Sister self-identifying as ASD is now identifying rest of family as ASD

[Kipsmum]

That's it, really. Two years ago my DS, in her late 50s, was divorced by my DBIL after 28 years of marriage. She's always been prickly and as she's aged I and my DB and DBIL have had to tiptoe around her more and more delicately. During the divorce process she went to a counsellor and since then has communicated with us in 'therapy speak'. Everything is about her, her feelings and her speaking her truth. My DB and I listened and nodded and tried to support her and we hoped she'd emerge the other side of therapy happier and easier to get along with.

Now she's sent us several massive WA messages to explain that she's done an online questionnaire and has diagnosed herself as ASD. She's started saying that both our parents were ASD and she also says my brother is ASD. She cites things like the fact that my parents were quiet people who only had a small social circle, as proof. She's said my dad had no friends and I gently reminded her that he belong to the bowling club and also the local cricket club and had friends from his allotment: they all came to his funeral. She's said the same of my mum and I've pointed out that Mum had a number of friends she was regularly in touch with and until she died had several holidays a year with those friends or her sister or other relatives. She also volunteered in a charity shop and did day one evening classes and made friends there. My sister is furious when I point these inconvenient facts out.

My DB is a quiet, family-orientated man like my father and DS says this is proof he's ASD, but DB's certainly not a black-and-white thinker and has no issues with communication and social skills, let alone the more obvious indications of ASD. DS has been angry with him because he's told her he thinks she's got this wrong.

We have no idea what to do or what to say. Unless we just nod and agree with her, DS gets very angry with us. If anyone has any idea of what's going on, please shine a light.

Lol i have done this in my family🤣 2 of my adult kids are officially diagnosed asd (proper multi disciplinary team, ADOS, full works) and i have unofficially diagnosed my other 3 kids and husband!!

Just lighthearted - they already suspect they are anyway.

Your sister's probably right. But it's upsetting you all so she is out of order. She thinks she's made a great discovery and wants you to share in the knowledge!

You will need to tell her straight that you don't want to hear it.

@Kipsmum like @VegTrug has already said we aren't all anti social or lack empathy or incapable of maintaining friendships outside of a particular hobby group. Just like neuro typical people.

Have found most of my friends (especially female) are ND though so maybe we seek each other out subconsciously.

Genuinely don't know anyone who is autistic that acts like your sister is regarding telling you everyone else is too. My sister and I have discussed our mother may be, because we both are but have never said anything to her or other family members.

@Wimberry really great post, thank you. Really insightful and put in a way that's easy to understand.

@MsCrawford

husband is on the list to to be diagnosed with ASD

What a strange list

@Kipsmum I mentioned several times that it's ok to push back on your sister armchair diagnosing other people. If she wants to look at autism for herself that's up to her, but other people's brain wiring is none of her business, and is over stepping.

When I read this, I wonder why it's offensive to be considered autistic?

It's not offensive to be considered autistic. It is offensive to go round "diagnosing" people who don't consider themselves to be autistic, based on stereotypes about what autistic people are like. I note that a few people on this site are now suggesting that OP's brother probably is autistic, based on....nothing? OP mentioning that he's quiet and family-oriented? 😂 Diagnosing autism isn't easy and it can't be done based on third hand accounts through a computer screen- now that is offensive!

How so strange? It's just a waiting list, just like any other waiting list with the NHS. He was self referred through the GP, so waiting for the next stage.

And she may well be right about diagnosis. Where I live, there's no waiting list for adult autism, because they've decided not to assess adults - the reasoning being if it was debilitating enough it would have been assessed by now.

My job prospects, chance of a family and day to day wellbeing have been affected by being autistic and undiagnosed, but because I live independently it's considered by our local health service to not be enough to warrant being assessed. A private assessment was nearly 2k, and tbh I wouldn't have signed up for that if I thought I was going to end up paying it. I knew I had 'traits', was thinking about seeking some therapy and went to someone who did a multi stage assessment process thinking that I could do the first stage (screening) and that autism would be ruled out. Obviously that's not what happened and I ended up going through the whole process. It was genuinely helpful in the end but expensive!

There's always the barrage of personality disorders to consider as well if she gets too overbearing with this. I am neurodivergent. I've also worked out it's my special interest and I have a career in this area.

But, grey rock. 'We're not talking about this now' and redirect back to the original topic of conversation. Thank you for your thoughts, we will have to agree to disagree on this.

And perhaps limiting too much contact. I have to set an agenda with some of my more challenging cases so we don't go off down rabbit holes of both mine and their making. It may feel formal for family, but I do this with my nd family too. Allocate time to talk about that issue away from whatever we are doing at that time. And stick to it.

It also depends a bit how it's done, though F your DS is autistic they may lack the ability to express their views as tactfully as someone who is ND (though NT can also be tactless) but not see why it was tactless.

Interesting my DS was diagnosed ADHD as is my daughter, and have a send teaching background and I would put some money on me being ND, also my brother.

We've also discussed that my Grandma probably was, looking back. She was a funny character. Loads of friends through church and hobbies but lots of characteristics and behaviours make me wonder if she might have been ASD. We discussed it as a family lightheadedly as she's no longer with us and it might explain some of hee more quirky aspects to her. There's no judgement, in fact we've all said it would have been good to have known, so we could have helped her more or dealt with some of the more challenging behaviour she could display differently.

One way to think your sister's behaviour may be that her focus on ASD (rather than some other developmental disorder or on depression related to difficult childhood memories, etc etc) is almost random. What I mean is that the real essence of her behaviour may simply be her need to understand her deep unhappiness by locating it within family experiences.

Many women around her age (especially following something big like a divorce) are looking around for a new understanding of themselves, a framework for the last third of their lives, and this usually involves looking backwards as well as forwards. Although she is approaching it insensitively, perhaps she just feels a need to ask for your help in this exploration.

I know I have done similar: I feel a real need to ask my siblings to explore with me the ways in which we were all affected by the domestic violence we grew up with. I feel that, alone, I can't form a clear enough picture of the past. It has to be a shared excavation.

Perhaps your sister is acting out a similar need for shared exploration - but just doing it rather crassly!!

Words to this effect and encourage her to seek her own diagnosis.

I cannot tell you the lightbulb that just went off for me, as a late diagnosed autistic, reading this! I get it now.....

I also actively do not want that kind of NT friendship, it sounds exhausting 😂

OP, your sister is in the middle of potentially learning a huge thing about herself. My ASD was identified after I started counselling too, and suddenly so much made sense about my life and I talked about it too much (and researched the hell out it). However, the 'diagnosing' others in the family is somewhere you can draw the line.

I’m a (very) late diagnosed autistic woman and a therapist. I see quite a few women (usually it’s women) who have begun to wonder if they are autistic, often having known there was just something different about them all their lives, or maybe having one of their children going through an autism assessment and realising the same traits apply to them. We are in a time of shifts in how we define autism, in particular losing some of the narrow stereotypical ideas about how autistic people experience themselves and the world, and those broadening parameters will inevitably - for a while - mean we see a sharp spike in diagnoses and self-identifications simply because we’ll puck up people who were previously missed. That doesn’t mean it’s a ‘trend’ so much as a pattern that will eventually settle down.

Your sister seems to be going through a period of enormous change and evaluation of who she is within the family and how the relationships she’s had with family affect her now. Autism certainly ‘runs in families’ hence the re-evaluating of her siblings’ and parents’ characters retrospectively. And autism isn’t exactly a red herring, but the deeper issue is that of identity and one’s place in one’s family of origin. You don’t have to be comfortable with your sister’s thought process and you’re certainly allowed to set limits on how much of them you want to hear about. I do pick up a sense from your posts of wanting your sister to settle down and go back to being who you thought she was, and that’s entirely understandable. However, therapy or any other deep process of trying to figure ourselves out tends to only go one way ie we stay changed. One of the pitfalls of therapy can be that one person in a family starts re-evaluating the family to the discomfort of everyone else. It’s like looking through the family photo album and one person suddenly producing a lot of new pictures and telling you they change the whole meaning of the rest - lovely familiar and stable ones lose their stability. You’ll want to push back and your reality is equally valid. We may have been raised by the same parents but we don’t have the same relationships with them as our siblings for all sorts of reasons.

Yes I’m ‘quiet and family oriented’ but would be shocked if someone said I was autistic. I’m just introverted-it’s not neuro diversity. I find relationships straightforward, communicate well, navigate the world easily and can plan and organise things well. It’s not offensive, just wrong.

Grey rock is probably the only thing you can do if you want to avoid conflict but she sounds insufferable. The counsellor she used during her divorce would have referred her for tests had she shown symptoms of any ND. But your sister isn’t qualified to diagnose you and your brother and needs to be gently told that.

You know you don’t have to speak to her? My sister is unpleasant and disagreeable to me so I don’t speak to her. I wouldn’t choose her as a friend and she very clearly dislikes me so why bother?
im currently low contact with my family and the sense of relief is massive. Be around people who love and care for you.

I'd ask your sister to concentrate on pursuing her own diagnosis if she wishes and change the subject. It's not ok to push an armchair diagnosis on other people just based on her own views of them. Especially not posthumously. She's made her point. Anyone interested in following up can do so but she should drop it now.

I've been(professionally) diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I can of course now see all sorts of ND traits in my family. Doesn't mean theyre necessarily diagnosable.

I have medical training but am not an expert on this so will not be pushing my theories out there. If I thought they may be of benefit (say for a child who was struggling) that could be different but I would do so discreetly, not via a group WhatsApp. She needs to consider others

OP if she is going to wait years for a diagnosis then there is not an awful lot she can do. She will be looking to your parents and her siblings to anchor herself, so she doesn’t feel different - and that means diagnosing you! Which is really, really unfair.
I have known I have ASD traits for a long time, picked up in my past by a psychiatrist, too. I have never investigated a further diagnosis and don’t feel I need one - I function well, have good relationships. I can see the same traits in siblings and cousins, and every single one has formally diagnosed ASD children. I don’t mention it or bring it up because I am not a doctor and it is absolutely none of my business.
Tell your sister to stop. It’s not about picking a fight, it is about having a relationship. If she carries on, she will drive you all away.
And I have never pushed for a formal diagnosis now as I am in my 50’s, it would not affect my life or career, but I also would never be ashamed of it, either.
One facet of us as humans is that we can obsess over details and sadly your sister is using therapy speak and self-diagnosis as a way of running from really getting better.
Therapy should help you to see yourself in a better light, process your past, get to know what makes you tick, enable you to have better relationships and build a better future.

It’s weird when children have such an incorrect idea about their adult parents’ lives. I once went to a funeral of a neighbour and her adult children (one abroad, one in Scotland and we are SE England) told us she was a recluse and had no friends. Funeral was absolutely packed with friends including an entire golf club.

Autism is highly genetic, research suggests possibly up to 80% inherited. So it’s not wildly unreasonable but the key thing here is that she is offending you and your brother, you don’t agree and you want her to stop. I think if you want to be able assert about yourselves that you are NOT autistic, you have to allow her the freedom to assert that she thinks she is. But that doesn’t mean she gets to say whatever she wants. It’s classically autistic to take a strong interest in something and talk to others lots about this. But you get to ask her to stop.

I would say something like “[sister], I’ve been reflecting on what you’ve said about being autistic and it’s made me realise I need to share more explicitly with you how I’m feeling as you probably wouldn’t realise. I support you in your journey of self discovery. But DB and I don’t like it when you include him. It upsets us and we would please like you to stop. We love you very much. I hope you don’t mind me being direct, I’ve been reading about autistic communication styles and realised I probably wasn’t previously communicating this very clearly. Much love…”

I’d be equally as offended if someone was suggesting my behaviour meant I had the flu, was depressed or was neurotypical. It’s not that the diagnosis is offensive necessarily, it’s that the scrutiny and pathologising of my behaviours and personality without my consent is offensive.

I relate to the NT description of friendships above. Maybe I’m autistic. But it’s not for anyone else to comment on. If I want to look into it and get a diagnosis I will. If I don’t, then I don’t need other people harping on about it.

@Wimberry another thank you for the post about friendships - I'm undiagnosed but almost certainly ASD (a lot of it in the family and going through the diagnosis with DD I tick a lot more of the boxes!

The friendship explanation makes so much sense and it's quite a relief to me - that sense of suddenly finding out that other people in a group had connections outside of it which had never occurred to me is a common one!

Yes! DD2 (NHS DX) wasn't bullied at mainstream school because people who weren't her 'friends' (2 in the end, twins) were just vapour to her. She literally didn't even register them. So they had no traction with her and didn't even try.

DD3 (assessment next week) was low-level bullied because she didn't 'get it' but really, really, wanted to. So kids could get a rise out of her. She is exactly as you describe - friend, foe, or irrelevant. She can only cope with friendships if the 'friend' is the same as her. When there are differences, she comes unstuck and doesn't know how to relate.

DD1 (NHS dx with LD, too) desperately wants friends but gives people her phone number then gets cross when they send messages because they're college people and she's at home.

@Wimberry I also relate to your description re. Calculated Vs 'natural' interaction. I'm on the ASD waiting list.