"Autistic people can't realize they are autistic."

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Sorry but I think this is all BS that is REALLY pissing me off. My whole life I knew I was different and I could not get one f*****g single person to believe me yet they continue to crap on me for my differences instead of thinking that maybe I have autism. It's been almost ten years since I've been diagnosed and I can't get one single person to believe that I actually have autism. Not even my own family will believe what I've already been diagnosed with. This makes me angry that NTs would have the nerve to think we aren't capable of realizing our autism when I've been trying to get believe to realize I was neurogically different my whole f*****g life!! !

I am pissed now!! !!

I had no idea that I had a developmental disorder until I was diagnosed, I thought I had social anxiety 2 yrs before my diagnosis. Which I do but thats not the whole picture. This was mostly cause my mom told me my entire life I was just shy and even after I got my diagnosis she didnt accept until I went away to college and completely crashed. People went around commonly faulting me for not consciously doing things correct. It did feed into my lack of self-esteem. I felt I was just messed up as opposed to actually having a disability. My mom didnt understand aspergers till recently, after reading 10 billion self-help books and me explaining it to her for hrs she finally is starting to understand. When all the people around u think your simply a flawed up NT, u believe it. U keep comparing yourself to other NTs which doesnt work a lot of the times. For most its hard to see a disability in someone thats so mild and I think that can apply to other mild autistics on the spectrum.

This is brought up in reference to diagnosed people who have been told they have autism or worked out that they have autism and others sometimes say "autistic people can't realize they're autistic."

Also, I do not think what you describe only happens to mild autistics.

I knew for most of my life that I was different. I just didn't understand what that might mean until I was finally given my AS/HFA diagnosis. Not that many years ago I simply called myself "eccentric".
Of course this obviously means that Autistic people CAN realize they are Autistic. We just have a lot of people out there (even "professionals") who are obviously still quite ignorant, and some of them prefer to STAY that way!

I'll pull a hypothesis out of my bunny ears for this one: My hypothesis is that "autistic people can't realize that they are autistic" (1) is a misinterpretation of "autistic people don't realize that they are autistic" (2).

(2) applies to most of us who were diagnosed in adulthood. I lived 30 years without realizing that I was autistic, because the majority of people are not, so I assumed that I was not as well. I did feel different, but I did not connect "different" with "autistic" until I gained more knowledge and understanding of autism than what had been presented in the media. (2) is a person assuming that one is normal until proven otherwise. It's the natural and obvious thing to do.

At some point, (2) became (1) in the minds of the professionals. Perhaps this is due to the communication difficulties of autistic people who cannot demonstrate their intelligence as readily as NTs. This is evident from IQ tests and everyday life. Many autistic people score poorly on IQ tests, even though they are highly intelligent. Many autistic people with high IQs come across as slow and stupid to NTs expecting NT responses. Therefore, autism became associated with low intelligence, "don't" became "can't", and (2) became (1).

I don't know who originally stated (1), but (1) has stuck over the years. This is due to the neurology of the NT, or plethistic, mind, which is naturally more susceptible to and guided by authority and peer pressure than factual information. In NT academia, once a statement has been made by an authority, it becomes extremely difficult to refute, regardless of the factual evidence against it. This is why the facts have been modified to fit the inaccurate model. Instead of refuting (1), the professionals have decided that you are not autistic if you can and do realize that you are autistic after gaining a knowledge and understanding of autism that surpasses their own. It only takes one autistic person to refute (1), but the professionals cannot or will not do so for reasons due primarily to their own neurological makeup. It is only by presenting overwhelming amounts of factual evidence and by having authority figures favor a new model that the old model can be modified in favor of the truth.

Perhaps some autistic people are also highly susceptible to authority figures and peer pressure, but this is more the result of conditioning within or adaptation to the NT society than one's natural tendencies. Young children who have not adapted do not give a crap about authority figures and peer pressure.

Excellent reasoning btbnnyr, I'm with you on this.

What you say makes a lot of sense and is very likely the truth.

I wonder if its entrenched in academia. My niece is taking psych courses, so I may ask her about it.

I wonder if it might also have something to do with the whole "Theory of Mind" paradigm at its most extreme(?): The idea that people with autism cannot conceive that other people even have minds, let alone what thoughts or feelings might be in those other minds.

If a person who believed that the above paradigm was true and absolute, and also happened to think very narrowly about the psychological concept of "self-hood" as being dependent on knowledge of "other", then said person might just jump to the conclusion that autistic people have no self/knowledge-of-self, because they lack the ability to see/understand others....and furthermore assume that we lack the ability to learn such things to any degree (based on the seemingly automatic presumption that different=deficient/defective).

I know that what you said in the first paragraph is apparently taught in at least some universities, as I've heard students authoritatively assert as much.

Maybe the idea behind it is that people with autism can't really know what they're missing, mentally. Though, if so, they should say so instead of saying something so clearly ridiculous.

I bet! That would make me angry also!

Huge load of bullsh*t.

I'm not sure I can properly articulate my thoughts on this, so I'm just gonna kinda go stream of consciousness here, and y'all let me know if it makes any kind of sense. Or not. Either way.

While it doesn't seem to make sense to apply such a rigid ToM with a broad brush, assuming that it applies to ALL autistics, at ALL stages of life, it may be reasonable to consider applying it to some, especially at a young age.

Personally, I have virtually no "sense of self" prior to, oh, 10 or 11 years old, and cannot piece together anything like a picture of how I was earlier than that. I simply don't know how I related to people, if I got picked on in my early school days, if (or how) I stimmed, if I was "normal" around other kids . . . I simply didn't pay attention to others enough to know whether or not I was "different." I think it took me that long to develop enough ToM to realize that others had thoughts about me. I don't think I even considered the possibility that others might approach things differently than I until I was 12 or 13. Until I developed the ability to understand that there might be other ways to think about stuff, there is no possible way I could have understood autism - even in a simplistic way. "Your brain works differently than other people's" just wouldn't have made sense, it would have seemed a literal impossibility - far less believable than the Tooth Fairy or Santa!

So, for me, much earlier in my life, it would have been impossible for me to know that I was autistic. The problem, it seems to me, is that some people forget that ASDs are (generally) developmental delays, rather than a complete inability to develop at all. Since all of the treatments for ASD symptoms seem to concentrate on early intervention, and assume that the delays can be minimized (or that the child can eventually catch up, with enough help), I have no explanation for why they forget that in this area.

Of course, I'm not diagnosed, so I might just be nuts, rather than Aspie/Autie!

I think this is just another example of "when you've met one person with autism..."

I also had no sense of self whatsoever prior to age 10. Even now, I have issues with it (for example, the other night I ate a snack before bed so that they cat wouldn't get hungry and wake me up...). I have trouble telling myself apart from other people.

The individual referred to in the post from the other thread stated that people with Aspergers are uniformly low functioning. It sounds like the individual may have Aspergers confused with something it's not.

For many years it was thought that those with Kanner's type Autism that had low IQ, did not have an understanding of what was going on around them, so If that were true they would not be able to understand that they have Autism. Now with other methods of communication we find that they have a rich understanding of the world around them; they had been listening the whole time and understanding, they just couldn't talk.

I personally have seen some teenagers with Autism, with the ability to speak, that could not understand why the condition of Autism made them different than others, refusing to believe they had this condition that was judged as a disorder. They stated, I'm not Autism over and over. My understanding is it is common for some children not to understand what it is about autism that makes them different than others.

While some may not have the ability to understand that they have autism, I think the individual referenced in the other thread may have been confused as to exactly what the condition of Aspergers is and the variation that is seen in those that have the condition, leading to a sweeping generalization that was incorrect.

My entire life, I did not realize I was autistic. I thought I was completely normal (and from my perspective I AM normal!) I came across autism when I was doing research for my nephew to see if he had it. As I read through the symptoms, I remember thinking, "I do that...I do that too....and that..." and all these things I had no clue that they were abnormal. I thought everyone acted and thought this way. This revelation came about 7 years ago. Just this year, some new information has come to light as we discussed my childhood in depth. I had no idea the extent of my deficits in so many areas. I never realized I had a disability, and now I know that I do, and one that I can NEVER improve (at least that is what my psych wrote on one of the forms I had to get from her). Although I sort of expected it, it is all still quite a shock that I have a disability because I never realized it before. I was completely oblivious! Now I KNOW I am autistic because I have been diagnosed as such. Now that I know so much about it, I find myself doing something, then immediately thinking, "that was a very autistic thing to do". I almost wish I could go back to being oblivious again so I am not always labelling every move I make as something autistic.