"How can you love me?"

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I am the mother of an Aspie teen girl. My daughter cannot understand how I can love her. Do you have any advice about how to explain this in a way that she is able to comprehend? I've tried comparing how much she loves animals to my love for her with no success. Any suggestions?
Thanks.

Why does she think you don't love her?

i think maybe she can come to the knowledge that you do on her own.

Mmmm... well yes, it depends. First of all ask her why she thinks that you don't love her.

I think is nurting instict, I love my daughter with all of myself, is pretty difficult to understand untill you don't have children (I've Asperger too and I never loved someone like my child).

I know that talking about nurting istinct seems to "discard" in some way what we usually call loves, but yet. I think that the difficult part for an Aspie is:

1) understanding emotion (so love is one).
2) lack of empathy (so we have problem finding them in others)

but we (at least the majority) understand caring. Every animal care for its outspring, its natural.

By the way you must still consider that being an adolscent aspie is being 2 things:
1) being aspie
2) being adolescent

And problems with parents expecially in the emotional district are pretty common in all adolescents.

some of us Aspies can't feel love from others. We can intellectually understand but our receptors are not wired up to connect with that feeling in our 'hearts'. I spent 99% of my life thinking other people did not like me, nor love me, to come to find out late in life that - of course they did! I just didn't have the receptors wired up and the connection flowing to feel it. I am finding work arounds for this, now that I know.
Perhaps this is what is going on with your girl.

it happens.

Merle

According to my mother the answer is "Because I'm your mother." This was occasionally followed by "And I'm supposed too."

All in all, what actually explained that to me was my dogs, in particular the broodmother. Seeing an animal care for it's child and then relating it to humans made sense. After that, I was able to make coorelations with others as well, from cats to cattle to deer to spiders. At that point I understood that all mothers love their children, it's instinct. Course, that only lasted up until I started to study some sharks and saw that the mother would eat the children if they didn't swim away fast enough while the mother was birthing. Kinda destroyed my original theory, but it didn't matter by that point because I was still able to use instinct to answer that SOME species of mothers will love their children.

Does she love herself? You can’t expect others to love you if you don’t love yourself. If she does love herself try to explain to her that you were once joined but now you are separate but still one.

+1

I understand that my dad, mom and sister "love" me.

I still don't know what that means. I still can't say that I "feel" anything for them. I can say I love them only because if I didn't care at all for them, I would move away and never talk to them again, but that's about the limit of how I comprehend a relationship with them.

Even when they want me to hug them, it makes me very uncomfortable.

You being the NT parent, you have to get into your daughter's head. She might have some affection for you, but she may not understand the feeling, how to show it, may not even recognize the feelings.

She deals with emotions by putting them into an intellectual context, and there is no way to reduce "love" to an intellectual equation. She sees no rational reason why you should love her. You would not be able to come up with a "rational" reason for why you love her.

This is an issue that I am working on with my psychologist now.

I can glibly say that I love my parents and that I love my partner, but to be honest, it feels like a form of words to me.

My parents and I have a wealth of shared experience. I learned many of my skills from them, and we share many common interests. This is to be expected when you spend your formative years in a home that is shaped by your parents likes, dislikes and interests.

My partner and I have shared a home (well, nine homes, in four different cities, in three countries) for almost 19 years. Our relationship has survived the usual range of swings and roundabouts. If it were to dissolve tomorrow, I would doubtless go through a great deal of stress--but I am not sure that it would have a significant emotional impact upon me beyond that.

Oh so very true. This is why I still can't comprehend love and grief. There is no intellectual way to define love. Is it exceptionally strong friendship? Of course, the way I define a friend others have told me that IS love. Strange to my thinking, because if that's true, then I have a lot more friends by others definition and there are actually people that I love. But by mine, I have 3 friends and no loves, either familial, brotherly, or significant other type.

I don't even feel love for my own family or husband.

Actually there is a rational way to define love, simply it's not properly love. I never understood why in english there is 1 word = love. There are so many kind of love (for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Loves ).

The love a mather usually have for a child is composed of nurting instinct (so is an instinct like being ungry) and affection (if you stay a long time with someone you have affection). After all "love" is a pretty empty word but actually you can feel love with brain, I know because I do, so it's possible.

When I was a teenager my self esteem was so low that I never thought anyone would even love me or want me. Even today I sometimes ask my husband how he could love me when Im so difficult sometimes. You might want to try pointing out all the things you love about her or even list them on paper...sometimes we just need to know what makes us special. Its really hard for my 17 year old daughter to even accept her diagnosis so she rejects it. I think she believes it is something that makes her less attractive its been helping her lately to point out her good points...be they aspie or otherwise. I think sometimes your kids know that you love them but they need to know why....Of course I dont know your situation so I can only give you what I see on my end.

Explain love good luck

One of the reasons why I like Japanese! There are several words for love, and they all imply different things.

I didn't feel loved as a teenager, because I thought that my parents hated me for having obsessions and talking about them. I also felt that they hated me, because I was a tomboy, and I wore my hair in a 60s fashion. I felt that my parents hated me at the age of 12, because of my accent, and they made it very clear that they didn't want me to have an accent, in a very nasty way..."Don't talk through your nose!" I also felt that my parents hated me, because early on in high school, my grades were suffering.