Feeling more or less AS depending on what people say

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This might sound weird, but I feel more or less AS depending on what others say to me, especially now I am flip-flopping.

I just moved, my last therapist thought I had AS and afterward I started to feel more of my AS problems, like social skills and obsessions and stuff.

But now I have moved, and two people I have met this week have told me I don't have AS at all. Now I am focusing on the fact that I can interpret facial expressions and the like, and I feel more NT, that I do relate to people on some level.

I just want your thoughts on this.

All my symptoms of AS consumed after I read about AS.

It is called "confirmation bias" by some. When someone offers an observation that on some level you agree with, the natural tendency is to filter information in a way that confirms what you are thinking. Information that contradicts is automatically discounted and sometime outright rejected. In the first case, you were told by someone in a position of authority that you were AS so you began looking at things from that point of view, confirming the diagnosis by selectively emphasizing behaviors. After moving, your friends said you weren't AS, and, while perhaps for a different underlying motivation, you selectively noticed behaviors that would be more like an NT.

It's not weird at all.

It's kind of like experiments where if they told the test-takers they'd do a bad job then they would score worse.

A personality is not a fixed thing, half of it is all about how the people around you are treating you, or less or more than half depending on who has the stronger will and personality.

This makes a lot of sense. When I initially heard of my diagnosis, my parents noticed that I claimed to have things that didn't apply to me at all. I would talk about how I had huge sensory issues and didn't like bright lights even though i coped well with my senses...and I would assign characteristics to myself that I thought I had but did not have. There is one person with AS that I've been talking to that I think this phenomenon applies to as well...although they will do do many things quite well, they will also say things about themselves that may just be exaggerations. This person was very recently diagnosed, so I'm thinking that they are selectively emphasizing some of their traits to make them fit the diagnosis perfectly. I don't know if any of this is true, of course, but it definitely seems that way.

I somehow have the feeling that you're talking about me. I try to not overemphasize anything I say about myself, but I feel that sometimes I don't have a good grasp on my behaviours at all because some people tell me one thing about me, and some people tell me something else. If you ever feel like I overemphasize what I say about myself, it probably is me repeating what my parents say about me. And they tend to be way too attentive to their kids, because the predisposition of many parents is towards extreme paranoia. I try to not say anything anymore that I just feel is me. I either repeat what other people have said about me, or I base it on my actual behaviours.

I do tend to feel completely normal in some settings, and that makes me really happy. I like being in these circumstances as much as possible because I don't notice my deficits there, because everyone in social circles tends to think and behave on a similar wavelength (and some of them are NTs, interestingly enough, although much older than me). If something bad happens, though, I start obsessing about myself again. I really want to just surround myself with people who understand me, so that I wouldn't have to explain so much and feel like I'm not being genuine enough to myself because I've understated one thing and overstated another. And then I obsess over that, too, because I did not express myself well enough to another person by my own standards. But I can't avoid being involved with the mainstream world... I really can't.

Thank you for clearing things up. This was intitially something I`ve wanted to ask you about directly, but I have reservations about being too honest or blunt as I`m always afraid of offending people.

It often seems strange when you say things about your difficulties and then you`ll do or say something that would require you to not have difficulties with these things at all...I`m trying to think of specific examples here...there have been some things you have said about being overwhelmed by sensory stuff that I feel have not really added up with you. For you to go out and experience the world as you do, even with the groups you go to, would require you to focus on the people at hand without gettying distracted by the small little details in the environment: that`s what sensory difficulties are all about. For a large period of my life, I had sensory issues so strong that people just blended into the background of things and thus I could not even hold a conversation with someone...but you can socialize and hold coversations with people. I believe that you could have some minor sensory difficulties but not to the extreme that you say you do. Feel free to clarify this, as I don`t know if you went through or are still going through the same phenomenon where I thought every trait of AS applied to me.

I don't mind bluntness. I myself have been said to be extremely blunt with people, without realizing why some things should be filtered out and why some things shouldn't. People always give me crap about being blunt, and it frustrates me to no end, so I do not do the same thing to anybody else. So really, if you ever have anything else to ask me, feel free to ask me all you want.

Interestingly enough, I can go hours in a coffee shop talking about AS/autism and not being distracted by anything else at hand. Once the topic shifts, though, I will begin to once again take in every single detail around me. I've really noticed it today at our group... we were sitting at a coffee shop and people were talking about going camping and traveling. I was sitting there and constantly turning my head around at everything I saw and heard. As a result, I only absorbed very minimal pieces of conversation. Once I redirected the conversation to AS, I could finally tune in and pay attention. This Friday, I was sitting at a meeting in a quiet environment with four other people. I did not say much, but was taking notes and absolutely had to pay attention to everything that was said. Nothing about the meeting was autism-related. I did not do the job perfectly, but after the hour and a half meeting, I came home and felt COMPLETELY drained. I still felt drained for the whole Saturday, and I think my brain still is a little bit messed up partly directly because of it. I know that it sounds entirely absurd, but it seems that if I either talk a lot and thus direct the conversation, or if the conversation is of intense interest to me, I will not feel drained after it even if it's in a noisy environment. However, if none of these factors apply, my sensory issues will return and attack me again.

I myself do get told different things by different people. Many people say my social skills are bad, but one lady I just met says she doesn't see anything wrong with me in that area.

Sensory issues, I don't really have any, but my hearing is above normal, I'm told that a lot.

What people say to me even affects what I get on the Aspie quiz. The score varies with me between 120 and 140 aspie. I always score AS and NT traits or AS.

I dunno

I find examples like this from your life...as well as similar ones you have told me about or discussed on the boards, really intriguing. Not only is what you described so typically AS, but you lay it out so well because of your self-awareness. The other people I have met with AS have no idea about any patterns in their behaviours like the ones you have described and they would not be able to lay them out as well as you, even if they tried.

The phenomenon you laid out for me was what I like to call a "hyperfocus", where a person will become very focused once a topic of interest is brought up, and will feel at ease once engaged. In the case of hyperfocus, I don't believe that it has anything to do with sensory issues, but rather about how people such as yourself find pleasure and feel at ease. When you are leading a conversation or talking about a special interest, you simply feel in your element and thus very comfortable around others. When you are away from your hyperfocus, it is very hard for you to focus on anything else. You'll get anxious, edgy and lack focus, and your mind will wander. When you return to your special interest, it can be very relieving as that is what gives you pleasure. Simply put, your special interest is your grounding force, without it, you feel anxious and uncertian and with it, you feel relief, comfort, and pleasure.

The difference between you and me is that while you merely note how the inticracies and patterns in your behaviours are different from others, once I noticed mine, I corrected them because I saw them as bad or somehow faulty. You have been incredibly lucky to find people who accept you, support you, and who most of all, deem your behaviours as fine instead of correctable. This is one of the reasons I want to come to the AS groups again: I want to be in an arena where I can totally let myself go to the degree that you can...because I must say that I'm jealous of the fact that you can let yourself go like that without the fear of judgement.

I find that people have some pretty variable ideas about what AS is, or even what a disablity is. At times, people will assume that just because someone is highly verbal that nothing is wrong with them. You really need to look at the small things to know how AS manifests in someone.

Yeah, at some point, I am really going to sit down and write my whole story and how I've come to this awareness. I just know that once I start writing, it will be very difficult to stop, so I'm waiting until I get a couple of weeks absolutely free from all obligations so that I could have enough time to process my experiences in my head and put them into coherent strings of words. And the last thing I want is to make it AS-focused. It's going to be as genuine and as true to myself as I could possibly make it.

Well, the hyperfocus itself is not a sensory issue at all, obviously. Rather, it temporarily blocks out most of the things that would normally affect me very strongly. When I say "severe", I mean it in a comparative way, based on my past experiences with adults on the spectrum. I have observed their behaviours and compared mine with theirs at the time when I was still coming to terms of my acceptance of the diagnosis.

Of course, as a child, I had much more serious issues in many ways. When I think back to some specific situations in the past, the deeper I go into my childhood, the more I remember the things that I took in with my senses, and the less I remember the meaning of these things. For example, I remember some obvious ones, like me looking at food before eating it because I could obviously grasp why I was eating it in the first place. However, I don't remember (and, I'm sure, from my mother's descriptions of how I was completely unresponsive to my surroundings, I've never caught) the meaning of people's conversations, even though I can still hear each individual voice in my head and remember the situations we were in perfectly like a movie tape. A movie tape with a very selective scope of vision. Which means that I did not process what was going on around me at all, and like you mentioned, I do not remember any specific moment during my childhood where I could discern what someone was saying in a noisy environment. And I remember my childhood very, very vividly.

As I have observed adults on the spectrum, though, I've noticed that they are very focused on the conversation at hand even when there are many distractions around them. Compared to them, I turn my head and look around much more. I am aware that they might be just trying to be polite, and I try to look at the person as much as I could, because that's what I was taught to do all my life. A lot of the times, I just look at the person who is talking, while being completely spaced out in my own thoughts. A good indicator of whether I am paying attention to the conversation or not is whether I am responding to the person or not. Usually, if I catch something out of the conversation, I respond to it verbally, even if it's just a partial segment of their sentence. So a lot of the times, I don't get the meaning of what someone says, at all. I see that as part of my sensory issues, because it's an auditory processing problem. In case of the meeting I've mentioned earlier, it was very exhausting because rather than just spacing out for periods of time to cope with the need to constantly receive and interpret the auditory input, I had to really force myself not to do so. In class, I zone out a lot because I start paying attention to the particularities of the teacher's voice rather than to the content of the presentation, plus get distracted by external noise. I see that as an auditory processing issue, too.

This has nothing to do with my self-esteem or the influence of any groups that I've been part of, but I must say this: The person who I am now is the person I've always been. I really can't change myself because I don't even know what it's like to be someone else. I try my best to avoid any problems in my life, to lead it as smoothly as possible, but I couldn't see any other way. If I were to try to change myself like you did, I wouldn't know where to even start. I feel like I can understand a lot about people, but it's always in third perspective. There's always a disconnect between my behaviour and that of other people. I can see things in other people, but I cannot apply them to me except in a comparative fashion.

The lady that said that about my social skills just met me, depending on your definition of NT she might not be one because she has ADHD and four other diagnoses. My aunt that now lives near me who for sure is NT says she notices lots of little things that I don't do socially correctly.

Right now, they say my social issues are schiz, but I read up on that and schiz social issues start at adulthood, looking at my childhood psych records and they started way before then. My school psych reports sound like a kid with AS and ADHD, I think, I need to ask an expert on that.

I remember you posted your report on here earlier, and a lot of your issues suggest AS symptoms. I think the reason why you never got a formal AS diagnosis is because you have strong comorbids. I've met one person in real life who is like that. I have no doubt that she has AS, but the psychiatrists have trouble giving her a definite diagnosis because she has multiple comorbids and is thus a very complicated case.

Good plan. I wrote some huge sections of my book druring a weekend at the spa...having as little obligations as possible usually does the trick, as well as a change of setting from the usual places you would go. If your reading week is anytime soon, that would be an optimal time to get things started.



These are interesting observations, and it sheds a lot of insight into the way people on the spectrum process information. The phenomenon you describe (getting caught into the details of the environment and not entirely focusing on the interactions at hand) was exactly the way I also experienced things when I was a kid: I would not remember conversations at all but I would remember patterns ofn stimuli that I liked. I'd get caught up in combinations of senses: the colour of the room, the smell in the air, the nuances of someone's speech. The reason you zone out seems to be primarily auditory but even still, you identify and describe the process very well, and you should most definitely explore this in more depth while writing.



I think you could adapt in a way though in a similar manner that I did: by processing things intellectually. You have the self-awareness and the awareness of others (and how they behave in comparison to others) to take the first step and begin. But at the same time, I don't encourage you to do it: you'd be losing out on the unique perspective that you have on these subjects, and would lend yourself to the possiblility of an identity crisis. You have enough going on for yourself to add that into the mix.

There's no doubt that I have AS. But some days I feel more "autistic" than others, because certain things will make me self-conscious, such as watching a movie with an autistic character in it.