How far do you think an aspie can improve?

Post Reply New Topic

Aspies can improve as much as they want to. That sentance has more weight than is immediately apparent. A person may be distressed that their social skills are less than functional for what they want, but if being social involves something which they personally simply cannot stand, then even if they TELL themselves they want to improve, they really don't, and just get more frustrated that "nothing is working".

For instance, i want to make my dad happy, but i can't imagine, nay i refuse to accept that messes actually cause him physical pain, and therefore i am NOT going to clean up messes to his satisfaction. My want to help him is in contest with my want to believe he cant really be offended by message. And most often my want to believe he cant be offended wins out.

I'm sure plenty of you guys can list things you want to accomplish, but also explain wants that are counterproductive to the things on that list, and that is precisely what makes those things difficult to accomplish. You must accept that you have some selfish wants. Think about them reasonably, and decide what you want more.

Well, becoming a better person does not mean catering to people who are unreasonable and refuse to grow up and behave like adults.

I think there are advantages and disadvantages to being an Aspie, and that being "cured" isn't really the goal; rather, the goal should be to minimize the disadvantages. Being able to get around, socially, is the biggest goal; dealing with obsessions and special interests so that they don't take over your life is another.

However, the single-minded, logical, independent nature of an Aspie is something that should not be "overcome"; it is an advantage, not a drawback. One does not have to be an intuitive social butterfly to be worth something as a person.

For a neurotypical, "growing up" often means learning to be single-minded, logical, and independent. For an Aspie, it means something completely different: Perhaps learning to multitask, or learning to depend on other people, or learning to do things one does not want to do (i.e., self-control); and of course learning to deal with surprises, the unexpected, the unfamiliar.

Your average Aspie probably needs to make about as much progress as your average NT must make in order to "grow up". The progress just needs to be in different directions.

Some Aspies need more help than others; some NTs need more help than others. Some of us never really grow up--and sometimes, as long as necessary coping skills are learned, growing up doesn't even matter.

That is an excellent concept very well put. I've not seen it quite that clearly before.

It avoids the pitfall of thinking that progress is simply becoming more NTish, and the one of thinking that a diagnosis of AS is a "get out of jail free" card, excusing all behaviours and attitudes.

Last edited by Emettman on 12 Feb 2006, 3:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

For me, there are some things that just don't seem to get much better- I still speak too quickly and quietly, for instance, and I've made hardly any progress in controlling my temper. But I've made a heck of a lot of progress with social skills in the past few years. My social interactions and social life are really quite normal now.

I don't see great limits for myself regarding my behaviour, nor do I limit myself of becoming a steady happy person. Becoming this requires no formulaic path that one has to go through, there are numerous ways one could take to try to make his life as good as possible.

How one does this is for every individual to decide. In my case, the base of this particular development is that I find a place in this world where my assimilation in society does not overlap the position of me as an individual.

It's one of the reasons why I sometimes - as I already stated a couple of times here and probably elsewhere on the net - question the current social code, as I feel that in the society of now, reaching this goal is unnecessary made more difficult than it should be (in general).

Luckily it hasn't made personal development impossible though, and as long as people have the ability to think, the chances of changing the current social code as a means of a creating a good mix between the development of society and the development of individuals remain. This will require a lot of work though and is probably not to happen in our lifetime - until then the alternative thinkers are going to have to figure out for themselves how to cope in society, without losing their alternative way of thinking.
A lot of people have accomplished this and for some this will be more difficult than others, but it's nevertheless possible for everyone.

For the topicstarter this post may not have been very helpful, but that is my stance on 'how far aspies can improve' in a compact post on WP.