"You just want something to be wrong with you" res

Post Reply New Topic

Anyone else ever had this response?

I was trying to talk to my mom this morning about my recent Asperger's diagnosis, hoping it might bridge the gap between us and help her understand the source of a lot of the conflicts that we've had in the past.

Before I could even get there, she pretty much shut me down. I was sort of trying to lead up to it by expressing that I feel like I've had a harder time than normal lately socializing, and that I felt there was a specific cause. Her response: "You just want something to be wrong with you."

I didn't go any further. In fact, the conversation deteriorated from there and ended with her saying I am selfish, that instead of being grateful for the things people are doing for me (people I told her I appreciated but didn't consider "friends"), all she hears about is how miserable I am and that I dwell on the fact that I don't have any "friends" when people are, in fact, showing me friendship (I am, admittedly, oblivious to such gestures). She said all I'm concerned about is myself and my own misery. All of this pretty harshly. I said nothing, just, "I really don't know what to say...." and she kept going. At that point I just picked up my keys, said "I'm going to go." And left.

Anyone else experienced this? Anyone have any advice? I'm kind of at a loss. I just don't know how to communicate with her, and I'm feeling really hurt by her criticism, especially since I feel like I have made a GREAT effort to verbalize to the people that HAVE helped me lately how much I appreciate their help (she has not been present during any of these situations).

It sounds like to me that for whatever reason, your mother does not agree with your diagnosis. Apparently getting one won't guarantee your friends or family will be any more accepting or understanding then they were before, and my family is the only reason I would even consider an official Dx. I'm sorry for you being in the position you're in, try not to take it too personally.

My own parents are almost defensive talking about my childhood issues, I think they might feel guilty or something. Maybe your mom is trying to deal with this and struggling with her own issues about it. I think you being comfortable with it and make it "it is what it is" will help turn your family around. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's not a dirty secret. It's an integral part of who you are, and always has been. You're no different then before, except now you know different. Good luck. I think things will get better in time. Just forgive, live, and find happiness.

Your mother was rude to minimize your feelings, and her response to you might actually indicate a deficit in her ability to understand complex situations.

Not that your situation is particularly complex, however people who have difficulties with certain concepts often take too simplistic of an approach to certain situations. These people have a strong need for "normal" in their lives, and when things aren't normal, they have limited capacity to deal with the situation.

On the subject of people not acting normal, rather recognizing certain behaviors as an indication of a different neurobiological makeup, they either accept that that is just how the person is, without giving much thought as to why, or they become upset and accuse the individual of intentionally acting "that way". This is akin to a person banging on something in an attempt to get it to work, even though that thing may actually lack moving parts or any parts on which banging would fix.

However, that doesn't mean that none of your mother's claims were valid. People get tired of constantly hearing others complain, even if those complaints are valid ones. Additionally, parents often worry about their children when their children's lives are not going well. She might be more worried about you than she lets on, and it might stress her to hear you make negative comments to her all the time.

Your mother might have a difficult time accepting that you are different or even understanding differences in general, but it's generally no more reasonable to force enlightenment upon someone who doesn't have the capacity to accept it any more than it's reasonable to expect someone on the spectrum to just snap out of it and be normal.

Your mother might have difficulty accepting why you are the way you are but you should accept that she has difficulty accepting this and find a more positive center point of your relationship with her. Tell her more positive things and reserve putting the weight of your negative things on the shoulders of those who can better bare them.

I hate that response. It's not that I want something to be wrong with me. I already know that something is wrong with me. What I want is a name for it.

I've actually known people that would rather not know if something was wrong with them. Giving it a name and knowing more about it makes it more likely that you can do something about it.

Yeah it is crappy response, especially from the people that are closest to you. I've heard it myself.

Yes! I completely agree with this. And knowing really IS half the battle.

This. You're totally right. I think because for much of my life she has been the one person consistently there to listen to me (regardless of how conflicted our relationship has been), I've grown really accustomed to just sort of dumping all my negativity on her, because I have learned that people grow tired of it (yeah, I almost wrote "other people" there...).

And to an extent I guess I did sort of think that telling her about the diagnosis would be a sort of "magic bullet" to fix our relationship, like all of a sudden she would have the lightbulb go off and think, "oh, that's why you're like this. Now we can learn how to functionally interact with one another." I need to learn to accept that it might not happen quite that way.

EXACTLY.

Yup!
Could be she feels judged that her child turns out not to have been as perfectly normal as was thought... and that they'd completely missed it.
So denial is defense against letting the problem in
(?)

...I actually suspect, given that she shares some traits with me, that she may have some similar neurological differences. I think maybe her concept of "neurotypical" is somewhat clouded by her own lack of neurotypicism.

Not long after I found out I have Asperger's my sister contacted me to tell me she had read about something called Asperger's, had done some research on it, and believed I have it. I told her that the same thing had happened to me, and that I was greatly relieved to finally know why I am so different. I can talk to her about it when I have new info to impart, and she sends me info, too. But the one time I mentioned it too my father, it distressed him, and he didn't want to hear it, so I don't discuss it with him. He's in his 80s, so why add stress to his life at this point in time. There's nothing he can do to fix this, and that would bother him. At least now I know the cause of my problems, and that has reduced some of my stress. We don't tend to handle stress well, so any reduction in stress is good. Also, understanding the problem helps me cope better.

I am sorry you can't talk to your mother about your problems, but most people eventually get fed up with hearing a constant litany of complaints. This can make them snappish when you start to do it again. I suggest you avoid dumping complaints on your mother, and, as other posters have said, only discuss positive stuff. If you can't do that, then maybe you should minimize contact with her. If you really need some one to complain to, see a shrink for that.

Knowing what's wrong with us will help us in other ways. Now we can keep on the look out for treatments and coping methods that have been used successfully by others on the spectrum. Before we knew what the problem was, we had no clue where to turn for real help.

I still have my problems, but now that I know what to look for in my search for solutions, I feel more proactive, and that feels a lot better than not knowing and being miserable.

There is no cure, but now we can get some help. So take charge of your treatment options. It will reduce the urge to complain, and the people around you will appreciate that and be more willing to spend time with you. Or, as Dick Van Dyke used to sing, "Put on a happy face!"

I hate that response, and I've noticed that there are several types of people who give it and several types of people who get it.

The types who give it;

1. People who never believe that someone else is sick (or any problem that they have is legitimate).
My mother in law is one of these. When someone else is sick, she won't go out of her way to do anything for them. She would send her kids to school no matter how sick they were unless a doctor told her they were too sick. Even then, sometimes she wouldn't believe them. She worked in the medical field and was an anesthesiologist for 30 something years. Yes, she saw extreme sickness and injury but that doesn't mean that milder sickness isn't still pretty bad if that's all you knew. These type of people always tell you how it's worse for other people and they manage. In some instances, say a kid who wants to stay home from school because of a cold, it's the right way to be. But there are no middle grounds to these people. Either you are on your death bed, or your fine and blowing it out of proportion. My father in law always depended on her for medical advice. In his 70s he developed some strange symptoms. Stomach and bowel problems mainly. He would be constipated for a while, then have the runs for a while. Sometimes he would pass bloody stools. She told him it was nothing to worry about. She told a 70 year old man who had never had a colonoscopy and who had a family history of cancer, that it was probably his diet, and he finally mentioned it to his doctor when he went for a checkup. He had inoperable colon cancer that had metasticized and he was dead three months after he went to the doctor. Because he listened to her. He couldn't be sick, she didn't want him to be. While he was on his death bed, she was telling the family that he would be better in a few months and to come down in June for the fish fry. He died the next day. Oddly enough, when she gets sick, she's sick and it's the end of the world, even if it's just a little bug.

2. People who push themselves to work, etc while sick. People who have the "If you feel like dying, the best remidy is to get out of bed and put your boots on" may have a very good mind over body connection themselves, but they don't realize that others don't. They push themselves past their limit and expect everybody else to do the same. If you don't, you are a slacker and a pantywaist.

3. People who are hypochondriacs themselves. They always think they have something and they never do, so therefore nobody else gets to be sick. Some of them know they are hypochondriacs and so they think everybody else is one too.

4. People who are around a lot of people who whine about small things. They can't seperate something real from something blown out of proportion. You'll find this a lot in "helping fields", especially in mental health. At work all day they see people who can't put things in perspective, so they start thinking that no one else can.

5. People with personality disorders. If it suits them at the time or their agenda, for something to be wrong with you, then it is. It's very wrong with you. If it doesn't, you could cut off your leg with a skillsaw in their back yard and they would pooh pooh it. My mother is one of these types. She has borderline personality disorder and was somewhat munchausens by proxy when I was little. She didn't make me sick, I was sickly enough, but she blew every problem I had out of proportion and used that to smother mother me, and to get sympathy from friends and coworkers for having suck a sickly child. She could be the martyr for working so hard all day and coming home to take care of me at night. When my grandmother got really sick with cancer when I was 11, everything changed. My allergies etc were all forgotten and I was called into service to nurse my grandmother. I did a great job, what with spending all my free time in hospitals either as a patient or going to work with my mother, and most of my reading material was nursing magazines that my mother happily explained to me. After my grandmother died, it was impossible to make me "sick" again so she decided to make me "bad". She would overplay any normal teenage rebellion or anything that she didn't like and she would talk me up as some drug crazed juvenile. She got her pity then. To this day, she won't believe anything is wrong with me when it is. She told me to "walk off" my appendicitis pain because it was "just your panic, nothings wrong with you!".


People who tend to get these kinds of responses;

1. Hypochondriacs. Yes, they get them because they are always going on about having some terrible thing and they don't have it. "Nuff said.

2. People who have something wrong that is hard to diagnose. During all their times of thinking they have found it, and then finding out that's not it, people lost interest. They start to think of them as hypochondriacs and when the person does find out what's really wrong, nobody cares or believes them because they think it will just be something else next week.

3. People who do have a lot of things wrong with them. They may get sick a lot. They may have lots of personal problems. It's real and they aren't blowing it out of proportion, but others think that nobody could have that much bad luck, so it must be all in their heads.

4. People who whine a lot and blow everything out of proportion. Nobody knows what to believe, so they don't believe anything. After the incident when the broken hip turned out to be a pulled muscle or the collapsed lung was a combination of an underwire in their bra poking them and a panic attack thinking they had a collapsed lung, people just don't believe them. Some people just sit back and wait for something real to happen to them so they can say "I told you so"

5. People with personality disorders. Some of them are attention seeking. Some will use misfortune or sickness to manipulate, and some will pretend to be sick or have misfortune to manipulate.


I'm not saying you are any of those types, or your mother is any of those types. I don't know why you got the response you did. Sometimes people are just having a bad day and will say something dismissive like that. Other times there has been a miscommunication and they don't understand you. Or the problem could be them. Or you. I don't know. I just thought I'd post the types who I've seen give those remarks and get those remarks. This is only my experience and YMMV.

Indeed I had it, it took a few years for the sayer to not say it to my face when I talk about myself. It's hard to change it, when that happens.

My granpartens are like this but my brother and my mom are very understanding and no how to handle me and how to handle my aspiness but I get these repsonses from a lot of former friends of mine.

I was dx'd as an adult and had a similar experience. I think (or would like to think) that my Mom would like to be more supportive, but she's defensive about a lot of things that happened to my brother and I during our childhood. And, learning that I also had a disability that I never received any supports for seemed like it just added to her feelings of guilt and defensiveness.

Yeah I've run into things like that.......I think maybe it comes from people not understanding, also unlike obvious physical disabilities mental disorders are not visible and obvious like that. But just keep in mind you did nothing wrong by trying to explain things to her, she would be in the wrong on this one. But yeah I don't really talk to my mom about a lot of personal things because I am afraid of her criticizing and making me feel worse about it.


You're not selfish because you have difficulties and express that you are unhappy, thats BS....that's the kind of stuff that got said to me when I was a kid. Of course I thought well why is it only selfish when I do it but not selfish when other people do it. So yeah I am not sure what to say, but I hope talking about it here makes you feel a little better. Also maybe with time your mom will open up to being more understanding...but don't be like me and get in the habit of constantly worrying about what your mom thinks or if she disapproves.