I think my counselor may be an aspie

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This is bizarre. I'd like to relate my situation to the community here so you can share if you have any insight.

If you've read any of my other threads on WP you may have pieced some of this together already, so I apologize for any redundancies. I am an aspie Christian male, 40 years old, married almost 15 years with a 3 year old daughter. My wife and I have been having marital difficulties many of which are attributed to my aspergers symptoms, specifically the ones which place a higher than usual burden on the NT wife to head certain aspects of the family, which are supposed to be the man's responsibility. My wife has been showing signs of projection defense mechanism and possibly Cassandra. She has been difficult to counsel since she isn't seeing her side of the problem. Our counselor is very good at marriage relations and has successfully overcome similar difficulties in his own marriage. He is very "direct" in his counsel approach and doesn't sugar coat anything. Sometimes this comes across as harsh but its just the raw truth on matters most of the time. I can relate because I tend to do that too.

Recently we've been getting to the portion of marital counseling where its becoming apparent I need to take leadership in certain areas, and be situationally aware of my wife's emotional needs, etc. I became alarmed at this in addition to my wife's recent decision that I do not in fact have AS but am deliberately behaving this way. Concerned, I decided to "prove" to my counselor, and by proxy, my wife that I do in fact have AS. I refreshed myself on the symptoms and found good articles, the aspie quiz, various youtube videos etc. One of the main troubles I've encountered is when I try to describe AS to my counselor and he keeps saying "Yeah but, I have those same tendencies. I'm that way. I struggle with that too. Its just being a man. Yeah that's me. That's normal, we all have that. Its just living in the flesh." (Christian term, for those of you who don't know). We went round and round about how AS isn't something you can just "fix" or train your way out of. Its hard wiring in the brain. He insisted that I was making excuses for bad behaviors. I told him that I firmly believed none of the true AS traits were inherently sinful. I ended up writing several huge emails to describe my point. One of which included the Living with Mind Readers story I wrote. He didn't seem to think my story was all that good an analogy and even said "No comment on the above analogy as it is highly factious and is so vastly different from this situation that you cannot honestly believe that people will equate the two purely on the basis that there may be 10 – 20% that is true for both." regarding it.

Things have been getting increasingly frustrating until about an hour ago.

He finally replied to an email I sent several days back about the Aspie Quiz most of you have taken, which produces the radial chart. I sent this in an attempt to demonstrate to him how different NT minds are from aspie minds. I sent a couple dozen of your charts to show aspie looking charts and I had three NT friends of mine take the quiz to get NT looking charts. The differences are striking, the NT guys having very well rounded predominantly LEFT side of the chart results. As you might expect, mine and also many of your charts show irregular patterns that lean heavily to the RIGHT side of the chart.

My chart happens to look like this:
http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12c.php?p1= ... =72&p12=35

My counselor's chart looks like this:
http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12c.php?p1= ... &p12=46%5b

They're practically identical!! I can hardly believe it. For someone who went on and on about dismissing the legitimacy of aspergers syndrome as a neurological condition that you cannot do anything about, it certainly does appear that he has it. Just last week we spent most of the counseling session talking about it. During one part he was trying to explain to me why its polite to keep eye contact and I should really do it. Doesn't HE have eye contact issues? You'd expect so. I know a lot of aspies go undiagnosed or even undetected for decades, but I'm truly and honestly shocked at this one. Is it even possible to get a score like that on the Aspie Quiz and not be an aspie?? It seems doubtful.

So what should I do? Should I help him "discover" his aspie-ness? He seems to be doing just fine, and has an extremely successful life and marriage, and loads of healthy happy children of all ages. He struggles with sometimes coming across as too direct to people and not being sensitive enough ( oh big surprise ). Perhaps an understanding of his neurological condition may help him be a better leader at home, and in the church as well as in counseling. I don't want to blow it by making too big a deal about it so he just shuts the whole thing down, because if he really is an aspie he should be aware of the things this will mean about the challenges he faces. I don't think its absolutely critical he dive in and study it or embrace the title necessarily, but it may be good to acknowledge it and it will most certainly be good for ME in particular, having an aspie counselor who has successfully turned a very damaged marriage into a very healthy one. This would certainly help me maintain hope that my own marriage can recover and my wife learn to accept my traits. It also gives me a living example of what it looks like when an aspie does not let his social disabilities get in the way of a successful life.

Funny isn't it? My dad's the same; I'm fairly sure all my immediate family are touched by the autism brush, but he refuses to acknowledge it's existence.

I think it's because they think (or like to think) they are 'normal'; they don't have the same degree of problems; for example, if he has a job (counselling), then he's already light years ahead of me, and if he also has friends and a girlfriend/wife, then why would he have any need or desire to see himself as different from anyone else?

I guess some of us just get lucky/unlucky/better or worse parenting/adapt more or less.

Well, to be honest, the only reason he's so well adapted is because he's following biblical principles literally and diligently, no matter how uncomfortable they might be. Its a plain fact that these principles do help create a very healthy society even if many don't like the source of the material.

He's not a counselor by trade. He owns a construction business and is rather successful. I would hope to be like that one day, as I still work for others. Its funny though, now that I understand he's an aspie, I can totally see lots of aspie traits in him. Things that when you meet someone they just are "quirks" without explanation. Like his tendency to have a "one size fits all" approach to people. Or to be insensitive to the emotions of others. He said he used to not be able to do this at all but has taught himself to do this through hard work. Its admirable, really. I need to learn these skills and who better to learn from than a real aspie who's learned them himself. Much better than having even an NT counselor who understands AS. Now when I see him struggle with taking on another person's point of view, I won't view him as just being stubborn and pig headed, I'll know the real cause. It makes all the difference in the world. He may feel a little bit vulnerable, having so many of his personal traits fit a pre-packaged description like aspergers syndrome. I know I was when I first learned about it. I was very shocked that something so accurately described me. I was also shocked to find that it was not how most people's brains operated. Some things I knew, but when you don't know you have AS, and you learn you have it, you see things like dozens of seemingly random personality traits that uniquely make up you suddenly all come together it can be startling. After a bit though, I felt a great comfort and peace knowing what was going on.

It seems strange that he's very well-adapted but doesn't know he's loaded with Aspie traits. You say you find him less annoying when you view him as Aspie, which suggests to me that he's still doing annoying things.....maybe he's not so well-adapted as he seems at first glance?

I'd be tempted to keep on arguing with him about AS. I don't see it can do much harm.

Maybe he learned eye contact. Since he was never diagnosed, he never had any excuses for his behavior so he learned to deal with things and he worked on his traits. I honestly think people use AS to stop them from learning and they use it as a crutch and they just give up thinking since they have an excuse they don't have to work on things. But the ones who never knew about it seemed to have made it in life and succeeded. But there are some who aren't successful and don't have a job and aren't even diagnosed nor do they know they have AS.

I have always suspected when people say they struggle with this or that too that is part of AS, I think it's possible they could have it too. So to them everything you are doing is normal. I think my cooking instructor could have it too but she could have traits only.

I think that is precisely why my counselor has been resistive to acknowledging my AS. He doesn't want me to use it as an excuse for anything. Its a difficult balancing game because if you don't acknowledge AS, you're going to expect certain things that aren't going to happen, but if you do acknowledge it, you will be allowing some things to continue that may be able to be improved.

My counselor himself displays many AS traits I am recognizing for what they are now, and these things will probably always be there. Or perhaps he will work even harder now to correct them. Things like being insensitive to others feelings and having a one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with others assuming they want to be treated like he wants to be treated. Classic AS traits. But looking at him you'd never guess he's AS. He doesn't have "shifty eyes" like Alex Plank when he talks for example. When I described the "emotional honesty need" of aspies, like how I have an intense desire to be honest in my presentation of my emotions and in general, he said he didn't have that. But I do acknowledge that not all aspies have identical traits, so its a sort of grab bag and that trait wasn't in his bag I guess.

I would have thought that he'd do better to keep an open mind rather than resisting the notion of an AS diagnosis. It's perfectly possible to acknowledge AS without ignoring the subject's ability to improve, but if you ignore the condition, the impairments won't be given their due weight when working out how to improve things.

... yet you argue with him.

Yes, that is bizarre.

Why are you getting counseling from a construction firm owner?

Well since you went to him for help on your situation, I wouldn't waste time getting distracted trying to help him.

If you feel the counseling can't progress until both him and your wife acknowledge that AS is a disorder that you have, then you could possibly look for another councillor and then you'd just have to convince your wife...

Or you could examine each obstacle in turn, that is causing a problem in your marriage.
Label or not, its probably not feasible or desirable to change into something you're not.
I think its mostly about accepting the other persons short comings or different needs and finding the work arounds, given that you still want to be together.

eg being chronically late is a bad habit, but the effects can be mitigated a little, by establishing rules about communicating information on the delay and back up plans in that case.

I think its good to have a default position on issues of contention that keep cropping up. Ie what is the minimum you can both agree to. And then when things get stressful, you can at least retreat to this position and continue to function without arguing, even if you are fuming inside.