Self Defeating Behavior...reality or psycho-babble?

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Glad you had a laugh ! ! This was all just TOO serious ! ! Lighten up, ASpies ! !!

Another Aspie obsessive moment, brought to you by WP!

Serious part:

I also have this problem of putting things off. I think I have a high self-esteem. I feel more as if I'm purposefully making life hard in order to gain sympathy? Something convoluted like that. I also must do something about my missed 6 monthly dentist appointment. I missed it four years ago. (How do I get across what I've just done there. I've turned it into a joke. Intentionally. But it's not. I do that a lot: "Make light of things". Or just plain, don't say anything.)

Non-serious part:

This procrastination - I was going to do some now, but I think I'll leave it until tomorrow?

Joke:

Overheard at a linguists' conference in Spain. A conversation about a Cornish expression:
"How shall I put this, 'dreckly' (directly) is very much like the Spanish 'manana' (tomorrow), except without the sense of urgency."

krex - hi, you started a really interesting discussion here, thanks.

It's so easy for a medic or whoever to say that a behaviour is 'self-defeating'. That <may> be what it looks like from the perspective of an observer. I think the huge trouble is that these medics and also lay people are SO hung up on Freud and his aftermath. That is, everyone always looks at things in terms of psycho-dynamics instead of biology. If something is 'in the mind', a product of thought and the 'subconscious', it <can be fixed>, you can be encouraged to change your thinking via talk-therapy or medication. Frankly, I think Freud and his multifarious adherents have done humanity a grave wrong.

For people on the spectrum, it's not an easy case of 'changing your mind and improving via meds and psycho-dynamic interventions'. Our way of perceiving the world and way of thinking is biologically hardwired. How can talk-therapy change that to any measurable, effective degree? And meds just suppress all thought generally and only for the duration of the prescription, so how useful is that?

ZanneMarie sums it up here:
"It's just frustrating to me that they know now that it is a neurological disorder and it is still in the grip of Psychiatry. It's complete lunacy and I can only believe that has remained the case because Psychiatry does not want to lose the prestige or dollars that come with "owning the problem." It hasn't done one thing for people with the disorder except confuse them even more and deny them access to adequate explanations and rehabiliation options. The most they have done is talk to people and drug them for co-morbid conditions. They focus on that instead the real issue because that would take it out of their hands."
(...the destructive hegemony of bloody Freud and his followers...)

I think, from how you've described your issues, krex, that your behaviour only looks like 'self-defeating' from an ignorant observer's point of view. Isn't it so easy to blame the 'miscreant'? It means that you don't actually have to do anything to help because you see the solution as being in the hands of the 'wrongdoer', who is required to spend lots of money on psychiatrists and allied 'professionals'. Freud's followers have built themselves a € multi-billion empire on nothing but the totally unsupported supposition that somehow our subconscious runs the show. Errrm, well, prove it guys! Great scam you have going there!

Actually krex it sounds to me like you are coping with, struggling with, all the same ASD effects as alll us other WPers. It's not some deep psychological psychobabble stuff you're doing! IMHO! You're most probably doing a great job of living your life and contributing to your community in spite of all the usual AS difficulties that these psychobabble pontificators pronounce on and wrongly diagnose!

Ambient,


I couldn't agree more. It ended up in the wrong field and now it's like pulling teeth to get it out. It has started to really cause some damage. It isn't that I want to fixate on it, but I do believe we have to take a strong stance to make the change occur. In the end, for people like me, who found a way to get on and are "ok" (in air quotes because none of us really are ok including NTs. We all have our problems), it isn't a dire need, but if we don't make a stand for those caught in the quagmire of that system, who is going to do it? People who can observe them but really can't get inside their world (again not through fault of their own but because it is so radically different from their wiring) try to speak for them but it is very hard and confusing for them. They are trying to do the right thing, but unfortunately get confused about what the right thing is because of misconceptions and misinformation. That concerns me. It concerns me how many people are being hurt by this because it isn't looked at in a logical and dispassionate manner. That is something that is required in any medical theory and research setting.

So it concerns me, but only in that I want it moved to the field where it belongs so that progress can begin to happen. I don't want to see us stuck in some academic power struggle.

Krex, I have the exact same problems as you. I am chronically late. No matter what I do/how hard I try, I am at least 5 min late for everything, 10 most often. I have started planning and trying really hard to get everywhere 15 min early this past year and it is working phenomenally well (I'm 30 years old, it took me this long to figure this out! HA!) Problem is when I actually get to whre I'm going 15 min early and I'm really uncomfortable w/ not knowing what to do. lol (usually I end up pacing or sitting and staring at people w/ a grin on my face--can't help the smiling, I smile 80% of the time, no matter my mood. I try to be friendly, but I think I make a lot of people uncomfortable. I think they think I'm a mental case. lol)

I am extremely distractible, have to check everything out, etc. I get along really well with small toddlers, they have the same curiousity. Not trying to say it's ALL childlike, but the looking through clothes and checkig out pieces of trash on the ground, they definitely dig it. I'm just as curious w/ intellectual topics and people are amazed that I am like a walking encyclopedia when I open my mouth. It makes many NT's extremely uncomfortable for some reason, but others find me interesting (although in hindsight, I have to wonder how many of these people were actually undiagnosed aspies like me. )

When I was in college, I tried to get diagnosed w/ ADD b/c I was having such a hard time. THe pyschologist/psychiatrist/whatever he was (as*hole, that's for sure!) said that although I had many many of the symptoms of ADD, I did not have it. He also said I had a very high IQ, higher than 98% of the population or something like that. So if I am so smart, why can't I handle going to class, working at a job, etc, etc, etc on a daily basis? There's SOMETHING wrong with me (in an NT world anyway ) Now I know I have AS (not diagnosed) which explains my lack of ESP and inherent social knowledge, but I guess it doesn't explain my distractability. But I was't diagnosed w/ ADD when I tried either, so wtf is it?

OT, here, ZanneMarie, but you look like you've read up on Nazis a bit. I have done a little internet searching, not a lot, haven't gotten any books from the library, but I was wondering about something related to Buchenwald. My father-in-law's father was sent there. My FIL was 2 years old and sent off to England w/ the Kindertransport (sp?) while his mother did something else and eventually ended up in England as well. Anyway, FIL's parents were both very young, early 20's when this happened. Grandfather survived Buchenwald (he was poor, helped brother the bricklayer, so was used to hard work on little food) but they never had any more children. Do you think they did something to him at Buchenwald? I've always wondered that. It's seems strange for young people (they were still in their 20's/early 30's when reunited) to only have 1 child during a time when everybody had many, especially after so many Jews were eradicated. Just wondering if you'd ever read anything about this. FIL says is dad wouldn't talk about the camp. He would just say that no one would believe even if he did tell them what happened there.

Wendy,


OT It's possible. Some experimentation did go on, but outside of Mengele, I haven't read about a preponderance of it. What is probably more likely, depending on when he was in the camps, is that the starvation or disease may have done something. Malnutrition and disease were rampant in those camps. If you are in a malnutritioned state and you catch something like say mumps as an adult, I'd say the chances just went up that you might come out of that sterile as a male. But, again, that would just be speculation.

It's hard to say what happened. My class was more of a focus on the ethics of things like Euthanasia (what process society goes through in cases such as Karen Quinlan). Because of that, our professor took us through what happened in Germany because it was actually legislated that they could use euthanasia, then systematically exploited the system to "euthanize" people they considered unfit while hiding what they were doing from the genera public. For instance, many of these doctors talked about how they were forced to find a legitimate medical reason for the person (let's say ret*d in this case) to die. That is what they actually put on the death certificate. That legitimized euthanasia and subterfuge just kept expanding until it culminated in those camps. That is what they mean when they say that things are getting on the slippery slope. That is why they fight it so hard. Looking at that from purely an ethics issue that we have to be on guard against was actually what sent up my red flag when I read that researchers were looking for the "gene" that causes Asperger's. I'm not sure that came across, but that's why I had that kind of reaction.


Anyway, there should be books about Buchenwald. I'll go look in Nazi Doctors and see if any of them were there and what they said. If there's something specific, I'll let you know. It's very frustrating isn't it? My dad, whose mother was 1st generation American of German heritage, was actually in Germany during WWII and he would never speak of it. My dad was a very strong man (fell off a bridge once and broke his neck, but managed to climb off the frozen river and drive himself to the ER), but he would get tears in his eyes if you brought that up and say, "It was horrible. That's all I can tell you." I never saw anything else get that reaction out of him, so it had to be beyond our comprehension. It always reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Kurtz dies saying, “The horror, the horror.” I think that was probably true of your father-in-law's father as well. I've never known anyone who went there who would talk about it.

Wendy,


OT Here are some links specific to Buchenwald and what was done there for experiements.

http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/buchen/experime.htm

This one says Sterilization experiements were at Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?la ... d=10005168


This one is actually from the charges brought against the doctors after the war. WARNING! Extremely distubing content!

http://www.ushmm.org/research/doctors/twoa.htm

You'll see that the same doctors charged with the Sterilization at Auschwitz and Ravenbrueck were also charged with the Spotted Fever experiments at Buchenwald and since it says the Sterilzation experiments were also done at "other" locations, it is possible they happened in Buchenwald, but not certain by this document.


This lists all the doctors, the camps where they worked and what they did. WARNING! Extremely distubing content!

http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/nazidocsandothers.html


All of those are extremely graphic in detail and VERY disturbing. Please use caution about looking at them. If you make it through, you will understand why they never talked about it. It takes me right back to my class where we heard personal accounts and saw movies on what they did in those camps. I guess I just blocked it out. Seeing this just brought it all back again.


Again, apologies to others for getting off topic. Please understand it is just my way of saying we have to be extremely cautious of going down the path of trying to find the gene because that can so easily become "to destroy it." Doesn't mean it will...just that it could.