Aspies and "Learned Helplessness"

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No, I really shouldn't be talking as if I had any knowledge as I simply lack the life expiriences needed for discussing such a topic.

I edited my post as I hit submit too early - you can see an expanded explanation.

You have the same right to talk as the rest of us. I didn't mean to tell you to shut up.

Well I'm sorry if I caused any personal offense, I didn't mean to, and I am now aware of you

. Oh, but I don't want to fail later in life. I guess I just want to believe what I'm writing is true.

You didn't offend me, if that helps.

I hope you are as successful as you want to be.

I'm anything but helpless. I've had to fight for every inch of ground my entire life. I've saved my own life several times already and I'm sure I'll do it many more times before my life is finished. The one thing I've realized is that no matter how hard I try, some things are just impossible. I'm never going to play hockey in the NHL, I'm just not built for it or have the skill level. Am I helpless because I had to give up that dream? No. Just realistic. That's just like learning that there are some skills that I'm never going to be able to learn or accomplish no matter how hard I work. I've had to realize that there are always going to be things I need help with, whether that's from a future spouse (wouldn't that be nice? Now if I could just find a date!) or someone else. It's OK to ask for help. It's OK to say, I've tried as hard as I can, but I need help. I'm not a machine, I'm a human. I only have a certain capacity before I crumble under the weight of everything. Everyone has a different capacity, some more than others. It doesn't make anyone of us less or more than the other, it just makes us who we are.

Good observation. But remember, some people on the spectrum are REALLY impaired. Others, it seems, just got treated as disabled from early on, and have life skill issues because of it.

I don't know why you guys are making this so complicated. You take a person who is 'out of tune' with all of the people around them, who is bullied in school, has no support network either in friends or family and you get learned helplessness. It's the lack of access to help, in all it's forms, that leads to helplessness. I'm willing to bet that most ASD people either don't want help or just don't think of asking for it. It should be no surprise that this is the case with people who have a severe social deficit. I think people, even aspies, underestimate the consequences of the social difficulties in AS. The biggest advantage NTs have is access to a larger pool of knowledge in the form of friends and family when dealing with life problems, so they are less likely to feel helpless. So is helplessness in ASD learned or just a natural consequence of the larger condition? My money is on the latter.

Well the good news for you is that there are far more resources to help you succeed now than there were even 5 or 10 years ago, so you stand a much better chance of being a huge success in life than those of us raised even a decade or two earlier.

And the whole notion of success is so subjective. I consider myself to have achieved some major successes (academic and professionally) and some pretty bitter failures (mostly personally). But I've managed to largely work in a career I like and to pick up a handful of truly great friends along the way.

I do know that the successes I have achieved are directly related to the peculiar wiring of my brain. Does this make up for the pain of social failure? Depends what day you ask me!

But we shouldn't judge others like us based on their perceived successes or failures, not even if they are harshly judging themselves. Well all have our own unique challenges we face, and while there are common traits we share, no two of us are exactly alike either in the wiring of our brains or the external conditions we face in our lives.

Very well said. I think it is easy to underestimate the social resources (of all kinds) available to an NT versus somebody on the spectrum. This underestimation has been one of the things that has confounded me most in life. At times it has appeared as if they all have some secret code they use to communicate. And, it turns out they do, both in terms of facial expressions and body language, along with intonations and an informal language that always seems evolve faster than I can keep up.

Probably. As we study AS more and more, and the impact it has, we're going to see just how seriously social deficits can screw a person up. It's like how we study victims of abuse, and people with PTSD- it's not just sad memories, it's drastic.

Part of the problem here is, as I think has been stated, that people can't always distinguish between someone's learned helplessness - or laziness or whatever the judgement is - and their actual limits. Before I had access to (or knowledge that I needed) certain dietary supplements, my doctor used to admonish me to go out for walks with my dog. I couldn't seem to get her to understand why I couldn't do that, even though she knew of my fibromyalgia and didn't dispute the diagnosis. Once I started getting what I needed, by trying something suggested by a friend, I got out there and started walking on my own. I didn't need to be told to do it. My body got the urge to move, and I gladly went with it. So, the evidence that I wasn't just lying around out of a false belief that I couldn't get exercise was in what I did as soon as I became more able.

The other part of the problem is in the understanding that people aren't just being exposed to a few disappointments in life, from which they learn to give up. Some of us got hammered on over and over, by various people, for years. Given such circumstances, out of what, then, is someone supposed to develop the optimism and sense of control over one's own life to prevent learned helplessness after all that, unless there's appropriate help or circumstances get a lot better on their own? I got lucky, with my mixed bag childhood, and yet I still had a long way to go before I could really learn what my actual capabilities were, even though I had the drive to finally see things through. Some have been luckier than I, some not as much.

Between those two problems and the matter of actually varying capability, which also has already been mentioned, the situation is kind of a mess. It leaves a lot of people looking like they're either lying to get away with doing less than they're able to do or irritatingly whining about their delusions of inability. And not much is worse than telling the truth and not being believed. Ask any woman who's been raped and then told by others that it never happened, that it wasn't any big deal, or that she must've asked for it.