for older members: what was it like to have autism back then

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To put it simply. School was a living hell. Luckily for me. I lived in a community that had no other kids in it for neighbors, Although it was lonely. It was better then having the hell I had to endure at school from being in my own backyard. At least I had a place to get away from it all and that's one of the reasons I am here today.

Because aspergers is a HFA autism. There was no evidence back then that suggested that I had autism. After all. I don't in anyway feel funny, My psychical health was perfect. I even had a cat scan and an EEG done and both of those came out normal.

I never had any want or desire to try to leave/escape from reality i.e do drugs or alcohol. In fact. I found reality to be a fun and fascinating. As far as living in the 'Real world" goes. I had no problem with it. But when it comes to having to interact or communicate with other people. That's when things became a train wreck. I could never figure out why I never like the things that the other kids like to do and vise-versa. It just never click with me why that was. To put it simply. I always felt like I was an alien from an another planet and some how I got marooned here on planet earth. I just don't fit. I just don't belong. The emotional toll of not being able to intimately connect with others has left me feeling isolated and lonely in this world.

I was born in 1980, so don't really know if I qualify as "older". I got diagnosed with Minimal brain dysfunction at 5 years old, but it seems the most popular diagnosis was "what the f is wrong with you?"? I guess it was a bit easier for me, because I HAD a diagnosis since childhood, but the diagnosis was just wrong. Nowadays MBD isn't used anymore, it's kind of like a mix between asperger and ad(h)d. Some of my problems, like my terrible fine motor skills and my problems with perception, were addressed, but most problems were not. I remember going to therapy all the time as a child, all kinds of adults trying to figure out why I behaved so weird. I knew from an early age that there was something terribly wrong with me. School: primary school was hell, because both the teachers and the students bullied me, secondary was a bit better, but I was terribly lonely.

Many heartbreaking stories, especially for a parent

Very interesting reading some of the posts on here. Thanks for sharing.

People did not know about High Functioning Autism. We were catagorized by most people as 'a little different', 'spacey', 'strange', 'weird', etc. That was how some of us viewed ourselves. No one knew about the connection to Autism.

cardinality and vickygleitz,

There is a quote from the movie "The Ten Commandments" where a Jewish slave tells Moses, "Beauty is a curse for our women".

Thirty years ago I worked on a crisis hotline and talked with thousands of people about all sorts of problems. On one call I was talking with a woman in her mid thirties who was having relationship problems. After about five minutes I asked her if she had ever been sexually molested. I could tell from her voice that she was horrified to think that someone could so easily find out her "secret".

I was able to tell her that these types of painful experiences are harmful for two reasons. The first is the obvious trauma from actions themselves. However, less obvious are the injuries that result from not having healthy developmental experiences.

This is similar to ASD in that there is a sort of void that has to be worked around. In her case I asked her if she ever thought of confronting her father. She told me that her father was dead. I asked her if she ever thought about going out to his grave and taking a dump on it. She laughed (which was a good sign). It is not something that one would actually do, but it does show that one could do it. I am not a big fan of visualization, but this type of mental picture can help a person detach themselves from unhealthy relationship effects.

People who have been through difficult experiences often find themselves in later years dealing with the effects in a way similar to someone who was in a car accident. With a car accident the damage is mostly physical. However, there are problems of therapy that have as their objective the restoration of as much normality as possible. This may be improving up to the point of being able to use a wheelchair or being able to walk with a slight limp.

For women who have been victimized, traumatized, and otherwise injured, there is hope of healing and even the opportunity to comfort those who read what you have shared.

I am in my mid sixties. There were the usual problems from that time. Oddly enough when I was in high school I once commented that if I had been left on earth by an alien race, when I was picked up later, I would be angry that they had not informed me what it was I was supposed to have learned. Although the term "Wrong Planet" was not specifically said, I believe it was implied.

My experiences were such that we would never put our children in public school (regardless of ASD or NT). We homeschooled and are very happy with the results. We have an ASD son and daughter and one daughter that may be ASD.

My advice is to not remain in a wrecked car. Cut off damaging things from the past. Learn how to build the best life for yourself that you can. Seek out older wiser people from whom you can learn. I have found great joy in my Christian faith. Much of this came after learning to avoid churches. While not everyone is drawn in this direction, I would encourage anyone to find a foundation upon which they can build. The AA people call this a "higher power".

I would imagine it was easier for us back the than for kids of today as the world wasn't so materialistic and image obsessed, the only labels we had on our footwear where the little rubber labels under out 50p plimsolls.

Everyone was poor back then, my parents wouldn't buy me football boots so I had to have hiking boots on my stick thin legs, but nobody ever took the fun out of me for it.

Every kid in the school had exactly the same coat.a Parka, mainly green but sometimes blue so we all looked the same anyway.

Maybe I was lucky in that I was popular as I was the class clown and always making the other kids laugh, even unintentionally,

It was hard. We had all the struggles and no help and no understanding of why we were having them. But I managed. But since I found out after the age of 18 and I live in the US, I still have the struggles and no official help. The only difference is now I know why things happen to me as they do and other people are more understanding because they know what Autism is. And WP helps a ton. Same thing goes for having Misophonia except that most people have still never heard of that.

I was born in 1963 and diagnosed with Aspergers earlier this year.

Growing up, I felt different from other kids. Like, I simply didn’t belong with them. I didn’t understand why. It made me sad (had I known I had Aspergers, I would have rationalized this, as I was an extremely logical kid).

Anyways, I simply preferred to be by myself. My favorite place was my room.

My parents wondered what was wrong with me. I wasn’t the “normal” kid they were expecting. I had problems adjusting to social situations beginning early in my life (in Nursery School and Kindergarten). They sent me to see a Psychologist when I was in 3rd grade, 7th grade and later, after dropping out of college. Each time, I was having problems adjusting to new social situations. They probably thought I was shy (or had some sort of social anxiety). They probably hoped that the Psychologist would “fix” me.

When I was young, I figured that all kids would simply “grow up” and automagically become normal adults. I figured that this would happen for the other kids (even the bullies). I figured that this would happen for me. It was logical that this would happen. Based upon my observation of other adults (after all, my parent’s friends all seemed normal). I just needed to survive my childhood. And, everything would be just peachy.

In my 30s and 40s, I wondered why this wasn’t happening. Late last year, I learned about Aspergers. Now, I understand why.

This journey has been difficult. Though, I am probably at my most content now. I better understand myself. Likewise, I am more comfortable and accepting of who I am.

I'm 65. I come from a family of Aspies, my father had it, his father probably had it, my twin brother has it, his daughter has it, my youngest son has it. We have generally done pretty well in specialized fields. For example, my grandfather was a solicitor in England, where he literally wrote the book on the law of local government. (My grandfather was on General Allenby's staff in World War I, where he knew Lawrence of Arabia. He had a copy of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom with lots of little notes in the margin. I really wish I had that book.) My father was an engineer, specializing in fuels and lubricants. He did not get a PhD because he did something unheard of among doctoral students -- he finished his dissertation before he finished his coursework. He published his dissertation, and Shell Oil offered him a job at three times what Penn State was paying him. So he had them give him an MSc. My brother works as an accountant, as does his daughter. My son and I have both been computer programmers.

When I was born in the UK in 1948, my father was in the process of converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism, while my mother was a non-observant Jew. (Before he died, my father left the Church, and my mother is still a non-observant Jew.) We emigrated to the US when I was six. We moved around a lot, and I was educated in a series of public (in the American sense) and Catholic schools. I particularly remember my Catholic high school, which was run by an order called the Society of Mary. The teaching was excellent, but the Marian devotion that was shoved down my throat served more as aversion therapy than as anything else -- I still cannot sit through a rosary without getting a severe case of the fidgets. I did, however, get 5 years of Latin, including copious amounts of Augustine of Hippo in the original. I had some problems in school, since I would often get easily bored.

I was sent by my father to an engineering college that he had picked for me, and where I really did not want to go. So, I showed him, by flunking out fairly spectacularly -- my first semester GPA was 0.8, and the second semester GPA was even lower! However, not being in college in the late 60s was a dangerous position for a young man. I was drafted into the US Army, where, after a few long months of Basic, AIT, and OCS (they had lowered the educational standards, and a high school diploma was sufficient), I became an infantry officer. I managed to put off the inevitable for a while by going to some schools (I may not look like it now, but once I was a genuine Airborne Ranger), but I eventually got an all-expense-paid trip to Vietnam. (Go to beautiful Vietnam, meet interesting and exciting people, and kill them.)

I was assigned to the 173d Airborne Brigade, where I have seen and done things that I hope you, and everyone else will never know. To see the broken corpse of a teen-aged boy that I, personally, have killed is an horrific thing. It doesn't matter that, a few minutes before, he had been trying to kill me.

After about eight months in Vietnam, I was severely wounded in my left leg . I got a 30% service-connected disability. 30% was a magic number, as it made me eligible for vocational rehabilitation from the Veterans Administration. This meant that the Veterans Administration paid for me to go back to school. I went to the University of Wisconsin, and there I met Dr. Walter Bense, of the religious studies department. Dr. Bense might have been an Aspie himself -- he was a brilliant scholar who had trouble getting along with people.

Unlike many Aspies, I was good in math, and completed a BSc in Mathematics, although I did it in an attempt to please my father; and a minor in Religion because Dr. Bense got me interested in it. He was a German-born Southern Baptist with a PhD from Harvard who took me under his wing. He was delighted to find a student who could read Latin, and had a better than nodding acquaintance with Augustine. He had me study Aquinas and Luther, and introduced me to such gems as Euripides (Trojan Women spoke volumes to me), Thomas a Kempis, Thomas Merton, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He guided my religious education, and helped me get into Harvard for a PhD program in History of Religion. He died some years ago, and I still miss him very much.

I picked up an MA because I got married and my wife got pregnant, and we thought I should get a real job to support the family; so, like my father I turned my PhD into a masters. I had a job working at the university computer center because it paid better than being a teaching assistant did. So it was an easy segue into full time programming.

I have picked up an MSc in Computer Science basically because it looks good on a resume. (I remember getting into arguments with the professors regularly -- they tended to go with the theories, while I was interested in practice. Just for one example, which may interest the programmers among you; I proved, by running actual programs on a DEC VAX 11/780 under Unix SVR2 that bubble sort is actually a more efficient algorithm than Quicksort. The overhead from the recursive subroutine calls wiped out the theoretical efficiency of Quicksort -- and at 120K records, Quicksort failed because it ran out of stack space.)

I was fine at work so long as I did not have to deal with too many people. It took me a number of jobs to figure out what was acceptable behavior and what was not. I once was told by my boss -- a woman who had only a vague idea of what I did and no idea of how I did it -- to do something I thought was really stupid. I told her, in no uncertain terms, what I thought of her assignment. I was out of that job within a few months. I was always among the first to be downsized, and got either excellent job reviews or mediocre ones.

I have a problem in that I have only a rudimentary sense of ethics. I see nothing wrong with taking something that is not mine if I want it. Although, of course, I do not. I have compensated for this problem by becoming a student of ethics. I have few friends, and the only people I am close to are my family -- and my brother has estranged himself from me (and blamed me for this estrangement).

I had never heard of Aspergers until about 1990. My wife and I took our youngest son, then aged about ten, to a psychiatrist because he was having so many problems socializing in school. He told us that Noah had Aspergers, and described the symptoms. My wife and I agreed that he was also describing me. This seems much better than the diagnosis I had from another psychiatrist as "Schizoid Personality Disorder", which I certainly do not have.