Emotional Abuse?

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Opinions please. I don't know how to describe my parents' treatment of me. Some people have told me it's emotional abuse, but I don't know.

I display several ASD traits: inability to read non-verbal cues, need for order and routine, special interests, stimming, difficulties communicating (lack of natural body-language, staring or not looking at people), inability to recognise emotions within myself, and difficulties dealing with emotion etc.
I am also very shy, and am not confident about interacting with other people. I have extreme difficulty recognising people's faces.

Essentially, my parents do not want a child like me. They want an outgoing, socially normal, confident child, which I am not, and never have been. However, they pretend to themselves that I am all the things they want me to be, and when I am not they berate and punish me for being lazy, selfish, arrogant, heartless, acting stupid etc. They pretend that the only reason I am not what they want me to be is because I am badly behaved, so they punish me and yell at me when I am myself.

Because of their actions, I was suicidal as a child, and still am every so often - I just want to escape from them. I am now unable to be myself if my parents are present, even if I try. I have no support from my family.

Opinions please.

I went through a lot of this as well. I endured a lot of verbal abuse from my parents during my teens because they couldn't understand "what was wrong with me" or why I did so many weird things. I ended up getting so stressed out that I was almost completely mute at home for 2-3 years, which only made the verbal abuse worse.

Looking back as an adult, I understand where their frustration came from because I was by no means an easy child to love. However, that doesn't make any of that abuse acceptable. I was finally kicked out of the house at 18 and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Figuring out how to be an adult was extremely difficult but being free of that stressful home environment took such a weight off me that I was almost a totally different person overnight.

It looks like you're 17 so leaving may not be an option right this minute. If I were you, I would build up a support system outside your family and seek to spend as much time as possible outside your home.

The stress for you comes down to what you feel, regardless of the outcome of an objective assessment. For example, I found my Mom deeply unpleasant, but I never thought about her words as abusive until my sister expressed that in very emotional terms. Now, it makes sense to me on that level, but it got incorporated into my diagnosis of my Mom, rather than becoming a resentment. I healed a lot of that already, before figuring out the cause. She has OCPD, in my considered opinion. It makes her absolutely rigid about a very arbitrary sense of right and wrong, sometimes and randomly. I tried to argue that those demands made no sense, of course, and got nowhere.

I wish she had spent half that time teaching me about balancing a checkbook, paying bills, and foreseeing a budget. Get those right, and living independently will have a lot of fun times in store for you. If I may say something that will probably seem confusing for a while, don't underestimate the value of having roommates with annoying habits. My experience suggests that it operates more like a vaccine than an allergen for dealing with the world at large.

I'd like to add something else. If you can learn to show up at social events, that can have benefits. I've found that I can find a comfortable place to sit, and relax. People will come to me and chat. For my way of having autism, that works really well. I enjoy discussing issues, I enjoy verbal sparring, and I have a basic understanding of small talk.

Okay, mostly that understanding of small talk consists of listening for an interesting subject in the other person's small talk, and pursuing that topic.

Your parents’ treatment of you certainly sounds abusive. They are disapproving of and criticizing you for who you are. My own parents kept pounding my square autistic self into a round socially-approved hole, and when that goes on too long you can lose parts of yourself that take a very long time to get back. Pretending to be something we’re not in order to please others cuts us off from our creativity and vitality. Your situation has got to be painful – I’m glad for you that you recognize it as unhealthy. Sharing those issues with others who understand helps get back our genuineness and helps us understand and accept that we’re really OK as we actually are.

I know it feels like abuse to you, but it's not - certainly not intentionally so. True abuse comes from people who don't care about you. Your parents genuinely care about you, and fear for your survival in the real world as an adult, so they're extra hard on you now, in an effort to toughen you up. I know it doesn't work, but they're trying to help.

It's not fair to yourself or your parents to feel that they "never wanted a kid like you." More likely, they just never imagined or expected a kid like you, and because they know nothing about the autism spectrum, they simply don't understand how to help you.

Getting diagnosed would almost certainly help, where they're concerned. If they understood the struggles you're going through, they could better adjust their own thinking to try to accommodate your handicaps. If they can't be brought to understand that you are handicapped, their reactions are unlikely to change in any significant way.

On the upside, you are not experiencing anything others before you have not lived through, and survived. My parents treated me exactly the same way throughout my childhood and adolescence, and I often felt like they hated me, too.

It didn't help that about the time I became a teen, they had another child, who was as normal as could be, which only made me feel more certain that I was nothing but a disappointment (I still often feel that way, but now it's not because of them, it's just me being hard on myself). Truth is, I think it may have been having that nearly perfectly NT second child that finally made them realize there actually was something wrong with me. Gradually, they began to cut me a little slack, knowing I was just never going to be "normal."

But I didn't find out what that abnormality was for several more decades. Until I was 45 years old, I had never heard of Asperger Syndrome, and wasn't diagnosed until after I retired from a 30+ year career. I survived it all, with only the vaguest notion what autism was. And through all those years, believe me, all the employers I worked for were no more understanding than my parents had been. Nor have people in general been any nicer since I was diagnosed.

In the long run, diagnosis does help a little, but it's mostly personal emotional satisfaction, it doesn't make dealing with the world any easier. People still suck.

Yes it does sound abusive and their lack of trying to understand you and refusing to believe you could have autism, they are just choosing to be ignorant so that is willful ignorance there. I felt abused in my teens so that was one of the reasons for me acting out as a teenager and them getting mad at me for being upset or stressed our or when I would have anxiety just made it worse. I also felt suicidal and often felt like running away but had nowhere to go and I didn't have money and I couldn't drive then. To this day my mom still doesn't get it and just thinks I did all that to be Asperger's because of what my school counselor said so it made it sound like that. My dad seems to understand better because he says I was just frustrated. I think my mom just needs to blame my old counselor so she wouldn't blame herself. I mean does she really think I enjoyed all that anxiety and liked having all these emotions inside of me and getting so overwhelmed with them and having all those meltdowns?

Tell em to bog off, they are idiots.

I wonder how you keep your sanity without acting out from them not understanding you?

I guess with my anxiety, that was why i acted out and was losing myself. Something my mom will never understand and the fact she just made it worse for me by getting mad at me. So I got worse.