from the other side of things (no critique please)

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so I'm an, I guess, NT woman. Been staying up with a friend to make sure he's ok right now for a few days now. But because I know little about Autism/Aspergers, This isn't a cry for help or me attempting to be a attention whore. I'm just worried that he's going to be hurt again. He has AS, btw. I know there's probably going to be different reactions but what I wanna know is how you guys deal with personal issues in life and how you deal with pain or heartbreak.

To some extent, it depends on the exact nature of the pain or heartbreak. We often have different external reactions - but, at least for me, severely painful incidents take a very long time to process and deal with. I've used techniques such as simply listening to music, over and over, in order to distract myself from the pain, or writing or talking about the painful incident, again over and over to try to come to terms with it. I guess, from an NT perspective, I do this to an extent that is overkill.

You don't say what the personal issue is; what pain or heartbreak he's experienced. Death is one of the toughest things of all to come to terms with, for me at least. Especially the first experience that really drives home the reality. (I think that is true of NTs, as well, that your first experience of a particular ordeal is often the worst.) But even breakups, losing friends, or something of the sort, will hit us hard, because we have a much harder time establishing such relationships to begin with - so the loss in terms of its effect on our lives is greater, and we know that we will have to work harder to repair the damage than an NT would. (We have fewer friends to begin with. Making friends is harder for us. So is finding a boy/girlfriend. So I think, just as a rough guide, losing any girlfriend would be, for us, the equivalent of losing "The One" to an NT.)

I don't know if all this makes sense to you, but I'm willing to try to explain more if you think it is necessary.

I'm going to try to explain one other point, but I don't know how clear I'll manage to make it. We don't make connections as easily. As a child, most people around me were as enigmatic as those figures in a video game that block a door or gateway until you figure out what they want. They are part of the landscape, frustrating, confusing, not something to make any connection to. The first creature I recall understanding was another living being with feelings I could understand, and who cared about me, was a cat. It was years after that before I figured out human beings were - at least in very broad terms - just like me. And I'm still not sure most of them aren't hostile. I mean this literally; I feel as though I live in a world that hates not just me, but everything I am, everything which makes me who I am. So the few connections I manage to make mean a heck of a lot more to me. I can't count on a lot of other people filling the void. Which is why any loss, for any reason, is a huge blow.

I used to talk to my girlfriend on hours on end, but seriously.. she started telling me to look for the positive and I think it started to stress her.

What I started to do is go out for walks.. really out of the way and literally just talk to myself. The really interesting thing.. (in my opinion) about stress and heart break is that sometimes there's no upside to them. Sometimes a bad thing is just a bad thing and the only way for me to deal with it is to vent it to myself to my hearts content.

Doesn't make it suddenly bearable.. just evens it out a little bit that i'm able to get it out and not be treated like i'm crazy, or that I shouldn't be complaining about something that I feel is difficult or intolerable.

It's private matters, if it helps clear up the confusion. I'm unfamiliar how people with a ASD deal when life isn't great. Let me ask something though. I'm, again, not a person who has an ASD condition but I have many friends who do and, I admit it, I've never realized what it's like for them up until a few weeks ago.

I used to want to talk out my problems with anyone who I thought was listening, until I realized that only made my problems worse. Other people have "pain or heartbreak" of their own, and most are only being polite when they act like they care.

Now I know that my pain and heartbreak are indeed mine, and no one else's.

My current strategy for dealing with such issues usually involves either internalizing or sublimating them. The first is also called "stuffing" your emotions, and the second involves engaging in physical activity until I'm too exhausted to dwell on them.

A third strategy also seems to work. That is, if the grief comes from someone else's "attitude", then I just convince myself that the person was never really important, and thus anything they say (insults, put-downs, et cetera) are not important at all. Sooner or later, I actually believe it, and the person's attitude no longer affects me. This seems to work best in the context of a social website, however...

He's doing a LOT better, thank god. :3