Parents never told me I'm AS?

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"It does sound suspect. Have you tried to confront your parents about it?[/quote]"

Not yet. More and more, I know that reading and researching Aspergers is helping me to understand my life (regardless of the outcome of a diagnosis). At the same time, I am nearly positive that both of my parents share this condition, my father extremely so. And I can see how much the lack of understanding (of themselves, and from other people) has caused major pain in their lives.

They've always been very concerned with 'fitting in' and pretending to be normal. I think if I try to confront them, it'll just generate more denial and grief. Even if they could understand, I'm worried that it may trigger in them some major depression or, in my fathers case, violent meltdowns.

Lastly, my parents are very dogmatic Christians. Autism is self-ism. In their terms, any move towards the self is moving away from God.....

I tried to confront my mother in a very roundabout way.................I said I was going for a medical checkup and needed to know my complete medical history, even suspected unconfirmed/diagnoses..................when I asked about anything related to behavioural or learning difficulties, she said, 'oh no, you were always perfect and smart and wellbehaved and perfect little girl' and all that maternal blah-blah......................

When I first thought about parental denial of AS, I was so angry. Everyday thinking 'I cant believe theywould do that' 'they must be monsters' etc. Recently I've been able to get past the anger, but I'd still like to know if its the case. In a peaceful and constructive fashion. What I'm scared of, more than finding out the truth, is just that if they dont want to know then i'll never be able to have a proper relationship with them.....

Why don't you ask them about it? If they reject you or act in a way you don't like, just dump em as parents and spend your time with nicer people, like people on WP, who don't think autism is a bad thing.

I have flashbacks also about weird stuff like that in elementary school. (I've never had an official diagnosis)

In second grade I got in trouble for invading the personal space of other classmates, and the school counsuler brought me into her office and asked me who my friends were in my class and who I played with at recess. I had no friends and I paced around the playground during recess. She asked me who I wished would be my friends, and I gave her several names, and once a week those people and I would go to her office and discuss story problems of normal kids interacting. After that stopped, my parents started receiving notes from my teacher due to my impulsive behavior in the regular classroom.

Another experience of mine was in fourth grade, where I was bullied by a classmate with severe ADHD. Lacking common sense, I told him that I would bring a gun to school and kill him if he didn't stop bothering me. He told the teacher and made up this story about how I was "raping" another classmate (I didn't even know what this meant). The principal talked to me for 2 hours and called my parents, but I wasn't suspended or anything. The counsulor saw me the day after, and I refused to tell her that anything was wrong with me. Several weeks later, I was "invited" to another "friendship group" with the bullying classmate and a few other classmates where we discussed appropriate ways to behave.

My mom also told me that she thought that I was autistic because of my having temper tantrums whenever I couldn't do the same thing every day when I was a toddler, but she dismissed the thought because I was hyperlexic and did not show any signs of mental retardation.

~Saiyan

I am guessing that your parents could be in denial about your dx. Many parents have a idea of the "perfect child," the one that would become a doctor, lawyer, or a businessperson without any flaws. Once they find out that their child is not "perfect" by their standards, they grieve over the lost of their "ideal" child, not realizing that there is a child right there that needs their love.

Yes I think I'm just too old (32...) to have had the luck of being considered NOT NORMAL=AS when I was a kid or young women. 4 years ago a psycologist told me I could be aspie but I decided not to see him anymore. I read and read. Now I'm a little better, I have 3 friends 3, a lovely and very intelligent non-aspie husband, and till last week I had a work (financial calculatings) where I have been able to show how smart and brilliant I am, and get appreciations even from my parents!
But then...a BREAKDOWN....................
Got fired, and I know it's against ME, but I cannot really understand. My parents started say I am a s***t and I cannot keep a job...SO I TOLD'EM ABOUT AS, because their words hurted me too much.
A week ago.
And now my mother cries, and says " I felt you were different - I thought it was my fault - You were so smart - You were so different from other children and young people - You wanted no friends - You wanted nobody"............and millions of other...asp-things ...
Now I just think that young people with AS should go deep in to it, because you have the chance I did not have: try to build one's life having care of your difference, but most important, having care of the opportunities an aspie has, and maybe has to "take". I could have studied more and more and get focused on my talents, WE ARE SO SMART ! !! ! we can do better, but we just need to know our little defaillances (for example for me it' s mostly noise and no sun light get me crazy), so to find that little place (or that only person) where we can stay, do something good, and not get mad because of the ways NORMAL PEOPLE behave, and we do not really undertsand...

greetings from Italy

I can relate to the whole abuse thing.... As a kid I got misdiagnosed with ODD oppositional defiance disorder, and got treatment that came in the form of mental abuse to try and break the bad behaviour, with a social worker telling my parents that how I should be treated to clear up the disorder and extinguish my bad behaviour was throught things that for anyone under the spectrum would be a form of torture... I have never forgiven the people that made me suffer through that, and it only made my situations worse, meltdowns more frequent, and sent my aggression through the roof... About a year later, I got rediagnosed with AS and thanks to the specialist that made that call, I have been on the road to recovery since.I can't even tell you what kind of torture they put my mind through because I have managed to for the most part forget about it completly, thats a defense mechanism on my part, I can remember that someone has done something to me, and what it was like to have happen, but I can never remember what exactly they did. I do remember one thing though: I can't take cough syrup because I will throw it back up, due to problems with texture/taste, and I had a really bad cough at the time of the treatment, and what the social worker had my parents do was force me to keep taking the mdicine until I would learn to bahve properly and not defiantly throw it back up. Whereas now, my parents know I can't keep it down and why, and so they resort to lozanges instead, and they try to get me specificly mint halls, because I can tolerate them best. I will never be able to work with a social worker again, unless there is no other way to continue my life otherwise, simply because of the hate that disorder has created in me, and the fact that I will never truly recover from that... ODD has a lot of similarities to some of the complications of being under the spectrum.... that diagnosis is something to look out for, make sure you see someone that actually knows the spectrum when figuring out a child, just because the doctor may think so, doesn't mean he is right, and noone deserves to be treated for something they do not have.

Oh boy.

Same thing with religious background ... I don't plan to discuss it with mine, not sure what you´d gain by getting into it w/ yours.

A lot of the religious stuff in my case was weirdly akin to 'new' training developed for kids these days. Lots of focus on spiritual development, stories about animals exhibiting character qualities etc.


This summer, I called my sister to ask if she could dig out my childhood health records b/c I was wondering about my seizure history. For some reason, she asked our mother about something in it.

Turns out my grandmother had taken me to doctors when I was a toddler and gotten a 'ridiculous' diagnosis. My father thought they were saying I was 'mongoloid' (now called Down's); my mother knew what they meant, but once I learned to talk, she was sure they were wrong.

In the end, their denial - and my father's determination to overcome 'differences in learning style' - probably turned out better for me than if they'd sought special help.

I'm pretty thick - one of my sisters frequently made 'artistic' jokes, e.g. telling me I didn't have to try too hard to act normal when her friends came over b/c she'd already told them I was aaahhhhtistic. A few years ago, I was visiting and my father was telling someone in their church that she should be using his childrearing techniques on her autistic child. He gestured at me and said he'd felt her pain. She gave him what I thought was a dirty look - I thought he was just being a jerk.

My boss 10 years ago had sent me for an AS dx, but I thought that was about my social skills. This spring I finally started looking at it all. That was enough on my plate - I certainly didn't expect the toddler dx jazz, but it explains a lot of how much resentment the bio-donors have for me.