Anyone else feel angry for not getting an early diagnosis?

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How come I was diagnosed in 1998 and I'm a female with no speech delays and I didn't even show that many typical autism signs as a small child? It's not fair.

You did better than me LOL

I was diagnosed at about age 3.....and I was the nonverbal "infantile autistic" type. There was NO doubt.....

I was lucky my mother didn't "put me away."

Just by the way , am glad your mother did not put you away either .

I went to school and had good grades, so everything was "fine". There were social issues and sensitivities, but they were overlooked because I graduated and such. In adult life, eveything hit me, little by little, and here I am having to face all this in my 30s.

That basically my experience, except I my grades declined around grade 7 because I had no interest in school. I got diagnosed when I was 29.

Congrats to making it to WP ......... !

I find that "retrospective anger" can be used for good purposes.

I wouldn't let this "anger" stymie me.

I've seen this sort of "anger" stymie people. It's not a nice scene....

I'm newly diagnosed in December 2020, my fiancee threw me out on Xmas Eve.

I go back and forth, and get mad and then forgive, I'm all over the place. I'm looking forward to reading your responses...

This! Very much this.

I'm mindful that when I was growing up, there was "no such thing" as autism - certainly not in 1960s, 1970s and 1980s New Zealand. Autism studies weren't even available in the English language until the 1990s.

If I had been sent for diagnosis as a child, the very strong likelihood is that I would have been misdiagnosed as having something else - so wrong diagnosis on top of the social stigma of officially "being mental" (as people undoubtedly would have put it). As it was, I got accused of "being mental" often enough without a diagnosis.

As it stands, i got enough grief for constant "fidgeting", strange behaviour, "inappropriate" responses, emotional outbursts and "tantrums", being a loner, being good at certain subjects, being overly literal-minded, missing social cues, not being able to read people's minds, not being able to apply my "obvious intelligence" (demonstrated in subjects I was interested in) to subjects that didn't interest me in the slightest... the list goes on.

A diagnosis would have just been the "proof" that the other kids, teachers, employers etc needed that I was some sort of broken person.

As it was, I grew up being told "if you keep acting like that, you'll wind up in the loony-bin" (and that was just from my father) so, out of shear self-preservation, I learned to mask, I learned coping strategies, I learned to push myself to put up with things, I learned - academically - that change happens and there isn't a thing I can do about it, no matter how much it drives me up the wall - in short, I learned how to pass (for periods of time, anyway) as "normal" and avoided being institutionalised.

These skills and strategies enabled me to make it through primary school and high school, get jobs and hold them for more than 10 years apiece (even though I hated the work environments and the constant social stresses they entailed).

I first suspected I was probably autistic was back in the 1990s when I met a friend's son who was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and my initial thought was "holy crap, that's me dialled up to eleven."

As years went on, things like the Aspie Quizz and the Autism Quotient caused me to self-identify as Aspergers.

One of sons was diagnosed at age 14 with ADHD, ODD and autism traits. That made it even more likely that my self-diagnosis was correct.

It wasn't until the end of last year that I actively persued a formal diagnosis in order to better understand myself - so confirming whether or not my suspicions were correct became a priority.

The assessment process was quite quick, resulting in me getting the diagnosis within 2 months of initiating the process.

So: prior to the 1990s, I could not have got an autism diagnosis, and between then and very recently, my lack of formal diagnosis was due to my own failure to pursue one, despite suspecting/thinking that I probably was autistic.

I can't really be "angry" under those circumstances.

I'm certain that not having a diagnosis when I was younger has been both harmful and helpful.
On the one hand, I suffered low self esteem for years, self-harmed, contemplated suicide, mistrusted friends because I'd been stabbed in the back and duped so often, felt like I was "broken" and didn't know why, internalised other people's prejudices and inaccurate assumptions about me and generally had a crappy time.
On the other hand, I learned skills and ways to compensate for my weaknesses or avoid certain environments and situations, developed tolerance for things that would otherwise cripple me, developed a rather "thick skin" when it comes to insults and negative opinions. I masked my true self and made a concerted effort to prove my detractors wrong.
On the gripping hand, those positives come at a cost as well.

Welcome to Wrong Planet.

Your story will resonate with a lot of older members. We are the survivors. My answer to the question posed by this thread is on page 1 of this thread.

Cheers.

Yeah, there's certainly a lot to resonate with in the older members' posts. I could swear Fnord's dad and mine went to the same school - they certainly had the same ideas and solutions...

Post diagnosis - and after more research into the condition - I've certainly been able to put a lot of things into perspective and gain greater insight into things in my life. And I'm sure that's going to be going on for a long time.

Both my parents are dead so I can't discuss any of these revelations with them - and I'm not certain how receptive they'd be if they were alive.
Still, no matter: made my peace with them before they died and the world didn't end when they died without any of us knowing of my condition.

This all sounds very familiar .not getting a diagnosis till later in life , muddling through it all. With some degree of success .getting a better understanding of why things were the way they were till so much later , inspite of noticing distinct differences in how things went in my life. .parents being passed on long before diagnosis , despite my younger sister being nonverbal . And having a official diagnosis.

I have only just been diagnosed at age 50, and there's no point with being angry over things that can't be changed now and that nobody could help.

I definitely wonder how being diagnosed earlier could have changed things for me, but I know for a fact that if I had been diagnosed as a child I would have hated it. It would have been a label that confirmed probably my worst fears about myself, because being different was something I was running away from at that stage. Particularly I had an older brother who I was bullied by and it would have been ammunition for him that he would have loved! No amount of telling him to be supportive would have changed this, that's just the truth.

It would have been in high school when I really started to have major social problems that I wonder whether a diagnosis would have been useful. I had a lot of failed friendships and I put a huge amount of stress on myself telling myself I had to "fix" my problem. I also think that having parents who were better educated about how to support me would have assisted. It might have saved me a lot of trauma and enabled me to concentrate on my work and education which honestly my mind hasn't been on.

So at the end of primary school my parents were told I could expect a TE score of 970 (high) and they naturally expected I would go on to do law or medicine or something like that. Now I'm struggling to hold on in a dead end job, have no friends and never married or had a boyfriend. But there's no point in being angry. In the 80s nobody had heard of ASD Level 1 and I was a well behaved girl and a good student (for a while). It was natural that people thought the problems would just sort themselves out.

Strong emotions are destructive. Become an activist and leverage the hell out of anything that gives you pleasure - your favourite band or hobby, anything, you need it. Anger can sharpen your sense of justice and your self esteem and self compassion, but too much of it will retraumatise and is an absolute poison if you keep feeding to yourself over and over again. Take the positives from it and then forget it because it will destroy you.

I am newly diagnosed 2 months ago, though in retrospect it was obvious since it runs heavily in my family and I have many of the traits.

I think if I was diagnosed earlier though it might has restricted my options, because there is a lot of misunderstanding out there about what aspergers is and isn't, and what aspergers people are better or suited to. So I wonder if I would have not followed my passions and done something more 'suited to my identity' (as it was defined by other people who don't really 'get it').

On the other hand it might have helped me to see and mitigate some unhelpful behavior which I otherwise was pretending to myself that I wasn't actually doing. Plus when those behaviors became unavoidable to admit, and the negative consequences (eg social problems) I didn't just sink into anxiety and self blame because I was some kind of failure of freak.

Honestly, I'm not even sure how I feel about the diagnosis now. It explains a lot of things about myself and helps with not blaming myself. But on the other hand, I feel a bit restricted in some way I haven't before. But perhaps that's just negative thinking.

Does that make sense to anyone else?

(edit 1: also I'm brand new, so hi! Sorry to just charge in and start going on about myself right from the get go.)

Welcome to wrong planet Peter . I think there is some period of adjustment after getting a diagnosis and associating all those past behaviors and what it means or how it fits into ones life.

I was diagnosed with ASD to mum in childhood, indirectly, because I was 4 1/2 years late reaching verbal hood, was sensory interrogated, a little professor in my own world, and had limited understanding of others existence, by late childhood I had strict routines, food routines, strict interests in making comic books, still relatively low verbal skills till I was maybe 15 - if someone told me "Jordan, you have autism/AS" as a child, it would not have made a difference, because people's language was alien to me anyway and... I was sensory interrogated and hallucinating. I remember somebody asked me in secondary school "jordan do you have a skin?" (people took advantage of me), I was looking at my skin thinking they meant do I have any human skin????? I got home and realised - skin is slang for cigarette paper. That's also what came with my autism - misinterpreting and processing NT's language incorrectly - like visualising/hallucinating what other people say and misinterpreting phrases with double meaning - Social embarrassing moments and blushing due to anxiety in education was very common with me.

I was a sensory dyslexic too through life - by early teenage hood, with acute awareness of sensory sensitivities and existence, I was finding ways to keep my sensory sensitivities high, and sensory processing moderate, through routine, sleep routine (3 hours sleep a night), cigarette's as a teenager where helpful with light and noise sensitivity processing, that was a phenomenon actually and by age 19, I learnt ways how to fully filter sensory sensitivities - for better or for worst, not sure.

I'm still autistic - now I have broke the looking glass and am fully self aware - but not particularly a book case anymore - perhaps a schizoid-type autistic - I feel internally dead and not here, that could be a good thing because my development with autism has been really overwhelming.