Have your traits "backslid" as you've gotten older

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After one false start (at age 19), I finally moved away from home for real when I was 26. It was in the same town as my mom. At 28, I moved 2 hours away. For 20 years, I had a successful, if somewhat socially isolated, life in the "Big City". For financial reasons, I had to move back home with my mother, a move that was supposed to be temporary (6 months or so) but has lasted 5 years.

Before I moved from home, my "Aspie-ness" (in hindsight, since I wasn't aware of it at the time) was pretty significant. But over the years of living alone, I learned to take care of things on my own -- even to the point of buying a house completely on my own, which is one of my finest accomplishments .

But now, being back home with Mom, I feel like I've backslid in my development. I feel like I've lost some of my coping skills, and that I'd have more problems if I lived on my own. But I don't know if this is actually true. Maybe it's just that because I've been made aware of ASD, that I'm noticing my limitations more. Or maybe I've become more dependent on my mom since I've been here.

Anyone else have to move back home after successful independent living, and then fell back into some old fears and problems?

my parents always bring out the worst in me, I try and avoid staying with them for long.

Life is like a bell curve. You start out totally dependent, unable to control anything, after whatever degree of success you manage to obtain by the end you are totally dependent, unable to control anything. Does the deterioration start earlier for us because everyday we have to navigate a world different and difficult for us?

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 24 Dec 2013, 2:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Perhaps the topic should be rephrased to say, "Have you social skills backslid as you have gotten older" or "Have your 'Aspie' symptoms resurfaced as you have gotten older?" If that is the case, it is a definite "yes" for me. It was this very thing that led to my suspecting that I had AS. While I was growing up, hardly anyone had ever heard of AS. I was a typical nerd with abysmal social skills until I went to university. During that I finally met some friends and became what seemed to be a whole new person. However, having lived in a foreign country for most of the past 6 years, I have taken to isolating myself from the culture around me, and I find my AS traits resurfacing with a vengeance. On the bright side, I gave up trying to supress my "inner nerd" and just be myself. I just don't have the energy for the charade anymore. I hadn't talked to myself since I was a teenager, but I find myself talking to myself far more often, since most of those around me except my family don't much English anyway, and are usually so brainwashed that their culture is perfect and are thus impossible to reason with due to their arrogant "culturally superior" attitude.

Anyway, I've been finding it more and more difficult to pass job interviews. I apply back home every year with the hope of getting out of here. My wife says she won't live with my parents again, so we can't move home unless I have work. I didn't even get contacted for a single interview this year. Trouble is, the longer I am here, the less I am able to function. The less I am able to function, the lower my prospects of finding work in my home country. The lower my prospects of finding work, the longer I am here ... well, you get the picture. Well, sorry for the long post, but in short, I find I'm slipping further back each month, so I can definitely relate to what you're saying!

I definitely feel like my social skills have backslid over the years, as well as my ability to successfully use coping situations to manage my aspie overstimulations. I'm only 34 and I feel like I peaked at my functioning around 6-8 years ago and its been a slow decline since then. As a tradeoff, I feel more self-aware more than I have ever been and cognizant of my condition and decline. I feel like I spend more time engaged in my own self-soothing and coping mechanisms than I do appearing as normal functioning. Putting on the social mask to hide everything wrong with myself and appear as an NT is just too tiring anymore.

I'm curious to know if there are any studies done on aspies that have shown a decline in overall functioning in any areas through the aging process that are greater than what would be expected for the same aged NTs.

I think part of it is that social skills are work and as you get older you start to wonder the "value" of all that work versus just being able to be yourself.

I reached a point in my mid-forties where I started to resent all thw work I was doing to cover my aspieness to make others feel more comfortable. I started to think - hey what about me? why can't I be accomodated?

I told my wife that one of my new year's resolutions for 2014 was to be more myself. After her hair stopped standing on end she replied "be careful with that". She might have a point - there's a balance in there somewhere. Finding that balance will take some time though.

This, but a negligible amount. I was much more worse socially when I was younger through a lack of awareness, and a failure to grasp even rudimentary social expectations.

^^^ well said, I'm attempting to balance me more toward myself, too.

I have been worrying about this myself for years. I definitely feel as though I've been going through a kind of "worsening" for a while now, not just of my social skills, but even of my own tolerance of stimuli (noise, light, tactile irritations, etc.), ability to concentrate, and so on. Everything has been getting worse.

I am happily married to an extreme NT, so I'm usually able to get objective NT feedback about my various situations, reactions, etc., but haven't been able to get anything concrete from her about this. A couple of weeks ago, I read a tweet with a link to an article entitled "Autistic Regression and Fluid Adaptation."

This gave me a lot of hope! I had thought I was the only one (I often forget to check in on the boards here or Reddit)!

I have a my YouTube channel where I often, though not exclusively, talk about my experiences as an adult on the spectrum diagnosed late in life, and just this week posted a video about this. I would be interested to hear if this is similar to anyone else's experience or not.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhgmcn35RCc[/youtube]

(Sorry the embed is so big.)

If you like the video, please LIKE it on YouTube and subscribe and all that stuff. Thanks.

Last edited by snayl on 11 Jan 2014, 6:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for posting that ^ it definitely is good to know others have the same issues going on. I'm determined to get into a "place" both physically and mentally, where I can and do handle my self and my goals. Getting there has been at (few) times great, at times incredibly stressful or even brought me into meltdowns. My offspring give me feedback, the way you say your NT wife does for you.

In any case, yes your descriptions are really similar to my experiences lately.

It does help to know you're not alone. I just hope this is short-term, like many of those first-person accounts described. Granted, short-term could still last several more years, but I sure don't care for this "new me" very much.

Hey Snayl, I've seen some of the videos you've made on YouTube and appreciate what you are doing, and I'm also a heavy Reddit lurker I even saw the autistic regression video just a few days ago. The more awareness we can get out there for our community, the better.

I happened to have such a study in my research files so I skimmed back through it. It's a journal article called "Elderly with Autism: Executive Functioning and Memory" by Hilde M. Geurts and Marlies E. Vissers. It was a Dutch study published in 2011 in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (a psychology journal).

They studied 23 people on the autism spectrum (mostly with AS) and 23 people without autism for a control group. All participants were between the ages of 51 and 83. They used standard paper tests to measure their results. The study showed more declines in sustained attention, working memory and verbal fluency for the autistic group, but no other cognitive differences. I'm a sociologist, not a psychologist, so I think it's important to remember that psychology considers neurotypical to be "normal", just like caucasian is "normal" and heterosexuality is "normal". So it could be that if questions were phrased differently or presented in a different way the autistic group would do better than the non-autistic group. For example, on an IQ test, a rich white child from the suburbs will do better than a poor black child from the country or inner city because the IQ test was written by rich white people from the suburbs. It's the same thing with psychology tests. They weren't written by aspies or with aspies in mind.

I think what you said earlier in your post is pretty typical for adult aspies. And adults in general, really. When you get older you're more secure with yourself and stop trying so hard to be something you're not. This can result in seeming "more autistic" after a period of blending in as non-autistic.

Burnout,yes indeed.

Our generation now in middle age did not know about the spectrum. It was sink or swim. So we tried to "fit in". We knew we were different, wrong, and had to work 2, 3, 4, 5 times as harder then everybody else to get what they got. Some of us failed and are not around anymore. Some of us through a combination of will power, copying others, figuring out the correct jobs for ourselves and a economy that was healthier and somewhat more merit based than today had jobs or careers.

As we get older we all slow down, for those of us who going at warp speed for decades our mental and physical states were "fried" or "burntout" this natural slowdown triggered a crash.

For me Executive Functioning always problematic has been most affected. For others it may be different.

I am really worried about the younger autistics. As bad as it was not a multitasking, always connected world when we grew up. When we were not at school or work we could recharge, depending on where you were there was somewhat more acceptance of quirks. we did not have to deal with COMMON Core standards and 40+ hours a week of Applied Behavioral Analysis therapists trying to change our behavior.


Autistic regression, burnout been brought up before
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt153352.html

Yep, my coping skills are getting worse.

One way I'm dealing with it is creativity.