'I am offended!'

Post Reply New Topic

Knowing yourself really well gives you really useful perspective, which is great--and really useful in handling those hypochondriacal tendencies. Learning from experience is priceless.

Not everyone has the same issues, but I am sure that being offended by ridiculous stuff is universal!

In essence, people have to listen to people's concerns, not dismiss them outright.

There are times, though, that people really need to "grow a pair." But they have to be encouraged to "grow a pair" in a diplomatic manner.

On wp, offended people often try to stop discussion of certain issues like questioning/criticizing self-diagnosis.
Often, the tactic is to make the people questioning/criticizing seem like bad people with bad motives.
The driving force seems to be hanging on and keeping up the self-diagnosis or identity no matter what.

I'm new to the site and accessing it via my mobile and managed to miss the fact there was more than one page of conversation, sorry. In the example you give I feel I can see where the conversation went wrong. You didn't include the thing that was key to your argument/view in your first post - I think you used the word excitement. The person who responded then refused to acknowledge it when you clarified it in your response to them. I'd say it's a given no-one would be happy with someone behaving in the way you described. In an ideal world they'd have asked you to elaborate and then discussed your views in full. They've essentially got annoyed at your first post and refused to let go of that emotion when you rationalised your view. I imagine your okay with self diagnosis if the person is respectful of the condition (although I don't really see the need to be sharing with everyone at such an early stage)? Over the years I have analysed such communication to death. Most messages are lost in communication. I hope you find a way to cope with such annoyances that suits you as your time is far to precious to be wasting on miscommunication. It can be soul destroying if others are witness to such behaviour and say nothing. I've found such behaviour has saved me a lot of time and upset nurturing relationships with people I'm clearly not meant to be friends with. Save your breath and typing fingers for people who get you or at least look for the good in your views, not the bad x

I generally find it useful to remember:
1) that interaction should aim to be a dialogue. We often come into discussions with the "end result" and conclusions already in the pocket, rather than entering a discussion as an arena, where the "result" and conclusions are made.
2) that a little bit of self-reflection helps in building bridges and opening the possibility for the above to happen. When you know yourself well - including the very human "weaknesses" and psychological motifs driving your actions, you know another human being a bit better too. When you know that you get hurt from the words and actions of others and that you don't truly know any other truth than yours, you maybe allow the same right also for the others a little bit easier.
3) that I ask myself first, is there at the end a need to think in a certain way behind my arguments and what is that need based on. Do I have an agenda, am I in between the lines actually e.g. paying back an earlier hurt.
4) that we are not just thinking and interacting in the world, but creating it as we do. We can add understanding and cooperation, or lessen it. We create hurt and lessen it.

I guess that's what happened, but I don't understand why it happens so easily. It feels to me that some people are looking to be offended and do not focus on what was truly said/written. Obviously I have been guilty of this before, everyone has, it's a learning process, but when a person persistently takes offense, it's a problem.



I don't support self-diagnosis nor official diagnosis as an identity. Not that I have a problem with somebody identifying with the fact that they're autistic (if officially diagnosed), but the primary reason for diagnosis should be to receive help or treatment and not to be able to refer to oneself as such. I lack trust in a person's self-diagnosis if they do not tell others that they have self-diagnosed when they say 'I have this' or 'I am this', because not only does that imply official diagnosis, but an ulterior motive, being that they could explain behaviours where relevant without attributing an identity. I'm not evil, but it doesn't take a genius to spot the potential bias there.

In terms of autism specifically, I have often thought that traits attributed to the diagnosis on WP are typical and sometimes ridiculous. Half the time you have people asking, for example, whether certain movements are stims, and I think that even correct answers are open to misinterpretation if a person is actively seeking a diagnosis.



Being that you brought up self-diagnosis, I suppose that's the primary area in which I feel backlash on WP. I'm very interested in the accuracy of diagnoses (including self-diagnoses) and love to discuss it, but half the time I don't get the chance to and am instead depicted as uncaring etc. or told that it has already been mentioned too many times. I think that if somebody is consistently offended by the discussion they should, you know, not read the thread?

It annoys me that I am unable to properly discuss the issue because of this, so I am excited when such threads arise, but that quickly dies after feeling a threat of being blasted. I feel to this date I have been unable to have an honest discussion regarding self-diagnosis.

I agree with your response.

I've self diagnosed myself having had it brought to my attention years ago and ignoring it. I've only told my partner and Sister I'm conviced i have it & want it to be private. My family and I were initially horrified someone had suggested I had Aspergers but acknowledged it was almost like reading my life story reading through the traits. We concluded it didn't matter. I am me. I've only revisited it as becoming a Mum has seemed to exacerbate it. I take zero offence at your stance. I'd love to think I always remember to include the fact I'm yet undiagnosed and unsure whether I want to be when stating I believe I have Aspergers as I'm a stickler for views not being stated as fact. I get why we all do it at times but some people are taking liberties (that guy in practically ever programme ever made on Egypt who states opinion as fact constantly comes to mind). Good luck coming to peace with this all in your head. I've personally avoided forums, comment sections & Facebook like the plague to save myself from the very topic you've raised.

Ty. What you wrote makes sense to me too.

I also have strong aversion to views being stated as fact. I suppose that's one of my major problems with readily disclosing any diagnosis, as no matter how ingenuous the reason for doing so, misinformation spreads this way and it romanticizes illness, especially if the person focuses on potentially psychologically beneficial traits in discussion. I think this is, in general, more likely to happen with self-diagnoses, because from what I've seen a self-diagnosis more often constitutes a strong identity/attachment with/to the label.

I think self-diagnoses like yours are helpful. The only potential problem I could foresee with such a diagnosis would be with physical illness, or serious mental illness where the person should not keep it privately but seek out an official diagnosis for treatment.

It's a common misconception that I am invalidating an individual's ability to 'know' themselves, as I never intend to pick out individual cases; I never really claim that any specific person's self-diagnosis is incorrect, I only have a problem with the concept of self-diagnosis in general. I also never intend to shame people for referring to themselves as Aspie or autistic, I think that can be positive. It's hard to distinguish my stance towards the identity aspect of disorders because my feelings are fairly intuitive and without a current example, there is no real context. I just establish that a person is more likely to be bias if their identity is involved.

Self-diagnosis was part of my inspiration for creating this thread but wasn't the sole reason for it. I find offense-taking widespread, but this is a good example. And don't get me wrong, offense-taking is often justifiable but it's a specific kind I refer to that's hard to point out.

I think you could be right. It's easier to get away with aggression on a social media site, they don't know who you are, and you can easily "hit and run."

50 years ago I knew I could get shot down in flames for saying I didn't believe in god, if I said it to the wrong people, which was most of them. These days I'm more likely to just be told that I'm entitled to my opinion. And Dad reckoned that people would get more offended by political opinions back in his day, that they'd even get into fist fights about it. So things don't look any worse to me than they've ever been, in real life.

It's always surprised me how easily offended people can be when faced with opinions that challenge their own. It's always about what how they think everybody should behave, and for me the weird thing is that most of the time, no matter who "wins" the argument, it'll make no difference to the way everybody behaves. But they way they go on, you'd think their pontifications were influencing a legislature or something.

I do feel people are easily offended these days (I don't think it's anything new, I think social media has made us notice it more) and I think why should people have to change things or avoid doing things because it might offend some people? Let's say someone is offended by the color red, should I stop wearing the color red on my clothes because it offends some people? I think people get offended over silly things. I used to think it was the Asperger's that made me not get it but I realized normal people have this struggle too because I also see them saying online how sensitive people are and say how PC things have gotten, bla bla bla so I know this is not an AS issue. Normal people are also struggling with this too.

For example, my aunt got offended when my mom told her she (her sister) was mad so my aunt got mad and said she never gets mad and my mom said "If it quakes like a duck" (however the saying goes) and my aunt was so pissed all because she got mad so my mom told her she was mad and that pissed her off more. Even my mother agrees that some people get offended too easily and there is nothing we can do about it, it just happens. It doesn't mean we always did something wrong when someone takes offense. Years ago I read a post online and it was by a mother who looked at a daycare for her daughters and the daycare was a mess, it violated a lot of health codes and one of her daughters dug up a pair of scissors in the yard (or was it a knife? I don't remember) and I remember the home was filthy so I wrote it was a good thing she checked that place off before dumping her kids off there and she got very offended by that comment and called me ignorant. I was like what? I told my mom this story years later and my mom told me that woman was just being too sensitive, lot of people use the word dump to mean they dropped their kids off somewhere or their partners like they will say "I dumped my kids off at school on the way to work." Then she said it may have been cultural because in some areas people may use that word but in other areas it may mean something else entirely different. But I remember afterwards lot of people including my husband told me the word dump has a negative meaning to it. But my mom didn't think so so she said it may be cultural then with that word. Then that would mean it was just a big misunderstanding due to region differences because of a different culture. That woman was from the midwest if I remember correctly. I am on the west coast.

I do often wonder though is how can we tell if we are in the wrong or if someone is being too sensitive?

I know as*holes will often use this "You are too sensitive" tactic to dismiss your feelings and all and to continue being a dick and not care about your feelings and there are times when this is not what it's about at all when someone gets offended what we say or do.

It seems that often, when a person is angry, telling them that they're angry only makes their anger worse. I suppose the reason why it's called "mad" is that anger is like a mild form of insanity, so pointing out the obvious is counterproductive, just like it is with really insane people. Another way of looking at it is that to accuse somebody of being angry can sometimes be taken as playing an "I'm OK, you're not OK" game, it can appear to be invalidating the other person's words. Different people react differently, and it depends on the exact situation too, but I think it's usually better to avoid saying "you're angry," and instead to try to give some kind of reassurance or use some other way of calming them down.


She must have taken the word "dumping" in the "disposal of the unwanted" sense of the word. I guess she must have felt insecure about her attitude to her kids, and the use of the word triggered that insecurity. It seems strange, because she'd just shown how laudably protective she was towards them (by rescuing them from a care centre that had lax safety and hygiene standards), but I think it's often like that, people's guilt feelings can be massively out of tune with their actual behaviour. You touched a nerve that you couldn't have been expected to know she had, and she became hostile. Such are the dynamics of flare-ups between human beings.


I don't think there is any good method, except perhaps at the extremes, such as when somebody is obviously baiting somebody, or when somebody flies off the handle at the tiniest provokation, and even there things aren't always what they seem. But with the grey area in the middle, I don't think there's any way of telling, it's rather like the notion of fair play, or right and wrong. Nobody can read minds well enough to know who's genuinely hurt and who's faking indignation, or who is having to walk on more eggshells than they should be expected to cope with. It's possible to invoke the general popular consensus sometimes, and to argue that most people would consider a particular comment offensive or inoffensive, but I'm not sure that the majority is always right. Much of the time I think all we can do is guess, and to try and stay open-minded as fresh evidence comes in, and hope that we manage to get it about right.

The way that I think someone is more likely oversensitive is if they have a pattern of oversensitive behavior and often get offended. If someone doesn't show this pattern over time, but gets offended one time over one thing, then I wouldn't think that person is oversensitive.

Another type of behavior is when a person often says that others need to take their feelings into account, like they are entitled to have others consider their feelings all the time. But they usually say it in a way like others should be considerate of all people's feelings, but I think they really mean their own feelings, as they also say nasty things about other people that don't fit in with what they want others to do for them.

I recently got a group of women mad at me because I "wasn't focusing on systemic racism against blacks in America." That was possibly the most bizarre thing ever. They came on my post where I was asking why someone blocked me and started saying I was racist, but refused to give examples of where I'd been supposedly racist, and I finally figured out that it was because I wasn't touching on one specific subject.

And then

I never did get a straight answer out of that 200+ comment thread...

And then yesterday a cousin posted against abortion and posted a picture of a tiny doll that was modeled after a newborn and claimed that's what 12 week old fetuses look like, I said, "While I agree with the idea, I hate abortion, I feel like using pictures that are incorrect only hurts the message." Which was apparently the wrong thing to say as she went on a rant as if I had personally attacked her... I really don't think I did, and I still believe that portraying a fully developed newborn as a 12 week old fetus is lying and unnecessary.

You made a logical point, but in my experience, anti-abortionists are often extremely touchy like that, and simply don't want their belief questioned. Some issues are incredibly thorny and best avoided unless it's really important to wade in. Hmmm......is your cousin religious?

sadly... she's my cousin's wife, I've never met her myself, but talking online I've seen a lot of fear and deeply religious stuff (if you read anything about that naacp ex-president who is white, same family). They seem to have this deep fear that the world is going to erode everything they believe in and homosexuals are going to force Christian pastors to marry them...

I had a feeling she might be. Funny old thing, that.


I don't know much about the NACCP apart from that they supported the Little Rock Nine in 1957, which seemed laudable enough. You're saying the NAACP isn't all that it seems?


I've noticed first-hand how extreme some of the followers of intense religions can be, and it's very scary stuff. I saw it in otherwise perfectly sweet people while I was in Arkansas. To argue with them would offend them terribly, because they really do seem to absolutely believe some hideous things. Some of their preachers have much to answer for, IMHO.