socially introverted or AS?

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I am new to AS and can idetify with everything I've been reading here but my question is this. What are some of the other wierd things other AS people do that make them different? I have not been diagnosed professionally yet but my whole life is starting to make sense with all the knowledge I have aquired about AS in the past few weeks. I know AS people all have difficulties in social situations and obsessions on certain topics. I am no stranger to those feelings. There just seems to be more issues to me then just being an introvert.I can avoid social situations that make me uncomfortable.(I am mostly a stay at home mom,I work only 14 hours a week) . I and my marriage are having alot of problems surrounding clenliness in our home. I am a neat freak! I get very anxious if something is not put in its proper place. My husband and kids are slobs as far as I am concerned.I throw everything away. I have thrown away stuff I had just bought because I could not find them a home. Is anyone else out there borderline OCD as well? I also have wierd facial tics. I have had them pointed out to me on several occasions and I am very self consious about it. After I have been doing something that I need to concentrate on for a while my facial muscles will ache! I like to rock. I have a rocking chair that I sit in and find myself constantly rocking when I am in this chair. I hear music in white noise and on occasion white noise in music. If all of this seems a little strange I understand. I am just looking for some more answers. I am looking for more common threads other than the typical social anxieties and obsessions associated with AS.I also have alot of trouble feeling empathy for other people. ( I can feel empathy, only more often with animals than people).I have a horrible temper. Although since I have discovered AS my temper is not as bad because I understand why I have the feelings and anxieties that I do. There is no longer frustration in the mix.I am a social introvert(my palms sweat even when I am typing this because it is a form of communication)but do some of the other things I listed here sound like AS? I would rather have people who expirience AS on a daily basis give me some advice then a "professional" who gets paid $120 an hour who has no idea what it is like to exist inside an AS brain. Thanks for any advice you can give me and sorry if I have rambled on I do that alot!

A lot of this sounds very familiar, though I never knew there were other people who occasionally heard music in white noise and white noise in music.

Seems to me the temper and the placement of things have anxiety as their underlying root - which my friends have pointed out to me, too, from time to time. I used to deal with chaos in the kids' rooms by simpl;y havig them close the door (but their more-OCD than I am dad insisted I "MAKE them clean it up." Yeah. Right.

Anyway, hang in there.

That sounds like Aspergers to me.

Relationships are hard. I have had many a boyfriend that couldn't really bond with me. And a couple of them that actually got angry at me for being so different.

I've actually been working very hard to be more social. I know how weird I seem to other people. I study their body language, facial expressions, etc. and even though I don't always know what they mean, I am learning how to interpret them. I can reference the expresssions I'd seen before in future interactions with the same people. It takes me a while to "warm up" to someone. It's not that I'm trying to be unfriendly, I just need the time to learn their body language and individual facial expressions. Even their pattern of speech takes some getting used to.

You mentioned your face muscles get sore after concentrating because of your facial ticks. I have the tendency to bite on the insides of my mouth when i concenctrate so that not only is the inside of my mouth sore, but my cheeks, lips, and jaw are tired too. No fun. This isn't a tick for me, just a repetitive action, or a stim, similar to your rocking in your chair.

I have the animal empathy as well. Animals are easier to understand that most people. They tell you what they need and what they're going to do. I have owned and trained both a horse and a cat and found that I could establish a better bond with them than with anyone else. Animals are great because they always say what they mean...no hidden agendas.

Other weird things with AS are auditory processing problems. This sometimes involves not being able to translate what is being said into something the person with the auditory processing problem can understand. Many people with AS seem to have a variation of this. If I can't picture what is being said if the concept of the conversation has not been assigned a picture in my head then I have to discuss the concept at length until I have formed the picture.

Keep looking around on this forum...you'll find all sorts of stuff that we have and not just the social things.

Sure sounds familiar to me. I agree that the need for neatness (and the facial tic, by the way) are probably symptomatic of stress and we probably all exhibit our stress in different manners. It should be easy to understand, however, how the difficulties we experience relating (I am also married and have two boys, but it took me a long time to get there) to others would cause a lot of stress. This would be particularly true of people like me who were bullied in our youth because of our differences. (It seems that this is more common among males although certainly not unheard of among females).

Anyway, you have to remember that AS is a syndrome and is therefore deefined as a spectrum of behaviors and self-reported feelings. That is why diagnoses can be done at varying degrees of accuracy but can never be proof. Given all that, you sure sound like me, and I sure sound like an Aspie.

ah, I know the feeling. But don't worry, you'll probably find that people here are very freindly, and make you feel welcome.

Oh, and by the way, let me welcome you myself.

You seem to display a lot of aspie qualities. Hope you find some answers. Stick around.



I've also learned a ton about myself after reading about AS. Finding out about Asperger's has changed my life for the better.

I know exactly how you feel!

I went through an element of the same thing - for me, the quest to diagnosis began with a horrible fight with someone I considered my friend. After she said some completely hurtful things about me being cold and unfeeling and aloof...and a lot of other things I'm not going into, I had finally had enough of losing friends to the same reasons.

I did a lot of digging around and discovered a lot of things on AS. I think I researched into it for two or three years on and off before I got up the courage to speak to my doctor. (I have issues with waiting rooms and being in a confined space with other people, plus I have issues talking to doctors and people about my health, psychological or otherwise.)

The worst part, I realised, is not getting diagnosed. It's not BEING diagnosed. For me it was a relief...basically, because he told me straight up, none of the things I've always considered personal weaknesses were actually my fault. I had begun to believe I was a horrible person, to keep losing friends and to be so rejected by folk around me. Now I'm aware of the AS, I can work with it and accept it and move on as best I can...so like you my frustration is less now than it was before I was diagnosed.

And I'm a rambler too *hehe* rambling is good ;D

I think you sound pretty Aspie to me But I think it would give you peace of mind to have it firmly diagnosed

Apple

i am ALWAYS getting told off for rambling / mumbling. i say what i ned to say, and when i have finished COMPLETELY i let somebody else respond. if somebody interrupt me i can not then go back to where i was because i would have forgotten. and i cannot tell if anybody is getting bored with what i say because i cannot recognise their facial expressions or much body language.
the only body language i can tell out is when somebody is lying. i can tell that because i watched a television prgramme a few times on television called 'trisha' and there is a man on there who explained all about lying body language. and i was fixated to the screen and i can now find that i can spot it for myself! now i need coaching in general body language and facial expressions... but where???

i can defiantly say i am not great at clenliness.. it doesnt really seem to bother me all that much.. it bothers my mum though.. im not competely out of control.. i know when its time to wash my hair and not to leave empty food packets out in my bedroom becuase it will attract mice. i do have a place for everything in my bedroom, the way i like it. but them mum says its not tidy enough and i have to move everything and that annoys me becuase then i have to think about where i left things. and id not throw away something id just bought because there wasnt place for it.. id make room. i have a lot of 'junk' but to me its useful or could come in handy... to my mum its rubbish and junk. like bubble wrap.. could be used either to wrap a parcel or to pop all the bubbles out of.

for about 2 years i thought i had AS when i found lots of research and tests on the internet. i went to my doctor with mum and asked to be referred to a neuro-psychologist. he saw me about 5 times.. sometimes to talk about my life and what i find easy and what i find hard other times to do mental tests on me - like remembering numbers and putting shapes together from blocks and seeing what my basic understanding of the world is and whether i know many celebrities' names and what movies / bands they belong to - i sucked at that even though i love music i never concentrate on who it is playing the music i just listen to it.

theres so many other things that define me as an aspie.. i could go on all day typing. lol

Me too! Completely I can forget something in a matter of seconds And be talking and then lose my thread half way through and end up saying something completely wrong or irrelevant or rambly *hehe*

Apple

It doesn't seem strange in the least. When I was little I sometimes heard the beat and words of whatever music I'd most recently been listening to in the sound of the washing machine. I knew that the washing machine wasn't playing music but I couldn't shake the impression that it was unless I tried very hard.

Physics class was a long time ago, but here goes...

Any complex sound, say a note on a flute, is not just a single frequency, it's a collection of frequencies. A flute playing a "C" note is actually playing other pitches at the same time, but the C pitch is the loudest; its amplitude is greater than the other frequencies.

Now, a flute note isn't too dissimilar from a pure tone pitch, as these things go. Far from perfect, but you could do a lot worse. For comparison, consider a cymbal crash. The flute note will have one loud pitch, a few others roughly in the same ballpark, and the rest is a mass of much more subtle noises. For the cymbal crash, there are lots and lots of frequencies with roughly the same amplitude. This is why cymbals are not normally described as notes. You don't go buy a "C" high hat, it's just a high hat.

But even for a cymbal crash, there will still be one frequency that's the loudest, even if it's just by a tiny little bit. That's all it takes for something to be a note. If you have good ears, and you sit there and think about it, you can figure out the note a cymbal plays, or the note of a shoe falling on the floor, or the note of a kid jumping into a swimming pool, or any other complex sound. One pitch is always ever-so-slightly more prominent.

Hearing a note instead of a noise, then, is mainly just a matter of paying attention (plus the physical condition of your ears, of course). Most people will never notice or even think about this. Then there's people like Steve Vai, who've made careers out of turning regular human speech into musical scores.

You're just paying more attention to the sound than normal when this happens, is all.