Why do NTs exaggerate!! !! !

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This is frustrating.
I know that my outbursts are random and I do have them, but I know that I don't have them often. Sometimes I can go 6 months without having an outburst, but last time I had one, it caused an argument which turned into lecturing and criticism, and my mum starting saying, ''you're ALWAYS having outbursts! Every day we all have to put up with them!'' And I'm like, ''no way, Mum! I do not have them that often and you know it! You're exaggerating!'' But she won't have it. I know myself that I don't have outbursts every day. I record these things down in my diary, and I look back and I see weeks and weeks between outbursts. General bad moods don't count.

Also, when I tell my family about my social anxieties (because it's does me good to confide in people), my family are like, ''oh every day we have this same conversation about this same thing! Will you talk about something else for a change?!'' And I'm like, ''actually, we don't talk about this every day! You're exaggerating now!'' I store a lot of conversations in my memory, so sometimes if I think hard I can remember when the last time I spoke about something, and sometimes I discover that I haven't even hinted about my social anxieties for a few weeks. But people just won't have it. They accuse me of ''always doing these things'', and I just cannot win. It sometimes gets me so angry that people exaggerate all the time, especially when it's against me.

Anyone else have these conflicts with NTs? Do you find they exaggerate too much?

I hate to break it to you, but your parents are saying obliquely that they don't care that much about dealing with your issues. They say these things because they don't evaluate what they say stringently. This isn't typical for them. This is just typical for your parents. I know people who care more about solving long-running issues but they are sadly rare.

To your mom, general bad moods probably do count.

Most NTs exaggerate to try and prove a point.

I find that a lot of people can rewrite their memories to whatever they want them to be. This lets them say whatever they want, including exaggerating what you do and say. Facts are not particularly important to them. This kind of behavior is far more common in NTs than in people with AS.

Some people can rewrite their memories immediately when they are called out on a point, and they'll claim that they said this or didn't say that, when it's clear to anyone with a 60-second short-term memory that they are making stuff up as they go. It's frustrating, and I'm not sure what anyone can do about it.

They do it to get their point acrossed.

I have friends that do stuff like this... makes me wanna kill them a bit

"you always..." and "You never..." are the two opening lines of a conversation that I will not listen to. Absolutes drive me crazy especailly when it is abundantly clear that those sorts of blame placing exaggerations are clearly false. They may be designed to prove a point but all they do is attempt to rip down self esteem by villianizing what may be an occassional or unintentional behavoir.

It doesn't prove a point, it's intended to shut down the opposition to win a point.

This was a VERY hard lesson for me to learn and accept:

If you think they're exaggerating about you, they probably aren't (<-- that's me talking to myself there). In my case, I finally had to admit nobody was. It was me who wasn't able to accept the truth of who I am.

Once I finally did, that's when I finally became fully diagnosed, and finally began to really learn to change, adapt and cope.

By the way. It was this acceptance that also finally got all my kids diagnosed. The reason they hadn't been for so many years was because I kept filling out the evaluation forms as if they were completely normal.

They aren't. That was hard to accept.

And I'm not exaggerating.

Because being exact is rather inconvenient.

I mean, what's easier to say? This:

"You always think that."

or this?

"After analyzing your behavioral configurations in the past four months, you seem to think that approximately 73.284% of the time that I've spent with you."

I'm not expecting everything to be direct, but I just wish my family wouldn't say stuff that is nowhere near true, what even a blind person could notice. My mum needn't say, ''you have an outburst every day!'' Instead she could say, ''every few weeks we have this!'' Or something like that. I know you do exaggerate when frustrated, but if I exaggerated to an NT, they'll soon be onto my like a ton of bricks, saying ''that's not true, it doesn't happen that often!''

Slight exaggerations are OK, because we use it every day. For example, if you've gone shopping and have spent 25 quid, and your friend said, ''Christ, you've spent like 50 quid!'' And you just say, ''yeh, I've spent a lot today.'' But if your friend said, ''Christ, you've spent like 1 million quid!'' that is going a bit far with exaggeration.

I'm the first to own up to my faults... probably to a much harsher degree than the people around me realize. I'm talking more about placing blankets statements on EVERYTHING. I do not use 'always' and 'never' because it simply isn't true most of the time. And god forbid if I slip and DO use it in anger - usually when words are starting to fail me. If I do slip then I am 'always' passing judgements. But this is just my situation with less than NT family.

In the general sense, I'm highly suspicious of those words. I find when people use them, in exaggeration, even to just make a point, that they tend to believe them over time whether they are true or not. It's a case of recognising red flags in a conversation. Someone who is quick to exaggerate in this way usually does it in a pervasive manner in many situations. It's a red flag for drama. And I have highly tuned drama radar - so I can avoid it.

Hey guys, I exaggerate all the time (really), and probably more than anyone else in my family. Does this mean I'm NT? <sarcasm I don't appreciate seeing people put such a broad club on the same boat like that... people with aspergers can exaggerate too.

Excuse me if I sound rude; I'm just a little irritated by this whole "bad NT's vs innocent aspies" thing, as if we're some sort of separate species. We are not. Because we have issues we can't relate too, doesn't mean everyone on the other side of the border is the same. Some NT people can understand, others can't, and the same thing goes for us aspergic's. What happened to not discriminating based on how someone looks or how their brain functions as determined by a psychiatrists signature, but rather by their character (and Aspergers is not a label of character)?

OK, I have to own up - I hate seeing this on WP too. Some people seem to associate everything with AS, and split Aspies and NTs up into groups like we're completely different species, and nobody seems to stick to the actual common Autistic traits any more, but invent all these new parts to Autism. But I only titled the thread in that irritating way because I've seen everyone else name threads in that ''do NTs do X, do Aspies do Y?'' way too. Sometimes I seem to copy others.
But yes, Aspies can exaggerate too. So really, I should have titled the thread ''why do people exaggerate?''

I was wondering about the hypocrisy but didn't say anything because I was too lazy too. But I wasn't too lazy to type this and hit submit.

everyone is guilty of it sometimes... I find it easier to just ignore the NT/AS thing...