Anyone else feel like the diagnosis ruined their hapiness?

Post Reply New Topic

You react very emotionally to labels and dig out all the harmful misconceptions, stereotypes and associations (political views of Hans Asperger are really irrelevant to who you are) but it migh just be a sign of you having extremely hard time and unbearable anxiety on you at the moment.

The relavant questions are:
What do you feel? What do you like? What makes you happy? What annoys you? What is easy and what is hard for you?

There are no right answers to guess, only the true answers to find out.
I struggled with them a few years ago a lot but I was lucky to find an attentive therapist who encouraged me to name any feeling I could identify. With practice, it became a lot easier, thought the beginnings were really hard. I was probably as anxious as you are now, to the point I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't (derealization).

After you know who you are, the labels can't harm you because you know better.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm autistic and I'm happy to be alive. You've got to have a positive attitude. Happiness is a choice.

"I've not actually sat for a formal test, but I've spoken to people who know and they say that I am kind of on the line and also that it would be hard to assess me for certain, because the problem is I so desperately do not want to be ASD, and I know how to answer questions in a way that implies I am not, so it would just be hard to be honest."

You've been all over the place re: a diagnosis, being confusing and even evasive. If you have not been formally evaluated for and diagnosed with ASD you need to

a. stop using a label that doesn't apply to you and makes you unhappy and causes you to effectively tell truly Autistic ppl they should feel "less than" because of their condition

or

b. get evaluated and if diagnosed with ASD, deal with it

I wrote a nice long response and the security feature ate it. Meh.

My abbreviated response: I may fail the "Sally-Anne" test but NTs fail the "Sharon" test. Often I don't see it their way and they don't see it my way. Thank goodness! There's more in the world for it. I have received sufficient support to see this and other differences as GOOD (I still struggle, but it's more towards good), I see you were in a mostly abusive environment where difference was BAD. I would suggest that your abusive environment "ruined" your happiness - and understand the "A" word was used as a lever and has very negative associations b/c of that. I wish you the support and appreciation to get out from under the hugely negative messages you received. I am in a toxic workplace myself right now and while the NTs say there is "low morale", I find it Unbearable. I have to get out. The last time a was in a similarly toxic workplace a mentor told me I'd need time to recover, to find norm again after the oppression, to find balance. She was right. This is the same mentor that I failed a "Sally-Anne" test with - she was my boss and I didn't give her what she wanted (her perspective), I gave her what she needed (my perspective). She was upset at first then came back to me and was very impressed and suggested that I present things simply for my audience, then later extrapolate. I'm just discovering that I am Aspie; I think she knew a decade ago - but she treated me respectfully and appreciated whom I am, as I am. Also in a bad moment when I complained about being "too" sensitive, my therapist said "you are sensitive, that is wonderful, we need people like you." We need people like you. I hope you have people like that in your life and/or have more that come into your life... to help lift you up. And take what you see written in these replies and use it also - to feel your GOOD.

What is the "Sharon" test?

I can relate a lot to your story and situation. I too was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, with a sort of side note of maybe Asperger’s as well. I was assessed due to major issues with schoolwork and classroom behavior. Essentially, the older I got, the better I learned to cope with things to the point that I went through high school and college as more or less a normal student (i.e without any support or assistance). It seems like the older I got the better I got at all of the practical everyday life stuff. Eventually I even learned to make quite a few friends, but have always especially struggled romantically. In my late 20s I went back to my old diagnosis, remembered the Asperger’s part (which I had totally forgotten about), and was struck with grief and sadness. I have even gone for reassement this year (results positive), however it is a much murkier system as an adult. At this point, I am confident that I know enough such that I could intentionally get a positive or negative diagnosis depending on how I intentionally phrase things and present myself.

The truth is that there is no sure-fire test for autism. Until we figure out more about it, most of what we think about autism is speculation. If you get stuck in despair, remember that no one really knows what's going on, and neither do you! Don't kill yourself (literally or figuratively) over something you can't possibly even be sure about.

Since I can relate to your feelings, I wanted to respond to a few things you have mentioned in your various posts in the hopes that a different perspective might be helpful.

It seems to me that a lot of your anguish has come from people’s reactions to your ASD label. Ironically, this seems especially true of the therapists and social workers you have encountered along the way. I totally understand what it is like to be spoken down to and treated like things which are obvious need to be explained to you like you’re five. My advice is to take what these so-called professionals say with a large grain of salt! The truth of the matter is that a majority of services for autistic people are aimed at those who have the most trouble in life. They are aimed at people who might have comorbid intellectual issues, extremely severe social limitations, and great difficulty with self control. As such, the therapists and social workers who help out autistic folks fall into the trap of thinking that all autistic people are more or less the same. After all, all of their training is for people who need that kind of help. Some people do need to be reminded that you need to shake hands, and need detailed step-by-step instructions. If that kind of information is obvious to you, then those kinds of services are not going to be helpful.

The truth about autism is that not only does it exist as a spectrum of traits, but each trait exists on a gradient of functionality. This is even true for neurotypical people, who themselves are differently capable in different areas. If you try and asses yourself, your capabilities, and your limitations by using other people who are autistic as a proxy for yourself, you will never have an accurate picture or know how bad/severe anything really is. I think perhaps the sad truth is that, for the higher functioning, there isn’t much help that would be useful outside of emotional support.

Another thing that has clearly given you duress is the Sally–Anne test, and more importantly its implications on theory of mind. For one, you would certainly pass the Sally-Anne test now, you may well have passed at 4 too. You don’t know. You seem to be stuck on this idea that normal people are this certain way, and that you are so fundamentally different from that as to not even be human anymore. You talk about how you feel like you are merely an AI, just mimicking what it looks like to have a ‘soul’, but not totally human. It is my view that all people (including the Neurotypicals) are truly just the meat-robot you describe. The difference between the neurotypical and the neurodiversity is not that one is an ensouled high order being, and that the others are meat robots. We are all meat robots with slightly different wiring. A better comparison is probably to say that the difference is more similar to Windows and Mac OS or Linux. They all do the same fundamental things, just differently with different strengths and weaknesses. I think that you will find Neurotypicals are extremely averse to this idea. In a way, they almost cannot comprehend the idea that someone can think differently without it being somehow defective.

I will let you in on what I have found. Apes have lived socially together for millions of years. Because of this, apes have been cooperating, fighting, lying, and deceptive to one another for that long. For these reasons, it is extremely important (especially in the prehistoric past) to be able to asses other people’s intentions. Are they lying? Do they want to help? Is this a trap? These have been life and death questions for millennia. These are also extremely difficult questions to know about for sure. As a result, we have evolved ways to glean out such information (albeit imperfectly). This is why humans are so invested in our social rules and rituals. The idea is that people who have bad intentions will give themselves away in subtle ways, like ‘tells’ in poker’. This has huge implications for autistic people, especially people who are higher functioning and maybe only really struggle socially.

For one, this makes people hate the idea of explaining the rules. The user Dear_one aptly said in another thread, “Publishing the rules would just be surrendering to the cheaters.” I believe this concept goes a lot deeper than consciously believing that to publish the rules is to surrender to the cheaters. I believe that this is deep-seated and hard-wired into the more subconscious parts of the human brain. The essential premise goes that similarity is right, and difference is bad and scary. Ironically, this trait also makes humans irreparably bad at figuring out situations which are not more or less identical to our own. So, for example, you get tons of off-base theories about what autism is. Some of the false logic goes: They don’t show empathy the way we expect them too, so they must not have any empathy at all. They don’t communicate how they feel in a way we understand, so they must not have feelings at all. They don’t share the same predisposition to social rules and rituals, so they must not understand that other people have minds and feelings too.

The truth of the matter is that all people, even neurotypicals, are just animals! As Mona Pereth correctly pointed out, what neurotypicals have over the high functioning neurodiverse is similarity. They agree that caring about someone looks a certain way, and so anyone who doesn’t express it that way, to them, doesn’t care about anyone. I think that if there is one marked disability that can be ascribed to autism, it is that autistic people seem to fail to intuitively get what the pre-established rules are in society. Perhaps this is related to weaknesses in pattern recognition. But to not understand the rules is not the same as not having the capacity to care about them.

With all due respect, I would much rather be an autistic person than a person who is self-loathing.

You have choice of whether or not to hate yourself. I'd work on that first, and autism later or not at all.

I believe the belated discovery of AS has saved lives. Many older people had the transformative relief of knowing that the behaviours they had been so severely criticised or ostracised for decades were not moral failings, were not mental illness, were not some intrinsic personality fault, but a different neurology, characterised by many more brain connections than NT neurolology profiles. And they went on in many cases to begin to value their own unique capabilities.

I was a late self-discoverer and an even later diagnosed AS woman. It changed my life in remarkable ways, and it was a learning curve that may have saved my life.