Why people think we can change AS?!

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My biological mother came to the city that I live to vote on Sunday. She invited me and I went with her, but in the way I told her that I was diagnosis with Asperger. She said it's common nowadays - many people have AS or austim, and said she saw on tv talking about this, that even Messi has Asperger.
She didn't seemed surprised at all when I told it, but a few seconds after she said:
"But you can change! You don't need to have this thing forever, It's psychological, it's just inside of your head and only if you have willpower you can change. You need to stop avoiding eye contact first, avoiding people..."
Seriously? She does even know me and says that I can change the whole personality of my entire life, and the worst is that I wish I could be able to change it, I try every day to hide many aspects of AS, I try hard to make a normal eye contact while talking to someone. She even said I can study body language to stop the aspies aspects. WHAT?! People think it's easy to "hide/change" autism spectrum.

It's simple. Someone who would say such things is uneducated about the neurobiological brain differences. Yes, you can improve SOME aspects, but that would be by better coping mechanisms, not eliminating the source of the struggles, which is a difference in brain 'wiring'.

Your mother is thinking of it in the same terms as a psychiatric condition, like for example an anxiety disorder. The symptoms can be eliminated by therapy and medications. A person can completely recover.

Maybe try giving her sources, so she can read up on Aspergers and autism.

CodeGrey is right. To our knowledge, nobody has ever been "Cured" of autism. But there are coping mechanisms and habit changes. We were diagnosed at around age 3-4, and the first thing Mother Squid did with us was take us to the mall and have us make eye contact with everyone I passed for about three seconds. The challenges we face are still there. We just know how to cope with some, and how to fake it with others. Regardless of your mother's feelings, only YOU know how you feel.

Autism itself never changes, but people WITH autism can change despite their autism.

In large part, I blame Autism Speaks' curebie attitude and their takeover of the autism conversation.

People confuse being able to change your behaviour with being able to change your experience of the world. Some specialists I have seen have even said that I don't show as being as autistic as I used to be and therefore may not be so. They don't get it. I can only even get close to normal behaviour with a lot of medication and years of behaviour modification. But my experience of the world has never changed - I have an autistic mind.

At this point in time, no, we can not 'remove' or permanently change our autism.

Your Bio-mother only knows a little about autism and is talking about the social skills part only. Those can be learned in time to greater or lesser extent depending on the individual. But they are still mainly learned compensating skills and do not remove the autistic part. I will say that with some, if they really immerse them selves in learning and adopting NT behavior it can become like second nature to them and will push some of the autistic elements into the backround. But they are still there and may be tapped at any time.

As research learns more about the nature of autism it is possible that new treatments might develop. But at this point there are none and it is not certain they will develop any. I just try and keep my mind open at this point. The latest research into autism is turning up more concrete evidence. For instance the discovery we have something like 40% more synapses. You often hear the statement that Autistics are wired differently. Well synapses are in a real sense one of the brains wires and we have too many.

Up to recently it was so invisible physiologically that people could understandably wonder about it entirely. They thought it was emotional or something like that. They were wrong.

I think your best defense against misinformation is to be up to date on the newest information. Then you can have factual replies to their well-meaning but inaccurate suggestions.

I wonder if that's why we are so sensitive to environmental stimuli.

We have many more sensory neurons than NTs do.

That is a kind of intuitive/logical supposition, that I have heard other ASD folks (and myself) make and it may well be true, or partially so. But I haven't heard that from the scientific community yet. That discovery is very new. Only published a few months back.

A bit earlier then that they measured greater conductivity/activity (via MRI I believe) between the left and right lobes of the brain with ASD people. As an aside, in a recent examination of Einstein's brain the only anomaly discovered was greater connection between the left and right lobes of the brain. But in the first case they were measuring brain activity and in the second physical attributes, so it doesn't mean he was autistic but is an interesting fact, and it remains possible he was autistic.

If there are visible differences in an autistic person's brain I wonder if they change when the person undergoes cognitive rehabilitation. I suspect not, which is why I think the idea of people being cured is misguided.

What I've found in these types of conversations is that people (including family) generally respond in a way that makes them feel most comfortable with the situation as they understand it, regardless of what the reality may be. You seek understanding in this situation, and you don't get it because they're not trying to understand the condition or you. They're trying to cope and hold onto their own core beliefs.

It can be religion, veganism, adoption, or whatever? people tend to take whatever approach will cause them to have to do the least amount of thinking that will still allow them to feel good about holding the opinions they currently hold without having to change them, because changing deeply held opinions often takes a lot of effort.

With family, I've found that they are more comfortable with the idea that anyone can overcome any obstacle, and that means you can just bulldoze ahead and make yourself do whatever you need in order to "beat" it, like people "beat" cancer, or won a legal case, or something.

This is still in early investigation/speculation stage. But the researchers went further and identified the mechanisim that controls the amount of synapses that develop, and a substance/chemical involved in the brain that is not the correct amount. They then experimented with mice and found giving them a medication based on a missing chemical, reduced the amount of synapses.

But these synapses may only be one aspect of a more complicated set of differences in the brain, and the idea that you can arbitrarily just reduce them in a human is premature. I wouldn't want to volunteer for that experimental medication. Yeah maybe I won't get so easily stressed by sights, sounds, situations but who knows what else would get messed with.

Something like this may or may not offer a line of approach to more dramatic treatment.

There are several differences. The limbic system is different. It has many more neurons and the neurons are smaller than the NT counterpart. This is what makes it a younger brain physically and this is also what affects the emotional processing and emotional behaviors. Also the cerebellum has entire cell patches that are missing. Also parts of the cortex are overdeveloped especially in the frontal lobe and it has also been found that the cortex has abnormal cell tissue patches but they don't know yet how this affects the brain.

We can change.

I have.

Read the thread link in my signature.

I agree, you CANNOT change ASD even with all the therapy in the world, it is not psychological it is NEUROLOGICAL, which means the very wiring of the brain is different.

however, just because you cannot change ASD, doesn't mean you can just give up on adapting to live with NT people, some social skills are important, and Behaviour and yes, eye contact is considered important ( i physically cannot do it but i do try my best to do it)