I Want to Help Aspies!! !!

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To the person who did this thread:I'm really sorry.


SpaceCase

But i'm just wondering.. why would a completley Neurotypical person WANT to come here?

I know some things I'd rather not say with NT's around. - I think that's what some of the people here are trying to say.

But aspies can be a problem in themselves, with trolls like Letsgoblues and Teelaclarke.

i refer people to jman's thread, and stlf's post.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... highlight=

come on, folks - someone wants to HELP - give her a chance, before you start knocking her.

I have just read through this thread because of another thread started to address this very issue.

Someone started this thread with a post expressing a desire to help, and others replied to explain what would and would not be helpful, and pointed out some issues which had the potential for causing offense. It looked like a fairly rational discussion to me.

But now we have regular participants of the forum at odds with each other about whether we have mistreated someone.

I wonder if the participants of this board are familiar with the concept of "trolling." I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that trolling may have happened here, but I think it's an issue to be considered when conflict seems to be escalating among people who have come here for mutual support. Let's not attack each other over an issue involving someone who is no longer participating.

Yeah, our brains should be connected by a network. But it has to be wireless otherwise we have a bigger problem, than we have now.

And we need password protection in case we don´t want people to enter our brain.

*giggles* That would be SO handy!

That is always a possibility, but I am inclined to believe, after being on another thread she posted, that perhaps she was just a bit too anxious about being part of WP and wanted to find some way that she could fit in as an NT and thought that offering to help us was a good way for us to accept her. She may not have continued posting because she may have left WP because her recent DX was not Asperger's and the replies she got here were not what she was hoping for. On one thread she wanted to be an honorary Aspie, on this thread she wanted to help Aspies. This reminds me of something my doctor said when I asked him about my encounters with certain people who say they are Aspies but then talk about things in a very NT-like manner and don't relate to some of the basic difficulties that Aspies share. He said: "some people have probably read about it somewhere and just think that it's the thing to be." Certainly her statement about how cool she thinks we all are seems to support this theory to a degree. I personally do not understand the concept of "honorary Aspie" and as I said on the other thread, it isn't like we are an Indian tribe, or something. It seems she wants to be something she isn't and may be having trouble accepting that she isn't one of us.

I have no empathy and see no need to apologize for any offense she may have taken to anything I have said. I am being myself as I am with anyone else and have not said anything that was intended to offend anyone. I spoke my mind, that's what I do when I speak and if someone can't handle that, then they certainly would not be able to handle helping me in any way. Again, just honesty. If she reads this and takes it in the proper context then she will have learned a lot about Aspies, even if it makes Aspies seem less "cool."

Just via my own experience, I have met some pretty sh***y NTs. Per capita, I've known more NTs personally than Aspies but that's to be expected. But also per capita, I've met more compassionate and understanding NTs than Aspies in my life. Most Aspies wear on my nerves after awhile because we have a tendency to be pretty intense and self-absorbed. I find, for myself, weird NTs make better friends than do many Aspies in general because being with other Aspies is almost like having a double of me with me at all times. If I had an identical Aspie twin, I'd prolly feel like shooting her. People wear me out, but many NTs seem to try to comfort me because I'm the weird one.

Percentage-wise, I've have a good experience with NTs and feel sorry for ANYONE who is mistreated. Attacking a person despite their good intentions shows a very poor awareness and/or stubborness. And probably a lot of reaction to mistreatment in the past. Despite any of our experiences, a good portion of the responses to Christina were wholly uncalled for.

We complain about further mistreatment, but we get what we put out in the world.

I'm not Diseased, I don't wish to be cured, and I refuse to go to a Speech Pathologist who's job is to kill Accents.

Point taken, CockneyRebel. But instead of bashing her over the head with the NT idiot stick, we should have called upon our lovely ability to rationlize and reason and give her what she was looking for: to be educated about us.

You want her learning from impersonal, "professional" books? It's the professionals who write them and their own lack of honest, personal experience with people like us,that so many of us are misdiagnosed or completely undiagnosed and provided frustration after frustration of professionals who think we're not Aspergers but Borderline or hypochondriacs or everything else in the DSM or ICD.

Why are we sooooo aggressive to those nonAspies who come onto this board wanting to learn? I would rather they get it here than from some ruddy book because that's only gonna bite us in the butt anyways with a more misinformed or generalized notion of Aspergers floating around in the world.

We should have corrected her. We did. But we also berated and degraded her at the same time. We should have explained politely that most of us don't want to be "cured".

Perhaps courtesy is one of my pet peeves and so this is all the more frustrating. Perhaps I dwell on this more than I need to because my saying such things will go unread or just simply grumbled at and passed over as ramblings.

But, in short, this all sounds like a bit of revenge for mistreatment in the past and taking it out on earnest people coming in here, willing and wanting to learn and help if needed, and taking it out on them as if they had ever done a single thing to us.

Is there a way to contact Christina?

Did I say that she should read some books? I didnt mean that. Obviously no one can learn stuff from a book, even the best doctor in the world.

By the way: Why is it that "most of us" doesnt want to be "cured"? Why isnt it no one wants to be cured. Does some of you actually want to be "normal" without autistic wierdness...?

I don't really want a cure, I just want to learn to get by with AS. It has it's advantages that I really wouldn't trade in for anything. In fact some of these advantages I've used to help improve my problems, ironic as it sounds, but it works.

The best thing to do instead of fixing AS is to compensate with everything else you do. It works for me, and now people who don't know me very well think I'm a normal enough person.

About Christina:
The fact she´s not showing up anymore doesn´t necessarily mean she is offended. People can get bored after a while and shift their attention to something else. People may have other things to do which are more important.

After all, she has ADD. Doesn´t that mean she has difficulty keeping attention on things?

On the other hand, in one of her last posts, she writes:

This was not her last post, but maybe she was still angry, when she wrote the few posts after this one.

I don´t think there is a way to contact her, because her identity is unknown.

The only thing that can be done is stopping posts, that might be offending to her. The message that aspergers don´t want te be cured, is clear now, so why continue with writing about it?

I apologise, PrincessChristina. Sometimes I have a habit of saying the first thing that pops in my head. I've dealt with a whole bunch of people who tried to force me to be exactly like everybody else, in my Past. I shouldn't have typed what I did.

I think it's wonderful that you want to help people. I also didn't realize that you were only 13. You can volunteer your time to be a mentor to a child who's on the Spetrum. Do they have Peer Councilors at your School. Maybe you can look into being a Peer Councilor, when School starts up again in your area. You can also volunteer to do Speeches on how everybody should be respected and cherrished in Society, no matter what their differences are.

'cuse me jumping in here ...

I agree on nayashi's point on clarity, & go in line with MishLuvsHer2Boys in reiterating it; though I do beleive in simplicity, not too much waffle

Anyway, autism isn't a mental disorder, it's a syndrome, ie it's merely a difference that can be explained (possibly) through a biomedical model. Psychologists (& psychiatrists alike) are too keen in finding an "ideal" "cure" for autism - as a high functioning autistic the mere thought of being "neurotypical" makes me cringe (yes, that's merely me) ... & a long time ago when I first discovered that I might be aspergic (different by the way), I came up with the term NE (or NeuroEccentric), to describe myself & others like me. Personally I like it, & wouldn't want to be anything different.

Reiterating everyone else's presumed point (no, I haven't read the whole thread ), the key is to finding a way of acceptance, though - don't think me preemptively presumptious - depending on what age you are (looking at the "txt-speak" esque writing), that would be no easy task. It's not to say that you're mature but, people are afraid of what's different. To put psychology onto it, it's normative social behaviour & influence.
What I'm saying basically is that you should think of yourself whilst trying to help others in that you don't get yourself into "negative" position through good intentions. Help wisely, think first.