Disappointed with "The Complete Guide to Asperger's"

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It is offensive. He didn't come right out and say it, but I think it's inferred in his writing, because he talks about how Aspies often become good actors and imitators of social skills without having intuition about NT's feelings, and he doesn't give even one example of an Aspie who legitimately learned good social skills. He also talks about the emotions of Aspies being qualitatively different from those of NTs.

He also differentiates between people who arrive at the correct answer about someone's feelings logically, and someone who arrives at the correct answer about someone's feelings intuitively, with Aspies being the former, and NTs being the latter. So even if you got the right answer, but didn't use the right process (intuition), Attwood seems to believe that you don't actually have real social skills.

When I was seeing my school counselor in middle school and high school, my mom got really mad at him when he said I would never get better so he told my mother she was wasting her money on a PH D therapist for me. She fired him on the spot and told him to stay away from me as if he were a predator. She even called him an idiot too and didn't like him calling my behaviors AS or other things and said he wasn't a real therapist and he didn't have a PH D. TBH he wasn't really giving me solutions but he would tell me things like how I shouldn't let things bother me or how people are not going to notice the same details as me or how I think I have to follow every rule teachers make. Is Attwood someone who doesn't help his aspie patients get better so instead he just gives them excuses and say "that is because you have Asperger's" and offers them nothing to help them improve?

I guess school psychologists aren't real therapists. You need a PH D to be a real therapist and ironically Attwood does have a PH D.

Well lot you wrote about him seems right but I still wouldn't want mine to be called fake and see my niceness as invalid just because there is no "real" understanding. Does he forget that even NTs "fake it" too and they also fake empathy and feelings for others? No one bats an eye about it. So why is it any different for aspies?

And the sad thing is this seems to matter for some people because they want you to actually understand, not do it because it's the right thing to do or because you just care about them. I have seen too many women whine about their AS partners doing this and it's not good enough for them no matter how loyal their partner is and how well they treat them. It makes me think, goodness, is this how kids have felt about me growing up so no wonder no matter what I did, I was always the same person under their eyes no matter what I changed or how much I improved after I have figured out the rules.

I have a copy, don't even know where I got it...flipped through it once and thought it looked like a cumbersome read, so didn't bother.

Using my Theory of Mind skills, it seems to me that Attwood has somewhat of a different motive here. It's more of a political motive, where he is promoting social diversity by portraying Aspies as people with a set of talents that are different, but are no less valuable to society, than NTs. I find this to be a backhanded complement, and for all of his extensive work with autism, he does seem to lack insight into the experience of autism. His role seems more a liaison between the AS community and the NT community, and less of a role of helping individual Aspies improve their lives.

According to his biography, he seems quite normal, with a wife and kids.
And no mention of him having Asperger's.

I went on Amazon.com and it referred me to a highly rated book by someone with Asperger's

https://www.amazon.com/Diagnosis-Asperg ... op?ie=UTF8
Very Late Diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (Autism Spectrum Disorder): How Seeking a Diagnosis in Adulthood Can Change Your Life 1st Edition
by Philip Wylie (Author), Luke Beardon (Foreword), Sara Heath (Foreword)

I read part of his book An Anthropologist on Mars, and found some of the things in that pretty weird.

He talked about the three aspects of autism being impaired social, sensory and imagination. I understand imagination has now been replaced with "executive function".

He said a few times about impaired imagination. But then in the same article he talks about visiting a family who are all on the spectrum, and how they had cooperated to develop a richly detailed fantasy world.

How confusing!

I believe Attwood is NT.

Most books on Aspergers are not very positive where NT's are concerned. The ones I have read said that you will never get emotional support and must have other sources to fill that need. That's why most relationships between Aspie men and NT women fail.

I see relationships between Aspies and NTs as a work in progress. There is an evolution in what the expectations are for folks on the spectrum. In Temple Grandin's time the hope was that you would be not be institutionalized. Next was the idea that getting a job and perhaps living on your own wasn't too much of a stretch. Now there are Aspies who expect to get into relationships in their early 20s.

But yet he has admitted to "Cassandra Affective Disorder" and that stroke some controversy among the autism community but if I remember correctly, he backed out of it.

I have the word in quotes because I don't really believe in it because if we are going to have that term, then it should apply to all disorders out there because anyone with a mental issue or with any disorder will put a strain on someone if they person isn't treated or doesn't get better or if they don't even make an effort to change. Why must we have this for only partners of autistic people. What about partners of borderlines or partners of those who have OCD or anxiety or partners of those who have ADHD or anger issues or Bipolar or schizophrenia or have a disease like Parkinson's or what about a term for families who deal with dementia or Alzheimer's? That is going to put stress on family members. What about families of autism? What about my own mother who had to raise me? They already have the term battered woman syndrome for women who are in domestic abuse or have battered child syndrome for a child that is abused.

And what about a label for parents raising normal children? I hear that normal kids put a strain on their parents.

But if you read books written by aspies it's more positive and you see the condition in a different light. So it's like if what we read about AS is true by NTs or are they all wrong or are aspies all just deluded about themselves and refuse to see the truth and accept it?

It's like when I got my son's evaluation report from the school district and it felt like I was reading about someone else's child and my mom read it and I asked her what she thought of it and she said it was all vague. I told her my son must be displaying different behavior in school because he doesn't act that way at home. That is what it's like with books about AS written by NTs and aspies. It's like we are reading about different people in NT books about aspies but read aspie books by aspies, we are reading about them.

It sounds like that book is both hating of and loving of autism... saying autistics will never get it and are just acting if they do, and that intuition can't be learned... then saying that autism is a talent and all that...