This issue still perplexes me. Seriously. Can we discuss it?

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Rock bottom doesn't have a trampoline. You don't hit it and bounce back up. It's the lowest feeling where no light reaches you because you are far down. Nothing motivates a person at rock bottom.

There is nothing. Just darkness and emptiness. They are not there because they want to be. They are there because they feel hopeless and that nothing they can ever do has any point.

There is no motivation in that place. Only darkness and tiredness.

They see no hope in any plan that flickers past them.

Depression is weird. It's a bizarre malfunction of the brain. Of course depressed people don't think straight or see a point in trying anything new. Nothing worked before. Why would this new thing work?

Last edited by hurtloam on 18 Jan 2018, 5:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^ This.

Maybe not for you, but for me rock bottom became “Mortality Motivation,” that “Holy f**k I coulda been dead, time to start Living!” moment. It comes to others in near miss accidents, or the diagnosis of a terminal illness like my father - he’s going to die of cancer, we just don’t know how long he has. (Average 5 Years, long term 10, but could be much shorter.) and it’s been pretty awesome to see him truly cherishing moments with his grand kids and deciding to start taking action towards doing the things he wants to in life. He wants to ride a motorcycle, so we will pay for lessons and I gave him $5000.00 for his birthday in November to put towards a bike as he wanted to have the free cash to be able to buy his own bike before taking lessons and I didn’t want $ to be a constraint to him doing so as soon as his health and the weather allow. Anyways, it’s a strange thing to wish upon others, but I do wish everyone could experience their own mortality motivation moment as young as possible in life so they can truly Live the rest of it.

Obviously I am of a different mentality entirely. Just because nothing else has worked yet doesn’t mean I’m not going to even try, or give up & wave a white towel etc. f**k that, I’d rather go down fighting, trying new things until I find something that works.

Yes, my diet and protocol are unconventional treatments, but show me any other treatment, conventional or otherwise, that achieves better results and I’ll gladly give it a try. To ME the only reason not to try something is if you already Know that you have a better option that works better. Staying suicidally depressed isn’t better, IMO. YMMV.

And it seems bizarre to me that not one other sufferer, here on these forums, of the same afflictions is open to the possibility that what I do may work for them. Are you incapable of seeing that from my perspective?

I’m glad to read you’ve learned, grown, changed & improved! Too few people make any mention of their progress or successes with these things. I am curious how you’ve managed to do these things for yourself? Just forcing yourself to do it/practice? Some form of professional help? Other?

As for nice reactions vs mean.. everyone is different. You have no control over someone else’ personality or if they’re thinking negative thoughts or having a bad day etc. That said, I still find it valuable to rely on others like mirrors for my own behaviours. If I get undesirable reactions from people it makes me pause and think about whether my approach was appropriate or acceptable - usually it’s fine, but sometimes people’s negative reactions are an indicator that I made a mistake. I then tend to do a quick think about other ASD symptoms and assess whether I need to take a different course of action with my treatment protocol. Sometimes there’s tremendous value in others responding like jerks as it lets me know they’re reacting to my ASD traits and it’s me who needs to adjust myself.

People stay that way because their depression limits their ability to do anything different.

Not everybody is Goldfish. I'm glad you managed to pull yourself out of your funk, but, despite what you may believe, not everyone is exactly like you.

I’ve never said anyone is exactly like me, not even my twin brother. Now I’m becoming perplexed by the simple fact that you don’t seem to comprehend why I would be perplexed that the suicidal & those who post wishing they could treat/cure themselves aren’t at all open to the possibility that they can & that they could try something, anything, different.

Because their depression limits their ability to do so.

I understand to a certain extend because i can see that you do want to help.

I've spoken to so many people who cant grasp that other people dont think like them that i understand that you are just thinking like people who can't see past their own noses when it comes to understanding how other people think, but you just seem like you don't understand how depression works in most people.

The way you're phrasing things just looks arrogant and condescending. That's how you alienate people. That's not how to motivate people.

I understand you want to help, but your posts are long rants that show how little you understand about how human motivation works and how to win people round to your theory.

Implying that people are just lazy is not how you motivate people. You will never get anyone to trust you here because of how you are phrasing things.

We have explained the reasons people aren't doing what you're doing and you seem unable to grasp it. I don't think you want to understand or find a better way to help.

Just in case you're wondering what motivated me to drastically change my diet... I got so uncomfortably bloated and my clothes weren't fitting and I felt so physically awful that I started googling what to eat for hormone imbalances.

I'm a believer that we are what we eat, but I understand why others are dubious and don't want to put a shed load of effort into something that only has a slim chance of working because they may choose the wrong foods for their body's needs and waste 3 months on the wrong diet plan and get nowhere.

Visiting a trained professional is better because they can listen to what your personal symptoms are and advise accordingly, but who of us can afford that. So we're all left with the trial and error approach.

It's working so far in that I've stopped bloating up, i feel physically better, but I'm not feeling better emotionally. I'm still irritable and prone to crying easily. I'm just feeling sad all the time at the moment and feeling on the edge of having a panic attack when I have to leave the house. I'm not sleeping well at the moment either. Only time will tell whether my new diet will work.

I still don't think my diet will cure my autism and I don't think it's cured yours either. You're not coming over as NT in your posts at all.

Conveying this diet & protocol is how I can help.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. Imagine, if you can, that everything I say is true. Wouldn't you want to share it with the group?

For the 98734687368746348736437th time, I've never said I've cured my ASD. I've said I have an effective treatment protocol. I'm higher functioning than ever the last few years. I still have ups and downs, but nowhere near the downs I used to have before doing any of this. If I keep super strict to my diet and protocol I can keep symptoms
~sub clinical. Some of my symptoms have been ampified recently due to 5 weeks of antibiotics, mostly, and a bit of slipping on my diet. I'll be better & better over the coming weeks. I'll probably be back to a dayshift routine and off the forums again, too.

Instead of posting on here that many times, could you not have spent just a little bit of that time producing the report that you apparently won't have time to write for the next ten to fifteen years?

Yes I do understand the concept of exaggeration thank you, but seriously if you put as much effort into producing a proper report about your findings as you do posting on here, it would be a pretty damn good report.

(edited for typo)

Last edited by Sandpiper on 19 Jan 2018, 12:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Basically, the main problem is the notion that Goldfish's plan is infallible.

Of course, Goldfish should be allowed to present his diet, and his results. And if somebody wants to try it, and THAT SOMEBODY gets results, then it acquires a bit more credibility.

But what could irritate people is the fact that he is "befuddled," "perplexed," and "puzzled" as to why people aren't lining up to try his diet. This would seem, to some, to be a condescending attitude.

It's not that people think that the diet is bad or dangerous, necessarily. It's that, as a few posters stated above, it might not be applicable to their "form" of autism. If there's a risk that something might not work, and that making a long investment in something which could prove futile, I don't believe most people would want to make the investment.

I don't believe Goldfish has bad intentions. In fact, I'm pretty sure he actually has GOOD intentions. I just feel he could seem preachy about his diet at times. Like it's some sort of revelation.

I didn't mean to sound suspicious; I believe you when you say that the posts are there. I was simply curious to see if your personality would have seemed similiar to what it seems like now or if things have changed.

Huh, well I suppose even I could work something out with my tiny budget if I wanted to... but nah. If I ever feel like I've hit the very bottom I might give it a second thought, but I highly doubt that'll happen any time soon. *Knocks the wood.*

Yeah, I got will power, but I don't think I have it enough to pull a really strict diet. I mean right now I'm eating much healthier than I did, say, a year ago, but I never had any strict diet. I just changed my eating habits bit by bit since if I had changed everything radically at once I would've been able to keep it up from few days to few weeks, but then fallen back to old habits (I know this because I've tried different strict diets before and this has happened with those.) It's great when people can change their eating habits on the spot, but I'm not one of those who are cabable of that so I'll stick to a slower way of doing things that works for me.

My method of lessening the symptoms and learning to deal with the society is simple: practice. Practice and forcing myself to tolerate certain things. It's not like I listen to the advice of some NTs that I know that simply say: "Just go there and do it; it's not that hard." No, that doesn't work for me. My method includes making detailed plans of how to improve myself on various things and then following those plans. I think the reason it works is that it's not a therapist, parent, another autistic person or the like doing those plans but me. In the end, no one understands my abilities and the limits there are better than I do. I think of what I want to improve first, then I think what of those things are actually realistic for me to improve with the way I am at the moment (there are things I'd like to do but I know will fail if I don't improve at some others first.) Then, I look up information about whatever I've decided to do (read books, find advice in the internet, talk to people) and once I've prepared enough I just "go out there and do it" like I've been suggested to do. The difference is that I'm not just walking in blind; I've seriously found out about what I'm supposed to do at what point, what can go wrong and different options about what to do if something does go wrong. Of course how much preparing I need depends on what I'm gonna do.

For example if I want to try a completely different mix of seasonings that I usually use for a food that I have prepared many times before, all I need to do is to go over the possible new seasonings in my head to get a better idea of what I'm doing. However, if I want to cook something I haven't before and that doesn't really even remind me of anything I've cooked then I can't just look up one recipe and follow it. No, I have to look up different ways to see what would suit me the best... actually, there's this one kind of a special cake that I've been wanting to try to make, but I keep chickening out. Plus I would probably have to eat it alone since I rarely have guests, so I suppose I have to wait for a special occasion to make it... or so I keep telling myself.
Putting it like this, I suppose it sounds pathetic to some people, but this is how I do things until they're enough of a routine for me. I considered cooking to be a good example, but I do pretty much everything this way. Practice, practice, practice... but before that, research.
This works for social skills too; the more I deal with people, the more I learn. There are times when I make a total fool of myself (like yesterday) and wish that I had kept my mouth shut and not tried to practice socializing at all, in other words times that I mess up, but I don't think that anyone can get through life without getting some setbacks from time to time.
Yes, this is a slow method and yes, it can be frustrating and painful, but for me it works. For some this might even be common sense and how they've always done things, but I only figured this out a few years ago and while my life is by no means where I want it to be, I'm getting there. Usually slow like a turtle that sometimes backs up a bit, but the point is that I'm not standing still.

And yeah, I know that I'm probably not the only one or the first to do things this way, but I called it "my method" because it's one that I use and that works for me, plus I came up with using it on my own without any advice from someone else.

I think this about sums it up.

Yeah, it comes down to how you deliver your message and how it is perceived. Those on the spectrum likely have shortcomings in that area, especially when it comes to employing a bit of tact.