Do Aspies stand annoying Aspie behaviour better than NTs do?

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LtlPinkCoupe
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08 Jul 2012, 8:39 pm

I met a young man with Aspergers one night when my family and I went to a restaurant with him and his parents...my parents and his parents sat at one end of the table, and he, my sisters and I sat at the other end. Once all four of us were on our own, this young man started telling me all about his interests - these included his collection of German beer steins and this Pirates of the Carribean online game he liked the play - he told me all about how he'd modded out the pirate ship he used on the game, and that his beer stein collection included steins with lids that popped open when you pressed a button - and I thought they only made the kind where you had to push down on a small lever attached to the lid and lift it manually!

His mom kept leaning over and thanking me for being so patient with him, and I just kept telling her, "No, no, it's fine - I'm learning a lot from him!" And I truly was - I wasn't just saying that. :)

So, yeah, I don't personally know many people with Asperger's IRL (altho I did once have a friend who had lower - functioning autism and would mostly repeat what she'd heard from people around her, but she seemed to like me a lot, and I liked her :) ) but the ones I do know (or have known) I didn't find annoying in the slightest.

However, there was one girl I knew once who was actually really kind of mean to me (like pathologically controlling, doing everything for me and making me feel incompetent, among other things), but I think she may have had more going on than autism or AS.


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CockneyRebel
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08 Jul 2012, 8:58 pm

Lecks wrote:
CockneyRebel wrote:
I would tolerate it better than the average person would. I do it, because I don't want to hurt the other person the way that I've been hurt by intolerant people.

That's easier to say than to do.

I've met a grand total of 2 confirmed aspies, one of whom was quite like me; straight to the point the rare occasions he talked and always about general topics to avoid falling into a rant, whereas the other one was very clingy and didn't know when to shut up. (<- my annoyance shining through)

So no, being an aspie does not give us the magical ability to tolerate every other aspie.


That's just your opinion.


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09 Jul 2012, 4:35 pm

No



ToughDiamond
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09 Jul 2012, 6:32 pm

Moondust wrote:
My father used to "trap" us too, and my mother would relate to people by letting them monologue to her for hours (I had to endure it in my home), so I grew up to be allergic of monologuers.

Another one here.......it does help me to curb my own monologue tendencies to remember how Dad used to overexplain things. In that way I think Aspies can be quite good for each other, as a mirror for how some of our own social ineptitude impacts on people. Not necessarily pleasant at the time of course.



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09 Jul 2012, 8:55 pm

MONKEY wrote:
I understand aspie-isms, but they're still just as annoying to me as it would be if I was NT.


Yep.



Moondust
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10 Jul 2012, 3:11 am

ToughDiamond wrote:
I think Aspies can be quite good for each other, as a mirror for how some of our own social ineptitude impacts on people.


I don't know to what extent most aspies can use other aspies as models to learn what not to do. At least for those with NLD, we are unable to learn social-appropriate behavior from observation of others or self-observation. That's why it's ultimately a "learning" disorder. I stopped monologuing decades after I became conscious of how much it bothered me in others. I was unaware of it in myself. I guess it depends on severity level of the dysemia we each have, whether we are able to override the dysemia meaningfully by applying effort or not. My dysemia is so pronounced that my above-average intellectual abilities and all my incredible efforts never managed to compensate for the dysemia so much as to make a difference in my quality of life. Rourke says all aspies have NLD, but I don't know how true that is. If it works for you, great, though.


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ToughDiamond
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10 Jul 2012, 9:26 am

Moondust wrote:
ToughDiamond wrote:
I think Aspies can be quite good for each other, as a mirror for how some of our own social ineptitude impacts on people.


I don't know to what extent most aspies can use other aspies as models to learn what not to do. At least for those with NLD, we are unable to learn social-appropriate behavior from observation of others or self-observation. That's why it's ultimately a "learning" disorder. I stopped monologuing decades after I became conscious of how much it bothered me in others. I was unaware of it in myself. I guess it depends on severity level of the dysemia we each have, whether we are able to override the dysemia meaningfully by applying effort or not. My dysemia is so pronounced that my above-average intellectual abilities and all my incredible efforts never managed to compensate for the dysemia so much as to make a difference in my quality of life. Rourke says all aspies have NLD, but I don't know how true that is. If it works for you, great, though.

I agree that simply getting a taste of one's own medicine doesn't necessarily lead to improvement, and I don't mean to overstate my success. It took me decades to fix my monologuing, and it's not completely sorted out even now, but without that mirror I'd still be wondering why people get so bored with interesting things. I found a sure-fire cure - to simply not talk - but of course that's no better than the disease, but that led me to see that the problem was part of the start-stop impairment, and that I had to master the art of one-liners. Then I somehow noticed that it was usually possible to cut all but the first sentence of what I wanted to say, without losing much of the meaning, which made me less afraid of shortening my output. I got very into this idea of reciprocal conversation, and realised that it's actually easier to let go of my imagined duty to hand over a data dump of everything I know about a given subject, and to just sit back and let them do their fair share of the work. I started to look at my behaviour and ask "if all I want to do with my friends is to talk at them, why don't I just use a stuffed dummy?" Finally I realised that some people will help me to avoid monologuing, by cutting in on me or looking bored, and some who are natural victims....they're usually the nicest of people so I feel I owe it to them to make a bit of extra effort not to trap them.

I think Aspies do usually learn..........not sure about dyssemia and NLD, but the symtoms look so Aspie-like that I can't see how anybody could differentially diagnose the 3 conditions. I would think that there would be some traits that got better as soon as the behaviour was identified, others that would never go away, and between the extremes there would be a lot that could be worked on.

I guess a lot depends on the individual and their circumstances. A benign mentor or social coach of some sort could do a lot of good........even a video camera could speak volumes about my posture and body language, if only I could set one up without making people think I was insane. Conceptually it shouldn't be all that hard to make improvements - I'm sure it's just a matter of getting the feedback at the time, like a driving instructor would give.



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10 Jul 2012, 9:36 am

I think that genrally, an aspie would try to put forth more effort to tolerate it than an NT, especially if he knew why the other person was acting that way, or that they couldn't help acting that way or it would be very uncomfortable for them not to.

But I also don't think we as a group, stand annyong anything better than NT's. I think dealing with annoying behavior and traits may be harder for a good deal of us, but as I said, I'd think that many would try harder to put up with it than NT's even if by trying hard we still werent able to put up with it well at all.


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10 Jul 2012, 10:49 am

Well, I don't understand why Rourke says that all AS have NLD, when a central trait of NLD is extreme difficulty with math, science and visio-spatial abilities in general. As opposed to aspies, we could never be engineers, programmers or scientists.


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10 Jul 2012, 4:38 pm

If difficulty with science is a pre-requisite of NLD, then he must be wrong. My only big difficulty with science is resisting the temptation to apply it to everything.