Asperger's and social conventions

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A topic I've been unclear on for years.

I am a bisexual male with a Jewish surname. In 1979, I was born sunny-side-up with a single umbilical artery. At the age of 9 I was diagnosed with OCD. I was diagnosed with Tourette's when I was 11, and with Asperger's when I was 13. I was formally diagnosed with anosmia at the age of 34 after a lifetime of being unable to smell. I am a 4w3 on the Enneagram. On Simon Baron Cohen's tests, I got an empathizing quotient of 32, and a systemizing quotient of 17.

What I want to know is . . . is it a defining characteristic of Asperger's to break social conventions? I knowingly break many social norms/taboos, such as the taboo against spitting in public, the taboo against bisexuality, or the norm against breaking wind without saying "excuse me". When I go on an elevator, I turn around and look behind me into a corner, so I won't be following the rule requiring people to face the door when standing in an elevator. And I don't go anywhere where I'd be expected to dress up/wear a suit. I don't even own a suit.

I often yell or scream when I am angry. People have also told me that I was talking too loud even when I wasn't yelling or screaming or angry at anyone, but asking me to lower my voice gets me angry, so I BECOME angry thereadter. I don't like libraries because people there are expected to be quiet. I had several fallings-out with teachers who accused me of "raising my voice", as their euphemism of choice for yelling goes, often as a red herring to avoid dealing with the thing I was yelling at them for. Sometimes I just used a loud voice because I needed them to hear me across a room. There is too much repression of loud in this world, and all that repression thereof angers me further. Keeping your emotions inside is a bad thing.

Other issues involve my sitting. When I was 12, a psychiatrist whose office my mother and I were visiting scathed me because I was sitting on the floor instead of using a chair. My mother kept trying to get me to sit another way from my preferred method of sitting with my feet under my derrie`re from age 9 to age 16, because she said it "set me apart" from my peers. That socialization increased my hostility towards her and my alienation. I also perched like a canary at my school desk a lot (albeit this time with my feet in front of me) and my ISP actually had a goal under the category "Reduce behaviors that set him apart from his peers" saying I would get down from my perching position in my chair "when reminded by teacher". In practice, the teachers never told me to stop perching. None of the other students seemed to comment on the way I sat nor even care; it was the adult authority figures in my life rather than the kids who made a big deal out of it. One day when I was 14 I was reading a story in a tabloid (I enjoyed reading Weekly World News back then) about a man who was at a party when his eyeball popped out. I felt increasingly faint and weak and by the time I got back to my mother at the check-out I couldn't stand up anymore, feeling as if I was about to faint. I lay on the ground, and my mother said, "Come on, [first name], that's inappropriate". I was feeling very weak so I just explained to her at the time that I was fainting, but at the same time I felt very angry for being accused of doing something "inappropriate" through no fault of my own. I felt so faint I didn't have a choice. That incident has since caused rage.

Hygiene is another issue for me that has created a lot of conflict. You know how when you're a little kid you don't want to take a bath? Well, I never outgrew that stage. The thought of showering makes me shiver, and when I get shampooed I have the feeling of the green slime from You Can't Do That on Television being poured onto my head. I remember one day when I was 13, and my mother told me on a drive to school, "If you want to live in this society, there are certain rules you're expected to abide by, and one of them is that you have to stay clean". All I could think to myself is, "But I don't WANT to live in this society!" When I ranted about hygiene norms online back in 2000, this one Christian conservative boy said, "You are the first anti-hygiene activist I have ever met".

I also have reactions to certain phrases that are spoken to me because of my OCD. When someone tells me "Come on", I retort with "Let me do things at my own pace!" When I was 11, I decided that I was being spoken to like a baby when someone told me "It's time to brosh your teeth" or "It's time for dinner", so from then on I've responded to "It's time to/for . . ." statements with "No, it's not!" When someone shushes me, I give him/her a more strident "SHHHH!" back. When someone says, "I wish you had . . .", I say, "I wish I hadn't!" And when someone says "please", especially at the end of a sentence, I used to growl "AARGH!", but now I shout "NO!" in defiance. One thing I picked up on is that when "please" is used at the end of a sentence, it's usually in the no-nonsense tone, as if the speaker was swallowing a sigh at the beginning of the sentence. It really grates on me. I feel that these words and phrases are attacks on my dignity, and need to give the retorts to "neutralize" them. Other people have accused me of "talking back" when I say these things.

Another thing I have (and this figured big in the decision to diagnose me with Asperger's) is what I call logaesthesia. When I hear or read one of those terrible words like "scxxt" or "whxxps", I get the sensation that I have swallowed the word. It's as if it's inside of me, slumbering in my intestines and attracting intestinal slime. To hear or read a word is to take in. I can never read an article without feeling as if I'm taking a drink of that article's waters, feasting on a repast of bread, beef stew and almond roca from the article. The same with listening to conversation. The words, further, have specific tastes when I eat them. When I hear the word "whxxps", for instance, I immediately taste whipped cream. The whipped cream is there right inside of me, its cold creaminess sitting in the front seat of my pants. Would you like you have whipped cream in your pants? That's what it feels like to me.

The taste stays in there until I purge. When I scrape my nails against my groin and move my hands upwards, the whipped cream or whatever taste there is comes out. I can feel the taste coming through my intestines, duodenum, stomach, esophagus and throat and out my mouth and my hands move over the places, as if I'm vomiting up the word. It gives much the same kind of sensation as the purging that bulimics do. While I make the thrusts over my intestines, I want to taste the word coming up. I know if I'm doing it right because I can really taste it and feel an oily moving up when I make the word move out of me.

Each word has its own taste. The word "mxss" tastes like oatmeal. "Scxxt" tastes like cooked carrot, like the carrot in pot roast. "Jxggle" tastes like red hots -- the candies -- while "jingle" as well as "t-ngle" taste like those tiny spherical hard candies you put on cupcakes. "Xll xver the plxce" tastes like pasta-ey soup, a soup like Spaghetti-O's perhaps. "Slxp" tastes like Alfredo sauce, and "slxppy" like lasagna. "Sweetxe" tastes like water with granulated sugar in it. When I hear or read the word "pxke", it tastes like those burnt peanut candies with the spiky red shells. And "ice xxxxx", of course, tastes like ice xxxxx.

The most unpleasant taste of all is the word "cutxe", which tastes like phlegm. Every time I hear or read it I get the sensation of having just swallowed phlegm. I feel as if I have a cold in my nose with sneezing, and can actually feel the phlegm in my stomach and intestines even if I don't have any phlegm in my mouth, sinus and nose.

And it's not only the words that make me purge that have a taste. Some of the innocuous words do too. For instance, "trump" tastes like sautéed mushrooms. "Child" tastes like chocolate brownie. "Kentucky" tastes like fried chicken. With my logaesthesia, I am a person to whom words do more than convey semantic meanings. To you, "tale" is just a word for a story, but to me it conjures up the taste of lasagna, the pasta in lasagna with a light sauce on it. Often I will have an associated taste for a word without even realizing I taste it. For instance, I went years without realizing that "doodle" tastes like macaroni to me. Even names can have tastes to them: Greg tastes like chocolate Easter egg, while the name Kevin tastes of ice xxxxx cone and Tiffany of lemon meringue pie.

To avoid coming in contact with these words, I don't watch television or go to the movies. I avoid coming into chatrooms as much as I can, too. Logaesthesia affects my life when it prevents me from doing certain things such as these. I also used to suffer while surfing the Internet and had to copy-and-paste a lot of posts from the Net into Notepad and use Find & Replace on them. Now I have a Greasemonkey filter that replaces the offending words.

I do not always hear other people's words clearly, and sometimes it is not clear whether a word another person just used is a purge word or another word that sounds like it -- what sounds like "mxss", for instance, could really be "miss", "must", "nest", "next", "mass" or "Melissa". What sounds like "scxxt" could be "school", "scoop", "screwed" or "excuse me". And sometimes "what", "what's" or "whoa" sounds like "whxxps". If I can't figure out what the word is, I have to purge just to be on the safe side. And so I don't do extra purging work that I didn't need to do, I ask the person who said it what she or he said. A lot of time is spent asking others what they said, and sometimes I do not get a friendly reception. A client at my day program has even called me "nosy" because I ask others what they say. I don't care about the content of what someone else said, I just want to know whether they said that specific word.

The object triggers in logaesthesia also affect my quality of life. To avoid coming across things that make me purge, such as spiders and cobwebs around my parents' house, or plastic silverware in restaurants, or Winnie the Pooh and Spider-man garbage in stores, I have to close my eyes, or at the very least cup my hand in front of my eyes so I only see the aisles in front of me. It makes it hard for me to make my way around a store when I can't allow myself to look around, and sometimes I even bump into shelves. I can't push shopping carts or wheelchairs when we go into public places, unless we're going to someplace where everything is safe, such as See's Chocolates.

I am minus most of the core traits of Asperger's. I can read facial expressions normally, I don't have a special interest, and I can't *stand* routine. The people I've known online who have Asperger's also all seem to have hang-ups about having to interact with other people. They hate having to do so much as introduce themselves to people or interact with clerks at a store. One Internet forum I used to visit had a survey that included a question on what group (skater, hip-hop, preppy, goth, etc.) you fit into on high school, and one teen boy with Asperger's replied with "Other: a shy, reserved, asocial intellectual". Since this was a guy who liked to make jokes about sex and bodily functions on the board, I told him that wasn't how I pictured him at all. He said that he could be a lot of fun, but he did have a hang-up about people. Simply ordering food at a restaurant could be very difficult for him. He said, "I am more at ease with books than with people". I don't have any such hang-up. I don't even understand shy people: what are they so afraid of?

People sometimes get the misconception about me that I have sensory integration disorder, which is another core Asperger's trait I am lacking. People are used to autistic clients who are bothered by noise or bright lights. But those people are bothered by general brightness, they are not bothered by specific objects. Those people are bothered by general loudness, they are not bothered by specific words. I love to hear people scream, and I like my Nirvana loud. I used to scream every waking hour myself. When I went to the CIWP (my day program) flagship office in Hayward to give a speech, the director saw me covering my hands over my eyes to avoid seeing plastic silverware and arachnid life and asked my job coach, "Is the light too bright for him?" I had to explain to him that bright lights don't bother me. When another coach was in my CIWP group and someone was drilling when we got to my house, he asked me, "Is there too much noise for you?" and I had to explain to him that noise doesn't bother me.

I also attack myself, with what I call empathic self-injury. I imagine I'm George W. Bush or a cop or a teacher who wronged me, and attack myself while imagining I'm that person, and I feel the attack as if it's happening to them. I bite myself, especially my hands and wrists, and they are visibly covered by scabs. I also bang against my head (I'm pretending bullets are being pounded into someone else's skull). I do it much more without my Risperdal. Before I was put on the Risperdal, I also did a lot of yelling and screaming because I would have flashbacks all the time.

I often go into rooms alone so I have a place to purge where no one will see that I am purging. I used to purge in public (this was before I started my day program), but eventually the rituals got so deep into my groin that I had to unbutton my pants and couldn't do it in public anymore. I am not prudish about other people seeing me, but I am afraid that other people might tell me my behavior is "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable" if they see me purging, so I need to hide my purging to save my fragile soul.

But is this breaking of social rules really a characteristic of Asperger's? When I was 20, someone who described himself as "a 20-year-old guy with Asperger's syndrome" IM'ed my mother while she was online, and wanted to talk to me. Jay had been diagnosed with Asperger's by his high school psychologist, who falsely claimed that all he did was "read, study and play the stock market". When he asked me why I had been diagnosed, I said, oh, it was things like speaking loudly, spitting in public, sitting on the floor, not liking to shower or shampoo, calling my friends after ten. Jay said, "None of those are symptoms of Asperger's". As for calling my friends after ten, Jay said, "See, you HAVE friends".

At first it didn't bother me when someone called my behavior "inappropriate". Then, at about age 11 or 12, when I talked about sex or said something adults considered "talking back" and an adult told me that that was inappropriate, I started retorting, "That's YOUR opinion". Then, at 12 or 13, when someone said "That's inappropriate" I would say, "No, it's not!", or when they phrased it "That's not appropriate", I would say, "Yes, it is!" It started to really hurt me.

When I was 15, I began rejecting the very concept of social appropriateness vs. inappropriateness, i.e. the idea that things were wrong just because society said they were. I remembered reading in Bart Simpson's Guide to Life the question, "Wouldn't we all be happier if everyone just strutted about in the nude?", and seriously reflected on that. Doing things because society wanted you to do them made people unhappy. I came to believe in objective morality, rather than the cultural relativism that social conformists espoused. I would even go so far as to say that it's morally wrong to condemn someone for being gay or dating interracially or going naked in public or keeping one's hat on inside a building.

Now that you've all gotten to know me, what would all of you say? Does this sound like an Asperger's trait?

[moved to getting to know each other from GAD]

also, welcome.

Hey Savegraduation welcome.

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

I am also bisexual/biromantic and there is also an LGBT forum here on WP, so feel free to post on the LGBT forum all you want.

A special thanks to Kiprobalhato for moving this thread for me.

And also thanks to RoadRatt for your warm-as-sunlight welcome!

I also want to thank AnonymousAnonymous for your welcome. Although I should point out that despite my bisexuality, I am a virgin and have never had a boyfriend or girlfriend relationship. I'm not one of those too-shy-to-get-a-boyfriend/girlfriend types, I'm just not interesteed in doing the act. And who needs dating when I have all these wonderful friendships in my life?


Just to clarify: Feel free to discuss the OP here. Don't worry that you'll use one of my "purge words", because I have a Greasemonkey filter that will censor out all of my purge words and turn them into "whxxps", "drxp", "scxxt", "txsty", etc.

I'll bite.

To me, I would say that doesn't sound like Asperger's. The things you list are WRITTEN social rules. What we Aspies have trouble with is UNRWITTEN social rules. For example, not buttoning the top button on your shirt or not talking on and on about a favorite interest without giving others a turn. I am obsessed with World of Warcraft and will go on and on about it with other people. Even after I learned this was unacceptable behavior, I still can't resist the urge because I'm so fascinated by WoW. It just does this thing to me that I can't put into words.

BTW, have you taken the AQ test yet (also by Baron-Cohen)? My AQ is 33. I'd like to know how you score.

Welcome to the forum!

that's....awesome. how'd you make or install that filter?

Oh, OK, that makes sense. I don't do things like talk till I'm blue about World of Warcraft (or any other topic for that matter), probably because I don't have any topic that dascinates me to that degree.

I have a housemate, on the other hand, who is always talking about Pokémon. It drives most of us nuts.



I've never taken it, although I've taken the EQ and SQ tests. But I shall look into it.



I'm glad to be welcomed here!

There's a guy on the Fourth Kingdom forum (www.4thkingdom.com) who knows about my purge words and has read my blog. He's a geek who excels at things like designing strategy games, and wanted to adapt a Greasemonkey filter for me. I gave him a list of "censored" purge words (the forms I wanted to change the purge words into), with disambiguating phrases like "pxke (as in pxke around)" so he'd know "pxke" wasn't "pike" or "puke", and he typed up the list as a Greasemonkey file for me. Not being logaesthetic, he was able to type in all the uncensored words as well as my xx forms. He sent it back to me and I dragged the file into my Mozilla Firefox browser, which activated it. At first he guessed a few of the words wrong (he thought "jxggle" was "juggle", for instance, and he thought "Txto" was "Tito" when it's actually Dorothy's dog), but I soon got the wrinkles ironed out and now it saves me hours of purging every month.

Thanks for sharing your story, OP! And here I thought I had a vivid imagination as certain words remind me of others. Not to that extent though. (unless they are words which relate to food in some way). In fact words, anagrams, cryptic crosswords, blog and fictional writing and all other stuff involving words and language fascinate me. To me it's more that I have a retentive memory of words and can link them to various (hard to explain) stuff that enables me to memorize them.

Welcome to WP and I hope you'll have good times here.

You're welcome.



Remembering words? "Whenever something (or someone) divides or separates into two parts -- like Josephine and Kate, remember the friends who had to say a separate 'bye for Kate', and you will remember the word BIFURCATE." Like that?

Yeah, it's been very hard to find anyone else who has logaesthesia. Despite hunting for years, I seem to be the only one. I read the posts here about people who thought they were alone because they'd rather be alone reading than interacting with others, are totally weighed down by their interests, can't read nonverbal cues, need routine and have sensory issues (with loudness or brightness), and I just can't relate. I may REALLY be alone.


In other news . . . I looked over the AQ test, and am puzzled by what some of the questions mean. For instance,

11. I find social situations easy.

By "social situations", do they mean being introduced to someone's friend, or do they mean eating at a formal dinner?

I think more the latter, but I guess any situation involving people can be seen as a social situation. I get on better one on one, and find it difficult to react correctly in a large group. I avoid parties and formal occasions, which I fortunately don't need to bother with anyway. Nowadays it is easier because many things which used to be uber-formal are now no longer as prim and proper as they used to be.

I have ways of remembering words which can be hard to explain, e g "explain" can be viewed as something which used to fly (ex-plane)... any word ending in "city" conjures up a city, and so on. Loquacity sounds liquid, like liquid gently flowing over a city. I always like to memorize lists of words, capitals and so on. Useful in playing online Scrabble among other things!

Don't stress too much about being the "only one": I'm sure you aren't. But our condition is a whole spectrum of different things and we all have different "symptoms" or characteristics, co-morbidities or whatever you want to call them. I don't like social situations much either, and I have poor co-ordination (can't change gears for a manual shift vehicle for example, or ride a bicycle) and one or two stimming actions. Occasional meltdowns, sometimes triggered by trivial stuff.

I can relate to you though, and to a lot of us here on WP, as I don't lack empathy; this being a misconception about many of us.

I'm just the oppsoite. I feel more comfortable eating at a formal dinner than hanging out with someone's friends, because the situation is more structured. I know exactly what and what not to do, since there are rules.

Question for the OP: You mentioned a poll aboiut whether you were a goth, jock, etc. in high school. What were you, OP? I was a nerd (and still am). If you were a nerd, there is a good chance you may have Asperger's.

Oh, OK. Thanks for interpreting this question for me.



True, but there's still a long ways to go.

I do enjoy parties, I just don't go to formal parties. Like my friend Jolene's birthday party at her adult residential facility, which I attended bringing her presents. No one was dressed up or anything.



Oh. So not like the "bifurcate"/"bye for Kate" thing? (That was from The Weighty Word Book, by the way.) Do you remember the definitions too? If so, how does thinking of liquid over a city help you remember the meaning of "loquacity"?



With all the people who have OCD and all the people who have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, one would think other people like me exist. But Internet searches for "OCD 'lexical-gustatory synaesthesia'" have come up fruitless. WHERE ARE all the other logaesthetes?



Hmmm . . . my coo:rdination's not good, but at least I'm not clumsy. I don't stim; the closest symptom to stimming I have is pacing. And I'm still not clear on what a meltdown is.



Cool. So would you say that the low empathizing scores on Simon Baron-Cohen's test are not a true feature of Asperger's? Do Aspies often get high scores on the EQ test? (My score was below average, but still almost twice as high as my systemizing score.)

Oh. This is very different from me. I'm not the type of person who likes structure. If I'm just chilling with a bunch of amigos, sure, I have a good time.

One thing I noticed about a lot of Aspies from the Asperger's newsletter my family would subscribe to was that they didn't have a strong internal compass of what was right and wrong. They relied on other people to tell them their behavior was "inappropriate", as if to say, "I can't figure it out on my own". This was probably the first factor, historically, that made me doubt my diagnosis.



Me? I was one of two beatniks at Campolindo High School. I would eat lunch with the punks, however, since there just weren't enough of us dark-turtleneck-wearing types to go around. No one ever called me a nerd in high school, since I was what was considered cool. I guess not being a nerd makes me the odd one out on an Asperger's forum.

Hey, do we have a thread on what clique you are/were?

http://aspergerstest.net/aq-test/



Your AQ Test Score Is 24

22-25 shows autistic tendencies slightly above the population average

I predicted I'd be 26 . . . seems as if I was just a little high. Not too far off, though.