As an Aspie there has been the odd time when I accused somebody of doing something improper, devious, or engaging in some kind of shenanigans under some pretext. Of course the outcome was never "Yeah, OK, you got me, you found me out..." (unless it was sarcasm! LOL) but usually tended to be an abrasive response on the other person's part, even a couple of threats of harm, back in my early 20s. In retrospect, some of those times the person was more likely driven by good intentions and something went awry or was misinterpreted, but more than a couple of times you could say that there was, indeed, something more sinister behind their mask.
So how does (did) this happen to me or any other Aspie?? I speculate that it has to do with our tendency to not be able to read others intentions with ToM, big picture perception, or really just not getting "the gist" of a situation the way NTs do. (Sort of the inverse of the way we get cheated or "betrayed" by others without realizing until it's too late, because of our inherent naivete.) So then there's what I call the compounding effect, where we have had one too many disappointments where somebody deceived or covertly humiliated us so we tend to be jaded by that and project it on to innocent parties - ending up with a "false positive" rather than a "false negative" as I described in brackets above. But then such reactions go against our nature, they are more emotionally charged reactions - I believe our default response is to look at things more objectively and evenly, that we need to collect more "evidence", our mind operates the way a modern justice system would. Of course by a certain point we really DO realize that the offender has robbed us of our dignity or something more tangible.
I know that this tendency is in us from a very young age, as I read one source on AS that young children may assume that if an adult like a day camp leader or someone else's parent did a certain playful action, an action that was done in fun with some sort of mildly annoying outcome, that the AS kid would think it was malicious and confront them. Same thing if the adult had done something accidental, the child might get angry and yell "why did you do that??!" - being blind to the context as it were. That's in childhood though, where it's more of an independent variable; in adulthood, I see it as being more dependent on the "compounding effect", once again. You become cynical and expect people to have bad intentions at some point. But to reiterate, it seldom ends well when you confront them about it.
05 Jul 2013, 8:45 pm
