Asperger's is a Gift

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Oz-

Once againa great post i feel truley inspried again. You make me want to love myself and thats hard for me to do, thank you.

I'm Not Weird I'm GIFTED...

That's my new motto!

i have a little sign in my room that says that. not the new motto part but the gifted part.

Thanks and no problem Ms Beeve. Learning to love oneself can be a daunting task, especially if you've become firmly rooted in negative feelings about yourself.

The primary objective of any competent psychologist is having his patient making a series of small discoveries about themselves over a period of time. This is why, if anybody has ever had any experience in psychotherapy, the professional usually just listens and asks a series of "why" questions. The "what" and "how" questions are formulated before and after the session when the patient is gone, but during that session the psychologist is trying to stimulate the patient into self discovery of why they are suffering, how they got to be this way, and most important. learning that it all can be changed. Time is the key element, and this is why psychotherapy can take months to years before it begins to work.

This lengthy time period can be very frustrating for many. A negative person is consumed with instant gratification, and this is a learned behavior, not a biological dsyfunction. That instant gratification is rewarded with a normal doctor...you go in, you get a diagnosis, you get a prescription for treatment, in a short period you're cured and you go on. However, that does not work in psychotherapy, because the patient's affliction is based on bad learned behaviors....bad thoughts that may have been developing for years if not decades, not some organic problem. Any major breakthrough for an individual in psychotherapy occurs when that individual one day realizes that are NOT "crazy", "worthless", "never gonna amount to anything in life", "stuck in this hell", yada, yada, yada when they understand that all that despair evolved out of THEIR thoughts about themselves. Time and repetition of positive thoughts is the goal of psychotherapy.

I personally have labled these breakthroughs as "Helen Keller Moments of Life". If you remember the story of Helen Keller, Ann Sullivan relentlessly and repetively signed W-A-T-E-R to Helen while holding her hand under a flowing water spigot. Day after day, month after month...and then one day, Helen got it. After that moment, she couldn't be stopped, her desire to learn and explore more became insatiable. I equate this same principle to changing your negative thoughts about yourself into positvie ones. If a constant flow of positive reinforcement and realization of your misery is from your own negative thoughts is applied on a daily basis, one day...you to "get it". You fully understand everything that is required for behavior changes in your life.

Learing anything in life is based on repetition. I will give you a couple of examples from my personal lfe. I pick a pretty mean bluegrass banjo, one of the more difficult musical instruments to learn. People sometimes are amazed at how many notes I can fit into a flowing sound after I nail a blistering rendition of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown", but I like to point out to them how I learned to do it. I point out that at one point in my life, I couldn't walk. I had to LEARN to walk. I had to actually stop and think how to put one foot forward, what muscles to use, and how to balance myself in an upright position. Any human that can walk had to do the exact same thing. We all learned by repitition. The constant repetition of learning to walk eventually forced your brain to do it automatically, and now when you walk, it's a natural event...you no longer have to think how to do it. The same technique was applied to my banjo. At one point, I had to stop and think where each note on each string was, and where my fingers were supposed to be. Now, after years of practice and repetition, I no longer think where a chord or note is...I naturally go to it on the fingerboard. Just like walking, when I'm picking on stage, I'm not thinking how to do it. My mind is on other things...should I spice up the next verse, should I laugh, wink or smile, is the check from this gig gonna bounce, are the boobs on the blonde in the front row gonna bounce, am I having fun and so on.

I can now do so many things in life, because my Helen Keller Moment of Life was when I realized that everthing we learn is based on repetive actions...both the physical skills to walk and pick a banjo, but most importantly, the mental skills to learn to love myself and vanquish negativity from within. A person who is suffering some sort of mental illiness, unless it's biological like bipolar or schizophrenia, that person has , unbeknownst to them, learned to be miserable. Just as you conditioned your brain with repetition of walking, to where walking is now natural, repetition of negative thoughts have manifested into a natural misery. Whenever somebody tells me they CAN'T learn or CAN'T change these negative feelings about themselves, I ask them to walk across the room for me. If they can walk, then they have the capabilites to change ANYTHING in their life through repetive learning, but not until they realize THEY have to make this very same discovery.

Oz

Oz, I have a diagnosed learning disability in mathematics. There is NO WAY I could ever complete university level math courses. If someone held a gun to my head and told me that unless I lpass university level statistics I would not be allowed to survive, I still couldn't do it. My brain is incapable of doing mathematical equations. How do I know this? Well I have been trying since I entered elementary school. I have been beaten, humiliated, excluded, suffered poverty, and placed in at least one life threatening predicament because of my learning disabilities and the struggle for survival that LD creates in an NT oriented society. There is NO WAY no matter how hard I tried that I could pass a university stats course. So I had to accept that situation and find other paths to complete a university degree. As a result of NTism and my LD I was unable to choose my academic path from the range of programs available to NTs.

I think that it is unfair and simplistic to suggest that people with disabilities can overcome their disability by just giving it enough effort. That is more or less the attitude that my third grade teacher had when she smacked me around for not being able to memorize my multiplication tables. Your words imply that we could accomplish anything as long as we try hard enough, and that if we fail it is because we haven't tried hard enough to overcome our disabilities. This is the ableist attitude that disabled people encounter all the time and the reason we have human rights legislation.

When I was in grade six I tested with grade twelve plus reading and vocabulary. However, I tested with grade two math skills. As a result of my uneven cognitive development I was left to rot. By grade eight I had dropped out of school. I went back in my early twenties because I couldn't maintain employment, and I completed a B.A. in General Studies. I still could not do math, so I had to choose a path that did not include the math courses that I could not complete. I watched complete morons graduate with degrees in psychology. I even wrote their papers for them because half of these people couldn't think well enough to write 4th year psych papers. And yet, because of my LD in math I could not do the math (courses in statistics are required for a psych degree) and I was excluded from this path.

Well I am 42 years old now. If I had it to do all over again I would have filed a human rights claim against the university and try to force them to allow me to complete the program without the math component. That is how I would try to "overcome" my difficulty.

My point is that any discussion of disability should include some analysis of the ways that we are excluded from the rest of society, and to suggest that if we all tried hard enough we could get out of our "wheelchairs" and walk can lead to the kind of NTism many of us on this forum suffer day in and day out.

And yet, despite my criticism of your argument I have to add one note. There is one thing that I am very good at doing. I want to say that because of your posts I have begun working again in my area of interest. I had given up, but now..because of your damned irritating American ra ra ra speeches, I have begun to believe that maybe..just maybe..I can use my most beloved interest, my lifelong obsession, to accomplish my dream. So there...you have inspired me. And now I have to thank you.

Damn it.

And what did you say your name was?

[quote="bizarre"]I'm Not Weird I'm GIFTED...

i have a shirt that says that exact thing.

dude OZ, is there any way that i can work for you?

It's still more of a curse for me... With the other things I suffer from.

Welcome to our little hole. Your story is very inspirational and I totally agree with what you been saying. Before I was dianosed I knew I was different but my mother could not understand what was wrong with me till I turned I was 13 being dianosed. There is no doubt that having aspergers can be a both a worderful blessing but could also be a terrible curse. My pastor once told me some of God's greatest blessings starts out as a curse, but it becomes a joyeous blessing when that person understands what the purpose of the gift, believe me, that's how I feel about Aspergers
I also agree with you are saying to parents that want their kids to try to be normal. My mother thankfully did not do that to me, but let me be who I am. IMO I think that parents making their kids that are aspies try to be normal can do harm than good.

Kenneth

i think this is true, too. people tried to make me act normal since i was 5. when they did that all it did was get me stressed. I was very stressed when they made me stop jumping on the bed. I think its a blessing in everyone without it would stop messing with the people who have it.

gift *twitches*
xemnas: *grabs my arms before i do anything i'll regret* calm down.
*grinds teeth*
zenith: please excuse her she hates her AS with a passion.

Any gift that leaves you without a sex life is not a gift, I'd trade my aspergers for another life full of sex and a normal job in a heartbeat.