to feel sad at NT resentment of / disgust at people with ASD

[kiritekanawa]

I guess it's like anything where the "better" people despise you for being inadequate - I tend to wonder why, if they're so much better, they don't have any spare mental capacity for kindness, empathy, compassion or humility.

Perhaps I'm too systematic in my approach to being nice, kind and compassionate, and reliable and dependable - but I refuse to be bitchy about others behind their backs, I refuse to change plans on a whim just to deliberately assert control over a situation in a way that makes it difficult for others, I stick to rules that make sense for the greater good (and quietly say nothing and ignore ones that are just silly). The NTs in my family all seem to spend their lives being bitchy, nasty, whimsical, selfish and unreliable - but they all despise me, think I'm humourless and unimaginative and a social weight around their necks.

My NT sister and BIL spend a lot of time rubbing my and my father's (ASD) noses in the fact that I and my father have embarrassed DSIS since I was born, and their child is SO MUCH better than me/DF IN SO MANY WAYS because their child is neurotypical. "D"SIS seems to resent everything I've ever done in my life, and gets together to recount stories of how my father and I are embarrassing and inadequate, with "D"BIL and our mother (who incidentally clearly also has ASD but lacks social insight to a point that she doesn't really see what she's being led into).

When I get together with my aspie academic friends - we don't spend the time bitching about our selfish, unreliable relatives - we talk about interesting ideas and stuff.

AIBU to get a bit depressed at being thought of as an embarrassment and a liability?

TizWailor - it is completely possible to get across to most people who don't have major learning difficulties - NT, ASD, whatever - that they have to think before they speak and not just let the first thing out of their mouth.

One of the many things my sister hates about me is that I used to lack a filter, when I was a child/teenager. I clearly did. I got ripped to shreds for it at university.

To some degree it was to do with thinking I was seeing things more clearly than other people, i.e. I was arrogant because other people had sounded so downright silly and sheep-like (to me) all my life. I genuinely thought I was offering useful insight, and didn't realise I was missing all sorts of social cues and that plenty of other people had similar insights but were way ahead of me on the social cues and therefore weren't offering their insights the same way. It was also because I'd grown up in a household where nobody had any form of social filter, other than my mother's rather confused set of rules for social climbing/ game-playing - and these were based on such negative, self-serving views of the world that I wanted nothing to do with such game-playing.

Eventually two useful things got through to me:
(1) Humility: I don't have all the information, my point of view is not necessarily more insightful or useful than anyone else's, and it is quite likely to be different in ways that others find hard to understand, and I should consider that before I open my mouth and sound arrogant and stupid; and
(2) Learning to shut up and enjoy the view: no-one needs to constantly have things to say. Relax. You can just be there, be nice, be friendly (but not too much), shared experience is enough. Relaxing socially meant that I wasn't constantly dominating conversations with my supposedly brilliant insights sounding like a complete twat

If you can get both points through to your DH and DS it will help them. You may need to phrase it bluntly though, because they may not get subtle cues. Your DF may be past being told these things, particularly if he continues to hold outdated views - he may just not be particularly interested in engaging with the world on terms other than his own. I know plenty of NT people like that... it's not necessarily an ASD-specific thing, though it's certainly more obvious in people who lack social nuance and have favourite topics

Thanks everyone for your comments and observations.

What this thread may describe, a little bit, is how the social difficulties of some people with ASD work.

Obviously social difficulties can be about more than just starting your observations in a different place; thinking along different, more focussed lines; observing tiny, disjunct portions of social cues; lacking a filter; being hypersensitive to criticism from people who judge you by NT standards; etc. - for example sensory issues can mean you apparently have a very short social fuse. I think this comes back to the information-sorting aspect though - people with ASD seem to weigh the competing factors differently and come up with different things being important. Because of different sensory input, or different levels of understandting of particular things, they may be weighing up factors that other people have never considered.

And not everyone started out as monumentally arrogant as I was in my teens/20s, and not everyone has a family as messed-up as mine.

TizWailor

I don't really have a grasp of how mouldable ASD symptoms are. Some people seem to be able to make lots of adjustments once they know what to adjust; others don't - and I don't know if that is actual differences in the manifestation of ASD in those people, differences in insight/understanding, or differences in input from other things leading to differences in willingness to change, or a bit of everything...

However - on the assumption that some people can observe and change their behaviour to an easier way of experiencing social situations - then asking the question "is it an ASD thing, or is it a personality/family thing?" can sometimes be useful - in that if a trait is causing difficulty, and the person wants to change, they can be more accepting of the need to change if they're told it's to do with ASD than "actually you are just rude and you need to change your manners". THen again, some people (my parents' generation) will respond better to being told to mind their manners, than to being told that their behaviour fits into ASD, because to them, being "subnormal" is much worse than being rude.
I.e. you can employ strategies from clinical practice even if the clinical aspect of it might be irrelevant - though not everyone will be pleased with a fuller analysis!

Op your dsis is a bitch go totally nc you won't miss "her". You may wish she was a socially delightful sibling and the relationship of such a sibling but she isn't that and she hurts you again and again.

I would say (well hope) that a majority of people are not like her and the dick she married.

Some families are just awful no matter where or if you are on the spectrum

Send your sis books on social etiquette & the different types of social prejudices! Or a book on identifying narcissistic behaviour, because she sounds awful and then cut contact with her.

My ds is an aspie and he is managing ok socially, there are things we need to work on. I am more fearful for him than my daughter because people can be cruel. I'm having issues with my sil and her condescending behaviour towards him atm.

Learning to shut up and enjoy the view: no-one needs to constantly have things to say. Relax. You can just be there, be nice, be friendly (but not too much), shared experience is enough. Relaxing socially meant that I wasn't constantly dominating conversations with my supposedly brilliant insights sounding like a complete twat

Yes, this was me in my teens and early twenties too! Because, surely if you're having a conversation, it means that someone has to be talking, doesn't it? . (I think I've just about got it now- at the age of 41- after decades spent observing well adjusted and popular people having periods of silence in conversations, and no one thinking the less of them).

I don't really have a grasp of how mouldable ASD symptoms are. Some people seem to be able to make lots of adjustments once they know what to adjust; others don't - and I don't know if that is actual differences in the manifestation of ASD in those people, differences in insight/understanding, or differences in input from other things leading to differences in willingness to change, or a bit of everything...

(chucks a feminism bomb into the conversation)

I think gender has a LOT to do with this.....the "typical" Aspie woman learns to mimic "Normal" behaviour, while the "typical" Aspie man doesn't....is this really down to male/ female wiring, or down to different expectations thrust upon the sexes? In this society, women are seen as social enablers, keeping the family together, writing the Christmas cards, maintaining the social diary for the whole family, being a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, maintaining contact with the social circle......there is a lot more acceptance of a man not being good at this role than there is of a woman in the same situation.

I know of a lot of Aspie men who are "shielded" by their partners; they don't have many friends themselves, yet manage to have a social life that is completely arranged for them, yet which they can refuse whenever they feel like ducking out. Their partners take on the role of mediators between them and the world. I don't know of any Aspie women who enjoy such a privilege; it's either fucking learn the incredibly arduous job of maintaining social contacts (and I really do find it a grind!), or end your days half eaten by a German Shepherd in your lonely flat . (bitter, moi?).

Obviously, this doesn't apply to all AS men/ women yadda yadda, but it's a trend I notice- especially in the older generation.

I suspect it's social conditioning with ASD adding an extra element. As in, a lot of ASD traits are what people have decided are male traits, so boys from a young age do absolutely get away with more, then for someone who is not just picking up all the unwritten social things then gender differences can be a much more obvious one.

So boys with ASDS IMO can have a bit of a tendency to slip in to, well that's how men act anyway...

I don't know if I'm putting this well, lol.

My DS has (funnily enough) a tendency to see things as very black and white - expected gender roles is something we've had to do a lot of work on and he still has a tendency to fall back on, but I'm a man, I don't x y or z.

So my thinking on it is that if he's able to pick up on that, even with his social difficulties it must be something that does make a difference to other people too.

unluckily for him, he has me as a mother, so he's well versed on why things like social arrangements or birthday cards (men relying on women to do that is a bugbear of mine) aren't women's jobs.

...and we still get the "Autism is just extreme male brain/ all men are a bit autistic" comments.....

Everyone is on the spectrum annoys me more than the extreme male brain one from the POV that it completely devalues the diagnosis and belittles the experience of living with an ASD.

I find it very dismissive, well they both are, but for some reason I find that one worse for that.

Yes indeed.....oh, and another one, while we're on the subject: "You (woman) can't have AS because you manage to make eye contact, have empathy and don't spend your life on the computer/ banging on obsessively about your pet subjects".

You should have met me when I was 8 mate!

(although my eye contact is still a little off, TBH- I've over compensated and now make too much eye contact at times, which makes people feel uncomfortable ).

One of the side effects of DS being diagnosed was me becoming hyper-aware of eye contact, which made me give too much for a while... Just because suddenly I was paying attention to it.

It must be hard not to think about it when you know you're supposed to have a 'problem' with it.

Thankfully I didn't make it an issue with DS as I thought he had pretty good eye contact, until a doctor pointed out that it was only me he gave eye contact to, but how would I notice that? Lol

But yes as he's got older he has become better at that, he looks at eyebrows instead.

My daughter has Aspergers. She makes great eye contact, because it's something we taught her.Doesn't mean she doesn't have it.Annoys me when people make sweeping statements about the condition. Aspies are different just the same as every other human

What bugs me is the number of people who PRETEND to be OK with it... but really don't want an ASD child ANYWHERE near their NT child.

I have actually been asked if other kids could catch it!!!!

And I've had really good friends come up with the worst excuses as to why we weren't invited to events that my son would have enjoyed :-(

Iamatotalandutteridiot (I don't agree with your name BTW ) that's really sad. Unfortunately life does continue to be like that - but hopefully you and your son can find a nice group of people.

I think the feminism point is unfortunately true. However, things are likely to change over the next generation, just because gender norms have changed so much. I am from a generation where it was totally normal for fathers not to be present at births, to only rarely even hold or talk to their children, to never even learn how to change a nappy or feed a child, to have nothing to do with the child's education other than pay for it, and similarly to have no input at all into family/household life beyond paying for it and mowing the lawn out the front. And I am only 38.

Everyone who has mentioned eye contact - it's interesting - that's one I still find very, very hard, despite trying to do it "normally".

Particularly in stressful situations, i really hate eye contact or people coming into my personal space - I had a boss last year who used to pick on me for the fact I was "weird", who would stand about 50cm away from my face and spit while she talked, staring unblinkingly into my face while she told me I was stupid and lazy and shouted at me for things i hadn't done, making me step back and step back and eventually run into a wall - then she'd stand really close and laugh in my face about the fact I couldn't run away forever and would have to deal with people eventually. (Written down, I now realise that this indicates she was the total psycho in that situation, not me...)