Manipulated out of personal development

Post Reply New Topic

Have you had the situation where a family member, friend, classmate or colleague tried to disempower you by making your self-development wrong?
In my situation I had someone, directly and indirectly, tell me my self-development was me trying to be someone I’m not and that I should be myself.
I was trying to develop part of the real me that has been hindered by various things (some related to my AS and some not).

This particular person didn’t do it with other people. But as they initially were inspired by me (as they’d said) they compared themselves to me and then started to see my AS traits as both weak and a threat to them.
If you have had this then perhaps the person / people doing it to you, feared that your advancement would leave them behind you where they needed you to remain undeveloped and feel disempowered.
1) How did they do this?
2) Why do you think they did this?
3) What did you do to tackle it? / What would you do if it occurred?

Very hard question to answer as I have quite a bit to say on this matter

This is sort of a complex question, but over the years this sort of situation has happened to me repeatedly. The two most recent times were:
A. I told a friend I'd known for 40 years that I was giving some priority to my spiritual development, mentioning that I'd been active in a couple of churches in San Diego, where we both were originally from.
1) How he stifled/disempowered me: He's an atheist and must not have been happy to hear this and he abruptly stopped emailing and calling.
2) Why he did this: I think he broke off contact because it upset the status quo between us. And he must have had one of those "unspoken rules" that we should not discuss spiritual issues. My guess is that it could present issues for him. He had some insecurities and he may have thought I was trying to "one up" him. I think he also saw me as a static person, being autistic, and he didn't expect me to change.
3) What I did to tackle the situation: I let contact drop - I didn't push it. It was somewhat shocking that he reacted the way he did, as we had known each other since high school and it wasn't long ago that he asked me to look after his house while he was out of town and we used to attend cosmology meetings together, etc. However I've had to let go of friends and relationships before when I started to develop in new directions. I'm a work-in-progress and I can't sacrifice my personal growth. Plus due to my autism my friendships aren't all that close anyway. On the bright side, his abruptly dropping contact after 40 years was better for me than if he'd tried to actively discourage or criticize me.
B. I was a (primarily raw-food) vegan for about 14 years and was involved in animal rescue as well as protesting fur shops, puppy-mill stores, and participating in various animal rights activities. I had quite a few acquaintances and some friends who were strict vegans and who were deeply ideologically committed to it. However my health began to seriously decline and I had to give up being vegan/vegetarian. I mentioned this to one particularly close vegan friend that I knew for about 9 years.
1) How she tried to disempower me. She sort of ignored what I said and told me that I "had a vegan heart" and suggested I come back to the vegan and animal rights groups. She basically couldn't hear me. She messaged me twice, but ignored my email responses.
2) Why I think she did this: She's a caring person and has always been nice to me, but she wrestles with her own demons, so to say, and she wouldn't want to be confrontational. For example she and her husband were supportive during my divorce. And I've noticed that NTs tend to avoid direct confrontation because they don't want to create a scene or create bad blood / antagonism. On the other hand, she has totally devoted her life to veganism and animal rights, so it's hard for her to discuss someone deciding not to follow that path without being critical. So in order to maintain her own integrity while not being mean or antagonistic, she had to initially ignore the new direction I needed to go in for my health, and then ignore the couple of times I made contact after that.
3) What I did to tackle the situation: Well, my health was getting badly messed up and I couldn't back-track - I was in the hospital repeatedly. And I am nearly unable to lie (I guess that's part of my autism), but I also didn't want to put her in an uncomfortable situation or to make her feel I didn't respect her (I do very much respect her) by pushing my health issues and need to give up veganism (we spent years talking about how veganism was much superior from a health perspective and as she is very strongly committed to it she wouldn't have understood if I said I had been wrong). So I just emailed her about neutral topics, asking how she was doing at her new job and the like. But I didn't rejoin the vegan activities and so contact between us dried up. Rather sad.
Summary: I'm sort of used to this sort of turn-over in friends when I find that I need to move in a new direction in my life, so I don't get too surprised when these things happen. My friendships and acquaintances tend to center around specific areas of activity rather than just socializing because I'm autistic and have tons of social anxiety and awkwardness. Being autistic, it's been easy for me to go down paths where I neglect certain areas of need for myself, such as spiritual growth or health/nutrition, etc. and when I get confronted by the consequences of that I need to make course corrections, and then the friendships that are centered around specific activities tend to get dropped. When that happens it has always been very uncomfortable. I suppose if I were NT and already well-rounded and already addressing all areas of personal need and if I had a more stable relationship with myself I think such turn-overs in friendships would happen a lot less frequently.