Did you think your family members or anyone else had autism?

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note: please read this post first before responding, the title isn't what you think it is.

I used to think my mom had autistic symptoms too because this would explain why she thought I was perfect under eyes, normal, and saw my symptoms as normal and why she didn't see the disorder. If she has traits herself, this would all be normal to her. I also thought other people had the same traits too because they would say they have this problem too and stuff so they think it's normal. Did this not bother anyone else when people would tell you everyone has troubles with it, everyone feels different, everyone has to fake it, etc. because you also thought they had that same difficulty as you?

I had to learn through on here that is not what people actually mean when they say "that happens to everybody" or when they go "me too." I do have to wonder though how do you differentiate between someone having actual autism symptoms or autism like ones and someone just being NT? You can't tell just by looking at someone. I just always assumed it was just as hard for them or else they wouldn't have said it. So if baffles me how can anyone else here not make that same assumption as I did.

I'm almost dead certain my Mom has Asperger's. One reason I think so is because she stims a lot. We even set each other off sometimes. One of us will start rocking back and forth and then the other will start and not even really be conscious that we're doing it. She also has no real friends, she has a hard time understanding other people and they have a hard time understanding her. She prefers to be alone, she has isolated intense interests, she has a pattern for her day, she avoids crowded and unfamiliar places.. she has a significant number of traits associated with Asperger's. Plus, same deal, she knew I was different than pretty much all of my peers but she didn't think it was anything that needed looking at by a doctor. She tried to teach me how to display like an NT in public, as best she knew how. She told me that she thought I was just incredibly advanced and intelligent, and that it made me different from everyone else.

Autism runs in my family. My great grandmother, my great uncle, my parents, my sister, and I all have autism.

Oh yeah. My dad and both of his brothers. Which made my childhood and adolescence a lot easier than it otherwise would have been, but... with all that HFA around me, I thought we were normal, just kinda quirky and really smart.

Alas, I am the only person in my family with autism.

My mother has some other psychological conditions, though. She seeks to be hyper-normal, and is embarrassed in my presence.

It wasn't very nice growing up among hyper-normal people.

^^ Oh, that sucks. I'm sorry

It's okay

I'm glad I'm an adult, and have met people outside my family.

I discovered my own AS while researching my mother. She was dying, and my NT sister was still trying to get her to say something motherly. I strongly suspect her father and siblings as well.
A guy working in R&D, with family and all the regular stuff was on a tech listserv I followed. When I suggested he might have AS, he was quite chagrined, but agreed readily. I should call another old friend with the news about him and his mother.

While I'm probably the only one in my family who had been diagnosed, I do see traits of both ASD and commonly co-morbid conditions in multiple members of my family. Probably not enough for anyone else to actually be diagnosed, but certainly enough to tell me where my Asperger's comes from.


EDIT: Wording correction in the first sentence. Initially it said "I think I'm probably the only one diagnosed...", but it's a fact, not something that I think.

I think I see traits in most of my family, on both sides.

I am sure my mom had autism. It came across as quiet and polite, as was expected of women way back when, so no one would have thought it then. No one ever thought it of me either, though. We used to talk about how we thought differently than everyone else, but the same as each other. I grew up thinking I process differently than others, but didn't know there was a name for it. My mom died before I realized it was autism. I often wonder how she would have felt if she knew it was not just her and could have gotten help and support.

One of my cousins from my mom's side is definitely an ND, but I'm not sure if he's specifically autistic.

There's somewhat a chance that my grandpa, and his dad (my great grandpa) on my dad's side do have autistic traits. Yet they're both old and concluded that was the reasons for it, and they're both dead.

My mom's side is highly unlikely autistic, but my dad's side I had less than hopeful suspicions. And I do not know everyone well enough to conclude anything because most of them are scattered around the world... Literally. Seriously.

My own mom is very unlikely autistic, and she's already open up herself enough to do her antics in front of me and my sister. I also watched her behind her back -- I see no signs or whatsoever, implicitly nor explicitly. If there's anything I found out about her, it's high social and emotional intelligence.
My dad.. Ah, I do not know him enough. Never met him in real life for over a decade now.
And my sister... Definitely an NT -- internally and externally.


As for outside my family...
I dealt with classics. Dealt with HFA children. But no aspies close to my age and older. I suspected no adults yet. It doesn't help that my current culture is a bit heterogenous, yet ironically helps my case and well being in the long run.

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My Mum has a fair few traits, some of which I only discovered in the last couple of years since she was involved in my autism assessment. Up until my diagnosis neither of us had any inkling that anyone in the family might be on the spectrum, but we were always similar in temperament, and she was always very understanding about my need for rest after being around people, and my need for quiet and solitude. We also have very similar noise sensitivity, hyperlexic traits and insomnia, and she has often talked about socialising in terms of doing it "under duress", a lack of interest in gossip and struggling to maintain her focus.

She has always told me how similar I am to my Uncle, her younger brother, who she played with and babysat for a lot when they were growing up. There are some uncanny resemblances from what she describes and what I remember of him, though I've never spent much time around him as he's always been as reclusive as I am. So, I wonder if that too has a lot to do with her acceptance of my traits, having maybe grown up alongside an Aspie boy much like I was as a child. My grandparents on my Mum's side also seemed very comfortable with my oddness.

My Mum seems genuinely fascinated by all this whenever we talk about it. One of her interests is tracing our family's history and she has turned up some interesting family facts that might point to autistic traits in previous generations. It's easy to read too much into that kind of thing, of course, but we do seem to have been a rather eccentric bunch.

I'm pretty sure my grandfather did. He was a child of the depression, on a podunk farm on the plains of eastern Colorado. The entire town had approximately 20 families, and together back in the late '20s they collectively invested in a tractor for their farms. I know that sounds odd and out of place in 'me, me, me, 'merica!' but previous generations were much more 'socialistic' in their nature than current generations. Well, about a decade later the town tractor stopped functioning and being smack dab in the middle of the depression and barely getting by, the town couldn't afford to haul it to Denver for repairs. Luckily, my grandfather, who was about 11 at the time, always liked 'fiddling' with things, especially things he wasn't supposed to be touching, obviously the most expensive piece of equipment in town was a prime target for him. Anyhow, he snuck out of bed one night, walked the few miles to the town barn and started disassembling the tractor. He found the problem was that the gearbox had slipped and was out of alignment, meaning the shaft no longer connected and while the tractor would start it wouldn't do anything. It sounds simple, and any modern mechanic would have no problems diagnosing said problem, but my grandfather was 11, he lived on a farm where schooling went to third grade, tractors were exotic and new and thus only specialists worked on them, and he didn't even know the names of the parts he was taking apart and reassembling-- he just knew by looking at them how they were supposed to operate.

It was also no mistake or luck that he fixed it. When he was 16 he left the farm and got employed as a mechanic for a local airfield. By the time he was 20 he was the lead mechanic, by the time he was 30, he took a job as the lead mechanic for Frontier airlines at Stapleton airport (since replaced by DIA), their largest hub. By the time he passed he'd also designed and engineered two single engine 'kit' airplanes that saw moderate success, and at his passing was about 2/3rds done on a dual engine single seat hovercraft (2007, to give an idea of time frame). I'm the most educated person in my family (including extended), you won't get any arguments from them, nor would they say I'm being arrogant for saying so, it just is what it is; and at the end, at 79-80 years old, my grandfather could still confuse and confound me with his mechanical knowledge. Again, the highest grade he completed was 3rd grade at a farm school in the middle of nowhere. If that's not a whiff of autistic savantism I don't know what is.

Also, he dealt poorly with people, business partners would take complete advantage of his ideas, and he was more comfortable in the shop disassembling or creating something than he was in social situations. One other anecdote that's not so flattering, was when my grandmother was hit by a careless driver crossing the street (my dad was about 15, so he would been around 35-6, my age right now). The hospital called him at work and notified him that his wife was in emergency care, and had injuries that while not fatal were serious, serious enough he should come down and be with her. When he arrived it was 2 days later, apparently he was close to making a workaround for a design flaw on a model of small aircraft, and he left right after it was fixed. To his dying breath he claimed he was sure it was only about a half hour after he received the call that he left, but it was actually about 44-48 hours later. I know for myself when I get into 'hyper-focus' mode I can lose sense of time (generally in the range of hours, not days), but I believe his claim based on my own experience (also the only one in the family that believes him). Anyhow, all those things lead me to believe he had autism at some level.

Both my mother and father have traits but I don't think they would get the diagnosis. My father was diagnosed with adhd and was told that he was highly intelligent. However my uncle from my mother's side for sure is autistic as he has all the traits. Especially when he was a kid he acted very autistic and he spoke for the first time when he was 6.