How does an aspie move beyond an obsession with a person?

Post Reply New Topic

This is a problem I have had throughout my life. I’ve had obsessions with so many different people. The only time in my life when I can remember not being obsessed with some person or another was when my youngest child was small. I can only speak for myself, but I think for me these obsessions happen because my desire to have friends and to really connect and be close to a special person in my life has always been and always will be far greater than my ability to achieve this. I know that I am capable of very powerful feelings of love for another person and in order to be happy I need somebody I can give that love to. I don’t necessarily mean in a romantic way, a lot of ‘adult relationship’ stuff is beyond me and doesn’t appeal to me anyway. I have a husband who was once an obsessive interest of mine, but the relationship has been very difficult. Real relationships are very hard for me to cope with and are so problematic for me that it is always easier for me to love somebody else from a distance and probably the only way I can really be close to another person is in fantasy. When my son was small I had in him that special somebody who I could unashamedly, uninhibitedly and un self-consciously love in my way and so I didn’t need these obsessions with other people. My son is a teenager now and the loneliness is returning, along with an obsessive interest in somebody else.

Most of my obsessions have been with people who, for various reasons, there’s been no possibility of my having a friendship with in the real world. Sometimes they have been people I knew in the real world, sometimes they have been well-known people who I only knew of but never actually met. My fantasy version of these people probably bears little similarity to how they really are, in a fantasy we can make the other person however we would like them to be. I have always seen these obsessions as a problem and not something to be acted upon. Perhaps fortunately I have always felt far too shy and too inhibited to let the person know that I liked them. I definitely don’t think it would be a good idea to ever tell the person how I felt.

I think it is a nice idea to try to turn our obsessions into something positive. I haven’t felt able to do this in the past, but this time around I am trying to find a way, however indirectly and anonymously, of transferring to others some of the love I wish I could have given to my current obsession (somebody who sadly took his own life almost 2 years ago) by doing small acts of kindness where I can.

I am resurrecting this old thread since I found it while searching for "aspie obsession with person". Wow, I didn't even know that this was part of AS. I thought it was limerence, but clearly it is not.

I've been obsessed with historical figures and celebrities since age 12. At 20, I had a nervous breakdown and shorty afterwords, I because obsessed with one of my college professors. This obsession lasted for about 6 years, until I became obsessed with another professor. It is terrible....on some days, he is constantly on my mind like 90% of the day.

For those of you who were obsessed with a person, what has helped aside from transferring the obsession to a new person?
Sometimes herbal supplements help a bit but the obsession always returns. Distance doesn't help either. I think I am going to stop looking at his FB and social media so much.

I am glad that I am not the only one who obsesses over people. I have done that all my life and I hear it started when I was a baby. I did not know it was an Aspie thing but that would explain a lot for me anyway

It's impossible for me to just move on from an obsession with a person. It's like I have to have a person or people to be obsessed with, otherwise I feel lost.

However, if I don't see the person or people that I'm obsessed with any more, it becomes like ''out of sight out of mind'', and the obsession fades away and gets replaced by another obsession with another person or people. It's happened before. When I was 17 I first got obsessed with a load of bus-drivers. Then when the buses changed companies out of the blue in 2010, I was absolutely devastated, but after about 2 or 3 months, I got used to these new drivers on the bus in this new company, although I still missed the old ones. But as the months went on I grew less and less obsessed with the old ones, and started writing stories and drawing pictures of the new ones, and to this day I still love the new ones and the company it's still in, and hopefully will be in forever more. I know bus-drivers do come and go, but it's better than losing them all at once.

For some strange reason I've been obsessing over people since I hit puberty at age 11 (not bus-drivers obviously). Before then I didn't really get any obsessions with anyone or anything, just had casual interests with things that my NT peers were into.