Has anyone w/ AS been accused of acting up deliberately?

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Well as an Aspie diagnosed in 2001, I can say that back in the 1990s there was the odd time where someone got angry at me claiming that I was behaving "that way" on purpose - but thankfully this hasn't occurred since my diagnosis. It certainly caused me a lot of consternation and some unjust self-blaming for my predicaments. A couple of anecdotes:

In the early 90s, I was in my last year of high school and an English teacher accused me of "bamboozling" him when I would question why I got the occasional poor grade on a paper despite writing in a hyperlexic way - I told him that I had trouble understanding these notions like metaphors, rhetorical questions, discerning the motives of characters in a novel etc and he blasted me for playing a game with him, and that this kind of passive-agressive behaviour is going to get me nowhere in life if I insist on behaving "that way", I'm 18 and it's time to smarten up, etc. He certainly couldn't get away with that today! Or rather, interventions for such learning gaps would have occurred at 13 years old. BTW - I could never stand male English teachers, they were always snotty and aloof in my experience.

In 1995, I was living with roommates while at University (college in the U.S. - I'm Canadian ) and after about a month, one of the friends of a couple of them confronted me one night, grabbing me by the collar and yelling in my face that I was harassing his friends and they wanted me out of there. I know that I didn't do anything illegal or intentional, so I protested that I didn't know what he was talking about, nobody ever spoke to me about a problem, and he yelled "Bulls***! !! Don't you start that with me, don't even go there, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about!!" I asked him for examples, he said that I cut into conversations, talked off topic, and said offensive things, and was making their lives unpleasant in general. he forced me into admitting that I was doing all this deliberately or he would pound me (and he was a really big guy) then threatened to kill me if I called the cops (and his friends, my roommates, sure were not about to act as witnesses to the confrontation). I left next week out of fear for my safety.

Other than that, I have had at least one time where a bully told others, in front of me, that I was acting "that way" on purpose just to get attention. I don't think the bully actually believed that, it was just a way to manipulate his audience into attacking me b/c if you think somebody is behaving inappropriately on purpose, you feel less compassion towards them.

Thankfully it hasn't happened recently b/c I have improved greatly through counselling and self-awareness in the past 10 years. If what those characters said about me putting on an act was true, I should have gotten an Academy Award! (sarcasm)

Oh yeah. I assume so because I remember my mom telling me some teachers thought I was a brat. Also my family has gotten mad at me for my anxiety and so has my last ex. Even my last ex said "sometimes I think you just have anxiety to get your way" and even my other ex said he sometimes thinks I use it as an excuse. But then he said just because he thinks that doesn't mean he believes it.

Plus when I was ten, kids thought I was a show off. It was because of my weird behavior. Perhaps they thought I acted different for attention because that is what I read here about people in general. Act different, people think you are doing it for attention.

When I was 11, my mom kept telling me to stop that teasing. I would stop that teasing and do another one. She thought I was being a brat for not listening to her and being a smart ass. She told me this later about this is what she thought of me then.

In high school I wouldn't be surprised if kids thought I did things on purpose because then that would explain their rude behavior towards me.

At my old work, the office clerk thought I didn't use my common sense because I couldn't read between the lines well and I took things literal. He thought I should know things just because I had been there for a while.

I don't tell people about my diagnoses. So not really accused, just implied.

The specific incident I recall at this moment, a good friend's wife accused me of flirting with said friend, said I was unconscionably rude at her wedding reception*, and told me to never call back again.

* She asked me a deeply personal question and apparently the way I responded was deeply offensive to her.

The story of my childhood is my teachers telling my parents that I'm doing crap just to piss them off and then my parents punishing me for it. All the while I have no friggin' idea how I'm pissing off my teacher or what I could do differently.

This is precisely why it kills me when people say, "Suddenly EVERYBODY has Aspergers or ADHD!" No, EVERYBODY had AS and ADHD before now, too, it's just kids like us were being ridiculed and punished as "bad kids" instead of getting helped like the next generation.

Might as well get used to it, it never stops.

This is true. I've recently had people online suggest I have a cluster B personality disorder because of the way I get annoyed at people who misunderstand me and refuse to believe me when I say so. I don't even get angry, just insistent.

I had always assumed that everybody with AS gets accused of acting up deliberately. It seems that being misunderstood just comes with the traits.

it's true - it never stops. I used to be singled out by my teachers often growin up.

I have a friend at work who understands me fairly well (as well as one can understand another person), and I ask him often if I have offended others (I often suspect that I have) and how/why.

Over time, though, one learns how to compensate. For me, that mostly means keeping my mouth shut when people talk to me. Or, I just ask people very "safe", very open-ended questions that get them talking about themselves (ie - "Hmmm, this coffee tastes good. I really needed one today. What about you?", "Wow, that's quite the snowstorm. Did it take you long to get in to work?", "What are your plans for this weekend?", "How was your weekend? What did you do?").

As a child I was often accused of acting up deliberately, as an adult I have for the most part been ridiculed/insulted and backstabbed for it, and in some cases had to defend myself physically.

An example here would be.

Sat in a pub talking away to a friend, after about 30 mins a man playing pool stopped and said "do you ever shut up", I replied with "sometimes, but I can talk for England, and then turned to my friend and carried on talking.

Little did I know this was the man's way of saying if I don't shut up he's going to try and attack me, I gave him three warnings when he tried, as a child through to early 20s, I was obsessed about martial arts and my own fitness. And to cut a long story short, because I was the one still standing and because I didn't stop talking when someone dropped a hint, I was the one that acted up and caused it etc.

Has anyone w/ AS not been accused of acting up deliberately?

It happens to me all the time *Wry*.

I didn't get accused of acting up at school, however I also didn't have any friends. And apparently the mother of one of the girls in my class accused me of bullying her daughter... which was weird, cos I was being bullied at the time and would never have done that to another person. I've never understood what on earth she was on about...

I've also had the wife/girlfriend/whatever accusation of flirting with their man. Only problem is that I see my male friends as brothers, and they couldn't understand that. Personally, I couldn't understand why they thought I would flirt with someone else's man.

My best friend has been a lifesaver throughout this - we've known each other for 20 years, and yes, at the beginning she had a very narrow viewpoint about my motives, but as the years went on, she listened and observed more that I realised, because she really does 'see' me now. It's strange how the change has come about, but I know that if I make a social mistake, then I can describe it to her and she'll explain to me why it was wrong, with no accusations or treating me like an idiot. I wonder if she started to figure it out when she told me I had "reverse body language" in 1992?

Isn't it weird how people casually assume that mistakes are deliberate? Like we're all out to get them or something *sarcastic*.

Yep. Throughout my childhood, and beyond... to some extent.