Trying to come to terms with family rejection.

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There is plenty to hate. My husband has had two or three years to get used to the idea of me being
an aspie, but he can't really get his head around how the limitations work with others when I can still
communicate with him. He still says "Just say this and do that"

My answer to hating people when morally required to love them, is to find that degree of aloneness and isolation
for myself that makes social contact seem attractive. As they say "hungry people aren't fussy, and fussy people aren't hungry". I think most hatred is really overload.

PS I love my dog, got one as a support when I self-diagnosed, she has been wonderful.

I would love to get a couple cats, honestly.

I think having roommates is the closest to people I can be; I like going out and window-shopping, whatever...but I've found that going without physical touch eventually causes me actual pain. I was single for a year before this disaster of a relationship (mostly celibate, too; I think I had sex 3 times?) and I was in physical pain for about three months prior.

I'm hoping having pets would prevent this.

[quote="Chickenbird"]

A dog would. Dogs look right deep in your face, whereas a cat isn't much aware of more than your hands. [\quote]

Totally untrue; my cat Licorice always knew when I was hurting, and would sit with me and purr. I guess you're a dog person. I find dogs way too needy; they're cute and all, but you can't teach them to use a toilet like a cat, and they don't purr (which is incredibly soothing to me, to the point that I've purred to myself for comfort)

:3

I've sought out casual sex out of desperation for touch (huzzah for Craigslist). If it got to the point where the best I could get was a massage or a haircut, I'd liky just end it. Life would be pointless, then.

Although I do fantasise about it, I think I would probably hate for my life
to "have a point". I should be worthwhile, full stop.
There is also a difference between "my self" and "my life".
It's not always possible to have both in order, and then
choice is necessary.

Anyway I hear what you are saying and I would have said the same
before I "went there".

Your mileage may vary.

One's worth isn't based on having family associations or friends. Both can be well beyond your control and have nothing to really do with "you".

I had a permanent and major break up with my family (siblings/parents). When I was younger I was always on the outs with my family and felt like the black sheep. At the time I wrote it off as my non conformist nature and my mothers issues with trying to run my life her way. I assumed I might see things differently when I got older. As I hit adulthood (21ish) I distanced myself from my family both in the contact and geography sense. I felt so much better and it was much less stressful. I didn't realize how much this was a negative impact on me until I moved where none of them lived.

When I was in my early 40's my parents moved back to the area I was currently living in. I kept as much distance as I could without causing a bunch of drama. Interactions always left me miserable. But even my kids didn't want to go to family gatherings. My siblings were rude or judgmental and my kids just didn't enjoy going to these things. They always felt like going to jury duty or something. After my dad died it got worse. He wasn't around to keep them in line so their behavior towards me was even more mean or demeaning.

When my mom was seriously ill a few years ago it all sort of came to a head. My siblings were treating me like crap and dumping everything that needed doing on me. Be the person who is at the hospital 24-7, deal with all her affairs etc. Even when she was in rehab I would get calls yelling at me wondering where I was hours before I was expected to be somewhere. My sister in law called and chewed me out for eating lunch (it was an hour before I was to be there). It became like some weird modern version of Cinderella with all these people bossing me around like I was the hired help while saying demeaning things to me. I would have someone act like I was incompetent then in the next breath tell me I needed to do 10 more things because they wanted to go to choir practice or something else totally optional.

What all this made me realize is that the dysfunction, lousy treatment and the way I felt when I was a teenager was all back and just the same as an adult now that I was around these people for any extended amount of time. Only this time I could see it for what it was. It was these people behaving badly. Being an actual adult you have more to compare it to and I knew that people shouldn't be behaving the way they were. They were lying to each other, creating problems where none existed and just all around being horrible judgmental human beings. So to save my sanity I set some boundaries. IE: I would help but it will only be during these hours kind of thing. They all responded by jumping all over me verbally and making even more demands that I had to be at their beckoning and do whatever they wanted 24-7. My life didn't matter. So I said I was done. I stopped answering their phone calls, ignored emails, refused to answer the door and threw their mail away without reading it. It was the best thing I have done in decades.

But at the same time it is scary. You are totally on your own without a net. But I realized that they were not there for me anyways. If my car broke and I needed a ride, in the hospital, homeless? I would have been on my own even if they were in my life. So that notion of losing a safety net was all in my mind. That doesn't mean there isn't a considerable amount of grief felt. It is weird I felt grief over it and some guilt even though these people made me miserable and it was over all a major gain to cut them out of my life. There is a societal notion that you have to keep contact with your family and that you are some sort of bad person if you break away. It took me about 2 years after I cut all ties to really get over the sometimes confusing feelings.

I realized it really was them not me who had the problem. Coming to terms with the idea that there really isn't anyone there to catch you if you fall is tough. In some ways I still am trying to sort that all out. It has made me more concerned about putting away money and thinking about my future in ways to assure I can keep a roof over my head even when I am old and if I can't work for some reason. This really changed my goals in life too. I am much more focused on stability and sustainability than material success or status.

I still haven't "come out" as being on the spectrum to much of my family. When I told my best friend of 20 years, everything seemed to fall into place as it had for me. She told me that if I told my second brother it would clear up a lot of the things he doesn't understand about me, so I did and that was pretty much that. My grandmother on the other hand... I went to her house ready to tell her about my diagnosis, and when the topic of autism came up, she went on a tirade about how no one really knows what it is, so it often gets misdiagnosed if it even exists, so I decided to keep it to myself.

I think the worst attack I had gotten from a family member in my adult life was last year when my mother was in the hospital in full hepatic and renal failure. I live 12+ hours away from her, but since I have a corporate job with paid time off, I stayed to make sure she was comfortable, largely because everyone else was too emotional to make any plans and I am largely a creature of logic. I spent 21 hours/day tending to my mother while she was in the hospital, making "arrangements" while she slept, and it turns out she rebounded, so we had to change the plans that were being made. I started lining up physical therapy, hepatologist appointments, el al. when the brother directly below me in birth order drove up, pissed. Our mother had granted him Power of Attorney, but the PoA wasn't activated since she never lost her mental faculties. He didn't see it that way and tore into me like our father used to, yelling in front of our mother in the hospital. At one point I told him to at least look at the doctors I am lining up, they're really reputable and with UW Madison, I'm not going to send our mother to a quack. He wouldn't look at anything, he just replied (I still hear it in his voice) "Richard, you're under-slept and medicated, I'm the one who's qualified to make these decisions". I take Wellbutrin and Seroquel, and clonazepam only when necessary despite my doctor's recommendation of twice daily. I was crushed. After he left I called our grandmother (same one as mentioned above), who raised me after I ran away from my abusive home, and her response was that he was very angry, he has a violent history (he is his father's child), so if he attacks me not to fight back, just let him get it out of his system. He spent 4.5 yrs with nothing to do but lift weights and fight, and I'm supposed to allow him to beat me until he gets tired?

My relationships with my brother and grandmother are destroyed. I feel completely disconnected from them. I don't go out of my way to spurn them, I attend family gatherings with my other brother and my nieces at our grandmother's house, but things will never be the same. I have told them at their behavior was unacceptable just so I can get it off my chest, but they will never accept that they were, in my opinion, in the wrong, so trying to get an apology is futile. Luckily the as*hole brother lives 6 hours away in another state and only comes down here twice a year.

The point of all of this is that while their behavior hurt me, I am not their behavior. If I can experience something, I am not that thing and therefore I have no reason to identify with it. They made their choices of their own free will, and I said what I had to say to them. I have re-evaluated the roles they play in my life, and redefined how I define family, i.e. the family I choose is much more loving and supportive than the family into which I was born. Some of those individuals are in both categories. This isn't a "get over it", it's more of a "it sucks, it really does, and it happened and cannot be undone, so is it going to weigh you down or lift you up to be stronger" sort of thing. How it affects you and what you do with it is up to you. I have chosen to forgive some people over time, I have chosen to shun others for life. It's my choice.

What I have been through with my family certainly made me want to make sure I was helping rather than hurting my kids. I don't want them to be on the receiving end of what I was growing up and as an adult. No judgments as long as you are not hurting people or hurting yourself, do what makes you happy and I will support you however I can.

Something like a serious illness or death of a parent can really bring family issues to the forefront in some really horrible ways. People's issues or existing bad behavior seems to get more extreme as people are under stress or being expected to deal with complex issues.

I was the only one that was acting logically and in a way I think that made things worse. My mother realized I was the one there making sure her needs were getting met while she was mostly incapacitated but aware of what was going on around her. So she expected me to do everything and wanted me to do it but at the same time had her same old issues of constantly considering me inadequate in her eyes. It was a very bizarre dichotomy but she is pretty old and had a major stroke so logic isn't leading what is going on. My brother and SIL were doing things then lying to my mother about it and tried pinning one of them on me when they got caught.

The icing on the cake was getting a call at 4am in the morning from the rehab facility that my mom was having an atrial fibrillation issue or a heart attack but they were not going to call an ambulance to take her to the hospital because my brother had signed a do not recessatate order with the rehab facility. She was nowhere near any concern of her dying. So I had to threaten to call the police to get them to call her an ambulance. So I got to spend most of the morning at yet another hospital as my brother had "weekend things" to do and couldn't come down later in the morning to give me some relief.

If you have elderly parents make some personal plans now how you might want to deal with things like travel, problem family members etc. I certainly wish I had.

My adoptive mother took out an insurance policy on me and forged my signature. She named herself the beneficiary on the 50K policy, never told me about it until I was back at home after the birth of my daughter. She then turned around & asked ME to pay the premium while planning with the rest of the family to have my daughter taken by DSS/CPS.
She was successful in that when my daughter was 18 mos old, and I'd had a nervous breakdown because my stepfather had threatened to kill me. While I was in the hospital, she handed my daughter over, claiming I had 'abandoned her to go do drugs'.

No one in my family would take my daughter when asked by DSS, claiming they "wanted nothing to do with me". My daughter was bounced through a few foster homes and abused in a state daycare before being placed with her father's parents. They have since adopted her, changed her name, and severed all contact with me. DSS social workers encouraged them to view me as "just the birth mother" and someone who is "not family".

She was the only blood relative I have ever known, and the only one to ever say they loved me.