Feeling like family is mad at you for having AS?

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I have AS and I really feel like my family is mad at me for having Asperger's Syndrome. I especially feel like my parents and one of my sisters are mad and won't accept me for who I am. For instance, my mother sits around and constantly compares me to this sister who I do not get along with and tells me that she doesn't owe me a thing. For instance, if I tell her how I feel, she often pushes me to the side and tells me that she doesn't want to hear it. If I would have a melt down, my parents would tell me to stop crying and just push me away for it. Finally, my own father told me once that he chose my sister because I never had any hobbies like a normal teenager at my age.

Has anyone else had this kind of pain?

I felt that way in my teens because my parents get mad at me for my anxiety and my mom told me I embarrassed my brothers. They didn't give rats about me and just tortured me but I saw it as they did me a big favor. Autism doesn't mean to have everything evolve around you and to have your way.

I had tons of meltdowns and I had moderate depression and increased anxiety when I was 16. But I was also being a brat then, using my AS as an excuse and thinking everyone owed it to me and trying to be like my ex aspie mate by being violent to get my way. I read my old diary and it brought back old feelings and I read how people get mad at me for expressing myself so I thought is that a wonder why I don't have as much emotions and not care as much because I learned to shut them out? Even my husband says I don't express my emotions well and only time they ever come out is when I have anxiety. Then he said I did a better job expressing my feelings thanks to my pregnancy hormones and I was more emotional. But it increased my anxiety but now I am doing better again.

I used to think of myself as a stupid kid but now I see what a naive kid I was.

Never really been in a situation like that but with such situation, I think you should move out to live on your own if you are able to, doesn't really seem like a good atmosphere to live in. On my side I moved out because I couldn't endure the pressure of my mother to get a job and move out on my own, which happen to be something quite hard to do when you are depressive and suicidal, I actually got worse in the first few months I lived on my own, but thing got better overtime, my mental state is actually better now then it has been in over 6 years, moved out 3 years ago (got my asperger diagnosis few month after I moved out, didn't even know what it was when I told it, but once I got information it sure helped explain some difficulty I have or had when I was a kid). But I admit I had some decent aid through all this time, that helped me find a decent job, stabilize my mental state and reduce my anxiety. There is still work on myself to be done but at least it is nice to be able to go sleep without wishing to not wake up.

My mum's the same. I used to think it was because she didn't care, but actually I think she's oversensitive; if I tell her how I feel and she feels that I am blaming her and making her feel guilty, she goes into uber defensive mode and gets angry.

Some people can't handle criticism unless you use kid's gloves.

Moving out and being on your own really does improve everything in your relationship with your family. I did not have it bad with my parents so much, but my eccentricities and meltdowns bothered my brothers alot, sometimes. Nobody wants someone who is having a meltdown around, for obvious reasons. Now that I live alone, my meltdowns go unnoticed. The only thing left is that some people cannot understand how someone could live alone for so many years. They truly do not relate to the fact that many people with AS like to be by themselves 99% of the time.

Everyone wishes that Iniuan when it comes to falling asleep and not waking up. Yes, I am going through the rage part of living on my own and I am still going through it. A few of my friends have noticed it and had actually told me to go seek counseling. I feel so raged at my parents right now that it's not even funny and I have even thrown things against walls to prove that. Last night, I spent a good 4 and a half hours crying before going to sleep for 3 and a half due to my parents rejected me like that along with being rejected by another soul with AS which is for a good reason.

Hey Lene, the professionals in the field of Asperger Syndrome have continually put it across that the mothers of AS sufferers are not to blame. Well, who is? Are the professionals hiding something?

For starters, I always thought that babies come out of women. Thats exactly what happens. So when a feteus comes out as AS, surely, the mother is to blame. It is her body, she puts nutrients into it while pregnant, she's in control. Plus, its a well known fact that some pregnant women drink, drug take and smoke.

Is there a chemical released into the world that causes AS? For certain feteuses to become disabled, while others become NT?

Was your mother drinking, smoking and taking drugs while pregnant with you?

You can find plenty of free material - books and studies - on the net; please educate yourself before making such ignorant statements as the one I bolded in your post.

I always get the feeling that my brother is embarrassed by my AS.

My dad just refuses to believe there is anything wrong with me.

I don't know what the hell she was doing, but I was weeks premature. Born Dec '81 instead of the Jan '82 it should have been.
As for the bolded comments, I said "surely", I never stated it as fact. As for ignorance, not everyone can be as clever as you.

I'm not sure why you assume being born premature was your mother's fault. I too was a premature baby and it had nothing to do with my mother not taking care or herself or me.

It's not about being clever - there's a lot of free information available for anybody who wants to find out more about such things.

As an adult, I finally got up the courage to discuss this with my elderly mother about 2 years ago. I handed her a few pages discribing AS, she read it, and looked up and said, "You have this, don't you? Is there anything that can be done?". I responded by saying no, and that was the end of it.

I thought that "coming out", would give me a little consideration when judging me in regards to not being social. Nope.

I am contantly compared to my brother and sister, and accused of hating them because I don't visit them and socialize with them. They are really social, they have lots of friends and make them easily. They are popular. I am such and obvious outcast, that holidays were even pure misery. One Christmas, I refused to leave my bedroom so I wouldn't have to deal with it. Instead of understanding that I have difficulty due to AS, I am blamed for being anti-social.

Well, they say that 95% of the people don't care about your problems and the other 5% are glad you have them. Apparently this is also true with mothers.

It seems that AS runs in families, and is not caused by anything the mom ingested. That gets back to the whole debate on whether people with AS should breed. I guess you could say it's the mother's fault for having a baby that carries the AS gene, but as yet there is no prenatal test and hopefully there never will be, so you really can't blame mom. The thinking that if you allow a baby with genetic defects to be born you are a bad/evil person is why 90% of Downs babies are aborted.

If we aborted every single carrier of every single genetic disease, there would be a lot fewer people. I know that right after abortion was legalized in the US in 1973 that the number of live births suddenly plummeted by 50% in some places. It wasn't until abortion became less socially acceptable in the mid 1980s that the number of live births rebounded. In that time period, groups that don't believe in abortion like Muslims and Latinos decisively overtook whites in numerical advantage.

My HS biology teacher said that every human being carries at least 7 recessive genes that could cause problems if it became dominant in one of their offspring. Obviously humans are not going to agree to extinction, which sort of is contradictory to eugenics anyway. I know that there are couples who have two or three autistic kids in a row, or four or five girls in a row. Some couples just have the wrong genes.

Absent mandatory genetic testing of all couples (and even then people would just not marry, so you'd have to test EVERYBODY and have them compare tests before making a baby, which would be beyond the reach of most dictatorships, never mind a democracy), there's no way to know if the offspring of a certain man and woman will have problems. And then you'd have to consider that some women have no clue who the father is, because they have sex with so many men.

So, no, I don't think it's mom's fault, unless it's something like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome where it is DEFINITELY caused by stuff mom did. AS isn't caused by mercury poisoning, we know that, so it's not as if avoiding vaccines will prevent autism, despite what Jenny says.

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Yes, my brother and sister-in-law have not accepted what I have. I also respond to a med (not a cure) for what I have (ADHD) and there are some persons who are mad I have found a med which works for me a little and they haven't.

I'm not sure Craig. I don't think it's to do with what my mum ate or drank in pregnancy, but I do sometimes wonder if I am scared of expressing myself because my mum flew off the handle so much; a lot of my social anxiety has been alleviated by meeting my boyfriend (we can actually talk through issues and he listens, and he also agrees with me that my mum can be irrational). But I don't blame her; she must have gotten her habits from somewhere too. I think it was a combination of my thin skin and her being viciously severe at times- but she probably didn't realise she was over-killing the point at the time. She used to call me a brat and scream at me for making mistakes that any child would make; looking back, it's her issues and low-frustration threshold that are largely to blame, but it is hard to shake the feeling that I'm a bad person.

That said, once I got over the worst of my social anxiety, my communication skills are ok and I'm quite polite; perhaps more so than if she were more permissive.

You are what you are, stop trying to blame your mom. What comes out comes out. Blaming your own mom is like saying that you want to kill yourself. Don't even go there. Just try to work with what you have and look for outlets to improve the situation whether it's breaking away from your family completely or doing other activities more intensely or something else I can't think of.