This board has really made me think I believe my DH has ASD and yes - he was parented v badly...but that doesn't help me to not be hurt when he hurts me. e.g. if he's doing something (mending/tinkering etc) and I have to ask him something or get past him, he's very angry. Later he says, 'It's not you I'm angry with. I can't help it. I've always been like this.' And then the really annoying one, 'All the males in my family are like this.' (His mother used to trot that one out frequently) But the thing is, when he reacts angrily to me, especially and usually when it's totally unjustified, it hurts me emotionally. I then have to spend my time and emotional energy 'healing' myself. If I try to talk to him abut it and say, Even though you didn't mean to hurt me, it still did hurt me,' he reacts by saying things like, ;Go on - have a go at me and make me feel even worse about my sad life.
He also outsources things: we visited family last week and he and several other people present had emotional meltdowns. He later admitted that he'd behaved like a toddler (the toddler had an emotional meltdown with which he had no patience) But describing it to someone else later he said, 'We,' (looking at me) all had a tantrum. Well the truth is that I didn't have any sort of tantrum but spent a lot of my time absorbing the bad feelings others were having and trying to sort them out. He does this a lot, saying 'we' did something when he knows that it was just me! 'We' paid that bill on time. NO 'we' didn't. He has trouble even logging onto the internet banking so won't do it. But where soething has gone wrong because of his refusal to deal with a situation he always says, 'We' dropped the ball on that. It's very frustrating for me.
Last one for now: he can't separate his opinions from facts. So if he lies something e.g. a colour/film/style of clothing/food, he sees it as 'correct' and anyone not agreeing with him as wrong. i think he feels threatened if other people don't agree with him. Insecure really. This has caused a lot of problems for me in the past when he's tried to impose his taste in e.g. hairstyle/clothing/where I (when I'm going somewhere on my own) should go. He doesn't get that my opinio about my hairstyle is more relevant to me than his is. he says, and this is really r=cruel I think, 'Well, I'm the one who has to look at you.' But I think that I'm the one who has to live with however I present myself to the word. He says I shouldn't care about what other people think about my appearance and I don't, in that if I like how I look, other people's opinions don't matter. But if I'm forced to wear something I feel uncomfortable in/think makes me look bad and other people comment, I feel doubly bad. I had this as a child too, when my parents had over-the-top disapproval for all sorts of innocuous things. My parents used to give me a short back and sides haircut and strangers genuinely thought I was a boy. Because, in my parents' opinion hair any longer than that was the sign of a slut.
Can anyone relate to all this?