When you're raised in a undx'd aspie family...

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How the heck are you supposed to know what's "normal"? Or what is mostly socially acceptable? I have come to the conclusion that my mother, uncle, grandmother and great grandmother are/were aspies. Being raised around them I have always thought they were normal and have always thought other families were too painful to be around because they were so different. BUT now knowing that they are the normal ones and my family was the "weird" ones, it's a little hard for my brain to handle. I mean, if I don't even have family to look at to help guide me and show me what to do, I feel that I'll always be lost, alone and miserable. Help! *mental meltdown*

...cause the crap on tv, that's not real, right???

I'm pretty sure my sister, mother, and grandmother (mother's side) were all aspie. And although I never met him, I kind of think my grandmother's father may have been, too.

Interestingly, my non-aspie dad was the one who didn't fit in. But he has a lot of seething anger and is a bully in many ways.

Looking back, one thing that's helped me more than TV, which tends to be unrealistic in a number of ways, is skimming a bunch biographies and autobiographies and reading in depth the occasional really good one.

I think I can relate to what you're saying. Of course, one takes ones own family as normal because to you, as part of it, it is normality.

I suspect both of my parents as aspies. In a recent conversation with my father, he said that he found the comparably high levels of affection and effusion shown in the behaviour of other families to be somewhat 'fake' (or words to that effect). My wife's family is a lot more nurturing, warm and encouraging than my own and I have spent a lot of time with them, and my wife herself, obviously, over the years. My internal reaction to my father's words was something like 'how narrow-minded to believe that the majoriity of other people/families are somehow disingenuous in their behaviour to one another because they they behave in a more effusive way towards each other than we do.' I almost felt a little sorry for him. Now, I think he also has a point in that some of the aspects of 'NT' families do genuinely strike, it would seem, many aspies, as 'fake' or some such. But having been around my wife and her family for so long I can say that I generally have preferred the atmosphere even to sometimes think I would have done better had I been raised in such an environment.

It sounds as though you've come to a bit of a realisation with regards to the normality of your family. This sounds like a positive thing to me. I find that when there are shifts in how I see basic things in my life, such as family, there is a new way forward with a better understanding of myself and my world. Perhaps now you have the chance to see things anew and see yourself anew. I think this can perhaps be unsettling for a while if there is a kind of void where once there was a basic assumption about reality. But for an essentially false assumption to be gone, for me, offers space to move, psychologically, towards a new perspective that serves me better than the old one.

I don't like to give advice because everyone is different but this is my reaction to my intepretation of what you are saying.