Were you ever treated this way by your parents?

Post Reply New Topic

This post is a long rant. I'm just wondering if anybody here has had any experiences with this:

-10 years old: Mother takes me to a single doctor without giving me a reason why I'm going. Doctor sees me for 15 min at most and measures my height, weight, etc just to fool me into thinking the appointment is about something physical. The doctor also tries to "slip in" some sarcasm, etc to see if I am "autistic" or not. My first impression is that he's being sarcastic, but I keep quiet and don't say anything because I don't usually think its appropriate for doctors to be sarcastic (especially after first meeting a new patient). I'm taken out of the room and I sit in the waiting room while my mom talks to the doctor for 1 hour about some mysterious topic. Tells the doctor stuff like, "didn't want to go to school camp", "not good at writing poetry,", etc.

-Family gets a secret letter in the mail saying that I suffer from "autism" even though the doctor told my mother verbally that it is "aspergers"

-"Autism" gets on my school permanent record, and I'm officially labelled a "special needs" kid. Throughout late elementary/early middle school, teachers seem to give more attention to me and don't treat me like all of the other children. They make me feel like the "odd one" by doing this.

-I find out by accident that I "suffer from autism," and I get into a big argument with my parents. Meanwhile I'm treated like a "special needs" kid. Resource teachers offer to read for me (as if I can't read myself!).

-My parents appear to treat me as if I'm "normal". But really, they still think I "suffer from autism". They tell people this behind my back. This goes on until the end of high school. This creates anxiety and I keep speculating what they really think of me. By no means am I a "normal" teenager though, as I don't play sports, don't have friends, etc. But I'm not entirely a social outcast (I just avoid people in general). I just prefer staying at home. My parents begin to think I'm "one dimensional".Living with parents that think I'm "autistic" makes me more "autistic" acting. I become more self conscious (but a lot of NT teens do too probably in high school).

-My mom tells people (like her brother) behind my back that I'm too "black and white", "linear thinking", etc. Also tellls my dad that I am too "logical" and that I can't express emotions in a "pure, deep way" due to my "condition". But the real situation is that I do feel emotions, I just don't share them with my family (probably because at this point, I don't trust my parents anymore). I learn to fake my facial expressions, but I can't fake body language. This then reinforces to them that I "suffer from autism". They say my body language doesn't correspond with the way I feel!

-Parents become jerks, fight, and get divorced. Mom accuses me of having "no feelings/reaction" towards this. But my real emotions - I'm angry at both of my parents at this point (for their immature behavior), but I don't share this with anybody. I'm just really annoyed with everything at this point and just want to leave their household ASAP.

-When its time to go to college: I desperately want to to move away and go to college on the other side of the country. Parents say "NO". They don't give a straightforward answer why. When I say I want to live in dorms, they say stuff like "WHAT WILL YOU DO ON THE WEEKENDS", "YOU'LL HAVE A ROOMMATE", "YOU'RE NOT READY TO LIVE ON YOUR OWN because you don't do stuff outside school", etc. Parents force me to go to a local university and commute (one of the top in the country), but its really hard to get good grades.

-I go to the local university, and, of course, get lower grades (but by no means bad, just not good enough for grad studies). I commute daily, stay at home, and study. I have to study a lot since its a hard university and its hard to get good grades. Dad gets mad at me, says I do "nothing but school", and he accuses me of watching porn instead of studying!

-After 2 years: I've had enough. Tell my parents I'm leaving no matter what. Switch programs, but I'm "trapped" at this local university because transferring would mean repeating two years. Fortunately my parents don't stop me this time, and they actually support me financially. They seem to think I've "matured". Grades become much higher since I'm away from my parents, I become slightly happier.

-Today: After all of this, I still have ZERO self confidence, low self esteem - probably from the way my parents have treated me. Parents still think I suffer from "autism". I have to work super hard in school to recover from the lower GPA, and I miss out on having fun. I become really stressed with school (and people think I'm weird since I always appear stressed). Recent subtle things that show my parents still think I "suffer from autism":

-I tell my mom that I'm going to have to lie to somebody about something. She tells me "get your dad to do it for you...he'll be better with the body language". Still seems to think I don't get body language. Goes on to tell me what the body language should look like to communicate this lie. I already know this, and I feel completely patronized!

-My dad reads an article about an autistic person (classical autism, not high functioning) in a huge newspaper (where there are lots of articles). He probably thinks I need to be hauled in a bus and go to camp for social skills training.

I'm getting really frustrated with my parents now. Yet my low self esteem from this troubled childhood is really hurting me now. I'll be entering my senior year and I have to find a permanent full time job. Yet this lack of confidence is REALLY bugging me. I'm very shy, and I'm not getting good client assignments at work because I appear too "shy" and in confident. People do say supposedly good things about me e.g. - I'm detail oriented, sound very "smart" because of good spoken vocabulary/grammar, have an excellent memory, etc - but, these are common AUTISTIC traits! So in a way, this is like they're telling me they think I'm autistic! This has really become a vicious cycle. At this point in my university career (I'm in business school), I should be having an internship by now, and I should have had years of work experience (but I only have two).

Unfortunately I still have to have ties to my parents (financially). They're pretty generous, and I can't afford to be 100% independent. Most people at my age/level in university are also financially dependent on their parents as well. I only have 1 more year to go, then I'll hopefully be able to get a good full time job. But at the same time, my lack of confidence/self esteem is hurting my chances of getting a full time job! This is really becoming a vicious cycle!

Find a therapist. Cognitive behavioral therapy tends to be a good approach for high functioning ASD people.

This is what happens when parents let prejudice take over and squash their love for their child.

When they decided that you "suffered from" autism, they divorced autism from who you are, and rejected the autism. The only problem is that this is impossible--you can't separate the autism from the person, because autism is part of the way the brain develops, and the brain houses the information that makes up a human being.

So they ended up rejecting you entirely.

(By the way, the disparity in the specific autism spectrum disorder diagnosis may have been because your school offered special services for classic autism but not for Asperger's. Many people end up with this slight misdiagnosis so they can access services.)

I'm sorry this happened to you. Your being autistic--whether it's Asperger's or any other kind of autism--gave them no right to treat you the way they did. They had no right to underestimate you and judge you by the stereotypes instead of looking at you as a person. It happens to a lot of people; and it hurts them whether they are AS or NT or classic autistic or anything else.

I had the opposite problem; my mother refused to acknowledge that I am autistic, even though it is apparently ridiculously obvious to anybody who knows what autism is (I've had a cab driver ask me whether I'm autistic, for heaven's sake!). So she got on my case about my not being able to do things that are very difficult for me because I'm autistic. Instead of teaching me the skills I needed to be independent, she punished me for not having those skills, so that it took me a long time to learn them. The end effect seems to be the same, ironically, as what you experienced: Independence took longer; and self-hatred set in. I don't talk about it a lot; but I'm really, really hard on myself--I don't let myself mess up, ever; and I have standards for myself that are unrealistically high. That's still holding me back. And in both cases--whether they deny it or patronize you for it--it's an expression of the idea that autism is horrible and unacceptable.

What your parents did was wrong. You are not defective, and autism is not unacceptable. You're a human being, not a walking blob of autism; you have your own skills and your own mind. You make your own decisions, and you aren't defined by some set of diagnostic criteria. Your parents should have talked to you about your AS and helped you figure out strategies to learn what you needed to know. At my school there are people who need full-time aides; they go to college and live on their own like anyone else. I still need a lot of help, even at twenty-seven years old; but I can arrange it on my own. Your parents probably had no clue that not being able to do everything for yourself didn't mean you had to stay at home; you don't have to, you just have to be able to access those things some other way. But then, maybe they never bothered to find that out.

Your parents used your autism diagnosis to disempower you--that is, they used it as a way to take away your right to choose for yourself, express your own opinions, decide your own future. And they even used it as a way to devalue your skills by calling them "autistic". But that's not the way it ought to be. You are who you are. Autism is a part of you; and autistic people of all sorts--Aspie, autie, slightly impaired and profoundly disabled--are part of the world, an important part we can't do without.

Society will always need the quirky, obsessive, introverted people with their odd ways of looking at things. Whereas, society can definitely do without the bigots who insist that those who have a diagnosis are not as valuable as those who don't.

Wow. This is pretty much the same way that my husband is treating our 14 year old, and I hate it. Our son is aspie and his main issue right now is his temper, although I think he may be getting addicted to a video game. When my NT husband asks our son to do something he yells back "leave me alone", so what does his dad do? He complains to ME about him, gossips about him, tells me he knows that people with Aspergers have no empathy. I tell him thats not true. I am livid by this time because I am apie too and I feel plenty of empathy. Plenty. He sits and reads books about Aspergers that make it into an affliction.

He acts as if he is superior to us. I try to disengage with him and ignore it all but I am sure he thinks its my Aspergers--my pitiful condition. I look at my son and know why he's getting depressed and why his self-esteem is at zero. Its because his dad is not interested in treating him like a person. He just wants to read up on the "condition" so he can figure it out, as if its a friggin disease. I am living the life you describe right now.

Cut off all ties from your parents, if possible.

I am fortunate enough to get decent but not patronizing support at home.

219ahe, not to trivialise your story, but you should really consider publishing this as a novel. Normal kid gets mistakenly labelled with a neurological condition... it's almost funny, if it wasn't actually happening.

I'm not sure what to say to help, except maybe go to another psyhchiatrist and get your diagnosis overturned.