Myself I'm pretty sure I have both Avoidant and Asperger's. Officially I have AvPD but not ASD.
A psychiatrist (mainly a pill guy) who treated me for depression agreed with me that I have at least Asperger traits but never gave me that diagnosis. He wasn't the one who gave me the AvPD diagnosis either though. That came later. We had a bit of a laugh when he told me he saw some signs of Aspergers on our first meeting:
No innate respect for authority figures.
Taking no notice of possible effect on the emotions of others
Complaint about not being able to get laid.
Spoken grammer and vocabulary a lot like written text.
Deep knowledge of things most people wouldn't give much attention unless it was their job.
The two have a lot in common:
Not very social.
Lack of eye contact unless trained for it.
Not very interested in small talk, gossip, or the social lives of others. Aspies just aren't. AvPDs when they're trying to be social, if they are, are too anxious trying to avoid being emotionally betrayed to do those other things.
Both might complain about not having social skills. Psychs suspect AvPDs say that because they have a poor opinion of themselves in just about every way and a supposed lack of social skills is additionally an excuse for not being more social.
Meltdowns. AvPD meltdowns are always something about being dissed.
Would rather f**k without the pillow talk, or not f**k at all.
Some things usually true about Aspies that AvPDs don't necessarily have:
A pretty high threshhold for loneliness. I think mine is at least a year, unless horny counts as a kind of loneliness.
Incredibly brilliant.
Frightfully good-looking
A sense of humor that often baffles others, or no sense of humor at all.
Klutzy
If you got picked last for the softball game you don't care because you don't understand WHY people want to play it anyway.
One or more non-functioning or only partially functioning social instinct.
Stims.
Obsessive narrow interests
Don't like change in a lot of things.
And problems AvPDs have that pure Aspies generally don't:
Easily hurt by the even the mildest criticism. (Personally I can avoid this by having no respect whatsoever for the critic.)
Abysmal self-esteem. Like way abysmal. Imagine a pimp punching a crack whore who never even liked sex in the first place, who is standing in the gutter on a snake that isn't even respectable enough to be poisonous, that just swallowed a beetle that doesn't even have a monograph because it's too insignificant, and the beetle has a fungus blooming from it, but the fungus is covered by slime from the gutter and the slime is a biomat made by wimpy bacteria that died anyway mixed with something the crack whore's customer just did. I go through months at a time feeling inferior to all of them.
Fear that others will find out their abysmal self-esteem is amply justified.
Fear that those same others will broadcast it to everybody else.
Thank you for bothering to read my attempt to hijack your thread, if you did read this.
As for trusting doctors and psychologists and their diagnoses, always check out what they say by looking it up. I think they're usually sincere about wanting to help (unless they're old school psychotherapists who have become resigned to accept their own ineffectiveness), but it's not a simple job and they don't know things about you that you know yourself. After researching some antidepressants I decided I needed a particular one. My GP wouldn't prescribe it. I don't think he even understood what it did that others didn't. The next time I saw a psychiatrist I told him what I thought. He prescribed it and it turned out to be the most effective one I ever used.
25 Jan 2013, 4:38 pm
