blame.

It's like the guy who wouldn't shower. He only posted about it over and over and over again yet he couldn't take ten minutes to get in the shower and get clean, which would help his problem out a lot. It's also like the way people will label anything that offends them as "bullying". There is a difference between somebody being a general douchebag and someone bullying you. I've heard people say they were bullied when someone else insulted them one time, or when they weren't invited to something, or when someone didn't want to be their friend. That isn't bullying. Maybe they were bullied in the past and are overly sensitive now to things like that but they tend to see everything unpleasant as bullying, or someone having it out for them.

I complain an aweful lot, but I know what I have to do to fix my situation and I do try to do it. I can't fix everything, and yes my AS does make things harder for me a lot of times but I'm not society's victim because people may sometimes not like me or may be mean to me. I don't just complain and then sit back and wait for the entire world to change to suit me. That doesn't happen. We have to fit in with the world. I'm also aware that not everyone has the ability to do what I've done. I get that. However, that doesn't make them a victim.

Are there people who are victims? Yes! Most definately YES! Are there people so beaten down that they just can't see anything else and they truly feel like victims? YES! They need help, not being put down. But there are also so many people now who see everything as victimising them. It's because we live in a culture of entitlement. I'm not entitled to a relationship, but I am entitled to the opportunity to try and find one. I'm not entitled to a job, but I'm entitled to go out and apply for one. I'm not even entitled to food or healthcare but I am entitled to try and get those things. People who for legitimate reasons cannot support themselves should be taken care of by society, that's an unspoken pact pretty much, but people who can do for themselves but won't because their feelings are hurt, rather than having a true problem, diminish the true victims out there.

Well, victim blaming is at work here, hale_bopp. If I posted here crying about how no one likes me, I would expect people to be empathetic. I assume when someone says this, they mean one of two things:

1. No one REALLY likes them. It's not delusional at all.
2. They are breaking down to the point where they truly believe no one likes them, so it doesn't matter what reality is in that moment. What matters is they TRULY believe it.

I do indeed see a lot of victim blaming here. It also seems people don't like others receiving sympathy. Or, even if they receive it, it has to be in limited amounts. Then you have to boot strap your way out of your own problems, because that TOTALLY works. Yes.

The people who don't have great hygiene want to be listened to. They want others to acknowledge that it's hard for them to shower, they want empathetic responses, and sure, they might want to have a pity party. I'm an advocate of pity parties. I think they are a good way to get emotions out. They do not want people to say "If you don't do want I say, you are then the cause of your own misery". Or "If I can do it, you can do it". Again, this is a lack of perspective outside of ones own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

I see many people who are abused and they can't leave. People tell them to leave, but they conveniently ignore the fact that these people have no money, have no voice, have no access to therapy, have no family/friends, so on. These same people would pooh pooh someone in that circumstance as a victim, because it's been 20 years and they still haven't left the situation. The blame is, for some reason, not on the abuser, even though that person would abuse someone else regardless of if the current victim left. No, the victim is somehow allowing their abuser to abuse them.

In a less extreme example, someone gets called names a lot at school. It's happened for years. The person never sticks up for themselves. Since the person doesn't do that, they are somehow allowing their bullies to continue to hurt them. People try to empower this person by saying "You deserve not to be bullied!", yet they never think the person doesn't have the strength do stand up for themselves. They give all the advice in the world, but don't try to physically help the person. The victim is viewed as having learned helplessness, and then people start to turn on that person. They begin to say things like "well, if you don't help yourself, I can't help you". They ignore the fact that they COULD do something, but they expect a broken person to stand up to years of bullying with no confidence. Once again, the bullies do not share adequate blame. In this situation, the lens is shifted from the bullies to the victim, but in a negative way. The victim is blamed for the cause of their own suffering, and people don't have to worry about the situation anymore. They "know" the fix is the person standing up for themselves (not the bullies being punished) but the person refuses, so their own problems are their own fault.

What about a "silly" example? A person smells really bad. They are told to shower by countless people. The person seems to not comply. This person is made fun of all the time. People who used to feel empathy and sympathy now say she deserves to be made fun of. Some even go as far as to say this person deserves to be alone, and they can't blame society for putting those standards of smelling good on her. Later on, she was diagnosed with Trimethylaminuria. She was showering all along, but still smelled. Upon informing people she has this problem, they still make fun of her. She can still put on some deodorant or something, right? This person can't blame people nor expect people to change, because that's reality. Yet, in my opinion, she SHOULD expect them to change. The majority of people keep telling her she needs to change, though. I tell her she needs to find good friends who care. (This one was a real story, by the way.)

People with autism who don't shower may not smell like in the situation above. To act like all they need to do is simply shower, though. is silly. Those people do not simply have a victim complex. They have legitimate problems that you all are failing to recognize in an effort to reinforce your view that humans have more control over things than what they do. Oh, if only this person JUST showered or stopped complaining, right? I mean, it's so simple, this person obviously must be not doing this very easy task on purpose at this point. Why, it's so easy, that this MUST be the reason! If you call people out on this, they tend to begin to say things like "Well, I never said it was EASY. I recognize this person has legitimate problems. *Insert some story about how you overcame something even though it was hard. which is just another variation of 'If I can do it, you can do it.'"

This thinking is flawed, yet any attempt to point that out seems to be met with more stories about how everyone else overcame something while ignoring different realities. Sometimes, people even go the route of "Well, there is ALWAYS someone out there with more problems than you!", as if this is somehow supposed to invalidate your situation. I wonder how many people would think we should tell cancer patients that there is always someone worse off than them, because that's only following their logic. Why people think they have some magical authority to draw a line on real problems vs imagined problems I'll never know.


PS- What you mentioned about diabetes was interesting. A lot of doctors used to think like you. What good is a doctors advice if the patient doesn't comply? What doctors were doing was not listening. When they listened, they often found a lot of their patients were too poor to afford even basic meals, their medicines, and they did not have reasonable access to fresh fruits and vegetables. When the doctors had more information, they could see people in a different light. Their patients weren't just merely stubborn. The doctors could now find a way to help their patients, and the patients could help themselves like they wanted to all along.

Last edited by bleh12345 on 02 May 2014, 4:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

bleh12345,

Yup, again: Poor listeners make bad advisers.

Yes, it's unfortunate people don't just listen more.

Hey 12345, how's it going?

My mom who worked as a nurse also worked to maternity patients and she would have ones who were gaining too much weight and holding too much water so she would try and put them on a diet to help with their weight gain and water weight and they would come back for their next appointment and still doing the same mistake as before, eating how they were before she told them their diet plan. They would all say "it's too hard" and my mom would be thinking "Oh for god's sake" but she didn't say anything harsh because she is a professional and can't talk to her patients that way and putting them down no matter how foolish they are being or how lazy they are. She told me it's willpower and some people don't have that so they keep making their same mistakes over and over with diet. I suppose that can happen with diabetes too.

I just got tested for diabetes. Luckily, I'm healthy. However, I wanted to be tested because I have an eating disorder and binge on junk food. I understand the frustrations, but sometimes I literally don't have will power. It's a rather scary feeling, actually. Hell, sometimes I have woken up from sleeping with sugar in my hands, eating it while asleep. Sometimes, I literally scream "NO! I CANNOT EAT THIS!" and when I finally eat it, I do feel the chemical rush calming my anxiety and depression. I'm not sure people are all that dramatic with their eating habits, but man, I know how tough it can be to change them. I'm grateful for people like your mother not putting me down further. I already put myself down enough already. :s

Due to basic ignorance, people tend to overvalue the correlation (not even established as causation) between being overweight and developing type 2 diabetes.

http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/myths/

This is not only willpower, do not forget that many food people are taking in is severely processed and that food-industry is doing research on what quantity of sugar in combination with fat in combination with salt responds most to the brain to activate brains addiction centres.

Taking the food industry into account in terms of packaging, ingredients, convenience, price etc. makes far too much sense. It's so much more reasonable to judge people as if their choices are unrestricted and free and they're just choosing poorly /sarcasm

That's meant as more general frustration about that particular topic.

I think the fact that most are inclined to treat the problem of not showering due to severe sensory issues as something trivial is the problem. It might be that the benefit of increased self-esteem from smelling better makes washing worth it, even if it's extremely uncomfortable. But dismissing someone's issues as "silly" tends to kill any motivation to change.

But is it that persons fault they don't have willpower?....or could there be real reasons why they don't have the willpower such as certain mental illnesses, or being in a certain situation. If they say 'its too hard' it probably really seems too hard to them so they need some validation and respect for the fact its very difficult, before they will be in a place mentally to perhaps start addressing it and trying to change it. The response 'oh for gods sake' even if not said out loud is not acknowledging the person could have very real difficulties that prevent them from having a lot of willpower. People need to have more respect for each other in my opinion