Oh, there is nothing wrong with you.

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Do anyone of you guys have anyone in your family (Or friends/etc for that matter) that refuses to believe you have aspergers or other conditions?

Like my dad for instance. He just will not accept that I have Aspergers. Of course I don't see him much... perhaps like once ever other month if that.

Still he's all like "Oh there is not wrong with you, evreyone has these problems." when I try and talk with him. Same with his side of the family. Don't get me wrong, I get along great with them and have no problems... they just don't accept the fact that I could have anything "wrong" with me as they put it.

I guess it's better than my mom's bf who said I was "mentaly ret*d."( but I'd rather not go into him)

As for medication.. don't get him started. (I use to take it in the past years for diffrent problems. Mainly Aspergers but depression as well) He hates it. he's all into herbal/natural type stuff you can find in plants. He swears the medication will end up turning me into a zombie or what not.


I was simply curious if other people have run into this problem.

Definitely! I'm glad I'm not the only one (well, it would be better if I was, for the world).

Some of the few friends I've told say it's just shyness.
I really want to tell my parents but I know that my mom will say what your dad says. She'll probably say it to make me feel good, while actually AS is a relief.
Of course I should give her a chance for acting differently, but I don't know if I'd bear living with her afterwards if she didn't believe me...

yes, everyone, and it sucks!!

this falls into the people dont like to be wrong thing.
people do such bad things to prove to themselves and invisible others that their not wrong.

No, she's purposely messed up. She's pointedly and purposefully messed up. She's crafty and does all those things we say she does-on purpose.

That used to describe me actually. When my brother got diagnosed with bipolar (probably incorrect DX) and the doctor assured him he could get him on disability, I empathised with my mother who believed it would just enable him to quit trying to be functional. It's not that we didn't believe he had problems, but we didn't believe they were insurmountable if he applied himself. I've always been relatively high-functioning through a great deal of effort on my part and probably because certain key events in my life kind of pushed me to do certain things. For instance, I thought I was just dumb for a while until I took the exams to get into the gifted program so I could hang out with a friend who was in it. But then I went from thinking I was dumb to just thinking I was undisciplined, which was almost worse in my mind. It's like I had no excuse for not doing better.

I think my own realization really was a wake-up call. I confided in just one friend about AS the other day and he scoffed and was saying everyone has those problems, but I guess I kind of expected that at first. Then I started telling him about the severe mental illness in my immediate family and the symptoms that my brother and I both share and how most of my social development has been in the last eight years of my life (of thirty eight years) and he seemed more receptive.

He still didn't seem to quite "get it" though. Like, he read somewhere that someone did a test to remove heavy metals from a child and it cured his autism so maybe autism is caused by a build-up of heavy metals. So he's kind of one of those naturalists who thinks all our problems are caused by modern life and how we need to be vegetarian and eat healthy and most of our problems will just vanish. That strikes me as really naive. I tried to explain that it's genetic and neurolical, that we're wired differently.

The best analogy, I think, is to describe it like being born with a club foot. You can walk enough to function but you'll always be awkward and slower than everyone else and there are prosthetics that can help you function even better, but no amount of healthy diets and avoiding heavy metals is going to reshape your foot back into a typical foot. Nothing short of major surgery is going to change that. Maybe one day they will come up with neuro-surgical methods that can help, but laying off meat isn't going to cure it.

My friends (and partner) who have known me for several years do believe I have asperger's, in fact when I told them, they said it would explain alot. Though they all work or have worked in the (mental) health care industry.

Everyone else I have told have tried to bring me down to their level by dismissing it as I am shy etc.

Absolutely, my family is so full of will power. "If you wanted to, you'd be fine." I think they'd say that about a broken neck.

I have not gotten an official Dx yet so I have not told anyone but I think that my family would say" Oh , that is the reason your are so odd"
They would except it but i do not not think that they would really understand or cahnge their behavior. They would still expect me to go with them to reunions and still get upset when I leave after the 1st hour.

I have sort of an odd family situation, so I don't have much family. I told my aunt a few months ago after my diagnosis, and she totally rejected it. I pointed out a lot of specific things, and her responses were "Oh, that's just your depression" and then when I would point out something else "Oh that's just your anxiety disorder," and on and on "Well that's just your Obsessive Compulsive Disorder"..."that's just your ADD"...etc

She wouldn't ever try to argue that there was "nothing wrong with me," (because it was obvious since I was little that I was odd) but for some reason she wouldn't accept that it was Asperger's. I pointed out to her that it was pretty odd that she had no problem believing that I was unlucky enough that I ended up with 8 different mental disorders but wouldn't believe that I only had one disorder which had covered all the symptoms of all the other disorders I had been diagnosed with.

After getting an official diagnosis from 3 seperate psychologists and psychiatrists, she still wouldn't believe it. After "working" on it for a few months though, she admitted that she's finally realizing that I'm right.

On the other hand, my husband knew that Asperger's was finally the right answer from day one. I've barely told anyone else. I don't want people to think that I'm making it up for attention or pity or whatever.

not anyone in my family persay exept my stepdad he still thinks its a fake disorder. i have had people that worked for the state tell me "i was just being stubborn" and "they didn't know about As, when you where a kid" so they might as well have told me it didn't exist. i think people just look at As, as more of an annoyance than anything.

That sounds very much like my father.

His attitude... it confuses me. On the one hand, he seems to almost enjoy pointing out how abnormal I am compared with everyone else, and he actually agrees that descriptions of AS sound like me. On the other hand, he acts like it's my fault, that it's something I've *chosen* to have just to be awkward.

I told my sister months ago and she blew it off. I'm middle aged and i guess for all these people who have know somebody for decades and never lifted a finger to help somebody who was having a hard time in life,they have to remain in denial that there is anything wrong with somebody or else they failed to look out for kin folk like they should have.

it's like somebody laying there bleeding and they never noticed and got them help.

people have no problem when it comes to children and AS because it doesn't make them look foolish to figure out there is something wrong with a child and now they can get a personal warm & fuzzy feeling trying to help. But to have known somebody for decades and never worried about their butt says they where too self absorbed to notice and they are now driven to surpress that thought.

shyness and failure to apply myself is how people ignored my problem and figured I would grow out of it or some damn crap.

How can blindness or deafness be explained to somebody who has scene or heard. It can't be because they have never experianced it. They can close their eyes or plug their ears and think they understand, but the only thing they understand is no longer being able to see or hear. They could never understand what it's like to have never heard or scene.

I'm am totally blind to body language and nobody is ever going to understand it.

I guess it's like the indian tracker who can see things other people would never notice and he can't believe people don't see whats right in front of their eyes. He could teach most people to do it because it's something he learned. Try teaching an aspie to do what comes natual to people, they don't even know what it is aspies aren't seeing or where to begin.

How do you teach a deaf person to hear or a blind person to see ? make them fall down flights of stairs because they didn't see them and get hit by cars beacause they don't hear them coming

That's the mentality NT's have when it comes to AS, it's like if you get killed enough times socially you will learn hello NT's I'm blind and deaf to body language and getting killed in social situations ain't going to cure me, just cause pain.

I think many people blow off people with AS as stupid, like wow this person is really dumb.

Other people may think so, but people are so great about it that I just get it out of my head.

yes completely had no support from extended family. I myself, myy child & my half-brother (matenal side) have AS/NVLD &but although my hubby does his level best to support & understand, I think there is a certain point when NT's CANNOT understand my wavelength.

No one in my family knows I have AS, and I intend to keep it that way. I have relatives who are doctors, and with the ignorance about AS running rampant in the medical community, I don't want them finding out. They might get me confined to mental institution or something.

This is the very reason I've never told my family about AS. Even with all the problems I've had such as having to have physical therapy to learn how to walk as a baby or my preschool teacher recommending me being sent to a special school, I think it would be too much of a stretch for them to believe I had a mild form of autism.

After all, autism is associated with little children who can't talk at all and do nothing but remain in their own world. Most people don't know that it falls on a spectrum from severe to mild and there are many of us who not only can talk but live on our own, have careers and marriages.

More likely they would say there is nothing wrong with you because if there was something wrong they would have noticed being involved in the medical feild.


nirrti_rachelle


the movie Rain Man also throws people off, they think people with autism should be way out there in lala land and unable to function at all.