Other Aspies in the Family

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I think all of my family are at least on the spectrum, BAP to AS kind of area. My father is an engineer, very quiet and passive, tendency to talk at length about technical things and not notice when people aren't interested. My mother is very different, she is very social in someways but doesn't really understand boundaries or whats appropriate, very outspoken, all ways wants things her way. My brother, I am no sure, he was very difficult as a child, but probably more ADHD, now he is schizophrenic so think that overrides anything else. Definitely not a NT family.

Its weird, my whole life I always wondered what was wrong with me, but I was so self focussed and never took a step back and thought 'wait, my family are exactly the same' none of us can communicate properly.

Some I can only suspect in retrospect, because there wasn't even a diagnosis for most of my own life let alone back in the era of theirs, which is the 1920s/30s and 40s and upwards. But I've wondered about certain traits in both my parents; several varied traits spread among my siblings; an uncle who was very like me in many ways, a cousin who was cause for concern when young, although he's found his way now in adulthood, and there was a great-uncle who was what would now be called special needs and needed care.

The ironic thing though is that even though so many of us actually seemed to share some traits, which one would think would make us at least understand each other more, we still all fought and fell out and misunderstood each other, judged each other and rejected each other. Which makes sense now that I think about it. A bit like WP.

Thats true of my family. It is easy to have a idealised view of autism but it really can be problematic if parents and children have similar traits. Each person wanting to have things their way, difficulty seeing things from others perspective, difficulty picking up on what others are feeling, being hypersensitive, difficulty communicating emotions. That would be difficult for any people, but mixed in with the parent/child dynamic makes it even worse. Think it just made my family withdraw from each other, we get on ok, but we don't really communicate or know each other.