Aspergers and fatherhood

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John_Thompson

My heart goes out to you. Losing a loved one after 30 years together has got to hurt. It sounds like you have a close relationship with your daughters. Spend a year or two working to strengthen it even more. Don't rush into any new relationships for a while. Take your time until you are comfortable with your new situation. Use this forum (and similar forums) to express your grief and seek comfort.

I know how lonely you must feel. I think Aspie's don't deal well with emotional losses. We don't need a lot of friends and as a result, the loss of the best friend is very painful.

I was close to my parents and I was fortunate that they lived long lives. However, they died within 2 years of each other and I was their guardian. It was tough on me to see them struggle with death and then have to deal with all of the things afterward.

My first wife was my one of the very few really close friends I had. My world pretty much revolved around her and our daughter. Suddenly, after 20 years of what I thought was a wonderful marriage, she just up and left me for a foreign guy. I was taken totally by surprise. I fell into a deep depression that took nearly a year of counseling to recover from. I often went weeks without sleeping. The loneliness was the worst. Where my best friend used to be, there was now nothing.

During that depression, I made a big mistake - I married the first women who showed any interest in me. I got a wonderful son, but they were the ten most miserable, abuse filled years of my life. My inability to recognize the danger signs of an abusive personality cost me dearly. While my first divorce was like a death, I discovered there are worse things. My second divorce was like an escape from hell.

Hey, John. PM me if you feel like chatting.

Hi everyone - I just joined & found this topic after searching google & thought I would share my experience.

At 43 years of age I was diagnosed with aspergers in September of 2012, I have to be honest and say that I am not coping well with this diagnosis even though places a lifetime of issues in perspective. I am very high functioning & intelligent (IQ above 155) so I have managed to get by in life & appear reasonably normal, but I have found my life interjected with constant lack of stability in career & other areas of life. I can soar to dizzying heights in sport, career & life one day & then all the sudden hit the ground with sickening thud the next. one time i even decedent into a sub-culture of regular drug use became unemployed & slept on mattress in a friends living room, to once again 3 years climb the professional ranks to an elite level. Being born a multiracial child in a country that is predominately white during the 70s I was constantly racially abused during my youth, including abuse by schooling system so my difficulties in learning where treated as by product of being a black child & I was labelled slow. This ensured the aspergers was never identified and despite years of visiting doctors to discuss depression, anxiety and anger management issues, troubles with florescent lighting, intermittent motor control issues etc etc none ever suggested Aspergers as a possibility. It wasn't until my youngest was diagnosed with Autism that I connected the dots myself & sought a diagnosis.

My experience of fartherhood is not great I have found myself if honest to be incapable of the level emotional consistency and levels of interest required to be a good parent, I often find myself totally frustrated & unable to cope with the home environment. My youngest girl has autism & I have found bonding with her near impossible, she makes me anxious as she is low functioning & always creates stress. I dont like to take her places as she has socially embarrassing behaviors and is so obsessed with babies that she follows strange children around & harasses their parents, who are normally distressed at this strange child following their toddler around & asking questions about their nappies. She talks at you constantly from the moment she is awake to the moment she sleeps, we have had to restructure our life to suit her needs & get resources to assist her & to be truthful I resent greatly the stress she causes everyday. My NT partner has been near breakdown for years due to a combination of our daughters ASD & my inability to cope with daily requirements of being an active farther. I fought with her for years before the diagnosis & blamed her constantly for being over demanding & insisted I was doing enough by working & paying the bills, so at least the diagnosis has helped me to accept my limitations. But I hate myself deeply for being the way I am & having these limitations in loving & caring for others.

My need for escape from my situation leads to constant obsession over special interest which often absorb finances I cant afford & place the family in financial duress, but I can not be talked out of them & become unpleasant (not physically violent but very staunch & unwavering). I often view my children as being in the way of my projects, an absorber of my time & financial resources which leads me to want to isolate myself more. I get pissed off that they make mess which again cause stress & steals time, that they need to be cooked for which again takes away what little time I don't have to be at work etc etc. Then I become depressed & without hope because i feel this way about my children & family life, lately I feel I should just kill myself for everyone's benefit so they can go onto have a new farther who is capable of loving them as deserved. So my partner who is very loving & loyal women can gain a new relationship with a "normal" man capable of caring & being a good farther & emotional present partner.

I keep hoping there is switch I can just flick on and I will come to enjoy being a farther, at times I force myself to be more present & engaged but this just ups my level of frustration & I soon find myself retreating again. My partner argues with me regularly about my level of input, the more she does this the more I retreat from everything. I find when I go away for business I miss my family but as soon as I return I don't want to be there, I don't know how to cope with the internal contradictions which = more stress and anxiety. I work in a technical sales career, and I find this to be draining also as i have to constantly talk with others & mirror back speech, body language & work toward targets. I find I need my home to be a retreat but it simply another stressful & demanding environment so I feel I get no rest ever!

At this point it looks my relationship is near its end & my partner wants to leave me, I feel I shouldn't stop her as she deserves to move onto something better that I'm just not capable of giving. I don't believe I am capable of providing anyone with an emotionally rewarding relationship within a family, not that I am bad person I just don't have the capacity of an NT person give & take consistently to level required..

Reading over the other post here I am really glad to hear that there is a lot of aspie folks who aren't as extremely effected in this area as I am, and have been able to bond with their kids.

Many blessing to you all J

i'm a little late to this one but i wanted to share a perspective i've found useful for myself. Maybe it will help others. i've been married for 8 years and have 5 children.

Though i'm not a computer person myself i'll use the analogy because it seems that we (those with ASDs) tend to comprehend and find it more logical than most. We're all very aware that our neurological wiring is different than NTs. i consider this the hardware part. We're endowed with a specific hardware package from which our non-NT traits stem. This part is unalterable.

In order to suppress undesirable traits or cope with deficiencies, hypersensitivities, etc. i have found a reprogramming/software approach useful. My brain finds comfort in working through logical sequences so i'm able to "program over" some of my hard-wired tendencies. i'm sure a lot of people are doing this to some degree anyway. It was helpful to me to view the process explicitly as a tool and something that was repeatable and applicable to a range of issues. The hard-wired tendency remains but a program exists to minimize the impact or redirect to a different outcome.

For example, (by virture of my hardware) i abhor having anything dirty, germy, messy, etc. in contact with me. i have 5 young children. Herein lies a dilemma. For situations in which it is impossible to avoid this (e.g., one of my 2 1/2 year olds vomiting on himself last night), i allocate the mental processing power to my love for him, as much of a sensory blocking numbness as i can muster, focus on containing and resolving the issue in the most expeditious manner possible and the actions i will take immediately after to restore myself to the neutral operating point (thoroughly washing my hands, changing clothes, etc.).

It's not magic but it helps me survive. i program my internal hierarchy to move things like love for and duty to my wife/children up at the top and accommodating my needs lower. When processing a situation i run through a logic that performs a check on the hierarchy and processes accordingly.

This, of course, is exponentially difficult as adverse external stimuli are introduced. It is also has the limitation that if the planned sequences of the software are disturbed by something unaccounted for i tend to lose it.

Hi red_ryder.
I'm pretty introverted and also have Asperger's. They're not mutually exclusive. I thought I was only introverted for a while but it seems introverted people also can and do have lots of friends. This didn't match my life at all so eventually I found out about Asperger Syndrome and all of the rest of the pieces just fell into place. unfortunately I was 68 at the time so it didn't change my life significantly but just knowing the answers to all of those thousands of questions I had growing up was great.

Perhaps if I'd known earlier (about 45 years or so) I'd have been able to teach my children better socialization skills through some type of intermediary manner, although when my kids were growing up no one knew of Asperger Syndrome.

I sure hope that with all the testing and social support available today that it actually turns into a better life for the kids today and isn't just a bunch of noise and bluster. Would anyone know?

denny

I just wanted to say, that I identify very much with so many of the various poster's experiences here. We are not alone.

Divorce, death, late diagnosis, being surprised at sudden seperation, trouble parenting, immeadiate bonding and love for offspring, addiction, confusion, vindication, exhaustion with work and family, isolation and loneliness, misplaced effort on preoccupation, self-loathing, regret, illness, etc. etc. etc...

So many trials and tribulations through which we uncover our strengths and weakness.

Kind wishes to you all,

Tom

I never really enjoyed fatherhood it was an age of constant criticism from the wife. After ten years the marriage was essentially dead from my point of view.. I dreamed of moving to California and dating Cali girls. I think I could have used another 10 years of being single but got married out of insecurity and desire for a regular sex partner. My wife, was a trophy wife in a way as she was very popular in HS and this seemed to soothe my feelings of inferiority. I can cope with the NT world with learned behavior and a good lie system. I excel as a strategist and at math and science things but my career in financial has been a series of firings some tenures lasting ten years. Each time I used the opportunity of downtime to polish my BS skills and move up. I never knew about AS until around 48. If I had known what I was up against then perhaps my life would have turned out better. I do have a quality mistress half my age who has given me much joy in a sugar dating relationship going 6 years. Sex ended with the wife years ago.

I had been severely socially handicapped in high school. In college there was intense feelings of resentment.....at social rejection. Bonding was never something that never came naturally to me or for that matter happened at all. When my sons were in their teens I basically hated them because they were always in conflict with their mother. I never felt close to my daughter she always seemed aloof towards me. My relationship with my sons is ok and with all three their mother is the main conduit of family information. My daughter remains aloof to me to this day. I have enjoyed sex with various mistresses (mostly strippers) more than I ever did with my wife.