Adjusting to knowing your perception is faulty

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How did you/are you adjusting to realizing that the weirdnesses in your life are both 'your fault' and a biological part of you that's not going to improve?

Having only been reading about Asperger's for a week now, I find that I'm overwhelmed by memories I'd shoved to the side--things from my childhood and my present where I didn't respond to people's pain--or even inflicted more pain on someone when they showed vulnerability--, where I ignored important social rules, where I had to rely on toys and objects to overcome sensory overload, where I assumed I was doing things right or well when I likely wasn't.

I'm not sure how to, well. Survive now. My life's motivation has always been that someday, if I hung in there long enough, I would feel 'real,' included, and loved and loving. What I'm seeing in myself, combined with what I'm reading, suggests, instead, that I am who I am. Someone who will always need caretaking and leniency from others, and who really isn't the good worker she thought she was. Someone who will always be trying to make up for not having the wiring needed to really care for, support, and work for and with others, and who will just be pathetically grateful for any time and attention I'm granted but aware that others are always giving more to me than I can give back--that I'm a drain and not an asset.

How do you keep going? I feel like my lifelong suspicion that I'm not useful to anyone, really, is now confirmed. I've survived this long because I thought maybe I was wrong. I feel like the only thing I'll accomplish by staying alive is not causing people pain with my death. I've felt that for a long time, but now it feels more confirmed.

I think it's a matter of understanding how to work with what you have, which requires an understanding of the good, the bad, and the adjustable. Quite a few perceptions are faulty, which is why we have terms for things that have nothing to do with different neurology like logical fallacies or groupthink.

It is very hard to realize you don't have the same tools as someone else. I reacted with anger more than depression. I didn't let myself believe until diagnosed. After that I became bitter. There are a lot if occasions where I know now my condition allowed me to be used. I also know I come off as cold. What I had to recognize is I also come off as reliable, loyal and honest. It takes realizing that you have a challenge, but you have tools intrinsic to you others value, but have to work to develop. You won't be a mirror of a typical person, but you will be the compliment to them.

I think my main issue is that now I feel enormously fake--speaking of mirrors, it's like all I can do is imitate people who are 'doing it right' and like there's nothing under that! I feel like all of my 'good' traits arise from my inability to change or take action--sort of like thinking a cat is loyal, when really it just doesn't have the ability to unlock the front door and leave.

I had a very hard time accepting I was different when I was first diagnosed and I still didn't let it hold me back and I didn't even know what it was and when I read about it, I didn't want to be limited by it and not do things because the book or internet said we couldn't or would fail at it. I used to think I maybe wouldn't ever get married or have kids and then I heard about a couple aspies having kids so I knew I could have them too and Laine Holliday Willey got married so I knew I could still find someone. Just hearing about aspies living normal lives is what gave me hope. I did naturally get better, I was just slow. I have read we do develop later than others and are slower at it. That is probably why they call it a developmental disorder.

What defines a good trait, to you? Flexibility, emotional warmth, etc? Is it possible there are good traits that are being judged as bad because they can't be used for fitting in?

Part of my pessimism is from having grown up as the child of an NT/ASD marriage which clearly drains my NT parent horribly, and seeing how delusional/self-deceptive my father can be (he seems to genuinely think someone will invent immortality and bestow it on him before he dies, he's convinced he's a misunderstood genius and does things like buy $9,000 supercomputers when the family's in debt...). And then I just wrecked a marriage myself (my first friend in years), and am watching my two siblings, who both look and act very bright and attractive, sabotage themselves as they live at home. My sister's chasing a dream job, after choosing to leave work, even though she has no qualifications (now she's convinced if she goes to get a Master's, when she's always hated school, she'll somehow make it); my brother's at home buying board games while unemployed. They've both left the house before, but they always come back. (I'm out of the house, but terrified that I'll lose my job eventually. I don't do half the work I should as fast or as well as I should.

I'm having a hard time watching us all be in pain, and my mother in the middle of it, and knowing there's possibly no solution. Except, maybe, to behave as though we're all, in a way, 'ret*d' (a word I don't really mind--I certainly feel like my growth and abilities have been ret*d by something!) and lower our expectations for ourselves and refer to outsiders for feedback on how we're doing often.

It's like I've had scales fall from my eyes, and now I see how poorly we're all misjudging our capabilities and how dishonest we're all forced to be with each other. I can't tell my sister that maybe she should look into ASD; she'll flip out. I can't tell my brother for the same reason. Hell, I can't even tell either of them I'm looking into it; I've tried and they shut me down. I just have to nod when she says she's going to try to be an engineer now, and know it's almost certainly not going to work because she's blind to her own behavior and abilities, just as I can be to mine. I don't know how to judge myself any longer, or if what I perceive has any resemblance to reality, since I can see my father and siblings' perceptions are so far off, and know that I must be similar.

@Coffeebean Hm. Social usefulness? Like, it's something that people more than just myself can gain from, but that I also feel rewarded by expressing. Thoroughness, concern for others, loyalty, predictability. Those would be some of the traits I'm guessing I have that would fall in that category.

So I guess you're right. I don't see my non-assimilatory traits as 'good.' I hurt people expressing them, half the time.

Blindness to one's abilities is mutually exclusive with the ability to rationalize supporting oneself. I'm not in any debt, but I'd strongly consider it if I knew I could make a FirePro/Fermi/Xeon Workstation a possibility for me. Paying down 9000 dollars seems totally worthwhile if you're familiar with the present-day divisions among uses for computers. When I consider all you've been able to write so fluently and observe about your family, all I can see is someone ready to deal with any manifestation of their 'modern condition'. Your self-critical nature becomes a survival mechanism whenever you must remember where to be careful.

Part of being successful with AS is being very honest about what you can and cannot do, how/when/and where you can or cannot do these things. You might need to work with a psychologist or an occupational therapist to figure that out.

I was so frustrated when it was suggested that I may have AS. I realized that no matter how hard I tried and wished and pushed myself there are things I will never do or do well, and there are things I will always struggle with.

On the upside I have been able to know my weaknesses and work around them, how to get help for them, how to avoid them, how to cope, and work with what I can do.

*Hugs* It can get better. Stick with it.

@cberg My concern is that I can be great at seeing things, once I have the vocabulary, but I'm not always sure if what I'm seeing is 'really' there or not. I think what I'm seeing is, but, well. I would think so! And my father's hard. I can never tell if he really has the skills and abilities he behaves as though he does, or if it's poor self-awareness on his part. He's always had a good job, but I don't know anyone who knows him to ask them what he's done and what he's like when he's not at home. There are circumstances where buying a massive computer makes sense, and circumstances where it wouldn't, and I can't ever tell which is which, with him.

@nebrets It's frustrating to realize the limitations. They seem so restrictive! And so out of keeping with what I can *imagine* I could do. What I can do seems to be far simpler and less impressive. I used to be into Doctor Who for a while; I'd daydream that the Doctor would come along and use fancy alien science to 'fix' me Unless he did that, I wouldn't have even been able to go along as a companion in the daydreams...I'd have been stuck hiding in the TARDIS and categorizing his books.

I don't feel that my autism is on any level "my fault."

I phrased that wrongly. I'm still dealing with adjusting to the idea (which seems accurate to me) that, instead of changing on a basic level (actually becoming a more-NT person), I've learned to mask and appear more NT instead, as I've gotten older. I was deeply ashamed of many of the traits I suspect were ASD that I exhibited as a child and teenager, so the thought that what caused them is still there and is, in fact, core to my identity is distressing. Thus posting to the Haven instead of the other forum that's straight-up talking about Asperger's.

I meant how do you deal with it being 'part of you,' 'based in you,' as in, the fact of having it is not going to go away with time or effort. 'Fault' is not the right phrase, since I didn't choose to be as I am.

I can't legitimately speak to the "biological part of you" issue because I haven't yet received the results of my ASD evaluation, but I find it rather meaningless to make value judgments on the products of nature. Good vs. bad doesn't apply to biology because nature is not sentient; it just churns out whatever it churns out. Sometimes, it churns out ASDs. So there would be nothing for me to adjust to. I keep editing this paragraph but I don't think it will ever be as clear as I want so I'm just going to quit and leave it as is.

However, I've been having a lot of "a-ha" moments about the weird scenarios in my life as I realize the crucial issue is me being different. And the short answer is: I don't see these scenarios as my fault. And the more detailed answer is as follows:


I don't know the specifics of those situations, so maybe what I have to say isn't meaningful to you, but I've had something like this too, and I don't think of myself as having inflicted the pain. I didn't realize that what I did was painful, and there's no way I would have been able to see it that way. Other people's emotional responses often seem immature and overdone to me, and I make no apologies or excuses for that perception. That is my reality; I can't help it if it is not theirs, I can only try to understand and avoid the conflict. I cannot foresee emotional responses that are foreign to me, and I think that it is presumptuous to try to guess what other people are feeling or may feel without clear evidence; that is a sensible social philosophy to me even if most of the world disagrees, and I refuse to abandon the sensible. I do feel that I was somewhat naive to expect people to be more mature or unemotional than they are, but that's about the extent of my self-scolding.


I ignore social rules if I think they are useless and don't get me what I want/need, and I'm ok with that. What's best for me comes before arbitrary rules, and I often think that it's society's fault for blindly upholding those rules rather than mine for violating them.

On a broader level, I suspect that these social issues are largely a side-effect of civilization (so, even less of a reason to feel guilty). For most of human history (and to this day in some places), people lived in small groups; everyone knew everyone else for life, and guessing at how other people feel and crap like that would not have been necessary. Such a group was one's whole social world, as well as a source of safety and material needs, and so marginalizing and bullying to the point of suicide and refusing to accomodate relatively minor peculiarities of one of the members would have been obviously self-destructive, unlike in cities where people write one another off after knowing them for a couple minutes or treat others like crap with impunity and then have the freedom to just go off and find relationships with some of the millions of other available people. There was/is undoubtedly some marginalization in such close-knit society, but I doubt it occured/occurs on the scale we see in cities.

I've thought similar myself, though I haven't done enough looking around to know if historical sources support it. I mean, in Ye Theoretical Olden Days, I'm certainly capable of doing the sort of cyclical work that would have been needed to subsist, I think, and would have been doing it in a community instead of arbitrarily on my own. Even parenting, I suspect, I would have done 'well enough,' since survival of the infants would likely be the greatest aim, and I do think I could keep a kid alive, if not running around to social activities and playgroups all the time... And before computers, calculators, etc., a specific long-term memory and system thinking might have been more useful. Or completely useless, who knows?

Still, for me, I very much want love/affection and to share that with others, not just to expect them to meet me on my plain of understanding. I've done that before, expecting them to 'get' me or deal with how I act, and that ends up with me tying myself into knots as I simultaneously desperately want someone around and develop extreme contempt for both them and myself. Then when they finally break and do cry or show emotion, it just seals my contempt and makes me feel sort of--vindicated. I just watch. It's as though I want to prove to people I'm harmful to them, but only once I'm close to them already. I don't antagonize people I don't care about! It makes no sense.

Last edited by Crearan on 16 Jan 2014, 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Accidental double-post!