My NT mother thinks she is Aspie!

Post Reply New Topic

I self diagnosed AS earlier this year, and an official clinical diagnoses followed. I am now 20, and am making my second attempt at college.

Still, I find myself wondering if I am really even Aspie. While I hit all the criteria, and even all the common non-diagnostic traits, I feel that the negative aspects associated with AS just are not as strong in me as they are in some of the books I read. One book cited many Aspies whom I now mentally refer to as "Super-Aspies". Their stories involved things like climbing out of windows to avoid walking down a hall filled with coworkers, not knowing what 'pass the salt' meant until late teens, or being able to recall every license tag theyve seen that month.

I have plenty of abilities, a few might even be considered autistic talents. (on ridalin I can multiply 8 digit numbers in my head. I have not been on ridalin in years) I have plenty of short comings, too, but I am not as afflicted as many Aspies I read about seem to be (I might uncontrollably flinch when touched, but I do not fly into a rage or have a break down if I cant eat my favorite oatmeal).

That said, you can imagine my shock when my mother revealed to me that she had self diagnosed herself as Aspie!

My mother was a math major, but dropped out due my upcoming birth. She had a head for numbers, but in a normal sort of way that required lots of practice. She doesnt like being tickled, but had no real trouble being touched. Her IQ tests as normal, which seems a bit low for her.

She works as a sales executive, which means (from my point of view) that she her job is being a social butterfly and buttering people up to buy things from her. And she is good at it, winning multiple national awards from the large corporation she works for.

I have tried to explain to her that she isnt Aspie, that I wasnt sure I qualified, but she shrugged that off as my insecurities (which its not). Ive read tons more material on it then her, and am of the opinion that basically everyone who is not strictly normal, but not suffering from another, clear disorder (such as schizophrenia, bipolar, etc) could qualify as somewhere on the spectrum, if a layman was to judge.

How do I convince my mother that its okay that she is NT?

Well, of course it's alright if she's NT.

But, as a 57 year old, let me say that, since you, of course, didn't know your mother as an adolescent or young adult, it might be very hard for you to tell how much of what your mother does now comes naturally and how much is hard learned adaptation.

I know all about the latter.

Cut her a break. It's okay either way.

They just specified TAGS?????? INTEREST!! !! !

Frankly, these are extremes! Use THOSE as required diagnostic criteria, and most here probably wouldn't qualify. I don't then! Besides, "pass the salt" is plain English. MOST English speakers exposed to it WILL know what it means. BTW I don't climb out of windows, but I DO step around, or even go in the opposite direction to go down ANOTHER route. Still, you don't have to do that to be AS and doing that doesn't mean you're AS.



The math is impressive even on ridalin!

AGAIN, many here, even OFFICIALLY DIAGNOSED, aren't that bad. HECK, I'm not! Granted I'm not OFFICIALLY diagnosed, but I do match a lot here including some that ARE officially diagnosed.



SOUNDS NORMAL NT to me!



Her REACTION sounds normal NT!



How about sending her to the same doctor that diagnosed you? Hopefully s/he'll say the obvious.

Your description of her his 100% NORMAL!! !! !!

BTW did you ask her for VALID reasons why she thinks she is AS? I mean HECK! NO talk of early development! NO talk of social problems! NO talk of autistic symptoms. Without that, you can't be Autistic, much less AS! Not even any talk of any special talents! That isn't specified in the DSM by the way! AS is due to a changing of the structure of the brain, and that usually gives new abilities, but they don't have to be in areas like math. I wish they did.

My biggest problem is a kind of self talk. I finally comfortable reading without that again. I guess I have to do the same with math.

BOTH of my parents worked a lot with numbers, but I wasn't really exposed to that. I learned that in school. 8-( I'm GLAD I didn't learn to read in school!

Steve

Asperger's could be a spectrum in itself. A spectrum within a spectrum. Because if you lurk and post here a while, you'll notice people have varying degrees of functionality here. And generally speaking, AS people are more than capable enough to learn how to socialise and read social cues, or at least put on a convincing act.

It doesn't really matter either way, if she is AS or NT. Both are valid ways of being. Instead of trying to convince her either way, why not try to figure it out with her? If you were officially diagnosed, then she could be AS. If I recall correctly, genetics is one known cause of AS. Incidentally, it was discovered my father has AS. Is there a way to find out how your mother was as a child? Any prior diagnosis she may have received?

Last edited by goomba on 06 Feb 2007, 12:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

In context, it was license tags on cars. I doubt it included other types of tags.



I have a fairly good idea of what my mother was like in her youth.

Her mother was (and is) a 'new age' hippy. Her father was a... shady character. He took custody, poisoned the children against their mother, and was gone for months at a time, leaving her and her brother alone for long periods of time.

She would routinely spend this time wandering in the woods instead of going to school. She got into drugs at a -very- young age under these circumstances, then quit them cold after almost dying. From there on she spent almost all of her time studying.

She lived in a small religious town, though, and was ostracized because her mother was regarded as crazy. She had few friends, but I can discern no particular hardship in relating to them, or establishing social boundaries, or any of the other typical problems. She would however spend her free time 'people watching' when not studying.

She does not appreciate music well. She cant pick out lyrics, recognize harmonies, name bands, etc. She is deaf to very low pitch sounds.

She ultimately graduated top of her class in high school, went to college, then met my father.

Ive been given no reason to believe she is developmental impaired, no more then the average person is. By her reasoning, 90% of the population must be Aspie!



Thank you.

My mathematical talents arose from a fascination with numerical patterns. This provoked me to write out my favorite patterns (such as Pascal's Triangle, and a 3 dimensional extension to it I inferred) to as many rows as all the available paper would hold. I became frustrated with having to do the 'simple' rows over and over, so I invented methods to speed my progress. This habbit of developing short cuts based on my frustrations carried over to later maths. My short cuts almost always involve more actual compuations then then strictly neccessary, but they make each section of the problem salient and keep the number of digits I am working with at any given time small.


I also developed an obsessive compulsion based off of a game I started playing while riding to primary school with my mother - factor the telephone number on the billboard.



That was a psychiatrist working for the vocational rehabilitation program I was working at then, so that wont work. (the program was excellent, extremely helpful... but not geared specifically for autistics, and they saw me as mild case and effectively allowed me to moderate myself without fear of consequence)



I had a hard time speaking when I was young (I would not pronounce all but the first and last syllable of words, and had no concept of sentence structure), and could not read until my mother spent a few weeks of super-intensive tutoring with me (if I was awake, I was learning how to read). This was some time when I was in first grade. Up until then, I considered letters as numerical substitutes of a sort (I could do basic math, some simple algebra, just fine). I called all letters 'E5's, because A=1, B=2, E=5, etc.

Why does it bother you that she would do this? Isn't it essentially her business? Do you think she is falsely claiming to be aspie for some sinister purpose?

I think its self delusion, and I find talking to people who intentional delude themselves uneasing. I have to my mother practical concerns, and also because I enjoy her company. If she continues on, she might end up like her mother, willing to believe any bad diagnosis (or bad science) if it fits her needs/intuition.

I dont care that shes NT, and I am certainly not against being related to an Aspie, but I feel that her self deluding behavior is likely a compensation for guilt. I was originally diagnosed as Aspie when I was 12, but she hid this from me, my father, everyone. She only came clean once I approached her ~11 months ago with my self diagnoses (when I said 'in the last year' I meant in the last ~365 days)

Sounds like a tabloid headline.

What you can discern though isn't the whole picture at all. I would say 95% of people who know me would think that I have no trouble relating to people and that I just choose not to have a lot of social interaction because I prefer to read or something. I keep things very hidden.

Also, I'm not sure what your comments about her lacking in musical abilities has to do with anything. Having skills with music isn't a universal Asperger's trait or anything. I'm pretty much tone deaf. My only real abilities when it comes to music is that I can memorize lyrics without any effort at all.

I know, I just shortened it.



For AS, I was talking about BEATING milestones! I started talking in sentences several months before expected, and was 100% understandable(The goal at the milestone I beat was 50%)!

Steve

Yup. There's a lot of truth to that. Almost everyone I know has one autistic trait or another - most have several. The difference is, most of the people that I know are not negatively impacted by these traits - they function well in society.

She'll probably come around, though I'm not sure that it matters. When my daughters were first diagnosed with their ASDs, I went through a period of thinking that I had an ASD, too. After all, I do have obsessions and some social quirks, and was actually pretty seriously impacted by some of these traits as a younger person. After a while I realized that I was being silly, and got over it.

There's a big difference between people who have a few social or perseverative quirks and those that are truly impaired by their ASD. You know the latter when you see it (or, in my case, live with it).