Sensory Processing Sensitivity or AS?

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Hey all. I could use some thoughts from the AS community on this one. I've got a situation where I'm needing to understand better what my peculiarities are all about, and its actually going to matter for a court case.

Very brief history:
I had a marriage which fell apart in 2011 after 15 years of a highly difficult relationship. Married a woman in 1996. We had a lot of relationship issues. I felt very oppressed, but I am the loyal type so I kept trying to make it work. In 2006 she said maybe I have AS, since it would explain a lot of my traits that I was exhibiting in the marriage. In 2007 she got pregnant and we had a baby. Immediately after that, she fairly well dropped me relationally, which was pretty devastating, and our relationship became more like roommates. Eventually We had lots of marriage counselling, and she started denying that I had AS because she didn't want me to have a valid reason for not being able to understand how to meet her needs. She abandoned the marriage in 2011 when I started growing in confidence and was less easy to control. Since then, we've been in a court battle over my daughter who is now 5, and now she's claiming I have AS again, only this time its because she wants to use it to claim that I am not capable of meeting my daughter's emotional needs, so therefore I should not have any custody.

Basically, this woman is completely evil. She's manipulative, controlling and dishonest. She's made up horrific things about me and accused me in court of just about everything. She even claims that I've sexually abused my daughter, which is ridiculous. Over the past year, I've painstakingly proven that her accusations aren't true, but she still manipulates things to make it look like my daughter has anxiety about being with me even though when I do have her (for about 8 hours weekly) we have a wonderful trusting bonded relationship, and she becomes upset only when its time to go back to her mother. She knows her mother is an angry controlling person and that I'm gentle, kind and patient with her. She prefers being with me but proving this to the court is very difficult. The 15 years of marriage was characterized by me being very oppressed and controlled. It was very psychologically traumatizing. I simply could not please the woman unless I went along with everything she wanted and never contradicted her, lest I be accused of arguing. Logic and reason have no meaning to her. I'm almost certain that she has Antisocial Personality Disorder (a sociopath), and is a very dangerous person because she has no morals whatsoever, and will use and discard people as she pleases. I don't want my daughter raised in this environment, so I've put absolutely everything into this issue in the last year, even up to putting my career on hold due to the stress.

So, I joined this community several years ago and pretty much self-diagnosed myself with AS, because I related to most of the classic traits of an AS person. I took the Aspie test which scores you on a radial chart with how much you think like an AS or NT person, and I scored heavily on the AS side for a lot of traits. I've never had a diagnosis officially though. Incidentally, the court has ordered both of us to get a psychiatric evaluation for the purpose of taking mental health off the table as issues in the court, and determining once and for all what's going on. I don't know much about psychiatric, but I've taken psychological tests and they show that I'm fairly normal except for a few abnormalities relating to being very detail oriented and somewhat obsessive as a personality style, as opposed to a disorder. Then, last night I was reading an article and it referenced something called SPS, which means essentially that you're highly sensitive to stimuli, both physical and emotional, and you sometimes have a lot of difficulty processing all the input, so you tend to be shy or introverted, and busy social environments are easily overwhelming. I thought about this some, and wondered if there's any correlation to AS or if perhaps you might think you have AS when you really have SPS (or vice versa).

A major writeup on SPS is found here.
There also seems to be a website devoted to SPS here.
The site has a self test, and I took it and checked every box except for 5, clearly qualifying for the condition.
I even found on that site, an article talking about how SPS differs from AS or other Autism spectrum disorders, and that can be found here.

Upon reading the page about AS vs SPS, I noticed that the author's description of AS seems to be somewhat inaccurate from what I've read here and on other more authoritative AS sites. But by and large I think I am beginning to see the differences. Apparently SPS people don't have difficulty noticing other people's emotions, and that's a key difference. They also don't necessarily have a single fixated interest. But the outward behaviors of both AS and SPS people can appear very similar, although for different reasons. The SPS person withdrawals from social environments because they are overwhelming, where the AS person can't interpret the social scenario and tries to avoid the uncomfortable interactions, being blind to most social cues. Both AS and SPS people tend to be highly sensitive to physical stimuli, which can also lead to not knowing which group you belong to.

In my particular situation, around the 3rd grade I had a serious social problem with my classmates, as I was a victim of severe bullying. This lasted throughout high school. When I ended up getting married, I was 25 years old. The first bit of the marriage seemed ok in terms of my wife being close to me, but I was not very assertive in the relationship and just went along with whatever she wanted. Eventually as my confidence grew, we had a lot of fights. It became clear eventually, that there was simply no way to make her happy. This led to the assumption that I had AS, which would explain why I'm unable to please her because of my social blindness and inability to read her nonverbal cues as to what she needed emotionally. I went under the assumption I had AS for years, up till recently really. Everything pointed to it, especially the evidence from the marriage.

The difference is that when she left, I started to "get better" so to speak. In the last year and a half, aside from the stress of my family being ripped out from under me, I actually have been managing my AS symptoms quite well. In fact, most people I meet would say that they never would have guessed I have AS unless I told them, since I interact with them on a very normal level. I just assumed that this was because I'm 42 years old now, and have simply learned to manage my AS better than most. I figured AS was something where you struggle a lot with it when you are younger but eventually if you pay attention to how people work, and make it a priority in your life, you figure out how to read people and interact with them in a normal, or even a considerate way. Large crowds still bother me severely, and I am very sensitive to being put on the spot for anything. But one on one interactions seem to be without incident. This has had me curious for a while now about my condition. My assumption was that AS, being a physical untreatable condition, means its permanent, and I shouldn't be improving this much. Also, I've been managing the interactions with my little girl very well. I am very observant of her emotional needs, even more than a lot of other normal fathers are with their own kids. This makes me wonder, why am I able to be such a sensitive father when as an AS person I ought to be barely able to read her?

Having read about SPS last night, and realizing that I definitely have all these traits, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps an SPS man locked in with a sociopath woman for 15 years = AS symptoms? The thought of not having AS makes me feel slightly nervous, because I've self-identified with this condition for many years. However, I'd much rather know the truth about what's going on in my head. I think that would be most liberating. I also have to know what's going on for the purpose of court, as I've been fighting a dangerous crazy woman who is crafty, intelligent, and appears perfectly normal to anyone she wants to appear normal to. She's trying to say I have AS now purely to paint me as an incompetent parent (even though by itself that's ridiculous). Its a difficult situation but I need to find out what I've really got.

Anybody got any insight on this?

Recon, I think you may want to ask a mod to move this to member's only, to take it off of Google searches. There's a lot of info in your OP.

I don't have any advice about your custody battle, but my sympathy goes out to you. If your wife is a sociopath, it would not be good for her to be raising a child. I knew a couple of kids raised by a sociopath, and they both had serious psychological issues.

Anyway, regarding sensory processing sensitivity, the majority of autistic people are highly sensitive, but most highly sensitive people are not autistic. The big difference is that autism causes a number of other traits in addition to sensory issues. Difficulty reading nonverbal cues, obsessive interests, need for routine, etc are not explained by sensitivity to sensory stimuli.

Well, we've both been ordered by the court to get a psychiatric evaluation, so that's supposed to be the end-all of the psychologically related accusations thrown around in court. I've suggested in court that perhaps she has paranoid schizophrenia (her brother has been diagnosed already, and her other brother (who is not diagnosed) is deeply into conspiracy theories of all types and almost impossible to talk out of them). The whole family is seriously dysfunctional. There was also a whole lot of abuse, physical and sexual, in her childhood.

A lot of (ok almost all) her perceptions about me are wildly inaccurate, and it almost seems like she's living in some kind of bona fide delusion. Reasoning doesn't help. Explaining the truth doesn't help; I just get accused of arguing. For example, recently she's accused me of spanking my daughter. Well I've never done that, and even if I was the type of parent who did do that, there's no reason to because she has never had a discipline problem, and why on earth would I do this in the middle of a court battle when everything I do is under the microscope? I tried explaining to her that I never spanked the child, but she insisted that my daughter told her that I did, and that she's scared of me. Well that's entirely ridiculous because my daughter has an extraordinarily close and trusting relationship with me and is not afraid in the slightest. She also says that my daughter never speaks about me when she's with her, but my daughter has told me many times she asks her mom for more time with me. I even saw her do it right at an exchange recently. So there's really only two possibilities. Either she's delusional and insane, not in touch with reality at all, or she's a malevolent sociopath who is fully aware of everything, and is intentionally trying to destroy relationships.

Thing is, my daughter is an extremely good child. I believe she is also likely SPS, and she's the type of kid who you never have to be stern with because she's so agreeable. She also notices the slightest changes in things. Extraordinarily observant. She reminds me tremendously of myself as a child. I had considered that she might be AS, but now I'm wondering if we're both just SPS.

The main thing that brings me doubt that I might have AS is the fact that I can be quite emotionally sensitive to others. The vast majority of my failures reading other people's emotions (in fact perhaps all instances) is in the case of trying to read my ex. And given what I know about her now, I'd say that nobody can read her accurately. She's led me to believe that I'm emotionally incompetent and blind to considering other people's needs but evidence from my time with my daughter has certainly proven otherwise. If I had AS, I don't think I'd be able to do what I've done this year with her. Unless there's such a thing as "very mild case of AS" or if perhaps the social skills can be learned by someone with AS.

The secondary doubt is that while I do tend to focus very intensely on one interest at a time, I do rotate interests. I seem to have too many interests to be a typical AS person. But my ability to focus on one thing for just ages, far surpasses normal people, and that was one of the things which compelled me to think I did have AS.