Have people said you lack responsibility?

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Or, have they said something like you have no sense of responsibility, you don't take responsibility for your actions or something of the sort?

I've gotten this on occasion, even though my personality and attitude is the exact opposite: people have always remarked on how diligent and conscientious I am, as a colleague, housemate, romantic partner and friends...
It has mainly been through peers in my early 20s (former housemates, or friends of friends) or later in the workplace but not in recent years as I can successfully & consistently mask my Asperger manifestations. (I'm in my mid-40s.)

However, back when I was in my early 30s, I recall getting written up more than once at a former workplace for violating some unspoken rule while communicating on email to others. It was a complicated circumstance (at least I found). In hindsight, a good deal of it was due to aspects of the corporate culture that I found perverse.

That's the trouble, when you violate some unwritten / hive-mind / common-sense / emotional intelligence rule, and you claim that you have a psychological disorder that impairs your ability to absorb and react accordingly, people will usually not give a damn. Unless they are VERY enlightened and see something in you beyond that (which thankfully they did more than once in my personal history) and/or they have someone in their family who struggles with ASD/HFA and they appreciate that person's struggles. No, more likely they would call you on lacking responsibility and that ignorance is not an excuse, you should "know by now", etc. In hindsight, some folks may have perceived me as a form of sociopath, with the common denominators (i.e. deflecting when telling them "well nobody told me" or "this wasn't clearly communicated to me" and what-have-you, basically detaching yourself as the source of the upset, making the other person feel like *they're* the mentally deficient one, and all the other dirty tricks that sociopaths use.)

However, I think it becomes clear to most people that based on your presentation as more timid and lacking street-smarts, that you're almost certainly not a sociopath- just a weirdo.

Many of them will still feel contempt or suspicion towards you nonetheless though - I believe this is because of a certain ethos in society, more in the U.S.A. than here in Canada (or elsewhere) that it's stigma to have a victim mentality and not doing anything about removing your barriers, so a lot of them are invoking the FAE (that's the fundamental attribution error, google that ) - thus it becomes a double-edge sword for us, where our perceived mental illness coupled with a perceived victim mentality (in shirking responsibility) can be doubly stigmatizing for us.

It's an extreme example, but consider a pedophile who has a brain tumour that is pressing on the area responsible for better judgement of improper actions. The pedophile is arrested and called to account, but even if medical evaluators determine & announce the root cause, 99% of people won't give a damn. Like I said, an extreme example, but it's how people respond to brain disorders - negative emotions will always prevail over science. By analogy, our presentation isn't as deviant, but it's still regarded as abnormal and makes others uncomfortable and so they still hold us to account for it. In a similar way that they'd hold a schizophrenic accountable for accusing someone of putting voices in his/her head, or if someone with Tourettes randomly yelled "AAAKKK!! stupid c*nt" while twisting their head and blinking and flailing their hands. You get the idea...

I often get told I don't know how to take responsibility for things, despite the fact I even actively try to do so and remedy the things I do wrong. People have zero patience for me not innately understanding or picking up on certain social norms, and if I break them and try to explain that I didn't know what I did/said wasn't acceptable, but I'll try to remember that, it's still not enough for people. I often also get told that I should "know better by now" in these situations, and that even family members don't believe that I'm unable to automatically pick up on all of the things they do. People definitely seem to think I'm playing some sort of victimizing game with them, but I'm not, I just genuinely don't know as much as they do when it comes to socializing with others.

Well, in that case, you should reply with:
"But why would I play some game or pretend not to know? Wouldn't that make me mentally ill??"
...because the main reason why they're denying it's due to a processing disorder, is to sidestep the taboo of (alleged) mental illness.
But if you deflect that line of thinking back at them, then it puts them on the spot
Especially if you phrase it as a question!!

part one

yeah, they don't care. I have drug-induced schizophrenia and I recently read this about schizophrenics too...I was pretty blown away by how vicious the interpretation was, something like 'schizophrenics are overgrown children who don't want to take responsibility for themselves and learn to exist in the adult world'...this was from a clinician in an article about it. Well, for one thing, that illness is very freaking depressing and it is probably more escapism than anything else, though it is an illness of brain function so who knows what is at play.

ASD people have poor executive planning skills. That's a symptom of what is wrong with us. I have severe depression and am on disability because of it anyway...sometimes I do okay and sometimes I don't do very well at all. I recently went through something very traumatic and I am not doing well at all and that is just the way it is right now. I know from experience it will even up in the end.

part two

But anyway, I digress...the NPD people in my family resolutely deny or refuse to absorb that my ASD stuff is real because I am 'painted black' (more NPD/BPD stuff), I am the black sheep in my family so I am just basically f'd up and what is wrong with me is my own fault and due to moral deficit rather than neurological stuff. My brother is one of the golden children, he is ASD as well which I knew for like 20 years but no one would listen to me, he could do no wrong so I guess they didn't want him to have an affliction, though he is textbook and you can tell by looking at him he is autistic. But literally two days ago my mother was like 'now what is autism again?'...though I have told her about it a million times. She will not absorb I have a legitimate neurological deficit. I told her 'you have two autistic children don't you think you should at least google it'. She's the same way with my schizophrenia though, my cousin told her to inform herself about that but then my cousin told me my mother's response was that I 'just need to make up my mind and get over it'. It's maddening.

I'm getting to the point that I just want to slap anyone who judges me about anything I am 'failing' at though. Poor executive planning skills is one of the symptoms so we actually 'should' have problems in that area. I know years ago I went to great length to try to explain the whole thing to my mother (she is NPD and her memory issues are wacked so of course she doesn't remember and doesn't know what autism is now, lol) and I really thought I had made a dent and then my sister who is also a 'golden child' took her aside and invalidated everything I had explained to her...

(personality disorder terminology: https://outofthefog.website/glossary )

My sister is a speech pathologist and she deals with severely autistic children, there are probably HFA's all around her who won't be diagnosed until much later if they don't commit suicide before that happens, sorry to be so glum, but anyway...so my also npd sister goes in there and tells my mother that i'm completely full of it, as if the condition of high functioning autism doesn't exist...so my mother just conveniently forgot everything I told her, which she wanted to do anyway because she wants to believe I am demonic, generally speaking. NPD people need a black sheep to beat up on and project all their negative self image stuff onto, it is how they compensate.

The world would certainly be a more fair and pleasant place if our quirks were better accepted and understood. However, for that to happen, there would have to be both ability and motivation. People have some interest in fairness, but it is very erratic. The mental capacity is probably the biggest problem. People are already thinking full-time about the easier inter-personal problems that have better odds of improving their own lives. It might help to stop trying to say that we can't respond to vague communication, and just declare that we won't, making it a game for them to communicate accurately.

Yeah, I hear you on that, brother!! You are bang-on on the point about how people are implicitly expecting a quid pro quo to build themselves up in some way, and they feel/find that there's less chance of them achieving that by interacting with us. Since they intuit (quite accurately) that because of our presentation, we are less endowed with a friend network, practical smarts, and financial means for mutual entertainment options, they typically blow us off.

You're even MORE on the mark, sentiment-wise, about your latter statement...just going "on strike" when it comes to not dealing with unspoken communication, effectively putting the onus on THEM to practice more assertive communication. The "up to 90% of communication is unspoken" model doesn't work for us because of our lower threshold of ambiguity. It sounds perverse, but a couple of times when I could tell that someone was speaking in a nuanced way as if it would "kill" them to assert their needs and wishes directly, I retorted: "I'm sorry, I don't 'speak Japanese'" (inserted air-quote to boot). Or I followed up with "you know, certain people are so reluctant to disagree or openly state their preferences, they act like they're in Japan".

To paraphrase the Joker (Joaquim Phoenix)...

"The worst part about having a mental disorder is that people expect you to behave as if you don't."

Thus the corollary to Dr. Tony Atwood's famous dictum in the ASD/HFA community: "You don't suffer from Aspergers. You suffer from other people."

Can anyone tell me why I don't get notifications of replies any longer?