Old Home Movies helping confirm my thoughts.

Post Reply New Topic

So my family is very weird. Dysfunctional and abusive weird. Long story, not getting into it. But one weird thing is that we didn't have many home videos (I'm 33). We had Christmas videos, but that was it, and I've never seen them. Compared to my husband's family, it is odd as his mother has hundreds of home movies of them as they grew up.
But my mom's parents (she is technically my ex-step mother), DID film us occasionally and on some of these videos I saw some interesting things.
1. I kept to myself as much as possible as a kid. I was frequently tasked with babysitting, but still.
2. I used to clap to myself. Like, rhythms when I wasn't around anyone. At 12. I forgot about this.
3. I was amazingly quiet. I answered maybe 1/10 questions asked.
4. I was more.... droney that I had thought. This was an age where I had thought I had started talking 'normally', and yet, in the video, my voice is whatever-that-word is.

Makes me look back and say how the hell did my parents not notice something was fundamentally, if not wrong, then different with me!? I would have noticed this type of behavior with my kids! It wasn't subtle!

Although it has given me conflicting emotions, it has reassured me that seeking formal diagnosis is a good thing. I have an appointment on April 5th, and am very nervous about it. I'm going prepared, but still. It is very nerve wracking.

If your parents are unusual, it makes sense that they didn't notice your differences.

My parents both have autistic traits, and so I was not really thought to be unusual, until I got much older and had major behavioral problems. And at that point it was assumed that it was because I was "bad" or because my parents had split up.

I have home videos of myself at a young age, and I did display many unusual behaviors as well, including a complex motor stereotypy which I did all the time. I think other people noticed that I was different at the time, but not so different as to be thought of as anything but a weird kid.

I think it's wise to seek an evaluation. I'm glad that I did, because now I have the opportunity to improve my life. Good luck.

There are no home movies of me when I was a kid. Only photographs.

There is a home movie of me as a boy climbing up a ladder to a slide, when I get to the top I rapidly shake my head back and forth a few times before sliding down. I used to do that fairly often. Probably a stim

My mom and most of my family has mostly indulged or ignored me. They think I'm trying to find an excuse. But the one sister who doesn't (she takes me seriously) is the one who had the video.
They don't see it, and despite many things that point to it, they think it doesn't add up the way I'm calculating (to totally abuse a metaphor).

As a product of the same era, you have to realize, our parents didn't know about autism-- not even psychologists knew about autism in the 80's-90's. It's not really like them shipping you to a psychologist would have done you any good then, in fact it may have been worse-- imagine getting CBT with shocks at say 10 years old. Even worse you could have been misdiagnosed with something far different than autism and spent the entirety of your life following therapy that went absolutely nowhere because autism isn't curable. I understand the frustration, but I don't necessarily think your parents are to blame for not catching it.

Trust me. They DID ship me to psychologists, but only to determine who was the less inept parent. Not to actually HELP me or anything.

I'm just in shock. For someone who was supposed to be 'normal', I certainly wasn't.

They knew about the entity known as autism---but they didn't know it like we know it today.

Back in the 80s, and even the early 90's, autism was thought of as being solely the Kanner type.

My home life was also abusive and extremely dysfunctional. I can relate.

my uncle has most/if not all of the family home movies of stuff like christmas and thanksgiving....holidays like that....and he showed a few once, and even then they kinda breezed thru it. i would have like to have seen more. i keep asking, but like with everything else I want to do when the family gathers for holidays or whenever, i get ignored.

How fascinating it must be to be able to watch videos of yourself back then. I don't think there are any videos of me as a child. Looking back at photos there are so many of me chewing on my lip, even when I'm posing for the camera

My family was also abusive and I took 6 five minute clips to my assessment. My assessor said she'd never had them brought before but that she wished people did as they were very helpful to her.

I love having them, though there was a propensity not to record my "worse" characteristics but even with the best of myself showing I still seemed autistic.

I was quite stressed about mine as I wasn't sure they definetly showed autism but the traits were there.

Interestingly, I was a very typical baby at 12 months, but between 16 and 18 months I became way more autistic. In fact, in terms of social skills, I would say I regressed - my parents were convinced my MMR did it so it wasn't just me who saw it. I know regression at that age is typical for autism but I tend only to hear it for severe autism cases, rather than mild and no language delay cases such as myself.

My wife thinks they're boring and can't imagine why anyone would want to watch them, but my grandmother loves them... And today, nearly a year after they were converted from tape to DVD my cousin was watching them with her boyfriend as I arrived at our family gathering.

Some of the tapes were missing, which sucks as one of them was mostly of me rather than often of my cousins.

Oh, and when my grandmother head they were going to my ASD assessment she made a point to highlight all the 'normal' things I did... It seems her perception of normal is off!


My assessor found the videos of my alongside age matched peers or my cousins (who appeared in multiple videos and therefore she could see them at the same age as me in different videos).

My computer died with my edited clips on. Once I have some time, I might create a home video thread. I know there's lots on YouTube but I often found they were of young diagnosed and often more easily identifiable traits.