Extreme naïveté

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I have had this problem since I was a small boy. I tended (tent?) to not only interpret everything literally, I also trusted in everyone and believed that everyone was 100% right and 100% trustworthy.

When someone told me something, I had to believe it, because I believed that what everyone said was fact. It also got me into trouble.

When I was around age 6, somehow some strangers found out my address as well as found out that my family and I were going on holiday, and thus the house would be left vacant. They rang the house phone when my parents were away, and I answered. They knew my name somehow, and asked me when we were going to leave the house for our holiday, which dates exactly and at what time. I told them all of those details, because I trusted strangers 100%. I later told my parents and they were furious that I had answered the phone to a stranger and given these details. My parents had to change the locks of our home and get some relatives to oversee our house when we went on holiday. But I never thought to myself that people could be malicious. I just answered questions automatically like a robot.

This repeated itself in different ways, but regarding my thread on virginity and single, whenever people asked me, I would answer them honestly and automatically that I was still a virgin and single. This caused them to get information on me, and spread gossip as well as judge me negatively. I had big problems getting out of this naïve mindset, I just seemed like I had to trust and believe in complete strangers no matter what.

Another example is when I played computer games, some random person would send me a PM saying that they were an administrator and that they needed the password to my game account immediately. I gave it to them, believing them 100%. Then suddenly I could not log back onto my account. It took me more than a month to figure out that that person just took advantage of my naïveté to log onto my account.

Imagine if someone had asked me my credit card number or something when I was this naïve.

Now I am very paranoid and cannot trust people at all. The other extreme. I feel like everyone is trying to get information from me, and I no longer consider many people acquaintances or friends. Anytime someone asks me a question, I get suspicious if they are going to try to squeeze information from me and then spread it all over. I feel now like basically everyone is just trying to screw me over.

Is this related to Asperger's, and is there a way to get rid of this naïveté without becoming paranoid?

I think that it might at least partly be because of aspergers... all I can say is that these things are usually learned from experience when it comes to autistic people.

A six year old can be forgiven for that thing on the phone. A NT kid might do the same.

But yes, the rest of what you're saying I think IS very aspie related. Much of adolescence I was hostile to peers in school because I assume that they were plotting to humiliate me in some way. And I lost a lot of potential good friends because of that. And I was that way because other kids did give me grief that way at other previous times..

In my advanced middle age I am more sophisticated in the social realm than I was as a teen. But I still run into a curious situation: the fact that NTs lie so often that they assume YOU are lying when you're not lying. Sometimes it amuses me, and sometimes its aggravating. But often I find myself livid with anger, both at folks I interact with, and at myself, the later because "I must do something wrong that falsly conveys that I am lying when I am not lying".

I don't think I'm that naive. I say and do stupid things sometimes but it's not because I trust everyone around me. It's because I'm not thinking at the time.

I wasn't that naive as a child either (all children are naive to an extent but not to the same degree as the OP). One time when I was about 5 I was in my front yard trying to make something out of twigs, and 2 of my older brother's friends (one boy and one girl) came along to wait for my brother to come out and play. I needed some glue to stick my little model together, and the kids said they will wait there and guard it while I get the glue. I knew what they were thinking; they were going to knock it over so that it would fall apart. They promised they won't do anything to it, so I went to get the glue but still didn't trust them 100%. And sure enough, when I came back, my model was knocked over. They said that it was the wind but I didn't believe them, as there was no wind that day strong enough to blow it over like that. I just sighed and waited for them to disappear before I continued on my model.

Due to my experiences, in the past few months I have been extremely cautious and often paranoid about how people treat me. My default is that everyone is trying to screw me over in one way or another, either by getting information about me, gossip, etc. If in doubt if to trust someone or not, I am more cautious than not and usually do not trust the person.

I have also noticed in the past that so-called friends and acquaintances have screwed me over more times than not. So now I made a rule: no one can even be in consideration to be called a friend unless I have known them for minimum 10 years. By definition, that means that anyone whom I have met after age 20 is automatically not a friend.

A second requisite is that they must talk to me on a regular basis. A third would be that they have not screwed me over in any way in the past.

Anyone whom I consider "friendly" whom I have met recently I place in the "acquaintance" category.

So many people have tried to call me "my friend" or pretend that they are my friend that I no longer consider anyone whom I meet to be a friend.

I feel like I have to adhere to this guideline, because I have been screwed over so many times by people who I thought were friends and acquaintances.

I believe, it is an AS trait!
I myself am 66, ridiculously literal, not quite as naïve as earlier, - but I still wonder, how other people instictively know, if someone isn´t sincere....... AND now somewhat paranoid and prone to distrust and disappointment.

One of the common traits of an Aspie is:
* inability to deceive or to understand deception

I think Fireblossom is correct when she says: these things are usually learned from experience.

You have to develop a gut feeling of whether a person is honest or deceitful, and then test the gut feeling for accuracy.

It is dangerous to be naive and on the other side it is wrong to be totally paranoid. You need to strike a middle ground, to figure out the proper response. The proper response is to be cautious.

When I look at the definition of naive - showing a lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. So the proper goal is to become wise, make a good judgment call and that is based on applied experience.

Let me give you an example:

During the three years I was in Junior High School I was subjected to extreme bullying. I was both physically and mentally abused by my peer group.

One day when I was in the hallway of my 6th grade school, I was surrounded by a group of boys. They asked me what my nationality was. I sensed danger and said nothing. They looked at me. I was small and had large ears. They decided I was Japanese. I said nothing.

For the next three years, I was told every Japanese joke ever invented. Whenever they threw a joke my way, I maintained a stone cold face. That was a little hard to do sometimes because I wasn’t Japanese and a few of the jokes were actually a little funny. But if I showed any emotion, the jig was up.

To this day, if they are still alive, I wonder if they remember the little Japanese boy that went to their school. And I am still chuckling deep inside. That is my quirky sense of humor.

Now if I were Japanese, every one of their jokes would have been a dagger to the heart. And it also made me somewhat immune to any other criticisms they leveled in my direction. If they called me stupid, an idiot, a klutz, an imbecile; I knew deep inside I really wasn’t because I was pulling the wool right over their eyes and they didn’t even realize it. This almost made me bulletproof from psychological abuse.

Naïveté spelt correctly. A happy day.

I was like that in my youth but as a grew older I did become less trusting of people and even avoidant mostly because I felt that people in general weren't trustworthy. I literally lost all my friends after graduating high school. Every single one of them dropped like flies as I was enabled to shut myself away from the world while most of them were working or going to college. Of course the problem is that when you're not working or going to school is that your ability to relate to most people tends to be nonexistent.

Last night at a meetup people said that I was acting unfriendly because I was very cautious when talking to others. So it is either that or people think that I am a chump because they can get information out of me easily.

One guy kept asking me all sorts of personal questions about what my job is and where I live and what my ethnicity is. Eventually I told him to f*ck off. Then he told others how rude and abrasive I was. When others told me that I was rude, I also told them to go f*ck off. I cannot trust anyone it seems. I have been taken advantage of so many times in the past, and now when I close myself off when I think that someone is suspicious, gossip spreads that I act unfriendly.

It seems like a game where you cannot win.

I am extremely naive and I always need to be protected by others because of it.

I have been told I was gullable... I know I love seagulls.

HAHA!