Resulting problems from late diagnosed Aspergers

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I was Dx AS at 56 yoa. It brought relief and plausable explanations for all previous relationship experiences with people. But, it also showed me how my social naivety works in an NT dominant world: with Dx I simply perceived myself as a different model brain ( like cars have different engines and body makes). I was quite pleased to be different- until, I saw others shrink from me as weird, in fact a bit 'mental'.
Ptior Dx, my standard response to others seeing me a 'weird' was that they didn't practice tolerance and therefore were not smart. I would just walk away from this.
True I have walked away from a lot of relationships, but I'm also walking into a lot o relationships (not personal/intimate, because that requires too much explanation and work on personality etc- which i have always shied from)- and these are mostly positive even if not longheld.
So, I've kind of become a psychological independent from cliques/culture and work environs.
I've earned my Brd n Butter in highly skilled (i'm university trained in Nursing and Education) and low skilled (checkout ; cleaner- domestic and industrial;,housemaid; waitressing).

Because i was always learning about something - in my day to day existence or at an education institution of some type I had to be flexible around other people/places. This has allowed me to develop as a 'thoughtful and open-hearted person ( AT LEAST I AIM TO BE so Daily).

But like Alex of WPHome says there is no one way of being an AS individual, and often an AS expression (physically visible or not) can be so subtle......

In my experience it appears that NT's just don't have what it takes to allow the blend of differences from some people to take up their programmed field of experience/space.

So, as a result of Dx, I find that those to whom i have disclosed this info, now percieve me as 'neurologically different' as opposed to previously seeing me as " unusually intelligent". Their social ness with me is both stark and subtley different.

So after feeling weird for yet another reason, I have decided that it's still good to just have and live with the facts- the real whatever info that our human knowledge collections, allows us to know ourselves - if we choose to know n understand.

My AS son has friends with AS and shares his AS with them, but is cautious with NTs because the fact that he has AS sometimes freaks them out. I wrote a memoir, Sucking Up Yellow Jackets based on raising an undiagnosed AS son to adulthood and asked if he wanted me to use his name. He said no--he wanted deniability since he can't predict people's reactions. Like you, he's neurologically different and unusually intelligent and seems to have come to grips with both. He was thrilled when he knew he had AS because he finally had a definable reason why his thought processes are different from the people around him.

*laughs* Oh, me too! And it still bothers me. In fact, I recently realized that I keep changing which Starbucks I go to on the way to work, because the baristas are trained to remember the drinks of regulars, and then ask for and remember your name, and it CREEPS ME OUT. I feel like yelling," You don't know me!"

"Try listing all the things you are trained to do. Then list all the jobs you have had and figure out what you were really doing. You may have been listed on the company books as a designer, but what you were really doing was organizing or trouble shooting or finding new ways to use a product or service. These are your talents. Then list all the things you would LIKE to be doing."

This is excellent advice. I gradually realized that I tend to gravitate toward the things that I'm good at (outside of my job duties) and then tend to like them better as I do them. This has interested me in Project Management. PM is a field I would highly recommend to ASD individuals (or at least those that are similar to myself in their approaches to professional work).

I like it because (in no order) I can often work remotely from home, I get ad-hoc functional authority (less formal and awkward than direct personnel management), I get to abstract concrete ideas and vice-versa, I have authority within my area (and actually get appreciation for being an anal retentive expert on some things instead of resentment), I get to take someone else's idea and break it down into its constituent parts and then tell them exactly how they're supposed to be doing it. The hardest part is staying on track (which is ironic for this profession).

By the way, I'm 27 and I was diagnosed one year ago with Asperger's and Non-Verbal Learning Disability. I was diagnosed a couple weeks ago with ADD. There is some talk of Sensory Integration Disorder. When I was an adolescent and teenager, I was diagnosed with depression and OCD. Probably some others.

I had a very rough childhood/young adulthood, including violence, drug abuse, I was arrested twice, expelled from high school, held about a dozen jobs in eight years, dropped about 30% of my college courses, spent 11 years on my associates (two-year) degree; haven't finished it yet still. My high school GPA was 1.26 before I was kicked out in 10th grade, when I aced the GED (highest graded score in all categories).

When I was diagnosed, I had mixed feelings but overwhelming relief was the biggest part. Profound and deep alienation is a very difficult thing to deal with. For the non-ASD parents out there who suspect their children may be ASD-ish: I can't emphasize the alienation problem enough. I was suicidal by the time I was twelve or so.

This website was my first exposure to others "like me" about a year ago.

On the other hand, if I had been diagnosed earlier, I probably wouldn't have adapted as well as I have since I would have had an excuse not to. Hard to say.

My best advice for anyone (NT or ASD) when it comes to coping would be to TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN HOW TO GET ALONG. My biggest help has come from books like How to Win Friends and Influence People, as well as basic management books like Management Basics. Business/Management primers have an unconscious way of quickly getting to simple, pragmatic psychological "tricks" that would take lifetimes to figure out on my own.

Also, just an add-on for those of you with jobs: don't tell your boss/employer about ASD unless you need accommodations of some kind and are prepared for legal pressure and the opposing negative pressure from your employer toward you.

My boss used to think I was a rock star. But she told me that sometimes I have a tendency to debate people. So I told her that I have AS so maybe I miss the subtleties on occasion but I'll work on it.

She put me on a written performance warning less than a week later and now I'm worried about losing my job of 4.5 years.

Telling her was the biggest professional mistake I've ever made.

Approaching a half century of life, nearly 4 years after Dx ... it's a bittersweet feeling.

I now see how the combination of my AS, my naivete and my romanticism combined to make me take several wrong turns, especially in the relationship department.

Knowing what I know now, I'd have played more to my strengths career wise - how in the world did I end up in a high interaction, high context role!?

Now I'm scrambling to salvage what's left of life whilst dealing with my most recent relationship fiasco, in this case, marriage.

I once wrote a paper as a young lad, a sort of visioning thing regarding future adulthood.

The aging me now looks at that paper and utters: Bwaaaaahaaaaaahaaaaa!

Grest thread.

I have spent a lot of time and energy figuring out what people want-- based on praise and criticism-- and trying to give it to them.

I am told that I am very high-functioning.

I am not happy.

I used to be happy, but that was before I was aware of how truly wrong I am.

Now the best I can hope for is a blank state. Unplugged. I am hoping to find a way to stay busy enough-- mentally engaged in others' needs enough-- to erase myself fully.

Reply to KLH9211

My son would agree it isn't always wise to tell your employers you have Aspergers. I wrote a memoir about raising an undiagnosed Aspergers son. I asked his siblings if they wanted me to use their real names. They did, and I used mine. He mulled it over and finally said he might be better off to have some deniability. He has found people tend to react in unpredictable ways.

Good luck with your boss. As my son says, "Telling people you have Aspergers is a crap shoot."

Amen.

They might be understanding.

They might be understanding if YOU can take responsibility for educating them.

They might be inclined to assume you're a sociopathic ret*d.

They might choose to take advantage of it.

33% chance, with the remaining 1% assigned to the last category.

On optimistic days.

This is the best profile of Aspergers I've come across (for me)

http://www.help4aspergers.com/pb/wp_4a3 ... 112c8.html

But not everything applies.

Well, for me it lead to a nervous breakdown and a neurotic psychosis state that is still somewhat with me....

I now hold the belief that I can't cope with anything! Unraveling the tangled web of me that is hidden from myself by trying to fit in and be normal... how many defense mechanisms can one have anyway? Is my tail getting any longer, because I can no longer see it.... [some saying about if you have a tail and one person tells you, you don't believe it, but if a lot of people tell you, then you may turn around and look]

** edit, and yes I understand that one can not be both neurotic and psychotic by psychiatric definition..... I'm talking about thinking I was bipolar for six years.

True realisation of my Asperger's has gained traction only in the last two years, since my grown son left home. I was shaken by a crescendo of revelations ... 'OMG, that's why XYZ!' ... but now the unsettling clunk as slabs of personal history reorganised themselves has slowed. Meanwhile, a profound reservoir of something like joy seems to be accumulating. It probably isn't joy; it's probably just the normal way we humans are supposed to feel; but, whatever you want to call it, there is a sense of extraordinary buoyancy in the rapid rise from always-feeling-wrong to not-feeling-wrong-any-more since self-blame has been extracted from the mix.

Not all the ingredients of this transformation can be pinned down, but here's one: a complete focus-shift in the conduct of interpersonal relationships. Put at its simplest, what I now try to fit into is different from what I used to try to fit into. In the past, I would come away from interactions feeling failed and bruised. I would realise, too late, that I had done or said something wrong again, though I could never quite put my finger on what. I now see that unease was the result of trying unsuccessfully to contort myself into a social shape, a set of [NT] expectations, that I could never discern, let alone fit. Now, my starting point has shifted, whereby all I am striving to fit into is my own [AS] shape. Fitting my shape rather than theirs has become my benchmark for acceptability. No longer, therefore, am I losing energy and self-esteem in almost every encounter. No longer do I approach interactions with a sense of anticipatory dread. No longer need unimportant failed interactions escalate as I try desperately, ineptly, to 'fix' them.

It goes further, because accepting my own difference is freeing me to enjoy so many more interactions simply for what they are. There is, has always been, real contact with those who are like me on the inside: longtime friends and kindred spirits, neurotype irrelevant. With another group, those who are nothing like me inside or out, I'm finding it possible simply to find interest in the massive differences between us instead of feeling singlehandedly responsible for building bridges to mutual awareness. The last group has always been there, its cast of characters changing from time to time, but their effects a constant: they are the destructive don't-matters who were the bullies in school and are still the bullies in the workplace. The difference? Now I know none of it was my fault, and that it is not my job to take on the emotional burden of their wrongdoing towards me. Hmm ... all up, that's a package that should save a lot of effort and heartbreak from now on!

I see, on re-reading, that it shouldn't have had to wait for aspie awareness for all this to percolate through; it seems like a pretty viable recipe for human relations across the board (but then I suppose it would seem that way to an aspie) ... certainly, anyway, an approach it would have been invaluable for this new kid on the block to adopt much, much earlier. It's that cumulative self-esteem deficit that gets in the way, isn't it? AS has given me permission to use me, rather than others, as the starting point, a perspective which would never have been tolerated under the old rules. And the funny part about it is the result is nothing like as selfish as it sounds: strangely, it seems to free me up to be much more functionally considerate of others than I could have managed before. I'm not quite sure why, but (guessing) maybe I'm less awkward or apologetic or try-hard; or I have become a knowable fixed point so they can relax better around me; or I've just got more social energy since I'm not wasting it any more; surely it couldn't be so basic, could it, that now I know why they don't understand me I can forgive them for it? Whatever the mechanism, it looks like a win for everyone. Certainly is for me.

[EDIT: Although I've written this down as if it were a 'happy ending' story, of course the flipside is a complete lifetime of f**kups that I might have been spared if anything like a DX had been available earlier. But I believe in making whole cloth out of scraps, and my race is far from run! Harmony, here I come ...]

Your big story struck so many resonances with me. Thank you for telling it. I think you are right about keeping AS to yourself at work unless there is an active functional reason for putting it into the mix. I can suggest a less formal approach, based on personal experience where something needed to be acknowledged but full disclosure felt dodgy.

Recently my manager gave me a project to do at home. He needed to get me out of his hair for a while (I had been nagging about a traineeship I wanted, on which he couldn't or wouldn't give ground) and knew I was about to resign if something didn't give. What he didn't expect was to be so blown away by the radical innovation I devised that he would spontaneously be moved to promote its adoption as a template, organisation-wide. Which is interesting in itself, because he is a very status quo sort of bloke, not pushy at all.

Afterwards, I was asked why on earth I had chosen to embark on the professional path of court reporting rather than this sort of organic project development work, where my talents so clearly lay. I know why: it is because I thrive on mechanistic, functional tasks where high skill and low human interaction is required; I also burn fast and hot on the expenditure of creative effort and need long recuperation periods, which may be fine for one-offs but is unsustainable at a constant level day after day. Some little sparrow told me not to spill the beans about AS as it was halfway out of my mouth. Instead I said, 'I have a ... let's call it a "personality type" that is better suited to a head-down mechanistic type of role, which I believe is more likely to see me through to the end of my working life.'

Quietly, I believe the boss has joined the dots and figured it out for himself, but because I didn't hand over a label it didn't need to be written down on paper or officially noted in any way. Nonetheless, his attitude has subtly changed towards me; it is more relaxed than before; and - lo and behold! - the long-sought traineeship materialised.

It seems to me - granted, this might be magical thinking on my part - that the absence of a label enabled him to avoid a drama of his own about it, continue thinking of me merely as 'driven' (his term), and completely arrest his background concern that a sinister something-else might underlie my peculiar behaviour and difficult traits. Now we just have mutual respect for our (oh, so many) differences and are all enjoying a much quieter life. Long may it last!

I was diagnosed 3 years ago, at the age of 42. It's been a roller-coaster ride since. The highest point being just at/after my diagnosis (that AHAH! moment of explaination for all my constant struggles.)

My lowest point was just after that...when my family reacted so NEGATIVELY (no, that's not it...it was APATHY I got...they couldn't be bothered to care less). Their justification for treating me the way they do changed not one bit as a result of my diagnosis. And they continue to treat me the same to this day.

The one overt reply I got (from the sister who even bothered to express an opionion) was that of ignorance as to what AS is. The rest of my extended family acts as if AS is something benign...at least that is what I've extrapolated from their various non-responces.

I started another thread earlier about cutting off the extended family & I did do that for the holidays. WHAT A RELIEF! The only problem came about from my one brother that just didn't want to accept my choice. Well, so what? I'm an adult and I do get to chose where I go & with whom I celebrate occassions worth celebrating.

That's not unusual. Dealing with an Asperger child takes up a disproportionate amount of the family's time and money. My kids understand the whys of their brother's actions and make an effort to interact with him now, but knowing why he behaved in ways that made them suffer doesn't erase the resentment they felt when they had to live down his often bizarre behavior. We now live close together by choice, celebrate milestones together and have frequent parties. But he hasn't changed, nor have we.