Grieving decades of naivete

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ephemerella, that awesome post should be given much ampler coverage on WP. I'm certainly copy-pasting into my file of AS texts to keep. It's the kind of stuff that Aspies should be taught in social skills training (and not how to listen and ask questions, which is BS and gets you nowhere but further kicked - from experience).

One question about it: how come the simplest, most stupid of NTs manages to play this extremely complex and challenging game without failure?

Yes, this is just the way I feel, too. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock, and go back in time again with the knowledge that I have now. I realize that for so much of my life, I was clueless about certain (social) things, just WAY on the "wrong track"! I guess we have to learn by trial and error, and unfortunately there´s going to be a lot of error.

I have also experienced a lot of betrayal and rejection, like most. When I made the discovery of AS, I went through this process of going back to all my difficult experiences, and reliving them, but seeing them now in an AS perspective. This was very difficult. However, I still feel better than before; at least now I realize that I did the best that I could, whereas before I just thought I was stupid and ignorant.

I had a very politically minded guy I worked with basically steal my job out from under me. He would ask me for favors, simple stuff, which I would obligingly do, and then he would always say, "thanks. You're such a giver." with this total smirk. I knew I'd been boned, again! but it worked for him everytime, and I never saw it coming, although I did learn to hate his guts. This is a tough thread to read. Looking at this site got to be too much for awhile..

gee...i suspect a few of us relate to the above post!!

well, I almost made it to 50 before I found out...

I just have a feeling of relief. I was lucky enough to get a place that works for me, fixing printers (less contact with humans, though I can fake that..., and a mainly unsupervised day. I'm getting better at realizing my AS behavior ( albeit after I've done it, but it makes damage control easier...

But, yes, looking back over my life, I've been able to reinterpret things that confused me, and boy, did I make some bonehead mistakes...

One way for me to say this is that I have certain theories about this, that may not be really valid. My theories involve how I think NTs experience reality, based on how they interpret their sensory information flow differently than AS. Basically, I think they have more filters and managers over their sensory flow than we do, so that they can "make believe" better than we can (imaginative role play), whereas we are more firmly immersed in an objective reality because of our sensory system's more direct "wiring". So my theory says that AS are more immersed in a sensory-oriented connection to the external world, which makes us more grounded in an objective reality. And that NTs have certain filters and imaginative functions that enable them to role-play and pretend more easily than we do.

My feeling is that the abstract social skills of NTs are a grown-up version of the imaginative role playing and pretending that NTs do as children. As adults, they create personality games and play them out, not realizing they are games. So they can act one way when they are dealing with you one-on-one, but appear to become totally different people when they are in a group, but they have no sense that they acting different, even though they even treat you differently. So NTs act one way when they are in a pair, another way when they are in groups, and another way when they are in institutions (like armies and churches). But they have no sense that they are being inconsistent. What happens is they don't change as they move from one social environment to another, but their sense of the game changes. And the games they play are only adult versions of the pretend and role-playing they played as children.

The stupidest NTs can do this because the game-playing takes up a lot of brain activity. So the more social NTs are, usually, the more shallow and simple they are in other ways, as their brain is engaged in the game. That is why charming NTs appear shallow, as well.

I love the Idea of the "omega wolf". That's a great concept, I have been real aware of the whole alpha/beta thing, it never dawned on me I might not be on the game board at all. Kind of like playing "Risk" and you think you're making a stand for Australia, and everybody else thinks you're on Neptune. I thought I was rolling the dice, but I never even got a turn.

Yeah this thread is tough to read. I agree with a lot of what has been written, and I would say that for me naivete is probably the worst aspect of Aspergers, and has caused the most pain and anger over the years... I still find it almost unbelievable how devious people can be. Why can't people just be straightforward and say what they mean, mean what they say. That was my mantra as a kid and still is, if I'm honest. Trying to 'get this' is almost impossible I find. Intelligence just doesn't do it. Whatever I need is lacking and I don't think I can learn it. I have tried to stop caring so much about it, but it's like a sore that never really heals. You know you're going to get shafted again sooner or later, but it always feels like the first time. Thanks everyone who posted in this thread. It's honest conversation like this that makes WP so valuable. Thanks for sharing such personal experiences. And yes, I do feel it's worth grieving over.

This is right on, the whole filter thing, I totally agree with you. I think NT people maybe a little more convinced that their ego/mask is "real" and so they play the game much more convincingly and ferociously. I could never take it seriously, and was always trying to analyze the game which is not at all the same as playing it. I could analyze the hell out of it, but the huge empty vacant part of the picture, I could never see myself in the interaction.

When you're the "odd wolf out" I think it may be easy to over-estimate the successes and failures of NT's. It may just look effortless to us. I think the existence of magazines like Cosmo and GQ and all the rest speak to the horrible social insecurities they experience too. It's just that even when they are losing at least they are playing. I think that's how you get 'beta" dog cliques and why they can be even more vicious that the top dogs. Noblesse oblige constrains some overt excess of the top-most, they at least want to appear to be "charitable" in their interaction with the "less fortunate". It adds to their prestige. It's the second rung middle manager and Petit bourgie bean-counter who will rip you to shreds. Beware the slighted meter-maid.

I know exactly how you feel, greentea. I'm your age and like you, was only recently diagnosed. I too often cringe about events in my earlier life, like when I was the unwitting butt of so many practical jokes by people I thought were my friends and those moments when I finally realized people were laughing at me, not with me. Doesn't happen now but those memories have left their scars. I am always suspicious of people’s motives and have become very touchy about anything that sounds like it might be an insult. I can be an angry, surly person.

Yes, I know what you mean. It is a thing with NTs that they believe their own games... makes them more convincing and compelling actors in their social scripts and game... whereas AS cannot so easily transport themselves into these games and that is the root of the abstract social skills disability.

I'm another old guy that's gone through almost all of my life trying to figure out what it was I was doing wrong that everybody else seemed to be doing correctly without any effort. Maybe my perspective is a little different than the thoughts others have expressed.

A lot of events from my past are extremely painful to recall. A dozen times a day I hear myself say out loud, "Don't think about that." I work alone all day, so there's nobody around to form an opinion.

Still, as far as the overall pattern goes though, I don't have a lot of regrets, a few specific ones, but not too many. I don't see how anything I could have done in the past could have made things better than they were.

Since I'm now aware that people dislike me because I'm an aspie, so I'm incapable of acting right, people don't like me any better than they did before. Understanding the source of the problem hasn't led to a lot of insights about solutions.

So I ain't much troubled by regrets. Despair and loneliness, sure, but not regrets.

i relate to parts of this. I encounter regrettable instances and occasions about my life a lot at the moment, because i am going through my visual/mental files and am finally understanding all these previously unanswerable and unfathombale traits and naive approaches to things from the new paradigm of having AS. Many times a day i am left with the visual scenes and movies in my brain - all these past incidents and occurrences - and i am flabergasted by how naive and trusting i have been. i still have that tendency and people i know in the art scene where i live tell me i am like a kid when it comes to overdisclosing stuff and helping others and getting done over. I have some people who actually watch out for me now. They know i have AS and they are there for me and i can run things over with them and they kind of guide me a bit and let me know when i am being gullible. i feel fortunate to be getting this feedback from them and also getting the same kind of answers and guidance from coming to WP.

Warning: may be even tougher to read than the rest of the thread so far.

I hadn't noticed this was a tough thread to read. But now I think about it, I guess cuckoldness IS a tough subject...

Yes, ephemerella, I had thought as much - that the reason for NTs' shallowness is that so much of their mental energy and efforts are geared towards social pretense and social competition, rather than exploration of reality and formation of insight. I think this is in a nutshell the difference between NTs and Aspies - and I hope someday the "experts" learn THIS and reflect THIS in their writings, rather than all kinds of sub-symptoms that are actually various results of this basic difference, such as inability to do smalltalk, obsessive interests, difficulty reading faces, yada yada. We're geared to different goals, so we've become good at different skills. Maybe even at mutation level.

millie, having people who watch out for you and alert you is the most important help. This is the opposite of what I got from my parents and therapists. They reinforced my cuckoldness by adding to my gullibility and naivete the opposite of Theory of Mind: instead of teaching me that humans are mostly about pretense for social escalation and to read between the lines and join the dots about a person rather than believe them literally, they taught me that all humans are kind and sincere in all their dealings with others (except for very rare cases) and if they ever weren't, it was because I had done something to deserve it. So I was doubly a cuckold for the first 4 decades of my life: always blaming myself for others' heartlessness.

It was by reading a certain book and observing things and meeting a person who opened my eyes that I one day discovered I was living like the sky was green and the grass was blue. I ran to my family and my therapist, excited with the new discovery, and they were furious - the convenient cuckold was there no more to give all her hard-earned salary to get improved, and make untold efforts as a giver so others would be less cruel.

And yes, snuuz, I've become very touchy and mistrusting, observing interactions with people thoroughly for any signs of dislike / disrespect of me hidden in seemingly "bad luck" episodes: when they don't answer a question that's important to me and alas seem to have forgotten to answer it, when they talk over me seeming alas not to have heard me, when I make a small but telling step forward in our closeness and they don't make one of their own in turn, or seem alas not to have noticed mine or politely decline it (whatever the reason they need to decline) never to make one of their own. Etc. etc. All these people are outta my heart (even if I may continue a phony relationship with them if it's convenient to me). I may be too distrustful nowadays, but today I'd rather err on the side of caution than add yet one more memory to cringe about. And my only requirement is that they appreciate me rather than drip into me their covert aggression and/or rejection in these seemingly episodes of "alas! bad luck this time".

As I write this post, memories of my gullibility come flooding me. I remember I had a very close friend in college who had a very close friend whom I really appreciated and wanted so much to be friends with. However, this person was nice to me always but never wanted to get closer. We were alone in this country, our families far away, yet when that woman would invite my friend for dinner (my friend and I were flat mates), she'd never invite me as well. The only time she expressed a desire to meet with me was when she and my friend had a fallout and she wanted to talk it over with someone who knew my friend well, for insight. I remember myself coming to HER house ! ! I thought (cuckold me) that she now wanted to get closer to me. I never heard from her again, of course, till a few years later when she suddenly called me long-distance from a faraway country she was living in!! I was so flattered, so hopeful, so happy!! We chatted on the phone and she said she'd call again, but I never heard from her again. It was only a month or so ago, decades after those events, that I noticed: we were both in the same profession and she was gauging the possibility of coming back to live in this country and the phone conversation had been mainly questions from her to get an idea of how much work she could find here, how much money she could make here, what the prospects were in our profession at the time here. I had all the info, all the market research at the tips of my fingers, I was into the field hard then. I had given her all the info for free (people PAY good money for these market research things!!). This is how much of a cuckold I was for 4 decades. I have tons of other examples, which I'll spare from you.

Ever since I stopped being a cuckold, people who know me from back then still call sometimes and are flabbergasted to see a new me who sees their attempt at using me from a mile and responds in their own phony language (eg: oh, our profession...yeah, I don't know much really, but I'll try to find out for you...Why don't you tell me about our prospects where YOU are.")

I see you now have your Snoopy avatar. Very nice!

And yes I have experienced similar stuff to this thread, even as recently as 2 days ago.