Over 30's thread.

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When I was talking about 'raking over past incidents', I meant the stuff that conventional psychoanalysts/therapists try to get people to talk about; things like family relationships, mother and father and all that stuff.

I'm not sure about 'mind blindness' - I can appreciate that people have different thoughts and feelings to me, even when faced with the exact same situation. Of course, this is also counter-balanced by the fact that it is impossible to be sure about what someone else is thinking or what their probably response is going to be. The 'Sally-Anne' test is not difficult to pass for me at all, which is hardly surprising when one considers that the test was designed for children. One thing that was interesting though, is that I did have to 'think about' it to some extent - meaning that I ran the scenario through my mind before giving a response. I do not think that the Sally Anne test is a viable determinant for recognising mind blindness in Adults anyhow.

I have mentioned before in other posts about the 'empathy' thing and although I 'know' often which responses to emit on the occasions when they are called for, they are not based on what I am feeling and I also get it wrong sometimes. I have been called callous and unfeeling often enough in my life to learn that for some reason, many people expect to hear an 'appropriate' response to things, which happen to tally with their own expectations. This is one thing where the therapy I had probably did pay off; I was fairly rigorously trained to emit the correct responses, since the social censure for failing to do so was dressed up in highly judgemental language, with an implication of fundamental deficits on my part. It was suggested that I was either 'sociopathic' or that I was 'deliberately pretending not to' emit the response that the therapist deemed 'appropriate' to tally with her own ideologically-driven perspectives in regard to this issue. It was a fairly manipulative and controlling process that had more to do with attempts at 'social normalisation' and turning me into a pale replica of something I am not, rather than a safe space in which I could develop as the person that I really am. I didn't actually 'feel' what it was pounded into me that I was 'supposed' to feel though. Sometimes, I either forget to, or simply do not wish to play along with the hypocrisies that dictate a pretended emotionalism or connectedness to stuff that quite simply leaves me cold.

Two examples should illustrate this: in Autumn 1997 the Princess of Wales (Lady Diane Spencer/Windsor) died in a car accident in Paris. The entire nation appeared to be in the grip of an emotional upheaval. Shops and stores shut their doors on the following Saturday which was the day the funeral took place, crowds gathered in Hyde Park, depositing Flowers and Wreaths, lining the roadways and lamenting the 'national tragedy'. Even the ostensibly sober-minded sections of the Press (eg The Independent Newspaper), editorialised in 'evocative', terms about the 'Nation locking its hearts and minds in mutual grief' and I really didn't 'get' it at all. I am not even entirely convinced that it was a cynical exercise in political manipulation. If it was then why was I utterly immune to it?

A later example involves the 07/07/05 terrorist bombings that occurred in Warren Square on a No. 30 Bus in Central London. I felt indifferent/neutral to the entire episode, although I live perhaps 8 miles away from where it took place, but somebody I know called me up on the cellphone, ranting and generally giving me an 'over the top' response about it, whilst also relaying anecdotally, some of the over-the-top, reactionary and emotional comments friends of his had made. I could not get worked up about it either way.

My point about all this is that I do not believe it is based on 'genuine' emotion, so much as learned responses that people sometimes vocalise, in order to try to 'fit in'. I do not say things that are deliberately contradictory (though sometimes I might slip up), I far prefer to keep quiet and let it all die out quite naturally.

I understand that other people have thoughts and feelings, and I can pass the Sally Anne test without a moments thought. But I do this by conscious reasoning, not by instinct. Put me in a real-time interaction with another person and I seem to fail to read their body language, fail to interpret their emotional state, and implicitly assume that pretty much what I think and feel is all that there is. I don't notice frustration, anxiety, delight, bordom or what ever else is generated in the other person until there is some kind of exaggerated expression of this - by which time the perception has arrived too late to avoid problems. I usually recognise vague states of 'positive' or 'negative' when talking to people, but even these are not reliable. For example, I've recently had experiences where the other person was apparently smiling, but that this 'smile' was not indicating happiness but some kind of ironic frustration.

I definitely concur with your concept of learned responses. I also had near identical neutral reactions to Diana's death and the bombings, though I don't know if this is specifically an AS trait.

The problem with learned responses is that they only work well if you have a large enough repertoire to cope with every situation you meet. They go badly wrong if you try to stretch your generalisation of what script to use and get it wrong. Many of my social responses are now automatic, but only when I'm in a familiar and comfortable situation. The good part is that automatic responses are easy for me, particularly with people I know very well. The bad part is that they are sometimes wrong (laughing because something sounds funny, when actually the other person was seeking sympathy, for example).

When I was at university I took a short course in the philosophy of AI. One of the debating points was if you could determine if an AI was really intelligent, or if it was simply giving the impression of intelligence. I always maintained that the two were equivalent, because my experience (and therefore everyone else's) was that people really were computers, and all of the mystique around what makes people different was just a combination of superstition and learned social convention to fit in with the whole of society. In the context of AS, I think that I understand that most people do not see themselves as computers that consciously pretend to be human - that most of the emotional states and the reactions that people have are an intrinsic part of that person.

I don't know if this is an AS perspective or not. But it is my perspective, and learning about AS has helped me understand that better.

Just how far "over 30" do I have to be to join this club? By some standards I don't qualify since I'll be 30 'til January. How about we make it a "30 and over" club?

Well it's not a 'hard' age limit, basically this thread is for people who find a lot of the discussions here aren't particularly interesting or relevant to an older age group or those dx'ed later in life.

I'm only 29.... Can I pretend to be thirty like Duncvis? I feel discriminated against... Making me play in the ballpool while the rest of you talk about adult things.

erm...

who says we're not in the ball pool?

LOL.

i would be.

yay!

*chucks balls at vetivert*

Yuk... The ballpalls all wet at the bottom...

that's dunc, i'm afraid. i'm still trying to housetrain him...

Hehe... I am 29 1/2 so nearly there. Not that I really want to be thirty. Its a whole new decade. It's the gateway into maturity... house ownership, serious relationships rather than whimsical flings, pensions to worry about.... Yikes...

NAH... That can all wait....

**JUMPS BACK IN THE BALLPOOL AT THE DEEPEND...