Hi, There! (I'd Like Your Opinion!)

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But AS isn't not wanting to interact with people, its not knowing how to interact with people. Some of us want to interact with others, some of us don't, some of us want to in small doses, but wanting to interact with people or not wanting to interact with people has to do with whether someone is introverted or extroverted, while not knowing how to do so is associated with an ASD.

Have you read any of Joe90s posts? She wants to interact with people, she wants to be "normal", but she doesn't know how. I can't relate personally, but they show solidly the difference between an extroverted aspie (like her) and an introvert who isn't autistic (who doesn't want to interact with people often, but knows how to do so).

Really, one thing that we're entirely missing in all your posts is what you actually have for social issues. You repeat over and over how much you need help from your husband, yet every bit of your description of your social issues focus on not wanting to talk to people. Not wanting to talk to people is not the same as not understanding when people are being sarcastic, not knowing how to keep people from being insulted, not understanding why people are making these connections in what people are saying that seem completely meaningless. You might have actual issues here, but none of what you've said gives us anything in this area that implies an ASD. What you've said is that if you were given the choice you'd act like an introvert (while American society tries to force most people into extroversion.)


The thing that actually bothers me about your posts, so you know, is that you seem so convinced already that this must be what's "wrong" with you, not something that might describe you. You've been researching for a few days and don't seem to have gotten much time to read nearly enough to reasonably self-diagnose. You might in fact be describable by AS, you haven't spent enough time determining that to be talking at the level of certainty that you are.

Read more, research more, get as much information as you can, and see whether you relate to it. Read books by Aspies, read posts on here, participate on the forums without being offended when people question whether you're on the spectrum or not, listen to our complaints about your description of yourself and question if they're valid or whether you're only describing things poorly, and if you decide to, then go for an evaluation to see about a diagnosis. Even if you're only BAP, then reading more can help you understand autistic traits of yourself if you have them.

Last edited by Tuttle on 24 Oct 2011, 7:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hella, I'm not a doctor, and I don't pretend to be. These are just my opinions, based solely on what you've posted so far. It's not much to go on, so you obviously should take everything we say with at least a little salt.

You know yourself better than any of us could. We could be totally wrong, and I think most of us know that.

I'll leave you now with something a Psychologist we had working with our kids (all three of whom are on the spectrum, as well as me), passed on to us from a famous author of books about Autism.

"If you think you have AS, you probably do."

Of course, I think the author who said it didn't mean it flippantly. I think he was speaking of people who had actually bothered to do some serious research before saying "Hey, I think I probably have AS!"

It sounds to me like you have read up more than most do before coming here and asking around. Even if after reading our opinions, and after having researched it yourself, you are still mostly convinced it fits, it's probably a good idea for you to keep looking, and look much deeper into it.

If, over time, you think more and more strongly about it, you will probably want to try getting an evaluation done.

To tell you the truth, I came here, among other forums, and got a lot of the same kinds of responses. I went through strong doubts, researched more, and kept asking questions. Now and again I ran into the "If you're self-diagnosed, you're a fake" attitude.

Well, I finally broke down and got evaluated with PDD-NOS, which is only because I've learned to adapt so well I don't display many some AS symptoms anymore. They were all there as a child though, and AS does not just "go away" or cure itself. Therefore, though I may not have enough visible symptoms anymore, I did, which means it WAS AS, and still is.

So it's not necessarily true that self diagnosed people are fakes, or just people looking for a place to belong.

Keep digging, and good luck with it.

I would say that your answer to 1 is typical of most people, in terms of interesting conversation. When it comes to reading body language, etc, it matters not how you learned, only if you can do it, so if you can, it's not a symptom (at least, when you're taking autism tests like the ADOS, they don't care if it's rote, just if you do it).

Things you haven't addressed...

Do you have unusual speech/language?

Do you have adherence to nonfunctional routines?

Highly restricted interests?

Impairing sensory issues?

Also,

Do you struggle with your sense of self?

You've said you're highly emotional.

Do you have rocky relationships, or are you very clingy?

Do you tend to be anxious or depressed?

And you've said you've had issue with rage...

I am not trying to be offensive, but the way you communicate makes you seem more NT than autistic. An autistic person would not be likely to even think of the bolded question. The vagueness of your descriptions of yourself also makes you seem more NT than autistic. So yes, the way you communicate does make you seem NT. The style is NT, and you have not described your experiences in enough detail to have the content indicate autism.

Tuttle, you're right. I'm not sure I'm even expressing myself well enough to give you guys the information you'd need to know, one way or another, if my issues are related to AS or ASD or anything else. I always thought I managed to express myself clearly, but I often find that things I say either come off the wrong way or I focus on details that are too narrowed to show the bigger picture. It's something I've only recently discovered about myself.

As for how my husband helps me, well.. He takes care of me. He's the center of my universe, pretty much. I don't drive or work, so I'm pretty much useless outside of the house. And, I don't go out very often. Perhaps the reason I don't want to interact with people is because I'm tired of feeling exhausted whenever I come home after socializing. Maybe it's because I end up alienating myself from groups by being overly opinionated and loudly so. I don't know. All I know is that I prefer being at home and with my husband. Failing that, it's got to be a damned good reason for me to hang out with people I don't really know--or a brief, probably scheduled visit with very close friends.

I know that it's impossible to know everything about AS in only a couple of days--as I said, I'm still learning. I'm not giving up and I'm continuing to read and post, because I really want to know and understand. And, when you said the part about me being convinced that this must be what's wrong with me, well... All I'm trying to say is that it makes a lot more sense, now. Some of the things in my life and past really became a lot clearer. I used to beat myself up about them, thinking I was a failure at life. I guess that's where the "wrong" bit came along. As I said, I'm not positive--I just feel pretty strongly, based on what I've read.



MrXxx, thank you! Just...thanks!


SuperTrouper-- Further answers:

1.) It depends on what you mean by that. I do have peculiarities of speech, make noises other people don't generally, and make up words of my own, sometimes.

2.) Yes. I have rituals about lots of things, but food preparation is one of the ones that actually irritates me, but I can't let it go.

3.) Yes, and they shift around. I either burn out/exhaust one thing or get interested in something else.

4.) I don't know how impairing they are, but I do have sensory delicacies. Sound, temperature, textures, smells and all of it.

5.) My sense of self is fluid-ish. I try not to nail myself down, because I know that I'm not going to always stay in one place, emotionally/mentally. I'm still growing and will be until I die. I do struggle to identify the various pieces of me, but I'm not sure what you're asking, beyond that.

6.) Before I married my husband (and even after), I was super clingy, highly emotional(ly volatile) and prone to lots of meltdowns over very little things. So, yes.

7.) I struggle a lot with anxiety and depression, yes.

8.) My rage issues used to be /way/ worse, but I do have a very short fuse. I've worked hard to learn to keep it in check, because it often lost me friends when I was younger.


btbnnyr-- Okay. So, I read as NT to you. Thanks for your opinion.

Please don't kill me here, but I think you might be looking at more of a personality disorder than an ASD.... or at least, a residual one.

I don't think you are trying to be offensive btbnnyr. Assessing anyone by means of how they write though, can be and often is, very inaccurate. I've received many comments just like this. I am Autistic, and I would, yes I would, think of writing a question like that. A great many of us do have fabulous vocabularies. My own son, who is AS, has been using words even I don't use regularly since he was around nine. He's a voracious reader, is now fifteen, and not only has a large vocabulary for any child his age, he actually understands all the words, and how to use them properly.

Hey, I did get the same impression at first just from reading, but now I realize it wasn't fair at all, and not really based on anything in the DSM. To tell you the truth, "flippant" was exactly the word that came to mind when I first told her I was thinking maybe she wasn't AS. But just because somebody understands the word flippant and knows how to use it, doesn't necessarily mean anything.

I go on gut feelings sometimes too, but have found those gut feelings about Autistics are a lot more reliable in person than they are over the internet. Over the internet, there's a hell of a lot less to go on. We may not be able to consciously interpret body and facial language as well as others, but perhaps we do it subconsciously at least to some extent. The reality is, even though I am clearly Aspie, I do find it much easier to "read" people face to face than it is when I cannot see or hear them. Especially if I cannot hear them!

Aspie writing styles, from what I've seen, vary even more widely than the spectrum seems wide. Some never write at all, while others write extremely eloquently.

An afterthought:

Maybe the reason she seems vague, is because Autism, when one first begins to learn about it, is a very vague concept to wrap one's mind around. It took me a very long time to learn to write anything precise about it.

I don't think I've talked to anyone yet who wasn't confused as hell about exactly what AS is when they first heard about it. That confusion directly stems from the vagaries of Autism. Not that what Autism is, is truly vague. Not anymore anyway. It sure was when Asperger researched it though. Even his own papers reflect a lot of questioning and lack of understanding of what he was seeing in his patients.

When first introduced to the concept of AS, it's like looking through smudged coke-bottle glasses. What you read about seems extremely vague and ambiguous, at best. It takes quite a while to grasp it all, clean the smudges from the glasses so to speak, see it clearly for what it is, to then be able to speak precisely about it.

This! Oh, man, you nailed that down for me.

I totally identify with this. It's what I meant when I said that 'the more I read, the more I learn'. I've lived with whatever this is for my whole life, without even knowing there was something different about me. So, it's hard to start separating things in my life as 'abnormal' compared to 'normal,' so to speak. I'm working on it, though. The more questions people ask me--direct, specific questions--the better able I am to grasp that it's a pertinent area of my life to analyze.

Don't I know it!! !!

It's that right there that is the very reason it took so long for us to get our kids, and ultimately myself, properly evaluated. I had no siblings, and had no idea at first that I was Autistic myself, so when I read questions like:

"Is your child athletic as compared to other children his/her age?" I would answer, "Yes, of course! They're just like I was at that age!"

It took a long time to realize that if I were Autistic, and didn't know it, but was comparing them to myself, the evaluations would reflect nothing out of the ordinary. Stupid mistake on my part, because I ALWAYS knew I was NOT an ordinary child.

It's ironic really, that if you live with undiagnosed AS long enough, you can eventually accept your own experience as the "real" norm. That was where I was for a long time, until my kids came along, and I along with several other family friends could clearly see something was very different about them all that I began to question my own normality. Upon reflection, it didn't take long to see that repeated patterns of this: ( ) was anything BUT normal.

It took us several years fo research, and after giving up trying to get them diagnosed having a school psychologist (totally unaware we had ever researched it) spring, "Your middle son has AS, and your youngest is clearly PDD-NOS!" out of the blue, then looking closer at WHY they had been repeatedly dismissed as Autistic, for me to realize that comparing them to myself might have been the problem with getting them diagnosed to begin with.

Once I figured that out, I knew I had to have myself evaluated. I did. It came back positive with ADD too. Suddenly my entire life, and the confusion of the past eight years before my kid's diagnoses, all made perfect sense!

So, Hella, maybe now you can see just a bit why it's so hard to get into how the AS and ADD play together. AS by itself is complicated enough!

Sorry SuperTrouper, I have to disagree entirely with you on this point. It DOES matter how we learn to read and process body language. In fact, how one learns to do it as an Aspie is exactly as she described it. Faking it, learning systematic ways of interpreting it. Non-Autistics don't have to do that at all. Typical children pick up on it naturally, in many ways subconsciously. Autistics, if they do learn how to read it, have to process it systematically, as if every gesture and facial expression is filed away in a folder somewhere in the brain.

(This is what sarcasm looks and sounds like. This is what chagrinned looks like. This is what [fill in the blank] looks like, etc.)

Once we learn how each one looks, when we see it or hear it, we then must "retrieve the file," read what it means, and interpret how to react to it. All that takes a long time, and is very difficult to do. It's very stressful. NT's on the other hand, don't even consciously think about it all. They don't even necessarily consciously see or process any of it. They just "know."

It is true that when children, especially young children, are evaluated, they don't care as much how the processing is being done, because it is assumed, if you are young enough, that if you are Autistic you haven't had time to learn how to process it yet. The fact is though, many of us who are evaluated as adults, HAVE already learned to process body language, but in ways that NT's don't need to. With the proper evaluation, and the right doctor, how the processing is accomplished is actually very important.

The person who gave me the ADOS told me that it doesn't matter if your eye contact, etc are rote or natural... they have no way of knowing, anyway. So if you fake eye contact, they won't score you for poor eye contact. Simple as that.

I'm not saying it doesn't ACTUALLY matter, just that in terms of testing, they can't tell how you learned it. They don't take your whole history. They only know what they see.

Granted, none of this affects me because I don't read/show body language or eye contact or facial expression basically at all...

I'd be interested to know how old you were when your evaluation was done. Not that you have to answer. When I had mine done, she did actually take my whole history into account, and even called my father, who was 73 at the time, and interviewed him for quite a while about my childhood. The conclusion she drew was that I had to have learned to process it in ways that are atypical, because my Dad's accounts of my youth clearly showed I couldn't do it at all as a child.

Children, at least my children, who are diagnosed and have IEP's with the diagnosis applied, are actually taught how to do this kind of thing, among other things Autistics are not typically good at, in school. My kids have been going through fairly intensive training to teach them how. They've already been diagnosed, so there's no concern of that interfering with an accurate diagnosis. As an adult though, if you've already learned to do it on your own, that ability CAN interfere with accurate diagnosis, which is why historical background is so important in obtaining an accurate evaluation. Lack of that background, coupled with coping skills learned on one's own, accurate analysis is impossible.

It doesn't even make sense to me that a good professional would entirely dismiss a patients history, unless that history is impossible to obtain.

I really wonder how well an autistic person could apply their systemized social cognition in real-time. I know I can't. My autistic cognition prevents me from applying social cognition. One, I become focused on the topic of conversation to the exclusion of social cognition. Two, I am constantly processing the physical details of both the environment, e.g. mini-blinds, carpet fibers, door grooves, and people, e.g. freckles, finger hairs, nose hairs, lip creases, clothing patterns, so there is no more brrrainzzz to devote to a whole separate track of processing social-emotional cues and generating my own in response.

Just-turned-21 and re-eval Oct 7th, just shy of 24.

Both times, the person who took my history was different from the person who did the ADOS. Hence, yes, my history was accounted for but was unrelated to ADOS testing. And ADOS came second... so it's not as if I could have said, "Well, yes, I do xyz but it's only because I've learned," and then they know when they give the test. The person who does the test comes and gets me, does test, and gives her report to evaluator (guy who did history).

The ADOS wasn't used in my diagnosis, and the person who did my evaluation was always the same person, but otherwise it was similar.

The first step was history and background information - that determined whether he could ask insurance to bill him for a full evaluation, and was used as the history. In the evaluation itself, what mattered was what I did, not how I got there, except in questioneers which were interspersed with everything else, which at times included both "what were you like as a kid?" "what are you like now?"

I would say I think that how someone got there does matter, but can be the difference between subclinical and diagnosable.

It was noted on some of the parts of my evaluation that I clearly approached questions of whether something was awkward or not, or whether anything was wrong, analytically rather than intuitively. The fact that I got the "right" answer mattered far less than the fact that I was having to analyze something that most people don't think about. However, that was still something observable. I never told them I was thinking about it. I wouldn't have done so, I assumed that's what everyone did until I got my report that pointed that out...