I guess this is the best place for my question!

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Hi, manos!

Hey, I was diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder as a child/preeteen. It came to me as no big deal, just something I have. (I didn't even know what it meant then, haha.) I was diagnosed with Asperger's at 13 or 14. Where do you live? Schools can make accommodations for sensory processing disorder and autism/Asperger's — for your daughter. =)

For your wife, though, again, it's no big deal. It makes sense that your mother didn't tell her of her diagnosis then, "because the doctors back then said that she should never know." I mean, times are certainly different from then.

I can attest that cognitive therapy is a positive treatment of anxiety. I've been with a social worker for about ten years now, for cognitive-behavioral therapy. She's helped me with everything in life. I'm so grateful for her. While I'm not saying you'll need a therapist for your wife or daughter forever (my therapy was supposed to be done by 18 years; it was my own prerogative to continue), I'm sure that a therapist who knows what she's doing can help your daughter or wife with life's curves, hills, detours, speed bumps, and what have you.

My post is only a snippet of my experience, but I do hope it sheds some insight into solutions!
Honestly, it isn't a huge deal, and I hope your wife doesn't feel like it is!
Best wishes, for now. =)

Thanks for the info, everyone! I'm tempted to tell her now just to get it over with - I hate secrets. I really hate family secrets!

Tell her if your mother in law doesn't, but not like it's a big deal to you or anyone else. Just the facts, she was diagnosed, her mother followed advice not to tell her, this comes up now because it might be relevant to your child to know this. No one needs to tell her she is autistic, that wouldn't seem right to do. And though it may make her relationship with her mother more difficult, you keeping secrets from her won't fix the problem. This is just someone diagnosed her when she was young. If she wants to pursue that, that's fine. At her age and functioning well, no one else's decision but hers.

I see a lot of talk on here about NT. I assume they're talking about the Myers-Briggs. Both my wife and I are INTJs. Could it be that being an NT, people just think she's somewhere on the spectrum? But its actually just her personality type?

NT - Neurotypical.

Google definition:

"Neurotypical (NT) is a term coined in the autistic community as a label for people who are not on the autism spectrum. However, the term eventually became ..."

It's possible. Some people display so few traits that one Doctor may diagnose them as Autistic and another won't. Also, symptoms and traits come and go as well as fluctuate in severity. Their diagnosis won't have anything to do with Myers-Briggs personality types.

If you want to do a little recon work to see what your own thoughts are about your wife & child's traits are, pick up "The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome," and give it a read. If you're ok with downloading free ebooks, it is available online in pdf format if you search for it on thepiratebay.org. You'll get a crash course in almost every possible trait. The external ones you can observe for yourself. As for internal thought process & sensory perception traits, you'll at least gain some insight into them and possibly match some of them to your wife if she's ever inadvertently described them or complained about them.

I would do two things. 1. The daughter you both need to know so you can help her. The wife, is she showing any signs? Everyone shows SOME or ONE aspie trait from time to time. Look at the big picture, is she happy? Does she has a successful fulfilling life? You're thinking of it like it's a one shot setup but every aspie is very different from the next. They call it the autism spectrum now. Whether she is or isn't doesn't really matter unless it might be causing problems in her life. If I thought she was perfectly fine just the way she is I wouldn't bother telling her. It's not a disease, it isn't going to kill her or cripple her, if she's not having difficulties that are aspie like and might need aspie answers then I wouldn't tell her myself.

The MIL is watching the kids Friday. I think this gives her a chance to tell my wife. If she doesn't then I have decided I will.

Also, I convinced my wife to take the online AQ test developed by Cambridge (to see if our daughter was at risk). She scored a 17 out of 50, which put her at an elevated risk for Aspergers. A similar test for kids showed my daughter as risk as well.
Oddly enough, I scored the highest, 25 out of 50.

I don't know how much stock to put in these tests. And how much is just personality type.

They are screening tools. No matter how high you score, if your life works for you without a diagnosis and without extra support, this doesn't need to be one more thing to worry about. The SPD label for your daughter is because things weren't working, right? To give a label and support adults helping her and maybe get her OT. So unless you are having difficulty I would try to let it be not a big deal and enjoy life if you can.

I was diagnosed Asperegers at the end of last year. Until a month before that, I had no clue whatsoever that I was not normal/typical.

It's surprisingly difficult to recognise traits in yourself if you are unaware that those traits aren't common/typical. Once I became aware of Aspergers, I did a lot of research and took a heap of online tests, just to see how I rated. I found the online tests, while they turned out to be correct, didn't inform me about how I was different. It was the articles that gave me the biggest hint that I could be Aspergers. Even then I could only recognise the larger more obvious signs within myself. The last 12 months I've read many books on the subject and can now recognise a lot more signs within myself.

It was more obvious to me that I had social difficulties, but I never recognised that it was me. I just thought I was unlucky in love, I thought I was perfectly normal. That's why I had to have the diagnosis, I couldn't tell for myself if I was indeed on the spectrum or if I just had some traits.

My pshychologist said I was well over the 60% cuttoff for Asperegers, but she didn't elaborate any further. It's been my own study since then, that I've come to agree with her diagnosis.


I'm sure you're wife would be disapointed in her mother. That would be understandable.

I can only state my own experience here, perhaps you're wife will be similar.

I've accepted that the difficultes are mine, so I treat people with more leaniency knowing that the difficulties are mine. I've gotten closer to my mother (I had my own issues with my mother and how I was treated as a child, but I've forgiven that now, because Aspergers wasn't known at all, and Autism wasn't well known, so I could never have gotten help or understanding by anyone at the time anyway).

Work and people are a constant challange, but I try to be tollerent and ask more questions. Knowing that I can't read people well, I need to dig deeper to understand more carefuly what is being stated.

All this to say; you're wife, and perhaps yourself, are likely to be better off knowing than not knowing. Once you know for sure, you can begin to work within your limitations. It makes life a little easiler I found. ie: you don't beat yourself up for mistakes as much.

If you scored the highest on the online test, I would recomend you to do more tests and read more about the subject. Like myself, you may be on the spectrum but completely unaware that you are.

I've also discovered that I'm attracted to similar traits in the opposite sex. The NT's and me just don't get along at all. But I do get on with girls who have traits far better. Perhaps this is what attracted you and your wife in the first place. Just a thought.

This is pretty much exactly what I was going to say.

Like GregCav, I didn't know until a couple years ago when I was 29 going on 30 years old, so I'd lived my life up until that point blissfully unaware of it all. Everything was normal to me because it was all I'd ever known. But then reading and learning all about it shed a lot of light on.. everything.

Also, I agree with the AS-AS couples thing. Since learning all of this I've come to know 100% without a doubt that my closest friend & crush of the last few years is also on the spectrum. I wrote him a 20 page letter detailing all of that and more & gave it to him nearly 5 months ago. He hasn't read it yet, because he's not much of a reader, but he did tell me it'd be my Christmas present to read my "book." That's awesome because it's exactly what I wanted for Christmas this year, and was going to request it - but he said it first for the win!

So, yeah, there's a possibility that like the two of us who have been close friends since before I figured out my own AS diagnosis and then realized his, that you & your wife are both AS people and it's a part of why you're such a good match for one another. You'll know one way or the other when you read "The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome," as you'll either just learn interesting stuff.. or you'll learn an awful lot of your personality traits and characteristics are all ASD traits. There are so many that are so ridiculously different from one another that it doesn't seem like they're connected at all when you're just going along through life the way you always have.. but then you read this book and realize that all of these different quirks about you that are seemingly unrelated, that you've never even considered could even be a thing let alone related to one another in one big thing, well.. that they are, and that collectively the sum of these quirks is Autism, even if very mild.

My wife and I are very alike and very unlike almost everyone else we know.

...and now you're about to find out why.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Guid ... s+syndrome

You just reminded me of a high school friend of mine/old boss. It wasn't until well after I figured out my diagnosis that we got to talking and comparing at work and realized he, too, has a lot of AS traits. Later, working with her, that so does his wife - but quite mild. One tell tale sign is the prosody of her voice and the way she greets customers with the identical greeting over and over and over again all day long - vocally identical, like it's playing back from a recording. Of course she has other traits, too. But I never once mentioned this to her or to my friend because she's so mild it doesn't really screw with her life.. but realizing this about them both made me realize exactly why they're so well matched as a couple. It's quite nice, really. If I were him and I realized this about myself and my wife I'd tell her, but me being their friend/employee, and her symptoms being so mild, I figured I'd just keep my mouth shut and know what I know and utilize it in my own communications with her in order to minimize conflicts in the workplace.

Not sure this is still the right place to post on this topic. But I figure if you've read this far you won't care if I venture off topic. I just went and found a bunch of tests on another thread here. Thought I'd share my results.

The confusing part to me is that I've been in therapy off and on for the past 14 years. I'm on anti-anxiety medication. But no one has *ever* brought up this issue.

1.The Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire
You scored 105 aloof, 92 rigid and 64 pragmatic
You score above the cutoff for both aloof personality and rigid personality, which means you're probably not very interested in interacting with other people and don't like changes. You might have a tendency to be fairly controlling in interactions or prefer doing things by yourself partly because you have more control. However, when you decide to interact, you probably don't have too much difficulty communicating with the other person and making a good impression. You are probably either on the broader autistic phenotype or actually autistic

2.AQ
25 of 50 (first time through I scored 31)

3.The Empathizing Quotient and Systemizing Quotient
Your Empathizing Quotient is 23
Baron-Cohen (2003) suggests that this means "you have a lower than average ability for understanding how other people feel and responding appropriately".
Your Systemizing Quotient is 52. Baron-Cohen (2003) suggests that this means "you have an average ability for analysing and exploring a system".

4.Emotional Identification, Perception, and Expression
69/100
You are reasonably skilled when it comes to the core ability of identifying, perceiving and expressing emotions in yourself and others. There is still, however, room for growth. Overall, your skills in this area of emotional intelligence aid you in the process of reading others, understanding how they feel, and effectively identifying your own emotions. These skills form the basis of your ability to relate to the emotions of others as well as well as your ability to understand yourself.

5. The Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) test
17
If you answered more than fourteen of the questions as true of yourself, you are probably highly sensitive.

6. Understanding facial expression test: The 'Reading the mind in the eyes' test (Baron-Cohen et al.).
Average score is between 22 and 30.
Your score: 18
A typical score is in the range 22-30. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult.

7. Face blindness / Prosopagnosia test
Out of 30 faces, you correctly identified 22.
You were familiar with 29 of the people in this test.
If we exclude the ones you were unfamiliar with, you got 76% correct.
The average person with normal face recognition was able to recognize about 85% of the faces they were familiar with. If you missed more than half of the faces you were familiar with, this may indicate face recognition difficulties.

8. The Aspie Quiz
Your Aspie score: 117 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 111 of 200
You seem to have both Aspie and neurotypical traits

I've never taken any of those test so I don't have a clue how valuable they are to figuring this stuff out. I got the absolute most out of reading the book above.

I did read your results, though, and they at least give you a little insight and some things to think about, eh?

What are the sources for those tests? I'm really curious!

Waterfalls made an awesome point. I wish I would keep that advice in mind everyday for no worries.
Also, it's really up to the individual - you!!

My daughter's doctors just called me back. They suggested that we take my daughter to a specialists to have her tested. They also expressed an opinion that my wife should be told.

This thread is the source of the tests: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt113459.html