Spectrum within a family

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My son was diagnosed at 3. He is probably Level 3 although he can speak, read, and write, but has zero social skills and gaps in his cognitive abilities. He also has OCD and can be quite rigid about his daily routine.

As for myself, please see the link in my sig. Whereas my wife is NT although dependent on psych meds for anger and depression.

I have noticed that my interaction with our son goes more smoothly that my wife's. Her interactions with him frequently feature loud voices, agitation, scolding, and protests. Whereas I can usually calm him down and have learned how to convince him to change plans when necessary.

Trying to not get into too much detail nor assume that I am far enough into the spectrum to make a difference. I'm not that much like him but I feel I understand him and I believe we benefit from that. No question here just wanted to share.

My daughter is ASD and "easy" to get along with from my similar perspective. We've mutually set expectations and instructed each other for a very long time. I (ASD) have TOM that aligns with her more so than my Allistic husband. My son is ADHD and supposedly is not ASD but leans heavily towards PDA; my husband was constantly getting into power struggles with him. My husband took everything so personally --- the concept of "they would if they could" was completely foreign to him. He thought all their problems were personal attacks on him, or unbearably inconvenient to him. He is finally shifting his attitude to be tolerant, compassionate and helpful. Part of this is him owning his own crap and expectations. Given ASD stereotypes, it blows my mind that I -the Autistic one- has a significantly higher EQ than my Allistic spouse. My difficulty is that I run out of energy or get too excited/stressed to implement. My husband is awesome in those times; keeps us grounded.

My mum was NT but with anxiety, and I was very close to her from the day I was born. I suffered separation anxiety all through childhood and even in adulthood. Sadly she died from cancer but it was a good thing I had moved out by then otherwise I probably would have been unable to cope emotionally without her.

My dad is NT, I think. Definitely not on the spectrum but sometimes I wonder if he has ADHD even though he isn't hyper and loud (but I know that ADHD doesn't necessarily have to mean hyper and loud). If not then I think he might just have "high-functioning learning difficulties". I have an average father-daughter relationship with him but I was closer to my mum. It might have been because my mum and dad had different personalities so my dad sees things differently to what my mum saw.

I think both of my parents are BAP. So they made a full autistic - me. My three sisters are all NT, even my twin.

However, my twin has a teenage son who is almost definitely on the spectrum. But she won't have him undergo an autism assessment because she doesn't want him labelled. It's incredibly frustrating in my opinion because there are services available to him if he has a diagnosis.

There’s a lot of autism and ADHD in my family. My mom, son, nephew, and I are all diagnosed. I suspect that my dad and brother have it, but they’ve not been assessed.

I have an easy time getting along with my son, nephew, and brother. I’m sensory avoidant and my son is sensory seeking which makes things challenging for me sometimes, but we certainly have a special connection. My brother and I are close.

My mom is a difficult person to get along with, and it’s unrelated to autism, I think. She has a lot of anger issues from a very messed up childhood, and she was overly harsh in her discipline of me when I was a kid. My dad was, too. They are both very religious and disapprove of me because I’m no longer a JW. That’s unrelated to autism; it’s just how members of their religion are.

One of my sisters and I think both our parents and all three of us show ASD traits. My dad also had issues with depression.

Growing up, it seemed clear that all of us were different from the families of other kids we knew in school, but that was just how things were. There was no explanation. For most of my life, I felt like my immediate family understood me in ways no one else did. I guess this is why.

As a family we had significant issues, mainly due to my dad. But there was also a tremendously powerful sense of belonging. I have huge social anxieties, but at the same time an unshakeable inner core of belief in myself that I owe to that.

Somehow, that last part worked better for me than either of my sisters. I was the oldest, and the most spectacularly "gifted". My dad in particular really reinforced the idea that I could do anything at all, and made me feel like some kind of super-being, even though he also drove me crazy going on about stuff. Thinking I was a super-being did not help my relation to other kids in school. Till age 11 or so, I was totally oblivious to the way I came across to them. Literally did not think about it, even though I experienced the effects. I was more interested in getting approval from the adults.

When I first left home, I went through a phase of neglecting contact with my family. But by my late 20s, I found I wanted to re-bond. We were all very tight, though my one sister still had lingering issues with my dad that did not feel resolved for her until close to the time our parents died. From the time I left home, my dad stopped attempting to intervene in my life, which was a huge improvement for me.

My mom grew tremendously as a human being over the years. When I was a child, she was still very timid about a lot of things. But after we kids got a little bigger, she got really good at her violin (one of her special interests -- nature was the other one), and she later said that gave her much more confidence in general. She ended up much stronger than my dad. She found ways of working around her social anxiety that my dad never did. He had a pattern of coming on too strong and scaring people away.