I'm Not An Aspie. I Lied During My Assessment.

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@bumbleme: I can say I don't fit any type of Aspie, (please see previous posts, as I'll have to re-hash and you might end up bored).
If the psychologist, who assessed me had asked if I have any particular skills/special interests, (which I subsume myself in for months/years), she might have come to a different conclusion. I don't present with repititive behaviours, (I certainly don't stim), and any interests I develop, I become bored of easily.
That's another question: do all aspies stim?

My way of putting it is that I'd got into the habit of presenting myself in a distorted way, so that I wouldn't look odd and invite contempt. So when I was assessed, I felt I needed to try to remove that disguise. I couldn't completely do it, because I wasn't aware of all of the distortions, and even when I was, to deliberately regress felt dishonest. More positively, practically everybody adjusts to life as they grow, which is often a good thing, and it's also a good thing that such adjustments often become part of the person, like the ability to ride a bicycle, though some adjustments will probably always be painful and feel unnatural, and couldn't even be applied at all on a bad day.

In a sense I see the assessment itself as something of a lie, because instead of being a scientific assessment of one's native autism, the assessor tends to withhold an ASD diagnosis if the client has adapted to the extent that the underlying condition isn't impacting significantly on their life, which to my mind makes no more sense than saying somebody's legs aren't paralysed because they happen to own a wheelchair. The assessment may be valid enough if all you want to know is how disabled you appear to be, but as well as getting exempted from Aspie-unfriendly duties in my workplace, I also wanted to know how natively autistic I was. It's a complicated subject.

I think everyone is different on the spectrum, also I believe its very difficult to lie at the assessment because these are specialists trained to recognise ASD. I don't always experience sensory overload when in public, I think it's a NT belief that we are supposed to always experience it though. If I am particularly stressed or had a bad start to the day I am more prone to it though. I think my major traits are routines and ability to socialise/make small talk.

Maybe you have some OCD?

I cannot believe that the attention seeker is still being fed, good grief

I agree. To the OP- you may just have traits of OCD, but this seems almost exactly like me when I obsess over my diagnosis. Thankfully, I have mostly been able to overcome those doubts (they used to plague me 24/7), but it wasn't easy and it took quite a while. Just think about it- your obsession is whether or not you have Asperger's Syndrome or not. Your compulsion is coming here for reassurance, but it isn't enough to have diagnosed autistics say they don't have a certain trait (such as perfect pitch or special interests)- it isn't reassuring enough anymore. If you want to rid yourself of these doubts, you are going to need to work at it, like I had to. It is so unbelievably hard, but if you want to know for sure and stop obsessing, you need to take the necessary steps in order to get rid of this particular obsession.

(By the way- OCD is very often comorbid with autism. There's more evidence for you that these worries and doubts are unfounded (and when I say unfounded, I don't mean that they aren't real worries and I am not making fun of you in any way- I just mean that your obsessions are irrational like mine) .

@Voxish: really? I wouldn't dare call anyone an attention seeker, if they posted something that made them consider their diagnosis.
.. maybe you can tell me why it is, that I am supposedly an aspie, and yet I have stimmed in my whole life, (flapping my hands, twirling, etc)? The psychologist, who assessed me, never asked if I stimmed. Given that every aspie is supposed to stim, those of us, who don't, can't be autistic.

Stimming has never, ever, been part of formal diagnostic criteria. Nor has any member here has ever claimed that all ASD people stim, AFAIK, except for one anti-neurodiversity troll that we banned several times.

I've read posts on this foroum, read articles on the internet. Stimming is considered to be repititive behaviour. I used to make up pop songs, as a girl and used to sing in my bedroom & I made the noises for the instruments. I've never flapped my hands/jumped up and down/wiggled my feet/whatever.

All the articles and the posts I've read, stimming is an integral part of asperger's. If stimmimg is supposed to relieve stress, the I've never been stressed.

Even when my dad was dying, I wasn't stressed enough to wave my hands about, or twirl around. I'm fortunate, in that I'm single, (so I never have meltdowns), I work from home and I don't go out. By not living with anyone, (if you're an adult), and working from home, stress can be reduced, as people cause stress.

There are threads about stimming. People stim lots of ways. One of the best I've found involves working my abs. It beats clenching my jaw in every way. People rarely notice, and my abs look better. I used to tap my fingers on my desk, never step on cracks, all kinds of things.

So what if you're not an aspie? Or if you are? It's a spectrum, hence, everyone is on it. Diagnoses exist for people when it causes them problems in their lives. It sounds like something is causing problems in your life. You might benefit from spending less energy on naming it, and more energy improving your life. I don't really care if you get help for that by having a somewhat incorrect diagnosis. Everyone who improves their life makes the world a better place for everyone else.

@jrjones9933: I only had one 2 hour session - some of which the pyschologist interviewed my parents, then a follow up with a psychologist training to become an assessor. I wasn't given any tests, such as the EQ Test, or the SQ Test. I wasn't given the Aspie Quiz either, which apparently, is better than the AQ test.

I wasn't asked if I liked systems - there is no order in my life and my house is a tip. I wasn't asked if I had any specila interest, to the point of being anal - I don't. I might start collecting articles about William, Kate & their children, or I might want learn the terminlogy of golf, but I get bored easily, which may not be an aspie thing. I also, in my assessment, said that I needed to have a reason to talk - that I don't like engaging in everday chit-chat. That was a sort of a lie, as I do engage in chit-chat when I go out, as I would go loopy-doopy; I talk to myself as it is, or the cats. I like chatting to people, but I'm not great at it, as I live on my tod.

@marcevans: I only have sensory overload, when it comes to taste/smell. My late dad couldn't stand milk, but in no way was he autistic. Lots of NTs have issues with not liking certain things, but they're not autistic. If my Aspie Quiz, (my 1st attempt, where I didn't alter the answers, so that I would have more ND traits), stated that I had equal NT & ND traits, which must mean I can't be an aspie.

My late dad summed it up nicely: am I the way I am, because I don't mix with people? Maybe, if I socialised more, I wouldn't be 'autistic'. My mum said on one occasion, when I was telling them I thought I was an 'aspie', is that she knew of someone, who pretended to be mentally ill, and then he actually developed a mental illness.

No doubt Roxxy Voxxy will have a go at me again. The thing is, I have read stuff and the fact I don't stim, have a deep special interest, don't have a special skill, etc, then it is impossible for me to be an aspie.

This thread is going nowhere fast except in circles and repetition. OP, I see you have made similar threads on other forums in past years, and I assume you came to WP because it is the largest AS forums, though the answers here are unlikely to add anything new at this stage.

@B19: I just want to know why it is that I don't seem to possess nearly of the 'known' quirks. Why it is that I can score quite highly in the Cam Face-Voice Battery Test, when a low score is indicative of Asperger's. People say that female Aspies 'learn' hpw to recognise emotions, but I've never learnt.

I have been diagnosed at a supposedly asperger's centre, but I was never asked if I have any of the quirks associated with asperger's. I was never asked if I can understand maps, if I like to know how buildings are constructed, or if, I ever have a walk in the woods, I like to know the names of the trees, (all questions from the SQ Test).

Why aren't I a genius at a certain subject? Why aren't I deeply into a special interest, (I tend to get bored). Why don't I have meltdowns, if I eat a pea, by mistake? Why don't I fit into one of the three types of thinking? To sum up, why don't I feel properly autistic?

LD

The answer to many of your questions could simply be that the spectrum is as wide as it is deep.

Many of us in the spectrum find this difficult to grasp. We simply like "us and them," or "in and out" models. The deeper reality, like everything else lies in varying shades of grey.

This is why I don’t stim much during the summer or when I am not overloaded by work at school. I have nothing to be that stressed about. I think you have the answers to your own questions, but the obsessive thinking about whether or not you have Asperger’s is causing you to look for reassurance here.

Yes. You might be at the milder end of the spectrum. If you really think you biased your assessment towards the severe end, it might be helpful to (re-)take the Aspie Quiz, this time taking extreme trouble to make sure your answers are as honest as possible. My guess is that you'd come out as a mixture, with some AS and some NT traits, but just knowing your traits is very useful and relatively objective, much more objective than a woolly psych label which might encourage you to shoehorn yourself into believing you have all kinds of traits you don't really have.

In my case I did the Aspie Quiz because my (then) wife had suggested I might have AS, and although skeptical, I didn't want to dismiss her idea out of hand. At the time I had no idea that an official diagnosis might lead to adjustments at work - I'd always had problems at work but I'd explained them as being down to the cruel yoke of capitalism (I'm a socialist) and the fact that in the workplace one was forced to associate with "suits" and random people who one wouldn't normally want much to do with. If anything, I'd have felt some satisfaction in proving that my wife's idea was a lame one, like a lot of her ideas seem to have been. Nor did I know anything much about AS, so I didn't know what the "right" answers were. So I had no means or motive for biasing my answers towards a false positive. Yet the result said "you are very likely an Aspie."

Ironically, my thinking style seems to have changed since then, so that if I took the test again now, I'd have a lot of trouble answering the questions at all, because they're so reductionist and they demand black-and-white answers, and since my diagnosis I've become very aware that the truth is usually grey, so I always want to tick between the boxes, but they don't allow that, so I'm forced to lie. And of course now I mostly know what the "right" answers are, which always leaves such tests wide open to biased responses. If the OP has the same trouble, all I can recommend is this: every time there's a question that doesn't allow the truth to be told, you have to tick a box that you will know distorts the truth either one way or the other. Keep track of the directions of the distortions, and make sure that you distort the truth in half the questions one way and the other half the other way. By doing that, the distortions should cancel each other out.