Acting without thinking. Aspergers or Executive Dysfunction?

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One of the biggest problems for me socially is acting on my immediate impulse to do something without considering the consequences. Almost 100% of the awkward situations I create are because I say or do something without considering how somebody will react to it. My dilemma is that usually it is very hard to get myself to think about a situation before doing it because sometimes the urge to say or do something is so overwhelming it is like a compulsion I just have to fulfill. Anxiety/fatigue makes me very prone to this kind of impulsive behavior- I end up doing stupid stuff I would never do with a clear mind and looking ret*d/weird. I am often full of regret for botching situations that I knew couldve turned out better if I hadnt overlooked a choice I made.

Misunderstanding people's body language/social cues has never been my problem, but simultaneously considering that information and shaping my actions to get a desirable response is very hard for me. In general I'd say actually doing things I understand is harder than understanding them. For example, when I write an essay or solve a math/science problem I have to break it into small parts and make sure I do each part properly every time or I will not be able to approach it at all. If I do not break it down I feel confused and overwhelmed. Functional socializing (group conversations, small talk, whatever else most AS people have trouble with) which doesnt take have many variables is intuitive for me but when it comes to hitting on girls, leadership, improvisational speaking, I flounder just because I don't know where to begin and how to plan my actions. (the key here is things that require tactical choice of words/actions)

If it happens to be important, I might add that I am horrible at writing essays, playing chess/starcraft/any strategy game that takes planning/ monitoring one's actions and modifying one's approach, I can't seem to play a piano piece flawlessly no matter how long I practice it, I regularly forget basic skills in every academic subject area, I can understand academic concepts one day but not the next, and am often oblivious to things right in front of me.

I've read about this thing called executive dysfunction that produces appearances very close to Aspergers, and every fact sheet I read about it seems to describe me very closely. ED(for short), i've read, has been shown to cause sequential memory problems, poor working memory, impulsivity, poor control over emotions, and inflexible thinking, among other things. At least to me, somebody showing ALL of those symptoms could easily appear to have Aspergers. I've been to several psychologists and only one suggested I showed a few symptoms of As, while another insisted I had a very mild case (even though I didnt meet the diagnostic criteria) but after I stopped seeing him I heard that he had claimed to cure me (even though I was no different than I was when he received me -_-). One of my psychologists (who was supposedly an expert on ASDs) couldnt really diagnose the difficulties I was having, but he described it as a "sort of thought disorder".

Forgive my rants. Bottom line people, do any of you experience this? Anyone heard of Executive Dysfunction/considered it as an alternative to their apparent AS?

I'm not totally clear but I think ED can be considered a component of Asperger's. I know that I have ED and the significant impact it has had on my life. It's very frustrating.

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That's one thing I don't fully understand Executive Dysfunction I've seen it brought up here on WP and from what yougivinbeef said I don't seem to fit it and from Google it seems very OCD like (making lists following a very strict routine) if you need that than that's cool. but is there more to it than obsessive routine? (such as lists etc.)

I think maybe some people have obsessive routines to help overcome the problems associated with executive dysfunction.

zelda:
For me, the list making is a coping strategy not a compulsion that needs to be fulfilled. I don't have a panic attack and my life doesnt fall apart if I don't make lists, I just go through life in a very disorganized haphazard way. I actually don't make them as much as I should, given their proved effectiveness in keeping my life together.

aimless:
ED is a component of a lot of mental disorders. its actually the common ground between schizophrenia, ASDs, ADD/ADHD
and others. The frontal lobe gets f'ed up pretty easily compared to other parts of the brain lol. What kind of difficulties has ED given you? Are any of the things I describe familiar?

everybody:

Chaos is basically the essence of Executive Dysfunction. It's like every part of your mind spills into each other and becomes a nasty incoherent mess. Allow me to explain the process:

Limited working memory(your mind's scrap paper) makes it hard to manipulate information in your head to deduce a pattern or comprehend a situation. If you don't understand the problem you're dealing with, you can't devise an appropriate solution. You either draw a blank or think of something irrelevant or ineffective. Your mental rigidity makes this faulty solution seem like the only one possible. Not surprisingly, you'll fail. Your unregulated emotions come on full force. The former 2 things combined make it almost impossible to learn from your mistakes. The other deficits in in frontal lobe functions (I can't remember them off the top of my head) make it much harder to store and retrieve information that actually manages to get processed. Most people at this point make a mental blueprint of how to do something for future reference but with ED that never happens and you start from scratch the next time you attempt it.

My experiences:

Imagine going through life having to satisfy every little momentary urge,unable to control your emotions,with the capacity to only think from a to b when you need to reach z, only remembering half of what you actually manage to digest, and then being unaware of what you forget because there's no framework/list/blueprint to refer to.

Most of the time my mind feels jumbled and I feel lost or disoriented. I am extremely disorganized, there no consistency to anything I do. There is no such thing as routines for me, I struggle to follow the few I do have (leave parts out, forget to do it altogether, get distracted, etc.). I am not bothered at all by change since by virtue of never following routines, I do everything in a different order than the last time I did it (until I remember how I did it.

School was extremely hard for me until I learned how to break down every assignment into parts so that I would not have to deal with so many variables at once. Math problems that had more than a couple steps killed me and writing essays was hell. In fact, even writing this message and tweaking it to convey the meaning I want it to was agonizing. My coping strategy makes my schoolwork manageable, but I still have to put in agonizing amounts of time to understand and remember it.

As I said above I tend to do things without thinking them through completely. Sometimes I will blatantly ignore people's negative reactions because I absolutely have to act on an impulse. For example, last week I went out drinking with my friend and he left to a (non-mutual) friend's house. This friend happened to leave their door unlocked. Although I was drunk I knew that I shouldn't barge into this person's house but my urge to bring my friend to another party led me to it. In the back of my mind I hoped everybody there was too drunk to notice, but like hell they noticed and I was pretty embarrassed.

Also like I said before, I can understand people quite well but actually applying that to my behavior is another story. I haven't developed a blueprint for social interaction, just like I haven't for anything else. When the situation is simple, like small talk or flirting, I can "feel" my way through it. I actually surprised myself when I took a job at Starbucks and became very intuitive in a large number of social situations.(this was back when I genuinely believed I had Aspergers and my self-esteem was quite low)
Because I never put the stuff I learn into a (semi)permanent framework, my know-how of it fades quickly unless I'm constantly doing it. Likewise, when I go through long periods of solitude my social skills disappear and I have to go about re-socializing myself. I suck in unfamiliar social situations for the same reason I suck at problem solving in school- I can't apply my know-how.
I've read somebody describe Aspergers as "social dyslexia". My situation is more akin to "social dyspraxia".



Forgive me for going on and on about this topic. I set out to write a short succinct response and it always turns into me rambling.

yougivinbeef, thanks, that was very informative. My experiences with ED are the same as yours except for the social aspect. I don't do social anymore (and happier) but back in the day and especially when I was drinking I would be more likely to do something I should have thought through before. In general I was so paranoid of making a mistake I did nothing. Antidepressants helped with the social fears though and now I'm more likely to blather on and not realize that after a certain point people want me to stfu.

I have clinical executive dysfunction. It is total chaos, so not nice to have. I’ve met very few people with this problem. It is the bane of my life.

In two separate reports my memory is described as "very low" or "extremely poor". I believe it is much more a recall and memory processing problem. I can't recall on demand but get random memories. But my memory problem is anetrograde in nature. I can't remember my childhood, and my memory fades as I go along. I also truly think blindly, in that I have no qualitative experience of thought whatsoever. This would take me quite a while to explain, due to how people understand the way they think, but essentially words like 'visualise', 'imagine', etc don't apply to me.

However executive is a huge area so it is also a spectrum. Technically executive dysfunction can also be the good things associated with ASD and other things since they can be viewed a dysfunction from the norm (even savantism has been associated brain trauma/epilepsy). However clinical executive dysfunction is only bad by definition. Coping strategies are very limited as any form of organisation or administrating your life requires minimal executive that most take for granted.

Acting without thinking implies impulsivity. In my case there is no evidence of that. In other words I have made really stupid mistakes but for the most part am not abnormally impulsive.

The only impulsivity get from my ED is either forced, or totally losing my patience.

What living with ED is really about constantly having to pull yourself back after being derailed for the billionth time. It can be a recipe for neurosis and mental health problems. I am really conscientious about that.

On the other hand I do get the compulsions that you describe. I’m more on the obsessive side than the compulsive side. However when I have compulsions they are usually persistent. I might even completely forget about them, and then they remerge or not. It tends to be around my social style/humour. I might even know it is at least subjectively stupid, but that does not stop me.

Impulsivity is different. It is truly acting without giving a moment thought.

0_equals_true:

Explain what you mean when you say that ED can be the "good" part of psychological disorders. It seems to me in most cases that it only makes things harder. For example, some psychologists say that ED is a substantial part of ADD/ADHD. Also, how could you say that clinical ED is only bad in definition when you just described it as the "bane of your existence"?

Today I had a physics test (oh joy) and while I didnt do as well as I planned, I still found it useful in hindsight as an example of how my ED effects my academics.

I find it very hard to get myself into a studying mindset. I will not be able to concentrate or absorb anything if I have anything else whatsoever on my mind. This morning, it happened to be the thought that I was not prepared for my exam. Instead of motivating me to concentrate harder, this thought completely wrecked my focus. When I finally managed to start studying, I slowed myself down immensely by reading the derivation of every formula, something I feel like I have to do in order to remember it. It took even longer because I found it hard to mentally perform the arithmetic to reach the next step.

Finally I got to an example problem (if you don't understand what i'm talking about by the end of this sentence just skip the whole paragraph) that used a definite integral and forgot that the integral of the boundary values by themselves have c's. (the only book that actually shows the cancellations is calc1 and i'm in a 300 level physics course). Although the problem blatantly stated x(0) = 0, I get this feeling it is not true and plug in t = 0 to the equation. Since I left the c out of the integral, my work read x(0) = "something definitely not 0" instead of x(0) = "that same thing" + c, which would have been convincing enough for me. I stared at the problem for an hour. It never occured to me that I remembered the integral formula incorrectly.

Bottom line- I forgot parts of the formula, worked the problem incorrectly, refused to modify my approach, or even skip it to study another section. Valuable time to study lost.

The test was it's own story. For one problem our teacher gives us a formula and blatantly tells us to use it. I try to derive the formula so I'll know how to use it. Seems like a pretty good way to problem solve, right? It turns out the formula I derived was for a completely different situation. And you know what? That's the one I end up using! On top of picking an incorrect formula, I forget the meaning of one of its variables, even though it was one of the few formulas I reviewed before the test. I spend an hour trying to figure out what I did wrong, run out of time and don't finish the test.

So I find out what I did wrong after the test, I hear the explanation, it makes sense to me, so I sit down to redo the problem and correct my error. I look at my notes (which actually had the test problem) and see the teacher used a different letter as a variable than I did. I start freaking out and imagining that the variable the teacher used has a different meaning than the one I used even though they were interchangeable in the problem. They seem like they represented the same quantity. Guess what? They did! But I didn't believe it.

I spent the next 5 hours writing equations to describe their "relationship", end up using a billion more variables, (length is a function of position, position is a function of time, time is a parametric equation, etc.), confusing myself with basic calculus concepts, trying to figure out how there can be a fraction of a position, and once again misunderstand the problem. If only I didn't assume those variables were different...I could've started studying for an exam I have tommorrow.

As soon as I get back to my dorm though, I get obsessed with writing this =p

When it comes to school, these are things I deal with on a daily basis. Sounds fun doesn't it?

i have many of the same problems you describes with ED. i am diagnosed with asperger-syndrom one year ago. i am not a native english speaker. i stared to learn the english language six month ago.

i can read and understand (speech) everything. but if i want to start writing or speaking, i have the feeling that i lost every word. if i started to thing about what i want to write, nothing works.

writing an essay is very difficult for me. especial if it's necessary to write structured.

writing my own thoughts in a free way seems the only way for me to write something down.

repetition is one of my favorite. if you read my sentence you can found many words i repeat. that's not a phenomenon if i write in a foreign language. it's also one in my own.

losing the structure by writing makes my frustrated. i love writing and as a child i - always - wanted to be a writer.

underlined, my hole life is difficult for me. if someone speak to me and required a fast answer or action, i feel a complete blockade. nothing works, nothing.

I got that too.
But I wonder: is it possible thaving AS and not having executive dysfunction?

I do have a problem with organizing, structuring information, planning, prioritizing. It might be a lot - maybe ED, maybe hypoactive ADD, maybe AS, maybe something else. The only thing I know is that there's something odd with my brain development, with the way I deal with information, and that it is a major challenge in my life. When I was younger I was able to compensate with above-average intelligence, but major depression added to my problems in a decapacitating way. I'm 26 now, and during the last two or three years it's gotten slowly better. I think that comes from me giving my best to care about a brain-friendly nutrition, from being over puberty finally and from training myself. Basically, the days when I can't cook a simple (but not routine) dish because I can't make a blueprint in my mind with all the steps I will have to follow seem to be over. I can't really say what exactly or how it changed, but I'll challenge myself more and see if it helps.

@wayside
It is completely normal to have a far better passive understanding of a foreign language than you are being able to actively use.