Growing up with Asperger's in a dysfunctional home.

Post Reply New Topic

Since I’m on a roll this morning, I would like to submit another topic. I am curious if anyone grew up in a dysfunctional home; and if so, how has that affected your living with Asperger’s? I’m not talking about living with strict parents or even a father who “drank too much.” I am talking about a household you’d only see on the Jerry Springer Show. I’ll start.

There are certain aspects of my childhood that even to this day, in an anonymous place such as this, I cannot bring myself to disclose. Mine was a very broken home where there was no love or respect. My folks divorced when I was a boy with my mother shuttling me all over the country. As I’ve learned, aspies do not like change, so you can imagine what that was like. I was compelled to care for my bedridden grandmother from the time I was 12 until she died at home; I watched her die. I endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of my mother and others. There was no outlet for me, because my dad died a couple years after their divorce.

That’s it in a very small nutshell. My mother has been gone for almost ten years now. Since learning that I have Asperger’s, I have come to the conclusion that she was most likely an aspie. She, too, grew up in a very, very dysfunctional home. The way I was raised and taught to think, act, etc. compounded the challenges of living with Asperger’s.

I have read many articles about those with Asperger’s being quite successful, but I have also read and seen some true horror stories. I would like to hear how your upbringing has affecting living with Asperger’s and vice versa.

Yes, I suppose that's what it was/is.

I've always felt a little wistful about not feeling close or truly accepted by my family. It's not that I have had such a horrible upbringing, but they were all about keeping up outside appearances. My parents divorced when I was three or four, from physical abuse issues from what I gather. They reunited a year or so later, but didn't actually remarry until I was in my late teens. How I found out they weren't married? My mom threatened to call me in as a runaway if I left her, because she had sole custody. How I found out they remarried? Browsing online court records.
There were a few incidents of sexual abuse growing up, but looms in my mind was the mindset of "don't tell your father". Why? Because he'll get angry which leads to screaming, punching holes in the walls, and this unflappable belief he has that he is always correct, and definitely king of the castle.
I can talk to my mother, and everything is fine. Talk to my sister in the same hour, and I hear of fights, abuse, affairs, you name it. We never lived close to grandparents/distant relatives, but I've heard what's wrong with everyone else over the years.

So yeah, I know what it's like to have issues with family. I've kept my distance for the most part, because it's more peaceful that way. I have a hard time connecting with people or being emotionally close, and sometimes I don't know how much is AS/alexithymia and how much is plain old distrust.

I think quite a few members on here have had a crap childhood, myself included. I don't want to talk about mine. Myself and all my siblings all have degrees of issues because of it, but only two of us have diagnosed neurological conditions and both of us are also the worst off.

Sometimes it's hard to know whether your AS traits are worsened by your experiences or are worse because you have AS and were singled out for particular stuff. I was definitely singled out as having something intolerable about me.

I was the only one of us children who was told with a look of loathing "you are at that 'difficult' age" and that difficult age apparently went on for a long time. I was the only one of us that had the mother of my only friend, told by my dad that he hated me. And she reported back to me what he'd said. I have no idea to this day why she told me he'd said that, because I would never say that to a child. But the fact that he told it to someone else and didn't e.g. say it to me in anger, made me know he meant it. Clearly there was something about me that was different and that he didn't like. I now believe he was on the spectrum too, and perhaps I reminded him of everything he knew was wrong in himself.

But I feel almost like none of it happened to me now, or it was a story someone told me, or it was a lifetime ago. I too have the ability to cut off my feelings. I only found out yesterday that I have alexithymia, so this probably explains it. I used to want to go to the top of a mountain and scream, and scream, and scream. That eventually went, it was probably a feeling like I needed the mother of all meltdowns. These days if I feel like melting down, I don't necessarily feel like I need to go somewhere to do it, probably years of existential stress mean I wouldn't be able to hold it in until I got to the mountain. The kettle is quicker to boil nowadays.

Sometimes I wonder if all the abuse I endured, as well as being an immigrant, "made" me an aspie.

I was naïve to the social mores and customs of the U.S. (Immigrant issues).
I rarely looked people in the eye. (Abuse issue).
I stimmed by rocking back and forth. (Abuse issue).
Loud noises really made me jump. (Abuse issue).
Say the wrong things in a social setting. (Abuse issue of simply not connecting with anyone to practice social skills with).

Of course, some of my traits cannot be explained by either abuse or immigrant issues such as:

Can't maintain a relationship to save my life. (Neither abuse nor immigrant issue).
Sunlight makes my eyes water fiercely. (Neither abuse nor immigrant issue).
Stereotyped use of language (3rd person speech, etc) (Neither abuse nor immigrant issue).
Aversion to small talk. (Neither abuse nor immigrant issue).

Wow, reading some of the responses here has blown me away. So much shared thus far could easily apply to me. What whirlingmind said, “. . . singled out as having something intolerable about me” is something I have pondered about myself for 53 years.

MjrMajorMajor’s comment about “not connecting with people” is so apt. I have a few friends, but I do not have that deep emotional bond that others do. When I have tried, it has been phony, an act. I’ve always felt that the friends I have had kept me around for entertainment. When things were dark for me, they were nowhere to be found. I’m experiencing that now.

redrobin62, what you shared describes me to a tee. In fact, I still “stim” by rocking back and forth. It normally stays dormant unless I’m stressed, as does grinding my teeth and talking to myself (full-blown conversations). Since I have been exceedingly stressed because of some issues at work, the stims have really manifested. I catch myself rocking while teaching my Sunday school class at church. No one has said anything, but I’m sure they think it’s odd.

The aversion to noise (dogs and car horns for me), sunlight, etc., etc. is very descriptive of me. I appreciate the input I’ve read thus far. It has been reassuring for me that I am not the only one on the planet like me. I find myself thinking, “My people.”

My musical interest put me with other people who had way more dysfunction growing up yet were way more functional in 'society'. Some of them had even been to prison and were able to integrate to some degree. I can't help but wonder if some time in foster care would have had me turn out more like a typical 'bad boy' and be able to blend in more with at least the fringes of society or if I would still feel like the man with no country

I grew up in a family that blamed me, the youngest child for the family's dysfunction. The abuse was mostly mental and the disdain was constant.
Overall I am fairly high functioning, I have a wife of twenty years a job all my life etc.. but the social withdrawl has always been an issue. I am certain that if I had had a supportive loving family, my life would have been much less anguished.
I also spent ten years in boarding school and I am pretty sure a foster home environment wouldn't have done you much good. It took me some pretty sharp footwork to keep out of the firiing line of the school bullies in my childhood. I watched them torture other unfortunates and I survived by playing the amiable idiot.

That's exactly what I thought when I first found WP. It was a Eureka moment, an epiphany. Peoples' experiences mirrored my own and their thoughts were my thoughts, their problems were my problems. Since then, it has been an invaluable learning curve for me. It has enabled me to identify things in me that I thought were "just me" or I didn't know weren't normal to everyone, as autistic behaviours. It has given me names and terms for those things. I'd have probably gone crazy without WP.