sexual, physical and emotional abuse

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Both sentences could too be used to sum up what my own situation was.

I don't find myself at ease with the term "abuse" because I often relate it to the more obvious forms such as sexual abuse or physical abuse leading to visible injuries and I wonder whether it applies to my case. While the beatings were "mild" in the sense that I don't recall being physically hurt in a significant way - I do know there was a psychological aspect mostly in the form of constant terror and humiliation.

There was terror because both my father's fits of rage and the level of violence they themselves reached seemed downright unpredictable. I still don't know how a man in his 40s could lose his temper so much over petty things; his general demeanour was that of someone out of control. These were sometimes accompanied by all kinds of threats and things like forcing me to walk slowly past him without covering myself from any potential blows and specifically without the guarantee that there would be no further violence (and sometimes there was - it was random).

There was humiliation because of the constant comparisons to other children, the meaning of some of the beatings, the kind of things I was called, the pointing out how ridiculous I was for being weaker while in some form of physical coercion, the constant invasion of my privacy and finally the fact that this happened many times both in public and well into my teens when I dreaded being seen by classmates in this kind of situations.

I really don't know what the hell was my dad thinking.
I'm not so surprised about my mother because she still has impractical ideas and is invasive.

Well, my father (88 years old) is now being treated for Asperger's (Lexapro, etc.) by a psychiatrist. We were as similar as we were different.

my adoptive father was very similar to this. I love him to death but when he drinks I know to stay out of his way. I may have Aspergers and I may not but either way its always a horrible experience when my dad shoves me around.

That sounds similar to what happened when I first began to suspect AS. Lots of counselors wanted to attribute everything to PTSD, (which I also have) and to deny the AS. It was as if they were saying that one could not have both at the same time.

Many years ago back in the early 80s, I had short-term a temporary position washing dishes at some catering place. There was another coworker who had just been released from the ACI(Adult Correctional Institute) who had been there 8 years whose father had been an alcoholic as well as a heroin addict. He said his father was a nice guy when he was a heroin addict compared to when he was an alcoholic.

Severe Physical Abuse, by a school bully. It got so out of control that there was an attempt on my life. Shortly after that the bully disappeared.

I just thought, What are the "signs" a toddler/small child is being abused? To they re-enact it in playing?

I don't think it's easier for either an NT or an autistic person. I think how you come out of it, how you survive is a matter of many many details coming together, not one big thing on it's own. Just more like, how was the time before, what characters are present in someone's life if there's abuse of any kind, how a day outside went, how many people are involved, what these people do and say, everything.

For me, it meant becoming less autistic, hf by abuse (physical & emotional). The irony is obvious, since the abuse took place because of me being autistic and abuse is not a way you make children get better in anything. I was really close to just going down the other side and going worse and worse and I have no idea what would have happened instead of what happened in reality.
The outcome's not at all predictable and how someone takes it, how severe it will persist in life can't be known until this is of the past. It's just complicated.

I was severely abused as a child, but so were my non-autistic siblings, and it hurt us all very much (we can't really cope with being around each other because of the stress that we haven't dealt with yet). None of us have married or had children, and the youngest is 37 (four of us).

It hurt me more as an autistic person because I'm unable to hold down a job, and my siblings are (though I think one of my sisters has also had problems). If I had a supportive family I could live with it would make such a difference in the quality of my life (being on welfare where I am is like living in a concentration camp, and it gets cumulatively worse). My family's rich - they could support me no problem. But they don't want to and so I basically have to wait for them to die and claim my inheritance to get off welfare (unless I can sell something I write first). It's tough. It's a double whammy.

How could you measure NT suffering agaainst Aspie suffering? With what instrument? In which laboratory?


No one feels pain like we do. No one is worse-off than we are.

Is that what this is? If so, I don't care for it. Suffering is suffering. There is no comparison.

This is horrendous for anyone to have to go through. And, it's true; you can't really quantify anyone's suffering and say that X had it worse than Y. (Although, reading these I have something of a feeling of 'How can I talk about what happened to me when everyone here has had it much worse?')

But I will anyway.

As a child, teen and into adulthood I underwent verbal abuse, emotional belittlement, gaslighting, and when I was still young enough not to be able to escape it, considerable physical pain deliberately inflicted on me in attempts to 'improve' my appearance. Were I to mention any of this to the perpetrator, I'm sure I'd get outright denial or some attempt at justifying it in the name of my 'need to be shown the right way'. I also haven't mentioned half of it to other family members, although they've become increasingly aware of how much emotional damage this person has done to other people over recent years.

And, the thing is, it's taken me a long time to face up to the reality of what happened too. And while that can't be uncommon, I suspect AS hasn't really helped here. I wasn't exactly punished for my AS traits (nobody recognized them as such), but some of them were actually used against me - my tendency to believe what I was told, the fact that I had few close friends and didn't know much about what 'normal' family life was like - I was indeed gutted when I did start making friends, in my teens, and discovered that other girls' parents were supportive, took their side, comforted them when they had an attack of 'I'm ugly and nobody loves me', whereas mine did exactly the opposite. But my first instinct was, of course, to ask what was wrong with me.

Hard to interpret mixed or ambiguous social signals from most people. Doubly hard when the person messing you around is a parent, whom you've been conditioned to believe will always tell you the truth. I survived, and still do, I think, only by keeping my distance.

I hope everyone here who's suffered any form of abuse can find their own way of living beyond it.

It's not so much a question of being "more" or "less" horrible as compounding psychological issues. My wife had an "eccentric" uncle. He had a lot of "issues". In reality, though, his underlying condition was probably Asperger's. However, he had Asperger's, and he came from an abusive family, and he served for a time in Vietnam (PTSD), so all those factors combined to make him an extremely dysfunctional person.

I, OTOH, have Asperger's. I also have a serious physical disorder. It is hard to separate how Marfan syndrome effects me from how Asperger's effects me, and there are clearly interrelationships. In some ways, Marfan "mitigates' my Asperger's so it's not a severe or noticeable as it might be for other people. In other ways, though, Marfan amplifies certain symptoms.

I was sexually abused by a cousin early in my childhood, and I've had to deal with my share of verbal abuse from various people. My parents could be verbally abusive at times, but, all in all, they were ultimately loving and supportive of me.

We talk about the autistic spectrum, well every one of us is a spectrum. Our psychology is a combination of many factors: genetic "traits" such as Asperger's/Autism, nutrition, other physiological issues, lifestyle, environment, upbringing, etc.

It's like physiological disorders. Let's say I have a stroke tomorrow. It would be becase a) I have Marfan syndrome, b) I have an artificial valve, c) I have a family history of stroke, d) I like fried foods, e) I didn't take my Warfarin yet today, and f) some stressful event triggers a stroke.

Now, someone else without all my risk factors may also have a stroke, merely because of genetic predisposition and stress. Or someoen else might have a horribly unhealthy lifestyle but no predisposition.

What varies is when the stroke ocurs, and how severe it is. Same with psyhological issues. If you just had Asperger's, you'd still have psychological issues. If you'd just been absued, you'd still have psychological issues. Because you have Asperger's and a history of abuse, your issues are more difficult and complex. OTOH, you're more likely to recognzie them and seek treatment for them than someone with *just* Asperger's or *just* abuse.