Hate feeling ganged up on...

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Double Standards seem very acceptable.
One person can talk down to you or belittle while their friends laugh in amusement.
When they get taste of their own medicine, they don't like it but suddenly what you did was not acceptable and it's not your place to do that.
Now you are a bad person.

Does anyone else see this pattern?

Of course, that's very usual.

There is an implicit order of social domination in group dynamics, which determines "who can speak" and "who can't", those who should be "submissive" or "dominant", and this order is implicitly validated by peers; some people will tell a joke and no one will laugh and another will tell the exact same joke and everyone will laugh, etc...

This social legitimacy is determined by prestige, agressivity etc...

For some reason, Aspies are at the bottom of that hierarchy. (lack of charisma?)

If you are caught in such a toxic dynamic where you are considered the scapegoat, better walk away from it, for your sanity's sake. Every social group is different and the implicit role you are given is different in every group (though there are patterns).

Absolutely. But I don't feel 'ganged up on' though. I just enjoy the irony of it. When you're a bit odd there are forms of humour to revel in that most people will never even be aware of. Some people can give it in the extreme but they can't take it if you hit back with like 1/1000th of what they gave you. That in itself is amusing to me so I'm happy to leave it at that.

Yes - happens all the time.

But I do think as aspies we can be quite blunt and our retort stings that much more. It's something I've had to watch out for in myself.

I think it's kinda like being on the receiving end of being poked with a stick and responding with an ICBM.

Yes.

Happened to me recently.

Listen to tchek, he got it all right.

There is only one "solution" to that problem:

What NTs value is the group/pack.

What AS people value is their individuality.

NTs think of attacking individuals of a group verbally as "playful socialization" - it's a way of establishing a pecking order in the pack/group. That is often times not too funny for someone with AS to whom individuality often means a whole lot.

The best counter-attack I have found is not to attack back at the individual who attacked you (because the rest of the group will just back that individual up). No, the key is to attack the group as a whole. This hurts NTs deeply, the same way it hurts us deeply when they attack us individually. There are basically two ways of attacking the group as a whole:

1. Making a joke that hints on how loose the group structure is, e.g. that the pecking order is loose, or that it does not take much to split up the group. NTs live for the groups they are a part of, so being a part of a loose group is hurtful to them, seeing that they might suddenly be without a group, which is fatal to them.

2. Making a joke that hints on how badly the group is doing as a whole. This makes the group aware that it doesn't function very well and that means they actually should consider splitting the group and join some other group. It makes them doubt the fundament of their existence.


Of course, these means should never be used to the loving, kind NTs who wish others the best. Luckily there are also many of those.

Okay, this I have to admit could be a problem. I can put up with crap for months without so much as flinching but then I say one cutting line or perform one action in self defence and all of a sudden I'm a social Dr Mengele or something.
I was a workplace laughing stock at a job but I knew I'd have to quit in a particular way. I've mentioned it before in other threads but I'll go into a little more detail here. Instead of being direct and honest about what the problem was these guys used what I've since learned is 'covert aggression', the type of stuff you can say openly but it's thinly veiled enough that they can call you paranoid or crazy if you call them out on it (which is exactly what happened later). I think they even tried to scare me into submission with subtle threats. One day a guy came to the shop door and asked for a product we didn't have so he just left his number on a piece of paper on the wall with a mobile number telling us to call him if we got the product in. After he left my workmate, one I'd clashed with a couple of times recently, said 'you wouldn't wanna mess with him. He's a member of the so and so's', some local biker gang. It was made clear he was a friend of 'Teddy', a friend of the shop's owner. In fact that slip of paper didn't even have his name on it, it had written 'Teddy's friend' then his phone number which I thought was kind of odd but I mostly thought nothing of it at the time. After I'd had enough of their bitchy catty ways I went in on a Monday morning and quit. I confronted them with a bunch of stuff they'd been saying and they just denied it all as I knew they would. I'd been growing my hair out kind of surfer style at the time and shaved it all off because I thought I might have to defend myself and didn't want them grabbing my hair. I guess I assumed they'd fight like girls too since they did everything else like little skirts. I even thought I'd have to prove I didn't start any possible violence so I recorded the whole conversation on my phone in my pocket. I still have a copy of it somewhere on my hard drive in case I ever needed it, like if I found out they were saying they fired me or that they were tough guys and stood over me or something. They literally begged me to stay and as we headed into long work days because of Christmas they offered to put me up in one of their houses so I wouldn't have to travel all the way to work from where I was living at the time. The next two weeks I did feel really bad knowing how hard they'd be working at Christmas time without me there but I kept telling myself they asked for it. One of them kept texting me and called a couple of times but I knew if I answered I'd get suckered into going back there to be used for a couple of weeks then dumped unceremoniously anyway. I tend to be a sucker like that sometimes. The last missed call I had was from a workmate's phone but the voice to text showed it wasn't him speaking, it was the friend of the shop's owner who's nickname was Teddy who had the biker friend. It just said something like, 'Dan mate, it's Ted. Just thought I'd see how you're going. If I don't catch up to you... have a good christmas'. And after that I guess they gave up on getting me to help drag their sorry old asses through the Xmas rush. I still have the text but I wish to this day it was a voice message so I could hear how menacing that guy tried to be So I guess that was their version of human resources, b***h and back stab then call in a friend who has a friend in a biker gang. Someone told me once I could get money for that, workplace harassment. Yes I still have everything to prove it happened but obviously I don't care about that crap. I'm happy knowing I did the right thing and I'm more a man than they'll ever be. It's okay with me if I have to be the 'bad guy' for not putting up with their hissy fits, workplace bullying and poor workplace management skills. I know what happened and if anybody really cared to know I could prove it in a second. Gutless idiots.
Does anyone else have a workplace story like that?

Wow, this is brutal. In a good way though. It's clever and no crueller than what they do to us. I really could have used this advice before I moved out of a share house recently. But I guess in the end I didn't need it. As always I just tough it out and eventually people see the trouble maker for who they are. This air headed girl loved causing trouble but the two boys she roped into a little alliance with her to poke fun at me have both since moved on and neither are friends with her any more. One of them had even known her for a couple of years. I think those two will patch things up eventually but I'm glad the weakness of their little triad, which sometimes just seemed based on making fun of me, fell apart without me needing to use the methods you describe above. That would have been like killing an ant with a bunker buster.

Holy crap, that is brilliant. Good to know.

And now I understand why an NT gets so offended when I say something to a person about whatever group they are part of, because they take it personally. I never thought about it as attacking the person.

I think that you can intellectually understand the NT's perspective. From the NT bully's perspective, I would say the following:


1.) It matters "who started it". From a typical human being's perspective, if a person (with ASD or no) did something to offend the group (e.g. violating a cultural custom or doing something "impolite") or another individual (e.g. being too blunt with a person), then they should "expect" some form of retribution for their offense. If the ASD person comes back with a retort after someone mocks them for breaking a social rule, then everyone else further thinks the person with ASD is breaking the rules even more.

2.) They may not evaluate all of the mocking or all forms of bullying as "bad" (Heck, sometimes I don't, either; e.g. if someone says something racist or sexist, I'll give them s*** for it). But for them, mild bullying can form a social function. Because it instills the cultural values described in (1) and tends to have the effect of weeding out awkwardness in NT's (but to a lesser degree in people on the spectrum, who can often be confused by why they're being laughed at or bullied).


It's unfortunate for people who'll break the social rules because they're difficult to learn or because they full-stop cannot understand them, because they can't actively cognitively realize that they're breaking the rules and thus understand why someone would feel compelled to antagonize them back. Thus they can't see why others would feel justified in mocking them. This is a case where trying to understand both sides, even if one seems supremely arbitrary and pointless, helps. If NT's could try to understand that people with ASD are simply not going to respond the way that NT's do when confronted with mockery and bullying, then they might understand that it's just cruel. Maybe then they could understand that logically explaining the social blunder made to the person with ASD is a far more effective method of behavior adjustment. And it would help if people with ASD understood that their behavior can be considered offensive and that it really sometimes hurt feelings or make people feel really, really awkward. Therefore, if people start mocking them for it, from the NT standpoint, there's a reason (from their perspective) for their behavior, even if it doesn't/badly applies to people with ASD. It's nearly impossible to not take personally, but I think it helps to at least understand where NT's are often coming from. I don't think it's right, mind you, but it's something that you have to expect will happen, even if it's unpleasant.


(And then there's just the people who're there to mock, belittle, and attack anyone who's socially awkward, including NT's, for their behavior in order to make themselves feel better. And those people are just a******s)

While I think in the case of actual bullies who have no interest in anything but putting other people down, this tactic may be --on the whole-- effective, I think that this can have disastrous effects if you're not careful with this tactic.

For example, let's talk about my last post. If you've done something to offend NT's without intending to, and they (in their view justifiably) give you some teasing, and in response you start attacking the entire group --well, you're going to get a very bad reputation. And very quickly, because now you've followed up a (probably small) offense with a larger one. While it might seem fun just to crap on people who're making you angry, frustrated, or making you feel alienated, most people with AS/ASD are not schizoid's who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in making friends. This means that you will want friends. And a way to make moving into a social situation and getting a close friend or two is definitely not to have everyone against you and thinking that you're just a horrible person.