Does anybody else find certain individuals just exhausting?

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I have found that certain people, usually the REALLY outgoing chatty types, drive me nuts. I have to sit at a table with one such person, my mother-in-law, tonight. I find her just plain exhausting to be around. It's not the usual mother-in-law cliches that bother me, though. She is CONSTANTLY talking. She tries to force me to eat foods I specifically state that I do not like. She is always preaching to me about being Christian. There are so many little behaviors that just drive me nuts. Oh, and the WORST is that I have made it very clear that I do not like to be touched and yet she still insists on grabbing me, hugging me, poking me, etc. in a playful manner.
It is not just her, either. It seems to be a specific type of personality but I just can't figure out the specifics of it. It is like she and those like her set off every syptom of my A.S. all at once. I don't know if any that makes sense, but can anybody relate?

I find most people to be exhausting, but, yes, the chatterboxes who are constantly getting into your personal space are particularly draining. I usually try to get plenty of alone time if I know I'm going to be around one for any length of time and then schedule more of the same immediately after. Can you maybe get your wife to arrange the seating so MIL isn't right next to you all the time?

Regards,

Patricia

Oh yes. I totally understand.

Most people drive me nuts. Most people drain me when I interact with them. But these type of people are the worst, definitely.

yes, i avoid the hypersocial and people who adore themselves. they'll suck the life out of you.

Ugh, yes. I cannot stand this type of individual. For me, I do everything I can to avoid them. It's like, "Mind your own business and leave me the heck alone!"

It's funny how a perfectly delightful person can come from a pack of drooling imbeciles, isn't it? My husband is the most adorable man, and it's a wonder he lived long enough for me to know it. That is, it's a wonder he wasn't driven to toss himself off a canyon wall (he's from Utah). His family is tiring enough, but it's the spliced in lot, his father's in-laws from his current marriage, that always seem to get to me the worst. Me, and everyone who knows them.

They're the type who start of open and friendly and chatty, and I don't fault them for this in a general sense though it's so wearing. If someone is a genuinely open person and still manages to be pleasant, well, it's a rare thing. I can take people like that for a short time and feel no real malice toward them, tiring though they are.

But it's never what it seems. For it turns out that a family such as they are is able to be so bright and bubbly and chatty because of an unspoken family policy of non-disclosure... in other words, if you don't mention it, it doesn't exist. This is what passes for manners. If you speak your mind, you're alienating the family. I should know. I nearly started WWIII the first time I had to be around them for more than one day with nowhere to go. Touchy people, no sense of humor, one of them was a witch... whaddya gonna do. Sorry, they do have a sense of humor. Not sure what, but it's dirty, whatever it is. So you have to sit and make nice with the tart who broke up one marriage so that she could marry a greasy old man and the dad whose parenting style was pure "cat's in the cradle" and has the big fat nerve to call himself grandpa...

So anyway, to sit among them and listen to them jabber about their hugeness just makes me want to scream. Everything big... Suburbans, big houses, buy everything in bulk, they're all taller than Goliath, BIG SCREEN TV, the family's come to visit so let's go shopping because they have no stores in Utah(?!), and above all, let's make a pilgrimage to Disneyland during the busiest season eating every meal BIG and GREASY inside the park and NO ONE knows where we're ALL going next, en masse, like so many sheep who have the shepherd from HELL. I mean, you sit at the greasy meal asking, as loud as you can, through the cacophony of park music and their own voices, where are we going next, and it's as if you aren't speaking, or they all say they don't know, THEY DON'T KNOW? And then they get up and go there, as one, because they've all just gotten into the habit of swarming everywhere they go! They CAN'T possibly like each others' company that much! They just can't! And they're so grand and magnanimous to accept my husband and his siblings into their fold, poor little things who went through the world's ugliest divorce because their sister broke up the previous marriage... And I know more than I ought to because my husband finally had someone to talk to when he married me and let the whole thing pour out. So I get around them and I shut down within five minutes, sometimes before I even get there... My personality dries up and I start talking like Mandy (re Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy) and roll my eyes at everything they do like an incorrigible child in the principal's office...

<pant pant pant>

Sorry, you were saying? Yeah, I've met tiring people. My daughter's one. I used to beg her with tears in my eyes to stop talking. Didn't work. It's my comeuppance... I'm a tad verbose myself.

Oh, dear god, the Chatty Cathies of the great sucking vortex of NT hell...
You have my deepest, deepest, most profound sympathy.

And irishw... my sister wants to marry into that family and shepherd all their children! She is one who is never without a herd of yacking, screaming children--hers or others-- around her and naturally THEY get precedence during any conversation. I haven't had an uninterrupted talk with her in 17 years! On the phone, in person, doesn't matter. Always little nattering child-bots yammering away.

Now I must go sit in silence... even the memory of these kind of people is traumatic to the system.

It's very reassuring, as always, to come here and find out that it's not just me. This is becoming my safe haven, even if I spend the majority of my time just reading.
The dinner was a nightmare. I've only had 2 panic attacks before and this was close to being the third. It was a ceremony for my oldest daughter's (7) Brownie Scouts troop. It was at a Chinese place, which is a bad start already because I don't like Chinese food. My wife drove, which always makes me anxious. The place was really crowded and people kept bumping into my chair. The lady that organized the whole thing touched my back when she said hello, as did half the people bumping into my chair when they apologized. Such presumption... hrrmm. And the MIL, true to form, poked me several times when she greeted me and asked roughly every ten minutes asked, "Why don't you try something? Eat that, try this, blah blah blah... The only that that saved me from complete meltdown, oddly enough, was that the baby started getting stir crazy and I had to pick her up and carry her around for the rest of the event, giving me an excuse to avoid socializing.

Whew... what a night.

I had to deal with one of these people for about 4 years. She was always chatty, telling me what treatments I needed for my autism and once stuck on a topic, she would go on forever and ever. The thing is the fact that I really like her daughter. However, I could never have her as a mother in law, because I would end up committing murder or suicide. I definitely know the type.

Yes.......(Yes X 10 ^ (1/0)) >> approaching Mental Scream for this HFA/Aspie.

Although I *might* like certin NT they can positively make me nuts.

In all seriousness, their chattiness can be physically exhausting for me. I am nice, tend to get along well, but the effects for me can be near collapse from overwhelm. I actually have had to lye down to recover.

Fainting couch? Anyway, yes, sympathies. Take 2 Excedrin stress headache tabs and rest. Then maybe she'll go away.

Chatter boxes, lazy parents (let kids run wild/may sound odd from me), whiny people, dirty people (pick noses & wipe it on stuff etc.) & the guy I knew who followed me around & hit on all the girls in my school (including my friends & proposed marriage to them & me) (an aspie who never took the hint that he needs to change some of his habits/ simply put, he's a creeper) (the only aspie I have ever really hated), plus materialistic, discriminatory, narrow minded, opinionated etc.. Not trying to sound mean here .

Yes, my sister and my mum's friend. My mum always talks to me about her friend, who I don't like. That woman can't shut up for 5 seconds. We went out for dinner and she was just yacking yacking away about useless stuff. Then I found out she's a little racist and thinks a mother with mild rhett's shouldn't have children. This forum would love her.
Then there's my sister, always so goddamn happy and loud. Calls people b**tch or slapper without any intention to hurt them. And she constantly criticizes everything I do.

It's funny the more someone talks the more you find out about them. Both people I mentioned above say really derogatory things, then there's me the quiet mouse who is so very politically correct that I can't have a conversation with anyone without being offended.

LabPet, you are so funny and yet so truthful!

Actually the act of greeting someone is terrrible.. you shake their hand, look them in the eyes - they notice you don't look, they notice you dont shake, they notice you dont squeeze - they feel insulted, you feel exhausted. Its much easier to grab someone and hug them - no eye contact - over quickly.

I usually have to shake hands when meeting someone for the first time. I fake eye contact by looking at their forehead or hairline. Sometimes, I can even look at their eyebrows. I have to know someone or otherwise be comfortable around him or her in order to let them get close enough to hug or let them touch me.