Resentment

Post Reply New Topic

Do aspies harbour more resentment than NT's? I mean my husband is just perpetually angry at me (for things from the past), previous employers (jobs where he got sacked), the neighbours (for calling him delusional), work colleagues (for complaining about him)

My husband only got diagnosed 6 months ago. Neither of us had previously any knowledge of aspergers. Had I known that he had aspergers I would have handled many things totally differently. Instead. I just thought and told him he was selfish, rude and didn't care about the rest of the family. arguments were never resolved and discussions just went round and round in circles.

Even though my husband now knows he has aspergers, he doesn't really seem all that interested in finding out about it and using this information to make sense of things that happened in the past. He still maintains that he was victimised. Maybe this is true, but he still holds all this anger. I asked him to read an article about Aspie/NT relationships which he begrudgingly did. When he had finished i asked him if it makes sense. He confirmed that most of it did. then i asked if he had any comments. He says 'no'.
I have told him i am joining a support group for people who has partners with ASD. he didn't make an comment about this.

He used to be a lot better at listening and attempting to understand my feelings. now, he just says nothing or gets angry. i don't know how we can break this underlying resentment he has towards me and others.
I told him the other day that i thought he despised me. he looked stunned that i would think that.

If I didn't know better, I'd say that my own wife had just started this thread...



It's not so much resentment (in my opinion), as it is resignation to the idea that he will never be "good enough" for anyone else's standards - including yours - and that he is being pulled every-which-way by others as they attempt to "correct" his behavior.

He is as he is, and as long as he does not intentionally hurt anyone, there is no need to change him.

Without knowing more, I counsel that you give him more time. It can be an extended grieving period (six months is NOTHING). That's not to say you have to suffer in silence, you may have to give him direction in how you expect him to handle what's going on, in a reasonable format/time period. You probably have no idea, the combing through the past, slotting every single occurrence in one's life into this new framework. It is completely maddening, even if you don't already feel like you've gotten the shaft out of life.

Don't ignore your own needs, but maybe take this time to be sure of them and tailor them according to this new information you both have...

I cannot talk about all Aspies, but my husband & child let go very easily. I am still mad for some fight we had and they do not get why I am still mad. They are just their regular selfs liki nothing happened. On the contrary, my husband tells ME I have to learn to let go, that I get too resentfull (which is true). I think maybe it would be good to find support for your husband, too. Maybe he needs someone to talk to.

I used to get quite angry about past wrongs until I developed better analytical skills and was able to examine why the person may have reacted the way they did, my role in that, and why, exactly, I was upset.

I discovered that most situations really came down to me being misunderstood, and I was upset because the other person showed an inability to empathize with me and mischaracterized me and my intentions, which in these particular situations, were usually genuinely good intentions.

I over came most of my anger by realizing that it was a short coming of others that they themselves weren't perfect, may not have had the capacity at the time to interpret and respond to the situation more appropriately, and had to be forgiven for that because it was unreasonable to hold them to a standard which I myself didn't meet. I would subsequently think of more appropriate ways they could have responded to the situation and reasons they might not have.

Occasionally I would come to realize that the person was stressed and their anger had nothing to do with me personally, or maybe the person really was a jerk, or maybe their actions were justified and I owed them an apology.

I think it is a good point. For some reason, I still have hard feelings about negative events that occured to me in the past, even if it was more than 20 years ago. I also harbor a feeling of vindictivness and revenge towards those who wronged me.

That statement is exactly my husband ! And he tells me he likes being like that. That his obsessions with these past wrongs are not paranoia, they are paranoia. he does not want to let them go and let others get away with things. he is fixated on any films that involve that sort of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth scenario. You know..... bad guy hurts good guy and good guy gets revenge.

I harbour a lot of resentment and I think it it due to over-analysis and ruminating about bad situations with people. The more you ruminate the more it becomes fixed in your mind.
I think that many people with Asperger's Syndrome do get victimized and the extent of a person's ability to put things into proportion and deal with it mentally is the extent to which anger and resentment will become a problem.

I think NTs have an internal sliding scale as to what they take seriously but I think to a lot of people with AS, there is a lot less categorisation of how bad something is in relation to other things. Then there's the tendency to start thinking about one bad incident and have every other bad incident throughout your life come into your mind one after another and a massive picture of yourself of a helpless victim in the face of other peoples' horribleness can form if you're not careful which gets very depressing.

If one person can shrug something off easily they shouldn't expect others to be able to do the same; peoples coping abilities vary a lot. Also dismissing a person's concerns will tend to make them switch off and not want to communicate as they won't feel understood so will think what's the point in even talking about it?

Also, I know this might get taken the wrong way, but in my experience, you can tell an NT the 'solution' to a problem that is perfectly logical and will work but for some unknown reason they choose to ignore it as if the solution is not 'NT' enough for them. There's some quality in the advice that makes them dismiss it out of hand.

I used to have a list of people I wanted to kill. But over time I only wanted to torture them for a few days.

I have a 'Hitlist' of people in the media who I feel should be executed for the damage they've done to society but it's only a jokey thing.

Sigh... add me to the list. I think I have let something go only to find I am angry about it again months or years down the line. I gently have to chide myself out of it or daydream about revenge or closure.

It may also be that your husband has a general sense of anxiety that latches on to things to be angry about as a sense of relief. That was one thing I noticed. I would be agitated about a bunch of little things and then recall a teacher who had been unfair thirty years ago and be angry at her all over again.

This did get a lot better when I went on Effexor and has continued with Cymbalta but it is still there. I have heard others have success with Klonopin and even Xanex but I have never tried them myself... and Xanex dependency is nothing to play with.

Feldenkrais movement therapy, meditation and exercise helped as well as going to a sleep study center and figuring out some of my sleep issues. Fatigue made almost everything worse and then caffeine would aggravate things further.

I think that what happens is the brain stores all the unpleasant memories in the same place so when you access one memory all the others in the same 'bad memories' filing cabinet start coming into your mind as well if you're not careful. You have to quickly close the cabinet and distract yourself to switch your brain away from it all.

When you are unable to close the cabinet and the bad memories are with you all the time, that is when depression has taken hold.

I have the opposite problem. I harbor guilt about fairly mundane things I've done that harmed someone for years to come.

Gosh that's impressive!

I have feelings of guilt every so often about a few things that I've done which I know I will always feel guilty about but not usually for general outbursts of rage.

I've found that most of those whom I've held resentment against have eventually died. It is exceptionally gratifying to relieve one's bladder on the headstone of someone who once held me against the wall and charged his buddies a dollar a pop to punch me in the stomach.

Once I decide I do not like someone or get a grudge against someone, I often never let it go. Forgiveness is not a word that is in my vocabulary. I have grudges against people who slighted me or whom I felt slighted me when I was a toddler.