Aspergers and telling confabulations

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I was thinking about a couple of people that I knew growing up that may of been on the autism spectrum. I know for a fact that both of these people had ADHD ond ODD along with borderline autism.

One thing about these individual's personalities is that they used to have a tendency to confabulate and tell stories about what was going on in the world or with their life. In many cases, they were always the center of the story, and their experience got blown out of proportion. It made these peoples' lives sound interesting.

Is this normal behavior that a person with AS would engage in? Why would people with AS do this, to get noticed or gain attention? I know I catch myself doing this from time to time. As an example, you go to a concert, and you tell people you sat six rows from the stage, when in actuality you sat farther back, or even in the balcony. I know that everyone tells fish tales from time to time, but with these acquaintances that I grew up with, it was a major part of their personailities. I would love to hear some thoughts.

I think most individuals with AS tend to be factual in their rendition of situations.

I'm quite factual. It makes life easier.

I thought you were talking about something closer to clinical confabulation, where a person with a communication or cognitive difficulty says something untrue without even intending to. I have done something like that, because I grew up with severe receptive language problems, and I learned to talk and write, by putting together plausible patterns of words. I didn't know the point was to communicate what happened (not when I was learning to talk, anyway), so I didn't consistently do so, things got changed, not on purpose. I was an adult before I learned to consistently say that I was unable to come up with the words for something, rather than just spouting whatever words I could come up with regardless of whether they meant anything about what I was thinking. I have spoken with others who grew up with severe receptive language but managed to fake learning to use language to communicate earlier than we actually could use it to communicate, and this was a near universal feature of that method of learning language. Especially when it goes on autopilot. I now watch it like a hawk and try to avoid situations where I have pressure to answer questions, because that is the situation most likely to bring about inaccurate communications.

The thing you talk about, though, sounds different than that. And I don't understand whatever it is.

Like Chronos, I prefer my life not be cluttered with BS stories that I have to remember details of in order to maintain the deception - its just too many mental balls to keep in the air, and I don't process fast enough to do that kind of juggling. Its just easier to tell the truth, whether its what people want to hear or not. Its the reason Aspergians have the reputation for blunt honesty - lying is too much mental effort and becomes very stressful.

...But the idea that all Aspergians are 100% honest is another myth. It is merely a lot easier for us to be honest. However, I make up things a lot; there are various reasons for it, but I can and often feel that I need to confabulate, especially when it comes to just collapsing many events into one.

The most common reason is that NTs just don't understand my form of communication, nor my perception of events. Therefore, I just translate by way of modification.

Last edited by dyingofpoetry on 14 Jul 2010, 7:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I think I do this as well.

i love that word

I didn't mean to confuse. What I was talking more was the person who tells fish tails for the purpose of getting attention, getting ahead, causing excitement, etc. Stretching the truth so to speak. As an example, lets say that someone went to a rally to hear President Obama speak. Lets say after the event you got to shake his hand. Even though you shook his hand, you go back and you tell people that you had a five minute conversation with President Obama. That would be a stretch of the truth.

My two childhood buddies of mine would do this all of the time. Due to the fact that their autism was comorbid with ADHD and ODD, I am wondering if those two disorders didn't play more of a part in this behavior than their autism did. I can see kids doing this, but one that I still have infrequent contact with still does it (at 31 years old).

I had a friend in college with Asperger's who definitely had issues with confabulation (the clinical definition). My friends and I were sure he wasn't doing it on purpose, but many of his stories were extremely unlikely, and we were sure that many details in them weren't true. However, like I said, we all had the sense that he was not trying to lie or make his stories more interesting. Having worked since with head injury patients who confabulated, I'm pretty sure my friend also was exhibiting confabulation when telling his stories.

Just to be clear, confabulation is when your brain makes up things to fill gaps in your memory. It is not conscious or deliberate. For example, I had a patient who sustained a head injury after being in a car crash. He couldn't remember the crash, or much of what had happened before or after it, and the story he told me was that he was injured while hunting giant bugs from a helicopter for the government. He told me if I didn't believe him, that he could show me bite marks a foot-wide on his vehicle. He absolutely believed this story at the time. A week later when he had recovered more, he didn't remember telling me the bug story and was embarrassed when his father and brother told him about it.

I do that.

Conversation sometimes moves too fast for me to think of exactly what I mean and put it into words. So I make up something that fits into the conversation, and it may or may not be true. I remember one incident in which someone asked me why I didn't have a driver's license, and I couldn't figure out how to explain that I had a mother who was too afraid to teach me and a father who liked to abuse me, and was dyspraxic on top of everything else and probably not ready to learn at sixteen, and I thought I was ready but couldn't find anyone to teach me; and that was too complicated to explain, so I said I had epilepsy--which I don't actually have, but which was easier to say than explaining the whole situation.

It's not the same thing as a deliberate lie because it happens before I realize what I'm saying is false. I'm just fitting my words into the pattern of the conversation; and they fit in, but they're not true.

It almost never happens when I'm writing, and not when I know it's important to communicate and I remember to take the time to think about what I'm saying before I say it. The temptation to just pattern-match and not pay attention to meaning is strongest when I'm engaging in trivial small talk.

I might exaggerate a little for comedic effect, but as far as changing important facts, it's like others have said: too much trouble to keep track.

As far as the confabulation thing, ugh, yeah, gets me in trouble with my doctor a lot (he asks questions that take a lot of thought, and I 'conditioned' myself in my teens-20's to spit out answers before the typical "deadline time" is up. It's been surprisingly hard to unlearn that.). Wish I'd known what that was in my teen years; could never think of how to explain why I might say something I didn't mean to say (in a way that people would understand/believe).

I remember this guy who started hanging out with the gaming group I was apart of. When I quit the army without finishing basic training this guy would not shut up about it. He went on about he was a marine core sniper and had swat training from the naval shore patrol and all this other horse pucky he could think of. Now this guy was not some athletic warrior type this guy had 42" waist and got winded walking with us to get a pizza and according to him he was out of the marines for three years. One day while he was talking about his "experiences" in the service some guy walked up to us when we were in a resteraunt.and told us he never was a marine and he washed out of the coast guard training. He tried to tell the same cock&bull story at the volunteer firehall when he joined them. He then was pretty much run off from the firehall for being screw up and lying on his application. He kept calling me a b***h for leaving the army with an entry level seperation and it turns out he got thrown out of the coast guard for undisclosed medical reasons. This guy had some sort of mental issues but I doubt it was Aspergers. he use to make me feel so bad about quitting the army and everyone use to laugh at me because of the things this liar said.

Perhaps in "why" type explanations, when I know the crowd or person i'm talking to is unable to understand the reasons, due to a lack of underlying details, I make up things. They aren't per se made up... they're simplifications, but to me it's still a lie, and creates anxiety and cognitive dissonance in me... that I have to then deal with. But it can be a lot better than being shunned for giving a three hour answer to why i don't have a driver's license.

There is the odd issue that, other than my closest friends, I have to create a story which although I strive to put as much truth into as possible, is a lie. If i COULD drop the story, I would, because maintaining them.... is hell. But surviving would not be easy without it. (they deal with AS and PTSD and issues arising from abuse as a child) I guess they too, are just simplifications of truth.. but are more complex.

I have a hard enough time dealing with how my social facades for doing business and pretending to care about the story a customer is telling me.... doing so is a lie... I hate it... but I have to do it, don't I? But then I have to deal with the dissonance, which wrecks me.

But... to confabulate just for the purpose of making myself look better? To Heck with that!
I don't want any more attention than I already get... I would like less... If i were to confabulate.. it would be to DOWNplay things... Hrm... I think i do that... dang...

When I was younger, I used to do this a lot.

You've hit the nail on the head here.

When I used to lie it was because I was quite self conscious about my real life.
People at school all had divorced parents, or they were a different culture or something and they always had some interesting thing to say about that. They would bug and call me a wuss me because my parents were together, and I wasn't from anywhere else but Canada. So I would make up random crap to fit in. I never messed with actual facts about my life, instead I just made up new ones. Like, instead of saying that my parents weren't actually together I would say that I was an alien from another planet, or something(That was in the first grade when people would believe that sort of thing). They got more complex and fantastical from there, until about the fourth grade. Kids knew I was lying to them, but they liked my stories so much that most of them didn't care. They'd come to me at recess once or twice a week just to hear more, and get involved in them, like 'Can I be an alien too? ' The rest of the time I spent alone.

Then in the fifth and sixth grade there were actual people who wanted to know about the real side of me, so I quit until the seventh grade. In the seventh grade, all the stuff about divorced parents came back. It was a pissing contest, whoever had it the worst was the most respected. Again, I never changed anything about my real life, I always said that I was a born Canadian and my parents were together. This time, I made up friends from a different school that did interesting things. Nobody turned against me again, they were so indifferent to me it didn't matter what I said. They were too busy being outraged at the fact I didn't fit in anywhere. Sort of a 'Hurry up and conform, what's wrong with you? Everyone else fits in but you don't, you must think you are so special and better than the rest of us!' mentality. I never told lies again, my real life still wasn't good enough for anyone and now neither was my made-up life.

I think the important thing to remember about such a person who does what I did is that it's really not about you at all. They're not trying to get anything from you but acceptance, or attention. They don't do that because they think you're some gullible person, they do it because their own self esteem is so low they don't think you'd be interested in anything that really happened to them. They are selfish that way, it's all about them.

I'm not sure if Aspergers/Autism has anything to do with it or not. I suppose it could have contributed to my feelings of isolation and wanting to reach out. I'm not sure.

Yeah, nice word. Had to look that one up.

I tend to be very factual - often people mistake me for being sarcastic when I'm being completely honest. If I can't remember something I just say so.