When others insinuate you're lying, do you feel dishonest?

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See, that is what really got me thinking about this topic. I often have feelings I associate as guilt but do not really do lots of things I should feel guilty, so it makes me wonder if it is guilt at all. I tend to be a very anxious person in general. I cannot really relate to your description of feeling like you are lying, as I cannot recall the last time I was even accused of lying, but there were a couple a times years ago where I was accused of stealing. Luckily for me it was proven untrue, but it was a very upsetting and I think I know where you are coming from.

I can very much relate to this. Funny how we humans are, eh? We can hear ten good things and one bad thing, but the bad one is what we recall.

Thanks hmmmn, I would give that a try. Actually, ironically, a lot of my bad "memories" that pop up and haunt me are always events when these types of interactions were used. These types of interactions caused the event to be emotionally devastating, which is the emotionally devastating events are the cause of my "memories". I usually talk out loud trying to get rid of them. This is where the "vent' would be playing in my head, and who ever was involved I would use the whole talking over them technique at them to get rid of them. Even though physically the event and the person is not there, but in my head they are and I use the technique to get the way i wanted the result to end with me being correct, and not the way it actually ended with them being correct. Maybe this time I can be brave enough to actually pull that in real life. thank you again Hmmmn.

I'm in the same situation. When I'm in very bad shape, I keep going for emotional support to the last therapist I had. But she never heard of AS and doesn't want to read about it. She also claims that all my symptoms are caused by childhood trauma and that if I have a degree of Autism or not is not really important. She has nothing to offer me in way of helping, but if I whine to her enough and I'm in too bad shape, she'll give me a tip or two of what to do in a specific situation with NTs at work or the landlord and such. Quite frustrating, but in this country we don't have therapists who treat people with high functioning kinds of Autism, and if there is one somewhere, it probably costs a full salary per session and is probably less effective than figuring things out on your own because they're still so ignorant about the whole AS thing. So I don't look for one. Besides, from experience around here, when a specialist knows they're alone in the business, they have an ego that makes your life hell.

I feel angry and helpless maybe.
I have had more than one person say to me that one can always tell a person is lying if they won't look you in the eyes...this must have meant that they thought everything I was saying to them must have been a lie.

Also...the doctor at the ADD clinic thought that I was lying...possibly for the same reason....and that really made me feel really angry and helpless....

Indeed. That's a good idea about a student therapist; I'll investigate that. Thank you!




Identity is key here. For example, before diagnosis, I would try to describe my autism-related experiences and be told "Don't worry. Everyone does that." This occurred even when they believed me to be autistic. They didn't want to deal with such issues, even when it was part of their job. My identity was very fragile around that time and such comments and evasions, being an invalidation of the new context with which I could frame lifelong unexplained experiences, would interfere with my sense of reality. I would find myself wondering whether the past therapists were actually correct that my problem was neurosis due to trauma or superiority complex. I felt suddenly morphed into their opinion of me.

This is similar to my undergraduate years when the professors assumed I had little ability and should leave academia; I believed I was unintelligent for many years because they always treated me as such. Any evidence of ability would be explained away as me strategising during tests or as due to the way in which class grades were were calculated that year. I was partially mute back then and they projected all sorts of attributes onto me. I wonder how they would react to clearcut evidence of intellect--say through IQ test score--and whether they would find a way to explain that away too, such as when one prof read I'd finished school top of the yeargroup and it didn't change his opinion in the slightest. It does remind me of brainwashing techniques, because attack on identity is part of that process.


Greentea: Do you find that although there might be a helpful tip or two, after the therapy you realise it has caused even more damage? For example, resulting in obsession over all the insults and reasoning errors to the point of chronic insomnia and rage/trauma? It's very difficult to drop a therapist when they are the only option. It takes me a couple of sessions to do so now--still too long--whereas in the past I'd keep returning for weeks or months with it causing more damage each time.

Yes, that bothers me too, even when I've no direct evidence that the other person believes that particular half-truth. When I asked my GP for an AS referral, I found myself looking at a sign on the wall behind her and to her right. I kept thinking I should deliberately make myself look her in the eye to try and register my sincerity, but I was also aware that she might have taken that as meaning I didn't have AS, if she was aware of the Aspie traits. Talk about damned if you do, damned if you dont! Towards the end of the interview I began to look at her face to some extent, but found myself looking at her nose and ears. And all the way through the interview I felt that she didn't bellieve a word I was saying, and that I was just faking the whole thing. I almost wanted her to call me a liar, in the hope that it might galvanise me and get me onto my high horse. In reality I haven't a clue whether she believed me or not, or whether she cared one way or the other.


I'm very preoccupied with the negative side of pretty much everything. I suppose I couldn't be such a perfectionist if I wasn't. No blissful ignorance here! It's often a depressing way to be, but it has its good side - it makes me very good at protecting myself from harm and failure, because I notice so many potential problems before they happen.

outlier, when she gives me a tip, it usually solves the problem immediately with the NT in question. So I feel relieved. What she does is tell me what lie the person in question obviously wants to hear from me. I have another acquaintance that gives me a tip once in a while too. In the past it was my sister, but I cut contact with her after a lifetime of abuse. Any NT with a bit of good will can give you this kind of tips. Most of them won't, though.

And I sooo know what you mean when the therapists invalidate all your hard-reached explanations of what the problem is and then you're back in the horrible loop of self-blame and self-doubt, the same craziness we lived in before hearing of AS. I spent years like that, until I was blessed to hear of WP. I don't even want to remember those horrendous times, but it's good to be reminded that I've come such a long way.

I had the opposite problem at the grammar school - they put me in to do three 'A' levels, and I soon realised that I was out of my depth, so I asked if I could cut down to two, which a couple of the other kids had already done. The deputy head turned down my request on the grounds that I was obviously bright enough to pass, and shouldn't therefore waste the opportunity to maximise my qualifications.

There was a lot at stake because 3 good 'A' levels would have got me into university, but I was already anticipating that being stuck alone in a strange city with even more pressure would very likely doom me to failure and massive stress, but I was hoping that if I just got a nice job locally then I might be able to cope with that. But the guy wouldn't hear of it, and told me to curtail my social activities (which were almost zero anyway) so that I would have more time to study. The truth was, I just couldn't understand much of what the teachers were teaching and was completely lost during most of the lessons. After a horrible time trying to swot up on work that largely made no sense to me, I scraped through with three grade E passes, the lowest grade consistent with a pass, and therefore couldn't easily go to university anyway.

I was half expecting pressure to go through "clearing house" (a system which gave out spare university places for any old place that was doing the course), but to my relief nobody bothered. I eventually got a job, and at the interview the head of department kept implying I was a fool for not going to Uni......I kept quiet about my reasons, as I didn't fully understand them myself in those days, and thought he'd just put me down as lazy, like the deputy head had done. In fact I thought it was either incorrigible bone idleness or brain damage.

When others insinuate that I'm lying I sometimes wonder if I am and am not realizing it, and then I feel bad. Or I feel bad that I let them think that, that I caused them to feel that I was lying to them. Because I hate being lied to.