Does your family have any misconceptions about autism?

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Mine do. For instance, my dad seems to think that autism is the same as psychopathy, which I hear is a fairly common misconception.

Hmm...it's interesting because my dad does have some (possibly) autistic behaviours. Especially his tendency to focus on a few areas of interest.

He really likes boats. That includes building them, creating sails, oars and stabilisers, finding ways to make moving the boat easier, as well as mending broken boats, plus researching different kinds, studying about the perfect conditions for putting up a sail, the history of boats, and he owns several different types of printed books on boats.

My mum always jokes that unless you want a four hour lecture, you shouldn't bring the topic of boats up with him.

It can annoy her sometimes, because he has built multiple boats, and my mum keeps trying to get him to sell one, but he still hasn't and he wants to make another. She threatened to use one of his boats as a plant pot, if he didn't sell it soon.

His response? To reorganise the Garage by tool size and category, so then we had enough space for everything.

Unfortunately, due to injury he can't pursue many of his boat related hobbies anymore.

Anyway, does your family hold any misconceptions about autism?

Most of my family avoids talking about it but what I’ve picked up from my mom, it’s just being antisocial. She told me one day that she thinks she’s autistic because she doesn’t like being around people. I think she was joking but I lack the joke filter so I don’t know. She said she was just messing with me but still.

That was a very entertaining post!

I wouldn't say that my family has any misconceptions about my autism, it's just not a topic that's brought up by those few who know. However, on the rare occasions I've confessed to being autistic to a few healthcare workers, their tone changed to treating me in a condescending, childlike manner.

For instance, "I see you wrote on the patient form that you are autistic, but I see you are handling your autism so well. Wow, you are living on your own and everything, you should be proud of yourself."

Fortunately, I have a good way to respond to that type of treatment. "Oh my goodness, becoming a medical doctor is such a great accomplishment. Wow, did you do it all by yourself! I bet your mommy and daddy are really proud of you, huh. Come over here so I can pinch those rose colored cheeks of yours, you sweet child, you!"

They get the underlying sarcasm like a bullet to to head at which point I'll say, "I'll stop if you stop", and we proceed to have regular conversation.

My mom thinks it's bad to adjust in any way to make it easier on me in regards to my autism. That, at least, I am used to, since I was diagnosed with aspergers like 21 years ago.

She treats my PTSD the same way, which has been far more difficult to handle. Her refusal to be more ginger with me has resulted in me literally jumping out of her car while it was moving, once. I was in a pretty extreme state at the time, and she refused to even temporarily adjust her behavior despite me pleading with her to not yell. I couldn't help myself. In a state like I was in then, it's like being in constant fight or flight mode, and her yelling was making me feel extreme fear.

She triggers me very often. There are many times I've been having an okay day and not thinking much about the past, and she will come and bring up my trauma out of nowhere and throw me off for the rest of the day. She will often ask me how my therapy sessions went, which instantly makes me feel like s**t because it makes me think of the difficult subject matter brought up in my sessions. Telling her not to do these things is useless. I've tried... she just gets mad at me and then doesn't absorb the f***ing point. She thinks that because she had/has good intentions, she has no reason to stop. She just won't absorb the fact that some things are best left alone, and that if I'm not actively bringing up my trauma myself, it's a bad time to talk about it.

I need to live on my own again.

Going to elaborate on how my mom treated me in regards to my autism growing up: her idea was that tolerating any autistic behaviors was bad, and so I got a lot of negative reinforcement in regards to those behaviors. I don't know whether this had many effects but I definitely blend in more with NTs than I used to. That could have been from professional intervention though, rather than her refusal to treat me in a non stressful way.

I had depression and suicidality as a little kid, like really young. I don't know for sure why I felt that way, but part of it could have been my mother trying to fit a round peg like me into a square hole, and in the process distressing me.

You’ve gone through some rough times, Tibergrace.

Is your screen name related to Rome in any way?

My mother insists that I have a “touch of Aspergers,” but that I am “definitely not autistic.”

A woman having a baby has merely a “touch of pregnancy”

My mother constantly tries to prove to me that I don't have autism because I can do things.

"Look, you can paint a wall! You don't have anything wrong with you!"

Which is a complete turn around from her telling me all my life that I'm stupid/can't do things right.

Raleigh, stop discounting your mother's opinion! Just the other day she told me you could breathe, so we can just stop with all that autistic nonsense!

My dad seems to think that having Asperger's syndrome means I'm just shy and smart. He holds me completely to NT standards and yells at me about how I'm lazy, not trying hard enough, and/or don't care when I can't meet them, when in actuality I do care and was trying my hardest. When I try to explain what it's really like for me, he doesn't listen, going so far as interrupting me mid-sentence to tell me that no, he thinks I just don't want to do something. And neither of my parents believe that I have selective mutism (nor does anyone else who's met me in person, for that matter), they think I just don't want to talk and try to force me to. Life would be so much easier if they'd just let me use a text-to-speech app on my phone instead of making me try to get something understandable out of my mouth until people give up and just ignore me.

I can relate to most of your stories. I got diagnosed at about the age of 4 with PDD NOS by a psychiatrist and then taken to many different specialists. One of them, a neurologist, told my parents I was smsrt and, since I had no speech problems, I was likely to get to live a “normal” life as an adult, if they treated me as if I was “normal” while growing up. They interpreted his advice as an instruction to put all the NTs demands and expectations on me and refuse any help usually given to most autistic children. I have always been mainstreamed and, even though my first school asked my parents to hire an aide to work one on one with me, they refused to do it and just switched schools. If I took something literally, I was scolded for “acting stupid”. Also, they kept my diagnosis from me, so that I would never think I had any reason to be different.

Many years later I finally learned how to look like an NT when I want to, and my life is almost normal, except for my lack of friendships. My parents informed me of my diagnosis when I was 21. By the way they talk about movies featuring autistic characters, I imagine they think most autistic people are just like them (I’m talking about The Accountant and the series Atypical). But they believe most autistic people behave the way they do because they have never been pushed like they have pushed me. They think part of autism is lack of discipline. Also, my mother has made it clear to me that she doesn’t consider me to be disabled in any way, because I don’t have physical or intellectual disabilities.

In spite of everything, they aren’t bad parents, in my opinion. They just want me to be as independent as possible. I know I can actually count on them when things get tough for me, but they always want to make sure that I absolutely can’t cope on my own before offering help.

My mom thinks Asperger's and autism are two different things and not everyone on the spectrum is autistic. She also seems to think people can become autistic if they were in certain environments and had the right components like for me I had hearing loss and then I couldn't talk and then I was still learning communication when I was put in that self contained class so I copied kids in there thinking it was school behavior and this is how we act here in school. My mom saw that as "oh no she will grow up to be autistic if we keep her with those kids so we need to get her out of that class."