Willard wrote:
I was married to someone diagnosed with OCD and while I think Autism involves some behaviors that appear similar to OCD on the surface, in my experience, they seem to be motivated differently.
People with OCD seem to engage in repetitive or ritualistic behaviors based in some compulsive sense that something dire will happen if they don't. "Step on a crack, break your Mother's back," that sort of superstitious thinking. They seem to feel that they can "control their own luck" - that if they perform action A, then result B will occur, even if there is no obvious causal link.
People with Autism I think engage in repetitive or ritualistic sorts of behaviors because our sensory processing issues make it difficult to navigate through new and unexpected situations, so we try to keep things as familiar as possible by doing them the same way every time, which is why we tend to get so upset when we expect things to happen a certain way and someone changes the plan at the last minute.
IMHO, They may look identical to a casual observer, but they're not really the same thing.
Good breakdown of the motivations behind behaviors that can appear
identical or similar on the surface, to an outside observer.
I love routine, but I detest ritual.
People (including me, 'cause how was I to know any other reason ?) used to think I had OCD before I got the Asperger dx.
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