Married to someone with Asperger's/ASD: support thread 11

[Daftasabroom]

New thread.

This thread is for those of us seeking to explore the dynamics of long term relationships with our ND partners. It is a support thread, and a safe space, it does get emotional at times. Avoid sweeping generalisations if possible, try and keep it specific to you and your partner.

ND people are more than welcome, some of us are in ND:ND relationships.

I was thinking of chengeing the thread Aspergers/ASD to ND, which I think might be more appropriate and inculsive, but I've left it as it is as I suspect many people find us by searching for Aspergers and/or ASD.

It's complicated and it's emotional.

The old thread is here

@Simplefoke i have ME too. It’s crap and yes dh is absolutely useless around that.
He spent many years believing I was just lazy, despite a diagnosis.
Still can’t comprehend that I’m exhausted from doing … well nothing.
Still can’t compute I’m getting tachycardia just from being sat at the table preparing a menu+food shop for the week. Etc etc….

He seems to somehow believe it’s not possible despite the many explanations I’ve given him, alarms ringing when I’m doing too much etc…,
Not dissimilar to him believing his dad would be better if he was moving around more when he was actually in late stage of cancer :(:(

One big issue for me is that stress sends me in a crash. There is no way I’d cope with the stress of a divorce just now. It would make me fully bedbound. Not a position you’d want to be in if you live in your own…. (Which I would be if I was separating).

@SpecialMangeTout its shit!

In my head if I don’t understand something or can’t understand where someone is coming from I’d google the shit out of it
until I do. It would never occur to me to say nope sorry you wrong.

Right?? If I don’t understand something I look for the information that will help me understand it, not just decide it doesn‘t exist or is a mistake or whatever because it doesn’t fit with the things I believe about the world.

I wonder if it’s difficult to navigate life without emotion. How do you know what path to take, where to go what to do what to say without having no feeling. I live my life by how I feel. I’ve struggled a lot though having been brought up by an Autistic mum who was never diagnosed. Have they feelings? I don’t mean to sound ignorant. How do they make choices?

Exactly @Simplefoke i feel like a robot. As long as I function according to DH’s robotic existence, no feelings, high tolerance for painful exhausting situations, never request any help, never request any novelty, always do what he wants to do and don’t challenge him then life hums along.

But it’s stifling. The routines kill me. My lack of friends kill me. I feel like he took a butterfly and put it in a cage. I can see the outside world but Im not allowed to take part. I want to leave but it’s scary. I’m also physically compromised and not sure how I’d work a 9-5 job. My shoulder is busted and I can’t sit at a desk and use a PC. This is what my background and training is. So yeah, it’s really tough. I have felt trapped forever.

@LiveLove24 what happens if you challenge any of what you’ve said? Does it end in arguments or being made to look stupid? I just wonder what’s going to happen when I tell him I won’t be going to see his mum with him anymore as it’s effecting me mentally.

@Simplefoke I can relate to so much of what you're saying, sadly. Down to being ignored by his family.

Those who shared how counselling worked for them, thank you. I floated the idea to DH but was shut down. There are apparently no problems, nothing to discuss, it's just wasted money. Sigh. I wish I could just pack my bags and move back to my home country. I'm homesick but always tolerated it because I moved here for love and he was my home. Now that I'm questioning our marriage, it's so so much harder. I think if we didn't have children, I would go back for a few months, give each other a break and really explore what we both want to do going forward. I sometimes think about the options I have and realise I don't even have the energy to cook dinner, let alone think about what life could be like if it wasn't this. I'm so worn down and I can't believe this is it now.

Well there are a lot of autistic people on this thread who could answer that on their own account.

My DH and DS certainly have feelings, but they often can’t put them into words, and sometimes it takes a very long time to process the feelings. My DH in particular can take weeks to have an emotional response to an event, and several more weeks before he can reflect on the emotional response, or work out what brought it in, and connect it to the event that triggered it.

Other people will have different experiences.

As for how you make choices without input from your emotions - my DH basically doesn’t make choices. If he can’t guarantee through some kind of statistical modelling exactly how something will turn out, and determine that this outcome is objectively a statistically significant improvement on the status quo, he takes no decision, no action.

You know I was taken aback when I saw a good friend of mine.
I was mentioning it can become really severe. And she said ‘Yes I know… I’ve googled it and read around it’.
dh has never done that. Ever.

@Bunnyhair ah ok. I remember when my daughter was born he was a wreck, being sick and bad stomach. He said he was absolutely fine and nothing wrong. Couldn’t connect the way his body was reacting to the event. Said he needed no support absolutely fine.

@Bunnyhair i came across similar experiences re alexithymia and how it’s not that much about not being able to know how you feel but about a huge delayed reaction before you know.
It certainly explained some of dh reactions to big, unusual things (let’s say like his dad dying). For others, like spending money, his reactions are automatic. It’s a NO.

@SpecialMangeTout Ive always wondered if I’m autistic. I really thought I was for a long time. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having been brought up by an autistic mum I’ve not been taught or shown or allowed my feelings so I’ve ignored them. I think that’s the difference between him and me. I have an emotion and a feeling and I know where and why but I’ve been conditioned to not trust or show them. He on the other hand can’t like you said name the feeling or connect it to its source.

Ah, the automatic NO. I think of it less as a feeling than a reflex. Like putting your hands out when you fall. It’s certainly something my DH has no conscious control over and can’t be negotiated with or talked about without other, bigger NO reflexes popping up.

@Bunnyhair can I ask your experience?
of it takes you time to process feelings, does that mean you’ll then get sad/delighted/ashamed/whatever sone days/weeks after the event or does it mean you can put the words on how felt only days/weeks after?

Thank you. That’s actually really helpful.

And yes to the ‘can’t be negotiated’ lol

It’s DH and DC who have this rather than me, so I’m just piecing together what I imagine their experience is.

With DH he just appears either totally normal or blank or inappropriately cheerful when a major event happens (like death of a parent) that most people would have some sort of response to. He’ll be disturbingly cheerful and genuinely not seem to understand what the big deal is. Then a few weeks later he’ll get crushing fatigue, whole body flu-like pains, dizziness, tunnel vision - and health anxiety, as he assumes he’s got some rapid onset degenerative disease. And further down the road he’ll be furious that people weren’t more supportive when his parent died - because he is now aware he is grieving, but he he has no memory of having skipped about the funeral chatting and laughing and in fine high spirits, to the great bewilderment and upset of those around him.

Most of his emotional responses manifest as physical shutdown of some kind. He rarely experiences delight as far as I can tell ☹️ - in the moment or afterwards. Happy things are immediately tinged with anxiety.

Yeah I agree with this. I’m the sort who would say the first, then hopefully shut up so the other person can offload/expand on what they said. If I do get the sense that I might have spoken ti much then I’ll stop and say “so tell me about your boss. What happened?”

But my DP would say he’d had a shitty day too and then would go on and on and on about that and his work and the people he works with (which he thinks is a lot more interesting than it is LOL!) and the other person would not be given the chance to complete their offloading.

@Bunnyhair thank you again

This actually explains dh reactions so well.
And yes he seems to only have physical reactions to things (atm it’s him not sleeping well at all. I know why but he has no clue apparently)
And YY to never looking like he has positive emotions either.

When I met him, the fact he was looking so calm, collected and down to earth is one of things I really appreciated (I was coming out of months being surrounded by people that were the opposite and it drained me).
But that’s taking it too far really.

@Bunnyhair the delayed body response and the shut down seems a lot like me and my M.E. I really feel like going to the gp to see if I’m autistic as my mum is. I’ve felt I’ve only developed ways of working as I’ve aged and watched others.

It’s hard to tell whether I actually do have ND or I’ve spent too long around people invalidating me.

@Simplefoke there seems to be some connection between autism and ME.
At least anecdotally.
(there is so little research around ME that it’s hard to find proper facts).

Ive always wondered if the pressures from being autistic (I’m thinking masking, trauma etc etc) simply compound ME.

@SpecialMangeTout Im unsure if I mask or if I’m surrounded by ND people and I’m actually NT and I mask around them.

It could be both. I think most of us in this thread have parents who are either ND, or mentally unwell in ways that mean we grew up needing to be needless. And it all slops around together so we don’t know how much of what we’re experiencing is genetic in origin and how much is relational.

@Bunnyhair so complicated! All I know is I had delayed speech for many years. I’ve hated loud noises, wet hair intensely, fear of abandonment lol, never fitting in anywhere, hate eye contact. I do want things done my way but I’m not nasty about it.