I think it’s something that can be an ASD thing. Gillberg’s Asperger’s criteria states:
Quote:
1.Severe impairment in reciprocal social interaction
(at least two of the following)
(a) inability to interact with peers
(b) lack of desire to interact with peers
(c) lack of appreciation of social cues
(d) socially and emotionally inappropriate behavior
I have always lacked the desire altogether. I lack the ability too, but that only feels like a problem when I want to interact with someone, and I have only felt it as a problem with 5 individuals in my life. 4 of them were in real life and two of them were people I became interested in because they had something to do with my obsession at the time.
I’ve just never taken any interest in other people other than parents and grandparents. It certainly wasn’t due to any trauma in my case, as my first 10 years were trauma free.
From I was about 2 and until I was 5 gong on 6 I played a lot with the girl next door. Then she moved, and I didn’t care at all. There was no sense of loss and it didn’t make me take interest in the other kids there.
Just before I turned 6 we moved, and the following year I played almost daily with a younger girl who was a remote relative of mine, and on a few occasions other kids in the neighborhood. In the daycares I went to I preferred going to places of the area where I could be alone and think and dream. Occasionally I played with 3 kids there (the relative I mentioned, a younger boy, and a very young girl of only 2 that I felt very protective of, she was also the closest one to being someone I liked, mostly because I thought of her as being little and cute). That doesn’t mean I always disliked playing with them, I just didn’t feel any emotions towards my playmates.
When I turned 7, I started school. 7 was the mandatory school age in Norway until reform 97. The younger girl who was a relative told me we could no longer play. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care, I just accepted it with an okay. (Only much later did it dawn on me that she might have been jealous that I started school, which was unbelievable to me as I didin’t want to start school at all.)
I took absolutely no interest in the other kids at school. I only played with other kids when they played games I liked, otherwise I preferred to go on my own and think and dream and look at cars. There were a few I disliked, but most of them I just felt indifferent about.
As I got older, I found school increasingly worse as it ate up more and more of my precious time. School was mostly boring and uninteresting, and in junior high some of the lessons were so boring I actually preferred to talk to classmates. I only played with them when I was younger and talked to them as I got older because I was forced to be in school in the first place. I forgot about them the moment I was no longer interacting with them. If given a choice altogether I would have been home playing (when a kid), reading, thinking and dreaming of my interests, and spending time with family and pets, and that was what I did in my sparetime.
To NTs apparently that is bad and means the kid is lonely and miserable. They’re wrong. I was never lonely, and I only felt miserable when forced to do things I didn’t like/that bored me. Luckily I was free to do much of what I wanted, so my childhood was happy. Had I had parents who forced me to socialize, I would have been miserable.
And no, I don’t have alexithymia, I know my feelings and I know what lonely is. I’ve felt lonely twice in my life: once when I was 12 (my father and I were on holiday in his hometown, I had little do being away from my things and I didn’t see much of him or my grandmother) and once when I was in my 20’s (my mother went away for a few weeks) and I only got to talk to her a few times on the phone. My loneliness only extends to missing people I care about, not the general ‘lack’ of people to be with.
Somewhat similarly, I never feel like getting friends or a boyfriend, but rarely an individual is someone I take an interest in and want to get to know, but those are exceptions and only about that specific individual. It never extends to others or leave me wanting more.
I have never bonded with people other than my immediate family IRL. I think it might be an ASD thing as I have seen others here say the same thing, for some that includes their family. I have always loved my family so I don’t relate to that specific part.
I wish people would understand that some of us are very different from the norm and stop treating it as a problem. It’s not a problem that someone who doesn’t desire a lot of people in their life don’t have it. On a very personal note, I am very fed up with people thinking they know me better than I do when we are so different we could almost be separate species. Having to defend being myself gets tiring. This is not about OP or other people here on WP, it’s about people in the past who thought everyone was the same and needed the same and made themselves a PITA to me.
11 Mar 2016, 11:39 pm
