Feeling of shame or unfairness of having Asperger Syndrome

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ToughDiamond
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24 Jul 2022, 6:40 am

I suppose when I'm aware that my ASD is messing up my life I can feel tempted to blame myself for it, and I can certainly feel embarrassed if others seem to judge me harshly and I can't explain my way out of it. But generally speaking I just see my ASD as the way it happens to be. Nobody did it to me deliberately, nobody could have made it any different. If I'm stuck with people who seem to be looking down on me for anything then their feelings can rub off on me for a time, at least to a degree, and that might make me feel inferior, but I usually know that's just an illusion and that it's important not to accept it. Ultimately the concept of superior and inferior people makes no sense.

I feel some sense of blame towards society for being more ableist than seems right and for being so hostile towards people who are harmlessly different, but my disdain for society isn't confined to ASD issues by any means. I just feel that people on the whole are too competitive, consumeristic, egotistical, selfish, judgemental, unfriendly, and uncaring. Aspies certainly aren't the only ones who suffer as a result of that. It's unfortunate for me that I lived through the 1960s when there was a lot of hope that the right-wing ideology was being swept away and replaced by something more Utopian, because after that there was a backlash and the whole movement just regressed back to what it had been before. I don't think I'll ever be able to quite come to terms with that disappointment.



ToughDiamond
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24 Jul 2022, 6:42 am

naturalplastic wrote:
"Shame" about 'aspergers' is impossible.

How can you be 'ashamed' of something that you were born with that wasnt your fault? Like being ashamed of being born in the 1980s, or being ashamed of doing a bad job of picking the right set of parents to have.

"Unfairness" ...not necessary but understandable. My sister is NT, but has diabetes, I dont have diabetes, but have aspergers. There is s**t to go around for everyone.So the unfairness part gets dampened down.


True, it's irrational to feel ashamed of having ASD, but feelings can be irrational.



Noamx
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24 Jul 2022, 5:56 pm

To be honest, "irrational" is a matter of personal opinion, just like for example, whether something is "rude" or not can be a matter of personal opinion too. It can appear irrational because you are apparently not supposed to be ashamed of it, but some people with a different point of view, can think the opposite of what you think about it. I tend to feel alot less shame about having it these days, but I can hardly say this type of feeling had completely disappeared. Its just weaker now. But the unfairness feels stronger because of the terribly annoying, extremely rare situations I had to deal with in my relatively short life(32 might not be that short, but alot of people keep saying I'm young). The situations I'm talking about are not the most terrible ever occurred in any person's life, but terrible enough to turn the syndrome into a personally unfair condition, more than averagely, compared to others with this syndrome.

Have you guys ever asked yourselves,

"What can I do to feel better about myself?"

"How can I deal better with problems in my life in generally, and which problems are of higher priority for me?"

"Does negative thinking, like the negative feelings like shame and unfairness, are only causing me further damage/trouble and I should avoid that, or not necessarily?"

"If I could live a better life, what steps can I take right now to do so, without much effort if at all?"

Yeah, questions I ask myself here and there, but I have multiple possible answers which make it a hard decision.


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About me, my name's Noam 32 years old from Israel, diagnosed with High functioning Autism at about age 21 but unofficially had this problem since I was born. From age 25 or so I started to function better but I still have alot of problems in my life. I live in Israel in a city called Ashdod, but I was born in Jerusalem. I'm Agnostic when it comes to religion.

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Edna3362
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24 Jul 2022, 11:42 pm

Noamx wrote:
Have you guys ever asked yourselves,

"What can I do to feel better about myself?"

"How can I deal better with problems in my life in generally, and which problems are of higher priority for me?"

"Does negative thinking, like the negative feelings like shame and unfairness, are only causing me further damage/trouble and I should avoid that, or not necessarily?"

"If I could live a better life, what steps can I take right now to do so, without much effort if at all?"

Yeah, questions I ask myself here and there, but I have multiple possible answers which make it a hard decision.

Personally these questions can be answered in my previous post in this thread. :P

The question remains -- why couldn't I just drop it?
Am I not an adult enough to recognize that?

Really, no one's stopping me from quitting my job (a job where I play by weaknesses and almost none of my strengths, and barely any progress or change maybe except for the worse) be less independent and be very reliant on others...

Then just focus on my interests and strengths -- my interests are potentially the types that one can sell their work type of job (as opposed to selling one's self) and everyone I know can willfully market for me.

I have several networks, all ready and willing. Several contacts to go around with.
I'm just a mindset away from peaceful interdependence...

... A mindset I could've chose as soon as I was diagnosed over a decade ago; choosing to be happy and free and focus everything with my strengths...

But I cannot dwell in what ifs.
And I'm was not the recently diagnosed 15 year old, with different choices and circumstances before her.

Instead I chose pride.
I chose standards. I chose the desire for independence. I prioritize self development.

It's been a decade now -- am I an adult enough to recognize the sunk-cost fallacy of the situation and go through with it?

Am I an adult enough to recognize that I'm not actually matured enough, despite it's been a decade now since, to could've choose this path correctly? And when could and would I?

This is what I ask of myself now.


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Kasab740
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25 Jul 2022, 12:09 am

I don't feel shame in the knowledge of having Asperger's. But I do feel shame in all those decades of trusting in people that I thought were my "friends". Like you, I trusted in people who I now know, were only out to be manilpulative.

So, stop that! Many of us are intellectuals, with sometimes post-graduate degrees. Yet others greet us as if we are nobodys/challenged. Asperger's is defined by, to sum up hundreds of pages of traits - others failing to understand us on the basis of a brief face-to-face meeting. Others would need to engage for hours, to have the slightest understanding on who we really are. But being Asp, precludes that.



ASPartOfMe
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25 Jul 2022, 1:32 am

Before I knew I was autistic and had any understanding of Autism I felt shame about some traits.

I can not feel shame or pride in being Autistic because I had nothing to with it, I was born this way. I take pride in things I accomplished despite me or anybody else having a clue. I take pride in being a surviver. So many autistics of my generation have not made it. There were bad choices I made that I now recognize were influenced by my autism that I still fault myself for because I should have known better or I did know better but chose the lazy choice anyway.


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ToughDiamond
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25 Jul 2022, 5:55 am

Noamx wrote:
To be honest, "irrational" is a matter of personal opinion, just like for example, whether something is "rude" or not can be a matter of personal opinion too. It can appear irrational because you are apparently not supposed to be ashamed of it, but some people with a different point of view, can think the opposite of what you think about it.

I rather think that conclusions based on sound reasoning are independent of personal opinion, while feelings, being ideas with no easily-explicable basis, are much more subjective. So I might say logically that I'm inferior to somebody as a poker player, but it's not logical for me to say that I'm inferior to the human race as a person, because poker skill can be measured and demonstrated, while the "skill" of being a person makes rather less sense. Nothing is inferior or superior, blameworthy or praiseworthy, in its own right, it's only seen as such if we assume certain value judgements about what skills or behavioural traits a person "should" feel proud or ashamed of. When people have different feelings about a matter, they could argue forever without resolving anything, but when it's a matter of logic, they can present their data and their reasoned arguments, and if they're both prepared to evaluate the material honestly and logically, they're much more likely to be able to agree. This happens all the time between good scientists.