People seem to cough around me..

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A somewhat related scenario from my personal experience:

I was once in a workplace where there was one guy who was singularly disliked by all. Unfortunately this guy was oblivious to being the office pariah, and was moreover rather assertive about socially imposing himself on people. One of this favored tactics was to find someone sitting in their cubicle. He would then stand in the doorway to that cubicle and begin to talk his victims ear off about one of his many distasteful opinions. (He was a highly judgmental and bigoted right-wing religious type.)

So the others in the office made a secret pact that they would rescue one another when this guy descended upon someone, or was on the prowl to do so. One of their communal warning signals was loud coughing (rather like the way monkeys in trees will chatter loudly when a snake or other predator is spotted). When so signaled, someone would rescue the victim by either calling them on the phone or coming by their cubicle and call them away on the pretext of needing their help with something.

I felt sorry for the guy, though I too avoided him because he was so toxic. In retrospect, certain aspects of his behavior were a bit Aspergerian.

Of course I am not suggesting that such is the case with the OP's situation; but it did remind me of this real-life example of an interesting NT group behavior.

hello there! I also signed up just for this interesting topic. i have the same problem too ,some years now. when people realize my presence in public they start the usual cough, fake coughs, sniffing, itching and staring. i want to say that i take shower every day , i don't have a bad odor and i'm very friendly and outgoing. As i was trying to explain it at first, i thought they did it by disgust because i have some acne scars on my face (although they say im good-looking). Then i thought that it was a way of intimidation and that my presence was not welcome or even my aura and vibrations was not positive. That made me very aggressive and miserable. Then i used to deal with it by intimidating them back with a fake cough or with a friendly smile or just ignoring them. However i realized that even my friends, my girlfriends and my parents did it too and whenever i told them about it they told me i was paranoid. Now it still makes me angry and sad, it isolates me, i cant concentrate whenever someone coughs and i think it might lead to depression.

this post here encourages me and i like reading your opinions about this subject and i would love to hear more.

Sorry for my bad English

Reptilians.

Same problem here to!

It started in 2010-the beginning of 2011.
I think i remember the first person that coughed at me, and the strange thing for me to is that my family and some of my friends also started doing it, but ofcourse denies it, and it has escalated since then, coughs, yawning and nose rubbing. It have led me to isolation unfortionately. But its good we talk about it and try to solve this problem.

I really would like to know what is behind it, but i think many things could be behind this behavior among people.
Maybe bad smell, or they are jellous of you. They dont like you, or as someone wrote whenever you feel something. Maybe you look like an open book and make people nervous.

Just by googling: people cough at me you find alot about this!

I get this a lot.

At the same token being treated with too much sympathy gets under my skin. I hate being treat like I'm inferior.

Hmm schizo affective/typal disorders really are common on the autsitic spectrum. Worth considering

I think it's just coincidence and people reading too much into it but that's probably because I never cough at people and only cough because I need to cough.

I can completely identify with that. It seems as though they're definitely coughing at me. It's very weird. I'm neither autistic or an aspergers sufferer so I couldn't say what relation my observations have with these conditions. They seem to so it everywhere. Work, I public, where ever. These are people who would appear to be physically well and healthy - not suffering from any illness. They just randomly cough Athens exact moment we cross paths. Like literally - it couldn't be more perfectly timed. It feels hostile.

I have been noticing this for the past few months. My guess is that it's discomfort and/or aggression. I see a lot of posters here have said it may be hostility, which is plausible too. People constantly do that fake cough at me. I know exactly what posters mean when they say the cough seems to be in response to you moving or something. The person will be quiet when everyone else is moving, talking, etc., but as soon as I do they start coughing. It's very unnerving and makes me even more anxious around people. I try not to dwell on these things because we are trying to apply logic to a phenomenon that is not logical.

I suffer from the same situation. Being on the train or sitting next to people in my trainee programm is no fun at all.
I guess we should put up a kind of self help group. I'm looking on this topic for several years now, and every now and then, you will find a thread on one or the other forum. But there still is no official explanation, there's not even a name to it. Well, there IS a group of people who think they figured it out - they think it's connected to their body odour and they eat special diets in order to be "less smelly".
But that's not for me. I can make people uncomfortable even through glass windows - wow, magic, paranoia? No, I guess it's just that we somehow move or talk in an awkard or unnatural way and the coughing is the automatic reaction of someone who just noticed something strange.
It happens to me even when I'm together with people who like me, when I somehow get lost in the conversation with them I seem to be "contrary to the flow of the moment", sorry, my English is not so good, but that's the best way I can describe it. Their cough doesn't seem hostile, more like slightly irritated. The problem is that I don't know what I did "wrong", hell I did nothing wrong in fact.

If you have to deal with this on a daily basis, that's pretty rough. Therefore I'm in the process of a descision: When my life will be shadowed like this anyway, maybe I can at least contribute to the healing of this "disease". If you have any ideas for what we could do, please contact me. But please leave me alone, if you a)are into religious explanations or something like that or b)if you think it has to do with body odour.

My aims are:
- talk to open-minded professional people about our experience in order to start scientific research and later on, finding a cure. That's a big issue, I know, but I still have 40-50 years on this planet, so...
- exchange strategies to cope

I will write about some approaches I have later. keep your spirits up.

It might be a good idea to compile somewhere a list of signs you're not welcome for aspies.

If people give you signs that you're not welcome, just walk away from them. Those people aren't worth your attention.

Sorry, but it's not like we can walk away from people and be happy. In fact, the coughing can happen in any public place. As I mentioned, it doesn't have to mean that those people dislike us. I have my personal anecdotes about that:
One time, I was waiting for the train. And old lady got next to me waiting and after some time started clearing her throat. Only this old lady, everybody who was not standing next to me was quiet. Sometimes I leave when something like this happens, but this time I looked her directly in the eye, trying to look harmless at the same time. To my surprise she smiled at me and than started small talk about the weather.
This was not the only case like this. I hate small talk, but it is still better than being coughed at.

Also my friends or people close to me sniff scratch their noses in conversation, especially when I'm in a bad mood, which is - most of the time. I wouldn't like to leave or lose them just because of this.

If I were to walk away everytime someone sitting next to me in the train coughs I wouldn't find a seat at all.

I can blend in with strangers and they aren't bothered by my presence.

Not necessarily. Not everyone who coughs is sick.