Can Asperger's look like emotional abuse?

[NotThemCrows]

I posted on here last week, concerned about my DHs behaviour. I have read the Lundy book (fantastic- huge thanks to all those who pointed me in that direction) and recognised some of the stuff in there.

Last night I had a 1 to 1 session with our Relate counsellor for the first time (had about 4 sessions together and DH had one by himself 2 weeks ago) and she thinks that my DH may have Aspergers.

This does make a lot of sense to me, he is socially awkward, no empathy, no emotional awareness etc.

Could his major problem be Aspergers?

I was just wondering if any else has difficulties with an Aspergers DH that feels like EA.

Either way he still has anger issues, has demonstrated unacceptable behaviour and I have totally had enough of his bs and want a separation.

I am just trying to make sense of it all (or am I making excuses?)

Thoughts please

Oh is that what a quiche is? It was suggested upthread by a number of people, including me. Should we have an opening post like that on the abusive relationship thread?

horse I think mine is like yours, I see absolutely no reason why people shouldn't 'have' both. I do think nastiness is a personality trait, whereas AS and ADD are about cognitive processing.

I'd quite like a thread called

"Is it narcissism, is it aspergers, is it abuse or is it just being a bloke?"

There are certain aspects of men that are hard-wired, it makes them who they are, it defines their gender difference. Men with personality disorders don't display them because men don't communicate as much as women. In my case I thought for years it was him just being a bloke, but since I read about narcissistic personality disorder I think that's a more likely diagnosis.

Personality disorders develop as an emotional survival tactic. A child changes his behaviour in order to cope with abuse or neglect from his mother/father. They develop very young and behaviours can be very similar to Aspergers as they often involve blocking emotion to avoid feeling hurt/rejection/neglect. If you block your own emotions at a young age it is hard then to develop empathy. I got this stuff from Beverly Engel The Emotionally Abusive Relationship.

But there is a big difference between a 'disorder' and a 'syndrome'. To me a syndrome implies that it cannot change - eg Down's syndrome - a collection of symptoms with no identifiable cause.

My AS and ADD have not changed, but I have learnt better ways of managing them. And better ways of communicating with DF.

I see what you're saying, horse, but I've seen at least 3 threads where trying to distinguish AS and PD just muddied the waters and got too heated and off the point. I do think it's well worth addressing, but thought perhaps it might be better to discuss AS on its own, as it were, first. I don't think me, DF or FIL had PDs, I do think we had/have AS, and any havoc we have wreaked is not through nastiness, but was the unintentional consequence of acting as we do, with the best of intentions.

*I'd quite like a thread called

"Is it narcissism, is it aspergers, is it abuse or is it just being a bloke?"*

Horse - me too - I think this would draw in a lot of experiences and comparisons. A support thread would be magic but I am still not sure what I'm dealing with. I am very unhappy with our relationship - it doesn't work - the communication is pared right down to practicalities and I have all but given up sharing anything else with him as the responses I get are rarely what I want or need - yet he is a lovely, lovely guy and I am really confused.

TPP - your post made me wonder if my mum has As, I have a difficult relationship with her too, she has little 'emotional intelligence', has an amazing retentive memory, does loads of crosswords! She can be a horribly depressing person to be around, but I know she has a heart of gold. I feel terrible thinking badly of good people, but they are making me unhappy. Then I feel I'm the one being spoilt, selfish etc.

Op - re the dc's, this is the hardest bit. Seeing other people and the way they are with their kids .... it's horrible to feel so stuck. My dh seems to need to have control in his life to reduce stress (my interpretation/diagnosis) by not doing anything new or challenging with our ds's. If I suggest we do anything I never get a straightforward positive answer, there's nearly always a hesitation, questioning about the feasibility or an outright block to the whole idea...I am utterly exhausted and defeated.

Am at stage where I'm wondering if antidepressants would help lift me, anyone else tried that? (I am on a waiting list for counselling but been told May would be the earliest before it starts)

Ok comparison seems to be the consensus :) I will assume EX (SINCE FRIDAY) ) to be mainly NPD, since he is a cocklodger I will refer to him as NCL.

submarinegirl I felt about DF as you feel about your mum. Spent my childhood trying to work out if he loved me. Even wrote a contract for getting a hug from him when I was about 13 (I may even still have it, now aged 59!)

Just before we went to a funeral last autumn, I said something like 'it's on days like these that I feel I should say out loud 'I love you'' His reply? 'Thank you' - I genuinely believe he didn't realise he was supposed to reply 'I love you too' - but after all these years, I am now sure he does.

Even wrote a contract for getting a hug from him when I was about 13

Aw bless - that's so sweet but so sad.

sub - it is very confusing and exhausting when you have to depend on someone like this for emotional contact - in other words, when you love a person like this.

I've just got back from a holiday without him, it was hard to admit to family that we were going without him, with friends I made excuses, but when I told him he first refused to believe it and it wasn't until I told him very clearly and brutally honestly that it would be too stressful and there would be too many arguments, that he just resigned himself to it without a complaint. He said while we were away he was worrying about all the terrible things that could happen to us...

But before this, holidays were clouded by him trying to undermine and obstruct so that it didn't happen, and if it did, it would be stressful and argumentative.

So depending on which camp you're in,

a) he needs to have control and order in his life and doesn't see that others need the opposite (spontaneity and freedom) (Asp)
b) he wants to control me and if he can ruin anything I might try it will give him more control (EA)
c) he is afraid of embracing the 'new' because he has learnt since childhood that any enthusiasm he shows will be met with rejection and dismissal which has made him wary of change. (NPD)
d) why rock the boat when it's so comfy at home? (Bloke)
e) pinkpussycat can fill in the bit about the NCL!

Horse - you've touched on such a relevant point giving all those options - because people like me/us have to calculate these kinds of things every day!
No wonder it's all so exhausting....

It raised a smile though - thanks for that :)

Sometimes I do wish we could just go back to the seventies and say 'all men are bastards'. Life would be so much easier. Lonelier, but easier.

I once worked with someone with diagnosed BPD and spent many hours on a great forum. It seems to have gone or changed its name, but I found this one, which seems to be organised in a very similar way: Out of the Fog

NCL is reluctant to go on holiday (or anywhere, really) He's not too bad once there.

DF and me have a history of throwing wobblers at the last minute, having to be coaxed round or take time to get ourself sorted. Not sure why - I have stopped doing this though (honest )

Rudi Simone's book about some number of things every woman should know if she loves a man with AS is a really helpful starting point for women in NT/AS relationships.

There are bits of learning that some AS people have to do consciously, which the NT world assumes they know by instinct from childhood - and of course those things vary, but might include: reading facial expressions and deducing emotion from them; deducing emotion from tone of voice or from shades of meaning in the words used; recognising emotions in themselves including anger; learning that their thoughts may not be shared by the person with whom they are in conversation; learning that just because something seems completely logical to them, it might not seem completely logical to someone they are talking to, and may continue not to seem logical to that person, no matter how long the explanation goes on for.

I think it's almost impossible for someone not on the spectrum who also has no experience of living intimately with someone on the spectrum to imagine how those impairments play out in family life. From the outside - there will be all sorts of occasions where the NT world would shout "ABUSE! Leave the bastard" (in the same way that 95% of "experts" spout bullshit about establishing firm boundaries with children who have autism, and then they will be magically "fixed" into being "normal") but, for me, abuse is about intention.

There may be hurtful remarks; there may be lack of empathy and therefore continuing to try to hammer a point home in an argument when the person being talked to is feeling completely flattened by the pressure of the argument, but honestly, on a deep level, still doesn't agree. etc etc etc

But if there is no intention to hurt then NO, it's not abuse IMO. It means that the couple in question have a lot of work to do, together, to help the AS partner learn not to be hurtful, and to help the NT partner learn what sorts of "reasonable adjustments" are necessary, reasonable and acceptable to them at this point in the AS partner's development. I think that to have a healthy AS/NT relationship can take a lot of openness and a lot of explicit learning on both sides - I don't think that one member of the partnership can decide that things need to shift and x,y,z need to be learned - it has to be a joint effort with shared goals.

And there's stuff about expectations too - Rudi Simone talks about sensory issues and how that means, for some people with AS, sharing a bed is just hellishly unbearable. So from very early on in the relationship, the couple may have separate beds. From an NT perspective that's going to be very unusual and probably shows the AS partner doesn't really love the NT one (Leave him!!!!) but from an autism aware perspective, it is completely understandable. If an NT partner really craves physical closeness with their partner all night every night, then an AS partner with those sorts of sensory issues wouldn't be a good long term choice. And there are benefits that go with the quirks that often go with AS, if the NT partner is of a frame of mind to see them as such (there can be benefits to sleeping alone, which some NT people might genuinely appreciate, yk?)

What I'm getting at is: if you are someone with lots of experience of NT/NT relationships, you probably have very little idea of the possible dynamics of an NT/AS relationship, and of the challenges and rewards that such a relationship might offer. On an internet forum, based on an odd anecdote, it's terrifically easy to label a behaviour as abusive when it is, instead, simply the result of a lack of understanding on the part of the AS partner. If the understanding can be developed then the "abusive" behaviour really really really will disappear.

I'm not an apologist for abuse. I'm also not an apologist for staying in a stressful AS/NT relationship which isn't getting mended and seems to have no prospect of it. (though I have seen a couple recently - acquaintances of mine - who have been arguing viciously for 25 years - the NT wife is the much more aggressive one, constantly trying to change the husband, sniping at him in public and in private about his shortcomings. I think she was just unbearably embarrassed by him (why she married him was quite the mystery) And now he is going through diagnosis and she is beginning to accept his idiosyncracies and the transformation in her behaviour towards him is miraculous - fond and supportive and confident in him. Just amazing to see. And it's also a reminder that the person who has the most learning to do in the healthy-relationship stakes is absolutely NOT necessarily the AS person in an AS/NT scenario...)

Great post. I agree about intention being the key - I have pissed people off so many times without knowing why

On the learning to do things: to put this into practice requires mental effort. I can interact with the world pretty well, however it takes an act of concentration. Just like I can do the housework - it takes an act of concentration - I cannot do it 'on automatic' as I have seen others do.

To clarify: the learning takes mental effort, and then doing what you have learned takes mental effort, hence more cognitive load. And possibility of overload and then meltdown.

Exactly, pink.

I think it's too easy for people outside this sort of situation to say "X is unacceptable. Your partner must desist X immediately or you must leave him/her"

when actually, learning not to do X might be a gradual process over 5 years.

And sticking with the relationship for that time, and being on that learning curve with the partner, might be the best thing in the world for both of the people concerned and their children. Speaking of which... I feel really strongly about this one... so often families with one or two parents who present autistic spectrum characteristics will have one or more children who are/could be diagnosed. And I feel really strongly about the value of persevering in making the parental relationship something worth modelling to the children. The parents aren't going to be able to model a conventional NT/NT. But they might well be able to model a wonderfully quirky but happy NT/AS or AS/AS. And what a gift that is - for a child who has spectrum characteristics to grow up with that sort of direct model of ways that, with their quirks, they will be able to have a functional relationship as adults. That's almost more important to me than anything else in raising my children - to be presenting a model of family life that they can tweak, rather than feeling they need to start again from scratch to have any hope of living in a healthy family dynamic when they become adults. And a co-habiting model with parents who model being fond of each other has got to be better than a model of rejection and divorce and dislike, if it can be achieved.

I'm an real optimist :)

This is a quiche that I would really love to be in. I would like it to be in "relationships" and to be called "support thread for AS adults in relationships, and those in relationships with AS partners"

Hi all, I have found this which seems to reflect how I have been feeling. (I have no idea if it's hogwash or not, I just found it.)

TBH, my situation has got so bad and unbearable that I have asked DH to move out for a few months so that I can have some time to myself to clear my head. :(

We just cannot agree on anything, I feel under so much stress/pressure that I can't take on board any extra challenges at the moment. If there is any hope for us, I know that working things out and remodelling our marriage to take account of his ASD will take energy that I just can't give, at least until I have started to recover from the traumatic effects of 16 years of partnership with an undiagnosed/unrecognised AS DH.

I think that maybe if we had recognised it before having dc's, we would have been prepared in some way and could have coped better. As it is, I don't know how to repair the damage to my confidence, sanity etc.

It's not as simple as my DH "just" being AS, (if there is such a thing) he also has real problems with controlling his anger and drinking. (I know from the little research I have done so far that these can be linked to AS).

I am just really concerned about the ongoing effects of his behaviour on the dc's if we try and sort this all out while under the same roof. He says things like "I know you hate me" at the dinner table, which our (very sensitive) 5yo finds really upsetting and I suppose it's been like a dripping tap.

He is totally bewildered and heart broken, despite me thinking I had been totally honest with him all along (while I was assuming he was NT). He just didn't see it coming, even when I have been telling for him for years "I can't go on like this" "I can't be in a family where x happens" "You are making it harder for me to parent" "I think it would be easier to parent by myself" "You are breaking my heart by doing y after I have repeatedly begged you not to" etc.

I think the intention behind the actions is really important. I am fairly certain that my DH has not meant to cause all this pain, even so I don't feel like I can carry on.

I feel like a terrible person, feel like I'm torturing a puppy by asking him to move out.

Thanks everyone for your perspectives. I am learning a lot.

Notthemcrows, I'm so glad you came back - we had all gone off topic a bit I think.

I have said all the things to my dp that you have quoted and I understand that there comes a point when it doesn't really matter whether they are intended or not. Children can't wait for 5 years while their dysfunctional parents sort themselves out.

It is a good idea to ask him to move out for a few months. It was great to just spend a couple of days away from mine...

Yes, it doesn't stop it hurting, knowing it is unintentional. And with the best will in the world, attempts to address the problems can backfire.

Him moving out for a bit sounds like a good idea, you need to get grounded in yourself and find out who you are without him, so that hopefully you can be who you are with him. And the same for him, if he is a self-reflective bloke.

great posts, ommmward, TPP and Horse, I feel I am getting somewhere in gaining understanding.
My dh is in no way abusive - he does not intend any hurt and to read some of these posts has helped a lot - thank you. I am optimistic about our future but am a bit stuck at the mo'.

OP - I read the link you put on and agree - the relentless crushing weight of dealing with mystifying behaviour drives us to poor mental health.
I hope you find the space and clarity to see a positive way forward. Your strength is of utmost importance just now. Get yourself sorted and then see what you are capable of coping with outwith that.

northerncrows I have come across the Cassandra Phenomenon before, I think it makes sense, and furthermore I think it makes sense of my parents' relationship, what I have observed of it (which is a lot!).

I found the part in your link OP, about Ongoing Traumatic Relationship Syndrome (a better description of Cassandra Syndrome) extremely interesting.

It explains the sheer exhaustion I think that many of us feel. We are not able to let go of the relationship, we love the person, and know they love us, yet we never have our needs met. We are under constant and repeated stress and we know they can't help themselves, it's just the way they are and they don't mean to hurt us.

This explains why I always say I am strong for having put up with this for 25 years. A weak person would have left, broken down by the pain. But I'm such a fighter and stubborn (Taurean FWIW) so can't let go. Add to that the classic relationship model of 40 years ago of bossy father and kind and forgiving mother. My father died recently and despite her age you can see the difference it has made to her demeanour. She misses him, but at last she has some peace.

The OTRS explains OUR situation, rather than focusing on whether the man is doing this intentionally or not. It is the pain that we feel (and of course our DCs), that is important.

If it means separation then so be it. The AS adult will have to accept it as part of their destiny, and everyone, including them, will feel better for it.

A man's need to have a family should never come before anyone's need for love and care. You can still love them and they can love you even if you are separated.

Yes, DM left DF when she was 55 and he was 65. They are still married and get on well, they are friends and family get togethers include them both and there is no awkwardness.

Hi all, I have decided to revert back to my former self (I namechanged when I started posting about DH) I am normally SorryMyLollipop.

I got confused and accidentally posted on here under both names the other day , many apologies. Its too confusing for me.

How's it going - is he still acting the tortured puppy?

Aaaah, that feels better.

I have been so relieved, the past few days, having space from DH. I've been sleeping better, been feeling more relaxed, happier etc and this has had a really positive effect on the dc's.

DH is going to see his GP next week as he has been reading and reading about AS and is now desperate for a diagnosis. I will keep you posted.

Thanks Horse, Pussy, Sub, Ommm and everyone else. You have been fab