Whats the difference between social anxiety and aspergers?

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whats the difference?


I am scared to talk to people, smile, look in the eye,

Does that make me AS or SA?

I'm not "scared" to look people in the eye... I just kinda don't and even when I catch myself looking away and try to look at them again SOMETHING in the room will look more interesting to me or I just don't feel comfortable looking directly at them, like two same polarity magnets pushing away from each other.. I'm still paying complete attention to them of course.

You have already asked this question, word for word.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt138107.html

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW-05IZsric[/youtube]

People with social anxiety just have social anxiety. They usually worry excessively of what others think about them and have a very present fear of social persecution.

A person with Asperger's Syndrome just doesn't have a very sound set of social instructions for one reason or another. Some may be oblivious enough to not even consider that other people think things about them, or some might be aware enough to have a degree of social anxiety.

I would liking it to dancing. You might be able to envision some dance in your head but that does not mean you can dance it.

If a socially adept, well adjusted person is analogous with a professional dancer, then a person who just has social anxiety is someone who can dance when no one is looking but will mess up if someone is watching because they are so worried they will mess up and make a fool of themselves. A person with Asperger's Syndrome would be someone who either knows the steps to the dance and can't dance it, or doesn't know the steps to the dance, tries to dance it anyway, and remains oblivious to how awkward they look to others.

What Chronos said. In most cases, someone with social anxiety will have the social skills intact but will be too anxious to implement them, whereas the person with AS will lack the skills altogether.

It's possible to have both AS and social anxiety though, seeing as they are two different sets of traits entirely. When I discussed the possibility of me having severe social anxiety during my preteen and teen years, it was dismissed by the people I asked about it as simply being "part of having AS".

However, you can be AS and not have social anxiety, or you could have social anxiety and not have AS. Most people I know with AS are very outgoing, (albeit awkwardly so) and don't really show any signs of shyness at all, and then there are the few (I'd fall into this category for a big chunk of my life) that are paralysed by fear when they encounter different social situations.

As with all related disorders, just because you have one thing doesn't necessarily mean that you'll have the other or that they are the same thing. Instead, you'll get combinations of the two.

i found out i do not have aspergers but social anxiety their reasoning was:


I have intrusive thoughts, which is almost soley a response to social anxiety

Intrusive thoughts are random, but troubling thoughts u may have like suddenly imagining doing things you would never do IE kill someone, incest, for me i have a lot of intrusive thoughts of throwing cell phones out the window, of tripping down stairs, getting injured in anyway, i've had the incest ones (GROSS) and i've had the murder ones too (which suck)

It makes sense, because aspergers, you don't feel anxiety, and these are anxious thoughts. Look up intrusive thoughts there is something on wikipedia about them, if you are socially anxious enough i can assure you (or maybe not assure you) but you probably have these

A girl at my school had obvious social anxiety, very severe, and I didn't pick up on an ASD in her. I had it too (undiagnosed, and probably Avoidant Personality Disorder as well for a while). Here's the difference. She, like me, spent a lot of time without any friends. But while I can imagine she could have been an easy target for bullies for being so shy and often isolated, it wouldn't have been because she was seen as 'weird'. She just seemed terrified, self-conscious and suppressed. No one ever called her 'weird', because she would just smile shyly while bowing her head and shrug her shoulders endearingly as she spoke. She would give the shortest answers possible but she never said anything strange or that could be misinterpreted. People would call her 'sweet' but feel sorry for her because she was obviously distressed even to be visible to other people, and her actual personality and opinions were completely locked away from the world, and she couldn't let them out however much as she wanted to (she opened up once in my presence, briefly, so I know she hated being 'quiet' as she called it).

I, on the other hand, was the school freak, lol. I don't know whether others would have noticed I was actually reacting to fear, but in my desperation not to do or say anything weird, my face and voice became even less expressive than usual, and it was years before I realised that this in itself was weird. I was interpersonally stiff, robotic even, and when I was with people who liked me and so was less anxious, I was less stiff but still got interactions wrong in other ways. Although I was possibly as self-conscious as she was, I would at times appear cold or arrogant instead, would say things that got me teased, and when I thought I was relatively safe with someone, had a few jokes backfire on me. She never, ever did those things. In other words while she couldn't hide her crippling anxiety, she did appear otherwise normal, and I didn't.

I'm on the spectrum but I've got Social Anxiety aswell, because lately I've developed this crazy obsession about people looking at me in public. It creeps me out when people look at me - and it's nothing to do with anxiety about eye contact, because I don't have a problem with eye contact - I find it natural and unbewildering. But when people walk by me I glance at them but don't stare, but as I glance I see them already staring at me as though I'm someone like Anak Durhaka (a deformed person I see on the internet a lot). And I know most people just say, ''oh don't worry about them staring at you,'' or,''don't worry about what they're thinking of you'', but I can't help it. They sometimes even stare at my legs or feet, or look at me up and down as though they're judging me of something, and personally I think it's rather rude for someone to look at someone else up and down like that. I feel like jumping back and yelling, ''mind your own business, mate!'' (The only time I get complimented by it is if it's from a nice handsome bloke, who gives me flirty looks, but that's a bit different from what I'm saying about here.)
Is this an Aspie thing, or is it part of general social anxiety or Agoraphobia?

Performance anxiety (SAD) is my number one problem but I might have a bit of both. I suspect ASD because of my:

1. Sensory Issues
2. Narrow, obsessive interests
3. Major discrepancy between academic success and real-world failure

But I might be mistaken and just have SAD?