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

Hugging's not painful to me, just annoying. I love to hug the children though. DP (also on the spectrum, I think) has to ask me for hugs. So not so sure it's gender related

Found this interesting

I'm Midlands too! But I'm the AS-like one in our relationship. I definitely think it is much less noticeable in me (less severe perhaps but I also think being female changes the dynamic in lots of subtle ways).

I can hug my daughters, and love to do so. I can't stand to hug my partner because he has, for the last 20 years or so been pretty nasty to me a lot of the time. It was only recently that I managed to physically push him away, I cut my losses really and he's accepted that, but not without a big fight.

He may well have AS, but that doesn't mean he hasn't caused me a lot of real pain over the years. The pain I feel is not because he has AS, but because he is prepared to hurt me emotionally before possibly doubting his own actions or words.

I'm all up for disability rights, but there is a point where an AS person should withdraw and accept that they can't destroy someone's life simply so they can have a family or a relationship. That's narcissism at best, and sadism at worst.

Horse I love hugging :) Neither DM nor DF were at all huggy, and still aren't. A hug does not comfort them, I know cos I was doing the hugging :)

For a long time now I have had no desire to hug NCL, though at my lowest I got him to hug me - any given hug would do. DS (NT) once came over when I was weeping, and NCL was there, and DS gave me the most wonderful hug, of non-judgmental concern iyswim. NCL would, on occasion, hug me if I talked him through it, he never learned to do it spontaneously, never learned from seeing DS helping me that time. This inconsistency was in itself a form of abuse.

Oh forgot to say, hugged my own kids lots over the years and been hugged by them too

Very interesting article schobe.

The article is interesting - there is a lot to be said to living apart/together etc, traditionally husbands and wives lived separate lives anyway, the pubs, the bingo, the coffee mornings, the football, all gender separated. Fishing. These activities probably saved many marriages.

But equally, when you do come back together the love needs to be there, selfless, wholesome love - not a begrudgingly compromised one.

horse initially I thought you were saying what you thought you were saying. But after reading ommm's post I reread and wasn't so sure.

I hope you won't mind a little textual analysis :)

I think you have to read into his reaction "wow that was a near miss, if I pretend there's nothing wrong hopefully she'll just forget there ever was anything wrong".

You have to?? I'm thinking this is your take on thoughts of someone with NPD?

And really he ought to be thinking "that's really helped to explain my situation, now I understand why we really shouldn't be living together.
"
If he was NT and not NPD? If he was AS?

I wonder if he's sobbing in front of the kids because he wants them to see how sad Mummy's made him, or whether he's doing it because he is Aspergers and doesn't understand the impact of his emotions...

My take from personal experience:
If he is like me and my DF we understand only too well the power of emotions. We know what emotions feel like! we are just bad at reading them from other people's posture, expressions, and the subtleties of their language.

When we cry in front of others, we are desperately miserable in the knowledge that not only are we ourselves in emotional pain, we are hurting others by crying in front of them. Furthermore we feel powerless to stop weeping - which makes us even more miserable and paralysed.

So maybe one possible reaction for others around in such a situation would be to quietly and non-judgementally leave the person to their own space and give them some quiet to recover.

If they then follow you and keep on trying to re-engage I would venture that they might have NPD rather than AS - on the other hand, I have done following myself, being provoked into a tearful weeping snotty rage in reaction to verbal or emotional abuse by NCL.

Tricky, isn't it?

That was an interesting link, Schobe, thanks.

I have been thinking a lot about NT/AS couples with dc's who decide to live separately. Would they really still be a couple? Have sex? Be faithful? I can't get my head around it all. I think that separate living maybe the only way to function as a family but I don't think I would still consider myself "married" to DH iyswim.

What does NCL mean btw?

Course it will work. You two make the rules for yourselves .

To me, faithfulness and having sex are to do with mutual commitment, not what accommodation you share or whether you are married or not. Surely this is what it was like for you two in the early days, before marriage, before living together, but after you had become an item? Why should having DCs make a difference?

Narcissistic Cock Lodger - it specifically refers to my now ex-husband, we are still under the same roof cos he can't afford to move out till he has got some money from the settlement - we are capital rich, mostly due to my family, and income poverty stricken due to his laziness and my mh.

I think he has AS and NPD. But I could be biased. The behaviours of his that I describe are accurate though

at NCL

I honestly can't remember the early days before living together, think we moved in together after 2 or 3 months and been together for 16yrs+

I think it would just challenge my idea of what a family/marriage is. Maybe I feel too strongly that I need an equal, supportive partner and still too angry that he may never be able to be that, to be the coparent that I want/need.

Is he working and bringing in money (sorry if you've already said). If so, you may be taking it for granted that he works and provides for his family, which is being supportive.

I think it was perfectly reasonable for me to expect mine to do the same thing, but for a very long time he has seemed to regard real work to be beneath him. Ditto the housework. Or doing things together that I liked.

Supportive? Not him.

He was working f/t when we married, but after losing that work, has never acted like a proper breadwinner, and doesn't seem to understand the need for a regular income. A cocklodger, a word I only discovered by joining Mumsnet

He is supportive financially so, not a cocklodger. I do care about him. The issue is that he just seems totally unable to parent and this makes family life unbearable. He can be supportive in other ways but I feel like I need and equal parenting partner instead of him saying and doing things that upset and confuse the dc's and me picking up the pieces all the time. Which has resulted in me being on medication for stress and anxiety and having time off work for stress.

He has been gone for a week now, and we have survived (and thrived)!

The house is calmer/quieter and so are the dc's. I am more physically tired but much happier and less stressed.

If we were out together as a family, guess who would go missing? DF! He would get interested in something (the Science Museum was one of our regular places to go) and not notice as the rest of us moved on.

And the other way round - he was staying here when the kids were little and I sent him for a walk along our local railwaly path, which ran past the house. He returned not noticing he had lost DD along the way!

And he took his other grandchildren to the Science Museum when they were around 10, and lost one of them.

No disaster ever ensued, but you couldn't really rely on him for this aspect of parenting .

Can I ask what he does, in general terms, and what are his interests? Do they overlap with the children's interests?

I don't think people with AS are generally cocklodgers, and it was v important to DF to provide financially for his family (although having said that he won't spend one penny than he can help, makes do and mends, and buys things on basis of functionality and cheapness).

Cocklodging, it seems to me, is an indicator of NPD.

He is a design professional. His loves are history, castles and football. Both our dc's are girls, aged 3 and 5 - so not too much in common (unless the castles are pink and full of princesses!)

I can rely on him in terms of their safety etc but he has a hair trigger for anger and aggression and very little awareness of how scary a 6ft3 adult male is to a young child. I am constantly having to remind him that he doesnt need to shout to be scary, its also about body language, facial expression, tone of voice, physical proximity etc. Its exhausting.

Our 5yo dd is very sensitive to all this and she has become very aggressive to her little sister. This week, with DH gone, she has been so much calmer and less aggressive

Yebbut it's exhausting for us to speak quietly to someone we care about, on a subject we feel is very important. After all these years I am still working on this one :) Only last week I realised that talking very loudly in a dear friend's ear while embracing her did not work too well!

And I am always being told off for SHOUTING when I just think I'm talking very loudly.

THIS IS SHOUTING!!!

Could it be that after being ignored repeatedly, for years, you have found that raising your voice is the only way to get any attention? I wouldn't blame you for that.

I think that is part of it horse. It is also quite possible that some of my family think they are enforcing the boundary 'do not shout at me', when they choose to ignore what I am saying (in, to my mind, a loud voice). Of course, this just makes me speak the louder, or shut up. I used to choose to shut up, now I choose to speak if I want. If I'm feeling v together, I even try to speak in a voice of normal loudness, although I rarely manage this

Interesting about the shouting, but there is a big difference between Lolly's man shouting at the kids, I'm assuming so that he can get them to do what he wants, and your voiceraising/shouting because you are not being listened to by adults.

It is probably about how you perceive being heard - Lolly's dh thinks dcs are ignoring him, when he won't accept that dcs are just different and you have to count to 10 to get them to just look up and that's normal. You, on the other hand, are being ignored by someone who is an adult and understands the emotional impact of exclusion and rejection brought about by ignoring.

Now if dp is Aspergers, (an AS child I can understand can hurt others feelings etc because their perception is limited), but as an AS adult, he ought to understand that it simply crosses the boundary of reasonable behaviour between you.

Either way - NT or AS, as an adult there's not excuse for it. I have endlessly made it clear to cp (crap partner) that it's not acceptable and the pain it causes (rejection causes the same amount of pain as physical, neurologists have recently found). He chooses to forget that.

It's so very hard for me to extricate myself from 25 years of coping with shite behaviour (because I'm the eternal optimist). I don't blame him now for not quite believing me when I try to explain the pain he causes. It really is my fault for sitting on the fence about it for so long.

I told him yesterday (when he asked what's wrong because I refused sex and he suggested I 'see a psyhciatrist') 'it's always been like this, you haven't changed at all - I just learned ways to get past it'.

Yebbut horse I shout at the kids for the same reason. They are not v young any more though, they have learned from NCL that mum is someone to be ignored - he has never backed up a single request of mine to them.

I do so see what you're saying, and part of the aim of this thread is to try to disentangle the different factors, AS and NPD. The trouble is that the conversation itself shapes things as well.

I'm an eternal optimist too, or I wouldn't have got this far .

Suggestion that you see a psychiatrist sounds v NPD to me. Of course it could be argued that it is AS logic, but I don't think so

Being an eternal optimist goes with the territory of being a victim. We try to an able and change people. Meanwhile the npd or emotional abuser enjoy endless attention and focus on them. For many years I could not perceive that anybody would behave in this way. Any counselling that I have ever had results in focusing on self esteem issues because I can never put myself before others. I squirm when other people compliment me for instance.