Manipulated & Easily Led
Dear_one
Veteran
Joined: 2 Feb 2008
Age: 75
Gender: Male
Posts: 5,717
Location: Where the Great Plains meet the Northern Pines
11 Mar 2017, 8:23 pm
As I stated,48 yrs old.With a list of mental health diagnosis as long as your arm,Depression,Bi Polar,Neurotic and so on ........ Many years of struggling in life,failed relationships,failed careers , you know what , just a failure. More attempts at getting help than you can imagine,Counselling,Psychologists,psychiatrists ,self help books, self help,self medication......
So I've been seing a new guy (professionally a Psychologist) and Autism comes up ,so I've had tests and done reading ,no "Official diagnosis yet" but a deff realisation and some understanding (of myself at last) .
Easily manipulated DEFINITELY . Due to poor social awareness and lack of understanding of people ,their motivations etc
Its a huge thing and dangerous to . Only being obvious to me having been in a relationship with a girl for 5 years. Pretty,sweet and petite,butter would not melt (In my mind) . But 24months after buying a house with her.Being talked into paying for everything Deposit,solicitors,mortgage retention,surveys and mortgage repayments as well as life and sickness insurances and all house related bills , but NOT having my name on the mortgage or any other legal document linking me to it . So 24 months after I am in hospital,9 broken ribs in a huge amount of pain laying there wondering what the hell had happened,who the hell had the previous night come into my bedroom and attacked me and why. Why as I lay sleeping did he drop a 30kg weight onto my chest as I lay on my back asleep and why was I laying there alone with no visitors,where was my GF. ?
My questions were answered by my 1st visitor 2 days later a male friend,mutual to me and my GF. He told me straight ,she's been seeing the guy that attacked you for 2.5 years ,we all knew but did'nt expect this ,she set you up dude,left the house while you slept n gave him a key to let him in,she wants you out of the house .But its all ok you can use my couch ..........
Took me a long while ,but looking back ,my life has been a series of although not so dramatic but similar events of manipulation ,mainly through just being clueless.I was taught to behave a certain way and assume others do to . My mistakes realised my chosen defence,total isolation,I don't be friend anyone and do not leave the house other than when absolutely necessary ........
So its taken nearly 50 years ,almost certainly I am on the scale or spectrum.Maybe I will gain more than just a diagnosis but maybe some tools to help me actually live,heres to hope........
Welcome! That's a particularly nasty story, but at least you survived, and may finally be where you can understand the patterns in your life.
"The next time I want to get married, I'll just find a woman I don't like and buy her a house!"
- Rod Stewart
14 Mar 2017, 1:54 pm
Yeah, of course. It used to be real easy to make me do a lot of things.
In grade 5, my parents bought me a 60-card Pokemon TGC deck. I was so happy, I brought it to school. I gave a card to a friend to be nice. Sharing is caring, I'd been told. Suddenly I had many more "friends" who all wanted cards. Sharing is caring! So I shared. By the time the day ended I was left with 9 cards out of 60. I had only kept the rare holographic card and a few other common ones that nobody wanted.
In grade 8, a girl in my class I barely knew asked me to help her cheat on a biology test. I did it, and none too subtly at that. It was a miracle we didn't get caught. Why did I do it? Nothing to do with male hormones. It was pretty much the same reason as the above. Sharing is caring.
I don't know why I broke the no-cheating rule. I broke a lot of rules to make others happy. Sometimes I even volunteered breaking them. It has cost me to do so before and yet I keep doing it. I follow rules strictly when it comes to myself, but when it comes to others it's like they vanish. I don't know why. If any of you has any idea why that could be, it'd be interesting to know. I've struggled for a long time to understand why I do this.
Anyway, in general, it's really a twisted application of the Golden Rule, "do unto others what you would like them to do unto you", taken to its logical extreme. "If I were not good at school, I would like it if somebody better than me helped me out, so I will help out" and "if I were poor and had no Pokemon cards, I would like it if somebody who had cards gave me out, so I will give one". The problem with the Golden Rule is that while it might be A+ morality in theory, it needs to be tempered in practice. Following it strictly and to the letter means that you will never refuse a request for anybody, even at great personal cost, because you figure that if you were to ask for the same thing, you would also enjoy receiving it. Unfortunately that was the only moral perspective available to me for a long time, so I gave a lot and received precious little in return. Not one of my grade 5 "instant friends" spoke even a word to me after that incident, and the girl I helped cheat of course never looked at me again after she got what she wanted.
These days I know better, but I've gone the opposite direction completely. I refuse any and all requests unless asked for by a directly related family member and I never ask anybody for anything. Anything worth doing is worth doing myself.
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Dites-nous où c'est caché, ça doit faire au moins mille fois qu'on a bouffé nos doigts.
15 Mar 2017, 7:30 pm
I feel that I have been manipulated a lot in my life and was wondering if this was an Aspie thing or is it just because my mind is weak and doesn't spot when I being manipulated or led until it's too late.
I'd say that manipulation can happen to anybody whether someone is disabled or not, somebody could try to black mail you or talk you into something you don't want to do, sometimes it can be hard to recognize body language in person. But if your online talking to someone (say facebook for an example) depending on a subject it may depend if a person is being a liar while manipulating you or not. If there's people that you feel like are manipulating you just to get what they want...then I'd suggest to simply ignore them & never speak to them ever again.
