Adult Aspergers Syndrome and the notion of what support is

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So much I would like to comment on there. Thank you for so much input.

About the age thing: this is about an experience difference, not age per se. I hope I did not give the impression that I believed all young Asperger's men were "angry cursers" (as I don't think that at all). There is a subgroup who are. And their experiences may have been different from the "non-angry young AS men". Members of a cohort share a lot of experience, though they don't have the same collection of experiences; between cohorts, context changes. Young AS people have all grown up in a greatly different context from the context you and I grew up in. The age variables are really quite complex and teasing out the contextualisations is no easy task, though I think it might yield some interesting material if we had the scope to make that examination.

As an assumption, let's just wildly theorise for a moment - that the angry young cursers somehow experienced either more damaging experiences and/or more of them than the non-angry young non-cursers, and this has left them stranded with a huge amount of emotional damage, inflicted within the context of their experience by others. Guessing again, this may be a sub-cohort with many shared features, and what they might be I can only make guesses about. Perhaps for example, they were diagnosed at a very early age (the Thomas theorem effect?), were marked out in special education for more intensive bullying, were not given any leeway for their challenges at home. We don't know, and currently we can't know. All we can confidently know is that by the time they tend to arrive here they have very significant, raw, festering and unhealed emotional wounds which are expressed in a hatred of AS, and of themselves; they make no distinction between AS and themselves (usually) because they see AS the totality of their selves.

Perhaps to hear that others are not in the same kind of totally acute suffering is another form of pain, and our commitment to the equity that neurodiversity represents is as baffling as Swahili to them.

They are good at giving voice to the anger (often rage by the time it arrives here) yet almost unable to give voice to the pain. Expressing their anger is the way they can express their pain, it is raw, un-nuanced, overwhelming, often painful to read. Yet it is real. They have lost faith in the possibility of healing, of succeeding in any way, if they ever imagined that possibility to begin with. (I suspect not in most cases).

Whatever the nature and extent of the damage they have sustained, it has reached deeply into their souls, hearts and minds. We have been at a bit of a loss to cope with their anger and to support them, I think. Where my thinking has changed is that they will never be able to experience potential neurodiversity benefits until they are offered a healing process that actually heals. And currently we (the collective AS we) haven't developed that healing pathway. We don't have instructors on how to create a healing pathway. We have to be the explorers of that new territory, and I now think it is this challenge we neurodiverse AS people need to address. The young angry cursers feel abandoned, and they have been somehow. Their consciousness has been kidnapped, and perhaps is held hostage by a past which has taught them the lie that the NT way is the only way, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.

I am sorry that I am unable to address this very clearly. It is a new territory of thinking for me, and there is no healing pathway yet for the old nor the young. Yet there could be and there can be. That's the new direction my thinking is going..

One thing I believe utterly is this: NT solutions don't work, and will never work for AS people. The solutions have to come from within the AS community, by AS people for AS people. Novel solutions which can be explored and uncovered in years to come. I am getting pretty ancient and my clock is ticking. I hope progress is made before I personally check out..

This piece really illustrates flawed notions of support:

http://anintenseworld.blogspot.co.nz/20 ... ative.html

It was quite painful to read how the teachers believed that teaching AS children was exactly the same as teaching "NT children with behavioural problems" - and because of their inexcusable ignorance, the AS children were placed in special classes with behaviourally-disordered, bullying NT children - amounting to a double victimisation for the AS children: they missed out on appropriate education, and were unnecessarily exposed to the risk of emotional, physical and psychological harms by adults who were supposed to be responsible for the well-being at school.

As I read that linked article, I thought of the 'angry young cursers' and wondered how representative of their experience the article might be. What child could live through that experience without emotional harm being done to his/her young heart and soul, who would not feel huge anger later in full realisation of the jeopardy in which their young selves were placed by adults who were supposed to be protecting and teaching them? The betrayal of the children's safety, trust and well-being effectively meant that instead of maximising their opportunity, they were set up for PTSD and a legacy of unhealed wounds which would possibly never be recognised as wounds, never be validated, and never heal. People can't begin to heal without validation of their suffering. It's an essential element that opens the door to the possibility of healing. These AS children were being set up not only to fail, but to suffer.

I need to deal with my own anger now...because just reading of these betrayals feels like being coated with slime.

Experience is important. When I was younger people were always trying to correct my pessimism. "At the end of the day things will always work out" they preached. The whole idea was baffling to me, it was nearly opposite of my experience. Things do not always work out, far from it, BUT I have seen many things occur that I thought were impossible. The most dramatic of these involve societal acceptance, but do not involve autism generally. So my experieces and thus expetactions are radically different from the younger generations.

Opponents of the Neurodiversity movement, your input is welcomed.

I think autistic people do need help to fit into the world. The problem is that the help that is being offered is damaging and makes things worse.

Employers are not going to make the changes that have been suggested; why would they? It's much easier for them to hire a natural team player.

I think the problem with "help" is that it is impossible for someone who is not autistic to understand the autistic experience. We are seen as flawed in a very bad way because social interaction is so fundamental to cultural behaviour. I fear the only help people are capable of offering is to help us to pass. Perhaps they cannot understand that it is not that we are slow to pick up on social norms, but rather that these norms are overused and often annoying.

Welp... that's better than the interview process at the district I work for. But I think the amount of hoops to jump through is ridiculous. Wouldn't it be easier to just have the teacher they are interviewing show how they would teach a class/ actually have them teach a lesson to a class?

There's a lot of nepotism and hiring ineffective staff in my district. My mother teaches for it and she's had an interview where a VP asked her what she would do if one student was misbehaving but the rest of the class was on task. My mother said she'd just deal with the one student while leaving the others to do their work. As for the VP, she was not happy with the answer my mother gave. She said that my mother should've said to address the whole class to remind them to stay on task. The person she hired over my mother had no classroom management nor were they able to use technology.

As for said VP, the district office is trying to fast track her to be some assistant something or other so they are moving her and putting her in positions that will get her there as fast as she can get in there.

As for interviews in general... I've wished so many times that interviews were less about talking and more about doing. I know I can do the thing, just let me show you how I can. I'm just grateful that I've learned how to BS from my father which seems to get me through my interviews.