How to curb UNHEALTHY instances of Aspie Obsession

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Here it is, as threatened.

Aspie obsession is a wonderful thing... if there's a guitar on my hands.

But when it comes to, say, experiencing limerence over a woman who's totally not worth it... or when it comes to obsessing over infernal madness that just gets you deeper and deeper into a world of sh*t, it's not so wonderful.

It can cause elation. And in other cases, it can cause anguish.

So I restate the question: how does one curb Aspie obsession in instances where it is UNHEALTHY?

How do you stop it before it starts?

And how do you recognize it and kill it if it's too late to preempt it?

Aspie obsession has almost killed me in the past. I am fundamentally not the suicidal type (I never have been, and I never will be), but if I was, I would've reached for my gun.

I usually sleep about six hours a night.

I know I've hit rock bottom when I start sleeping 12 hours a day/night because being awake is just too painful.

I've been there too many times. 85% of the time it involved a woman I should have stayed well away from, or who just wasn't right for me at all.

I don't want it to happen again. Ever.

I don't know if you have seen these threads yet but they might help.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... ic&t=18124

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... ic&t=14155

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... ic&t=10010

I know exactly what you are talking about and it is hell!

Well, I did a big search but came up with five billion hits so I just kinda said "F' it."

its a good thing my obsession isnt another person, when i was in highschool i kindof had obsessions with people, wich got me into all sorts of fights. now my obsessions are more intrests than anything else.

Obsession over women is something normal people experience too. But I guess you are saying that it goes far beyond normal obsession. Especially because you can't have what you want.

What about dating sites? You know what you're there for and so do they, and you're not likely to have to come in contact with her if it doesn't work out---thats what really causes pain, because everytime you see her, your desire builds again. Perhaps I'm being far too obvious and you I am guessing have more experience than me.

Women are like an addiction, the more you go to one, the more you want to come back. But once you find one, and it becomes long term, the obsession becomes healthy, since you know you've got her long term, and because you know that, you won't be as obsessed (since the obsessions seem to come from the lack of a female rather than having one).

How about this---stop dating, and the dates will show up. Make deep friendships with females you are interested in. Don't let yourself flirt or show interest. this may not prevent you from having feelings and thus beginning to obsess, but it will help curb it and at least you won't be actively feeding it. This is often bad advice to certain people, but if you find yourself in unhealthy relationships, you need to curb your obsession somehow. Hopefully, at least in theory, some of those friendships will develop into romantic interest, and once you know its serious, let yourself get obsessed. But the most important part is delaying the obsession.

You've probably thought about all this anyway......

Let me tell you all a story.

Back in the year 2003, the worst of all the quasi-girlfriends was the locus of my personal hell.

Worst case of limerance ever!! !

It lasted for two years. The relationship itself lasted only one month. Halfway through it, the obsession kicked in. I was about to end it myself, it was so crippling, but she beat me to the punch.

She wasn't an Aspie, but she was about the most emotionally stunted person I've ever known.

She never told me anything! Nothing! I never knew what she was feeling. She had weird body issues and I could never touch her. I would write big huge handwritten letters telling her how I felt... and I would never hear anything. Nothing at all. Just a wall. Just a wall.

It killed me. I felt like I was a mushroom, kept in the dark and fed on horsesh*t.

Well, the relationship phase of that episode ended in early August 2003.

In late August 2003 I met someone who became one of my closest ladyfriends.

By October 2003, I started to become obsessed with this new person. She was gorgeous... by Los Angeles standards, which are probably significantly higher than where you (whoever you are) live. And she had the most amazing personality ever. But it was platonic, and I was handling that perfectly fine. (As in, I wasn't about to get all stupid and find myself as the longsuffering quote-unquote "d*ckless boyfriend.")

But here's what happened.

I was walking along one afternoon... and I fell under the compulsion to go to where I knew she would be, even though I had no reason to do so. I was in the neighborhood, so to speak, so the compulsion just hit me. Up until that point, I had been devoting increasing amounts of mental energy to the thought of her.

I walked halfway over there, but then I stopped in my tracks, about forty yards off from the door to the room where I knew she would be.

I said "what am I doing!? This isn't necessary!"

And *BAM* Even though, per the usual Los Angeles fashion, there was not a cloud in the sky...

...it was like this black evil cloud that had been descending on me got driven off by the sun, and that pure cloudless warm golden afternoon all of a sudden shone so bright down upon me.

So, I stopped to analyze what just happened, as we Aspies are wont to do.

Here's what I discovered:

1. My ladyfriend was completely open. Anything I needed to know about what was going on, no problem.

2. Completely no bullsh*t. She had her act together.

3. No insufferable amounts of mystery to her. No needless wall.

4. Perfect reciprocation as a friend.

She was the antithesis of the girl that I was still then morbidly obsessed with.

But that event healed me of it.

Well, the obsession took another form. Basically, the girl I'd briefly dated was in the clutches of a best friend with Borderline Personality Disorder. I was watching her slowly be dismantled... BPDers are notorious soulsuckers. They can be some of the most hideously black-souled people you could ever want to meet. Of course, their pain burns the hottest of all. Unless they drive their co-dependent to suicide. Which was what I was deathly afraid of.

I became obsessed with rescuing her. I became a battler of demons.

And guess what?

In the end, she was rescued, and I can actually take a sizeable amount of credit for what went down.

But the damage was enormous. I had to go into therapy. And even though she was safe, she still treated me like dogsh*t, which was unbearable.

Well, a few therapy sessions. And then you know what the biggest boost was?

I moved away, to Las Vegas.

Not because of that, of course. But Vegas is where life has taken me.

Cured, baby!! !

Last edited by WildMan on 07 Nov 2006, 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

But I do not want it to happen again. EVER.

I wonder, she had no feelings for you or she was finding it hard to express them?

Long and the short of it is this:

1. She had a thing for "Prince Charming."

2. After a very long time, and a mere three days after he dumped her younger sister (!), she went and confessed her undying love for him.

3. Having just had to dump her younger sister (which was the stuff of trauma and high-drama, a big nasty flame-out), and otherwise having no such feelings for her... he... uhhhhhhh... let's just say it didn't happen.

4. She flies into the worst depressive funk ever... but hides it from absolutely everyone per her usual style.

5. I come into the picture. Her and I start hanging out a lot.

6. She seems to like to be around me. Which is strange... I didn't think she'd be the type who would. I start to go "hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..."

7. I hand her a handwritten letter. My best friend forced me to keep it to a vague, to-the-point two paragraphs. That is, after he saw the 20 page draft I'd prepared and flipped his lid.

8. She went for it. "Holy sh*t!" My first relationship where there are no (obvious) psychiatric, substance abuse, or criminal issues on her part! You can also include extremely dysfunctional family situation, etc. as not being on the list.

9. The notion gets into my head that maybe my luck has finally changed. Because she's so good, and all the other ones were so bad, she just has to be the one. The whole time, by the way, I am 100% clueless about conditions 1 through 4.

10. We date for about a month. "The wall" gets erected halfway through. I get increasingly frantic and start writing massive 20 page handwritten letters expressing my innermost thoughts and feelings in really bad, sappy prose. Total radio silence on her part. She goes through the motions. I get increasingly panicky and weird about it all. Delusion sets in. She becomes more and more of an ice queen. It kills me, because I require the opposite of that.

11. I reach the breaking point. I'm spending 20 hours a day in bed almost, because I just can't stand to be awake anymore, unless I'm with her. Because when I'm with her, I can try to get through to her, in person, and actively shore up my fastly-slipping standing in her world. My normal sleepy time is between 5 and 7 hours. I'm losing it... fast. I decide "this can't go on." Three days later I finally sit back down at my computer to compose my declaration, only to find that she ended it with an e-mail.

12. She didn't end it. She said we were going to go on the infamous "break." I had no idea she did not mean it at all.

13. I'm left in limbo for a very, very long time... thinking that there's a 50/50 chance I'll get her back if I play my cards right. I get really loopy and clingy and crazy. I still see her regularly because she is in my closest circle of friends (including "Prince Charming"; but remember, I remain ignorant). She gets increasingly nasty. Her BPD best friend kicks her evil plan into high gear and things get incredibly nasty. I start to slip. My friends think I need to be put on medication, or locked away. I start getting paranoid and delusional. Being alive sucks. Were it not for graduate studies and my friends/acquiantances in that sphere (including the ladyfriend that saved me, though to this day she doesn't know, and that's fine!), I would go completely insane.

14. After a year of this, she finally confesses steps 1 through 4, and claims that she accepted my... uhhhhh... proposal... in a lame attempt to distract/numb herself from the pain. She does this in a one paragraph e-mail, and claims that she didn't at all mean to imply we were simply on a "break", and she is p*ssed that I actually thought that, even though her letter explicity stated as much.

15. I go ape-sh*t and demand more information. A year of madness over nothing? Deception? She gets even angrier and stonewalls me. I give up. I start to hate her guts. The only person I get to hating more than her is her evil BPD best friend, who is really turning up the flame with her vicious machinations.

16. A year later, the evil BPD best friend's designs have been thwarted, and she passes from evil to good. But the co-dependent still treats me like dogsh*t. I try to resolve it several times; I see the loss of the original friendship that preceded our attempt at dating as being a great injustice and tragedy, a moral abstraction that transcends actual events and whatever sentiments or irrational cognitions. Nothing really changes. I am forced into therapy in order to get over it.

17. Her bullsh*t still grates on me and I have to put up with it at least once a week, but I've moved on.

18. I move to Las Vegas.

I know all that sounds one-sided. It is indeed true that I was thinking and acting in worst Aspie form, and that from time to time I was probably crazy or assholish in ways that the "aspie card" doesn't cover...

...but here were her two greatest ills in all this:

1. Instead of telling me whatever I needed to be told (even if it was just to go away and leave her alone), she simply got passive-aggressive. And if that didn't work (it virtually never did; it just made me try harder), after a while all her bottled-up rage would explode and she would go absolutely ape-sh*t on me. And things would get very very ugly in a way that was always traumatic for me.

Traumatic for her? Neither I or anyone else could ever know! She was the most emotionally closed-off, pathologically private person I've ever known in my entire life.

All in all, it was a worsening vicious cycle that just kept going and going up and up and up and out towards the planet of perdition that orbits the star of anguish, across our galaxy.

2. I tried to tell her I was an Aspie and she wrote it off as it being in my head, or as it being a silly invention of the 21st century victim industry. In her mind it was a pathetic crutch that I pointed to whenever I was acting like a social gimp, an emotional midget, or a ret*d... as opposed to an actual condition with genuine consequences.

And let me tell you, she was a cold-hearted b*tch about it.

Usually people with very high IQs are understanding about this sort of thing. There are always exceptions.

So if she is to be faulted in all of this, those two things are it.

I've only been on one actual date - and in hindsight, it was bullsh*t - and that was over three years ago.

Absolutely nothing ever since.

Wait, I take that back. I went on one in early June. But it was a no-go situation from the get-go so I ran and hid. Still haven't called her or anything. Coward's way out... but I didn't know what else to do.

Those are the only two dates I've ever been on in my entire life.

"Stop dating." Well, that's easy! It seems I've had no choice in the matter, because my condition is not by choice. We are the few, the ashamed, the involuntary celibate.

Did I mention that I'm absolutely obsessed with the idea of breaking the spell and getting a girlfriend?

I don't think it's healthy anymore. I think it's driving me insane.

But it's something I know I must accomplish, even at enormous cost.

But still, it burns.

Here's a current obsession that's been aching at me for weeks, but I think it's productive.

I want a bass guitar so particular that I might have to have it custom built. But I don't have $15,000 for an Alembic, who are one of the few outfits that could/would build it the precise way I want it down to the last molecule.

Here's my dilemma.

I want to get a 4-string bass guitar and low-string it. B-E-A-D. B is the lowest string on a 5-string.

I have small hands so I am limited to brands like Ibanez and Schecter, because they're the only brands I know of that make 4-string 35" scale basses that go well with small hands.

But I am not willing to settle for either.

Also, I want to install a pair of Darkstar pickups. Darkstars are super-custom pickups that cost $200 for a single, and $400 for a reverse-wound hum-cancelling pair. Their tone and power is as intense as the name implies. They're old-school passive as opposed to that new-fangled active sh*t, which I dislike.

Basically, I may be forced to purchase the highest-end Ibanez or Schecter, and totally gut it. Tear out all the active electronics, do some major routing, to install the Darkstars.

That kind of work could cost well over a thousand dollars (not including the Darkstars themselves; it's the routing that would be the b*tch, along with rewiring everything for passive set-up, because just tearing stuff out is a cinch), and it would leave me with a bass guitar with an official resale value of about $50.

And, because I dislike exotic wood accents (quilted maple tops, etc.), because I see it as garish, I'd strip it all off and probably paint it metal-flake black. Which would be considered blasphemous among devout gear heads (especially the boutique set) - it would be like gutting the interior of a stately and historic New Orleans mansion and redoing the inside in generic, tacky, white and pastel modern petit-bourgeois suburban yuppie decorating scheme (something that I have actually seen done!) - but oh well.

I want a "35 scale because I don't want that big fat B-string to flop around like a bungee cord. They make "34 5-strings and I've even seen it done in "32 (though you have to be an expert luthier to pull that off), but I gotta have it in "35.

For the past two weeks I have been devoting all my waking hours to this problem. I am driving myself insane!! ! I'm ready to get my gun and start firing it into the air!

But the end result will be worth it.

Ideal outcome: the sales rep at Warmoth gets back to me and tells me that yes, if I get a "34 scale 4-string with 13 degree angled peghead and use super-fat heavy gauge roundwound or old-fashioned flat-wound strings, and if the neck is adjusted just so by a luthier, that the B-string will be sufficiently tense. If I am also assured that the neck (based on a '62 Fender J-Bass, which I'm hoping is more slender than current J-bass models) is slim enough for my hands, I'll be in business.

Because their G4 model can be routed in-factory for Darkstars for a $45 upcharge. And I would get it with purple metal flake paint so it would be all dark and gothicky on the one hand but garishly sparkly on the other, with this huge scary-looking and scary-sounding Darkstars turning heads from 600 feet away. And it's all about that B-string... forget detuning, it's all about low-stringing the 4-banger.

I'm really, really, really hoping I can get my way. I'm obsessing over getting my way.

I'm hoping I won't have to purchase a $900 Schecter so that I can subsequently spend about $1,400 more dollars gutting and retrofitting the damned thing.

Huh... I've never been obsessed with a person, though I've had weird asexual crushes in which I dearly wished I could befriend someone. I never obsessed over them, though; most of the time I chose a good book rather than the possibility of their company.

I do have trouble with obsessions, though. When they are strong and I love them so much that work, school, and even showering seem unimportant, I have to find some way of controlling them rather than just riding it out, as I've been doing. You can get fired at a job or fail a class before an obsession lets go of you... and the stupid thing is, while you're busy with the obsession, you don't even care.

Aspie obsessions are wonderful and they do turn us into experts on our subjects of interest--but they have a very definite dark side.

Crazy obsession is a difficult one, I had an addiction to a person could'nt stop phoning them, all my thoughts revolved round them it was ridiculous. Over time I got less obsessive and I think if it happened again I would recognise the warning signs and try and keep more of a level head, take a step back. Its difficult but just knowing you have the potential to be infatuated may perhaps prepare you for it happening again.

I can only say like the people above, make friends first particularly with girls with the same interests as you if you can find them.Ask them out to a neutral place where you wouldn't see any other friends, and try to find something to do together where you can speak to them naturally. The only relationships i've had that have worked at all have come from friendship, but generally i'm no good at relationships. Like the guitar stuff, sounds great, maybe I'l l do that to my guitar.
What's limerance? If it's rude i guess I'll have to look it up.
My problem is that i stim by scratching my head. This is allright when what comes off is just flakes of dandruff. What comes off now is any colour, usually black, but brown ,red,yellow or green bits have come off too. Any one know whats wrong with me ? Sometimes it bleeds and feels awful, disorientating. I think it is infected seborrhia but there is no way i could go to my doctor and he will not examine me or help with anything. He just thinks i'm a mad hypochondriac. I can't go to a hairdressers, you'd need a specialist , i've tried all sorts of things but cannot afford any thing special.
And it feels like I killed the last man I loved through not communicating properly and not going and living with him, and i don't want it to happen again either. So I'm even more frightened of it.

RachelLugiagirl, please go see a dermatologist. I used to have these itchy dry spots, and went to a dermatologist, and found out they are a type of skin problem that has to be burned off.

As for obssessing over women, I did that when I was in High School, and just quit. Obssessing requires lots of time and effort. When I went to University, I just didn't have time. I also didn't have any steady dates.