Contact with parents

Post Reply New Topic

Unfortunately for all concerned, the individuation process for autistics is often harder and stranger than for many (not all) NTs. I see this issue from both sides. Nothing is more gutting to a parent than when a hard-to-raise adult child decides to reduce contact to nearly nothing or to cut off entirely. It's seen as a complete rejection and an invalidation of the many things the parent has given to the adult child from birth on. The mentally stronger parents eventually stop caring about their wastrel offspring, and the more vulnerable ones can be driven to suicide or have their physical health badly compromised by this unanticipated turn of events.

I am sure that the characteristics of AS or ASD do predispose to this sort of outcome. The autistic adult child has little awareness or empathy for the emotions of the parents, and are only aware of the uncomfortable frictions that their distancing causes. But in fact, except in cases of clearcut child abuse, it is not moral behavior to reject your parents.

Please don't come back at me about the narcissism thing. Autistics so purely misconstrue interpersonal behavior that their impression of a parent's behavior is entirely suspect. Many autistics feel comfortable self-diagnosing and I suppose that is their right, but it is not their right to diagnose everybody else in their world, as very few of them have the advanced training and perhaps importantly, the distance from the situation, to diagnose mom or pop with a personality disorder.

As the generations pass by, your choice to reject your parents may come back to haunt you when you find yourself in a very lonely old age. If you have children, they may treat you just the same as you treated your own parents. Karma's a b*tch, as they say.

Do you think if the child commites suicide it would be more gutting to a parent?
Maybe not, because then you get to be the victim.

Iv'e been in therapy all of my adult life, so no I have not self-diagnosed my parents. I suffer from the feeling of deep shame and self-hatred. I feel I don't deserve to be loved, I feel I don't deserve to live. Did you know that no one is borned with the feeling of shame?

I'm not going to become a parent, in fact I have sterilized myself. You see, I know myself very well, and I know that because of my wounds from my childhood I would not be a good parent.

I'm sorry you have such a hard time, Froya. Have you found people to be your substitute family? Your family of choice, not of accident.

Yes, I'm ok. Thank you.

I don't think cutting contact with parents comes easy to anyone. In fact I think it's one of the hardest things you can do, and that's why so few people acually do it. They would rather stay in abusive relations.

I have heard some people say that their parents are narcissistic, and there are books about narcissistic or toxic parents. I don't really believe it most of the time, when adult children say those things about their parents.

Quite frankly, it isn't your place to make such judgements on someones upbringing and to judge someones parent-child relationship. While true a percentage of them might be exaggerated or even a flat out lie, but another percentage will have truth to them and either way, the truth is none of your business.

Personally, I'm in contact with my dad and have completely cut communications with my mother. I don't know what's wrong my mother. It might be a large number of things. Truth is I'm not going to find out and I don't want to deal with it. A lot of people have been burned by my mothers manipulative and toxic behavior. I'm not the first and I certainly will not be the last to go 'no contact'.

In most cases, our parents love us as defunct NTs, not as high functioning autistics.

And as our parents are human, too, they come with their own faulty wiring.

So true.

Both of my parents, at different times, initiated lack of contact with me. My mother initiated lack of contact because she was angry with me. When she tried to restore contact, I went with the estrangement and did not respond to her messages. That was many years ago and they are now deceased. My life was so much better without them because of their emotional tirades. I have a small amount of guilt for not responding to my mother but being in contact with her involved an enormous emotional toll. I don't regret my decision.

I don't speak to my parents very much either, and when we do talk it tends to be brief. My mother was very verbally and emotionally abusive to me when I was a teenager. I was called 'worthless' 'pathetic' 'a n****r' 'not going to amount to anything',and generally made to feel unwanted on a daily basis. This going on while I got to watch my brothers enjoy being cared for and nurtured. Two different homes under one roof. It even got to the point where I was expected to ask permission to have dinner! I got a job at a restaurant and did not eat or drink anything at home from then on. My father was nothing more than her stooge. I have since graduated from hatred to indifference toward her. To this day though, I still feel that my life would have been much better without her in it. For what it's worth, I was an honor student and never got into serious trouble. Why did I have to be treated this way?

Thank you for sharing your stories

I have a civil order of no contact put in place after we had to call the police on my father for trespassing and harassment. The judge was shocked he would behave that way.
My mother called DYFS on my husband and I over 20+ claims of abuse that were found to be baseless and false. But it was two years of therapy, evaluations, visits, and more.

As a result, I do not have contact with either of my biological family. Since ceasing all contact with my father, I also ceased living under his 'rules' for life. So at 27, I finally moved away from his influence, and since then I have seen a resurgence of many of my eccentricities that I have not had since childhood. It is what led me here.

On the good side, I used to suffer from 3-5 debilitating migraines a week, and now I get 3-5 a year. My anxiety levels have dropped drastically. So my life has improved in many ways. In some ways it has gotten more difficult because not all of my siblings agree, but I don't care.

Repression (before)? I found I had to block all of my quirks and try to hide them as best I could before; now I'm learning to actually work with them. Some of the tools I learned in those years have come in handy, though, like learning to stim without notice.

Also, I understand the siblings thing - mine still live very much as younger versions of my folks, following the same irrational, inconsistent rules. Couple that with the weird, constant 2-against-1 allegiances that would form one minute and flip the next...life is just easier with less contact, and I'd never, in a million years be able to work on healing if they had a greater involvement or continued enmeshment in my life.

I believe so. But I also suspect a very strong familial history of ASD that has been mis- or un-diagnosed. Case-in-point: My father lives his life with an excessive list of rules governing his behavior from everything to when/how to accept an invitation, when it is acceptable or required to accept 'seconds' at a meal, to religion. Many of these rules were inherited from his mother. Also, idioms and other parts of figurative speech were explained in detail at the slightest misunderstanding. I'll stop there, but there is definitely cause for suspicion. Regardless of the basis, however, it as a toxic relationship, and distance has brought peace in MY family (myself, two kids, and husband). My siblings remain divided on the matter, which causes the most trouble. Mostly the two most-NT of us have the biggest problem, but likely because their upbringing was far different from what the rest of us experienced. The rest of us as well have cut off contact with our father as well, and are better for it.

Here I will ACTUALLY stop, at risk of diverting attention.

I feel a lot better about myself after cutting my family out. I feel like the social pressure not to abandon them kept me connected moreso than a desire to be with them. I'd rather spend the next ten years taking care of myself and NOT my parents. My mom used to remind me that someday I would need to return the favor and care for her when she got old. I can't count the number of times she said this to me. I stayed out of guilt, and now I leave with guilt. I'm exercising my freedom of choice.

Ugh. My mother does this to me all the time and used to guilt me all the time about how much she has done. It wasn't until recently I made the connection as to why both myself and my brother ended up in relationships with abusive, needy, guilt tripping women.


Well I can't speak about my parents but I don't need to be a psychologist to say two of my aunts are classic, textbook narcissists. One example that can be verified was at my Grandfather's funeral: everyone wrote formal condolences and Aunt #1 wrote her name as "Daddy's favourite girl" and wrote about how she is the favourite child, etc. This is someone in their late 50s! That's why I ended up in that abusive relationship: all those crazy behaviours seemed normal to me.