Grieving decades of naivete

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Again, this thread may be more relevant to the oldies among us, who heard of AS / NLD for the first time after a lifetime of not knowing what was wrong with us.

We've spoken a lot recently on some threads about cringing when looking back now, with the eyes of the new knowledge / diagnosis and seeing the social blunders we made decades ago.

There is one more thing I look back and cringe about. My social naivete. A lifetime of being blind to covert aggression and responding like a cuckold (meaning: someone who interprets being on the receiving end of disrespect and aggression as just an instance of bad luck and doesn't realize they're being purposefully hurt.)

As part of my NLD, I spent 4 decades in this blindness, till someone opened my eyes for the first time and from there, I started discovering when I was being abused / used / attacked / disrespected.

I wonder if I had had supportive family, whether this blindness would've been less bad...

Total sympathy with you there, Greentea.

The minor exception being that I've only experienced this stuff in earnest for two decades. I myself am just starting to understand what AS has meant and will mean for me.

This is the process I have just begun. Every day more memories come flooding back... things I've done or have been done to me that were painful and without apparent explanation. Now I am reframing these things through those new eyes. AS is the biggest WHY of my entire life.

I also share some of your experiences with social naivete. In my own way of trying to relate to other people, I was open and trusting, and also very blind to the social complexity with which the rest of the world operates.

Yours is a very important sentiment to understand, as I know many of us here have felt it, too.

Last edited by Acacia on 19 Dec 2008, 12:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

We all did the best we could, given the situations at the time, what we knew then, our mental states then. It's not your fault or anybody's fault that you didn't know then what you know now. As long as you're able to look back and learn from previous mistakes and successes, then no matter how much better you think things could've been, the way things did turn out won't be all for naught. The past makes you the awesome person you are now.

Thank you so much, Acacia. For a few minutes I thought I was the only one who'd experienced this...

Being ignored ---> thinking I had had bad luck and been forgotten for a while

Being told by so many that they were busy ---> thinking I had bad luck that all my friends were such active, busy people.

And so on and so forth.

I can relate to all your sentiments. But, I have specifically wondered if a more functional family would have helped me respond to my unique autistic struggles with a more positive outlook.

This is a very true and sensitive post. I think that the young people here, who can share ideas while still in high school and explore their sense of how they are to behave when marginalized or attacked, are very lucky.

I deplore all those years when I threw myself at personal and behavioral problems, when a little more information about why some approaches didn't work for me would have helped a lot. My life would be much different, if only I had information about AS two years before I actually did get the first information.

Only this year, has adult AS therapy become accessible in my area. Three years ago, I couldn't get anyone to even talk to me about adult AS. One leading medical facility in the area of Asperger asked me what was the point of trying to treat or counsel an adult for AS, since it was too late for them?

If only I had information about AS five years ago and access to adult AS therapy or counseling three years ago, my life would be much different today.

Families make a big difference, but isn't that true for NT's as well? They are the seedbed in which our characters and world view get their start. Having to make up for poor family programming can set one back a few years, if not many years, in life development.

gee, Greentea and others, i relate very much. You express it so well Greentea.
I have been a cuckold over and over again. I only began to understand in the past few years, that when two people look at you , and then roll their eyes at each other when they think you are not looking - well - that usually means something, and the eye rolling is at your expense! I kid you not. If i saw this in a film, or if i read it, i knew what it meant. BUt in the complex world of social exchange, when i am trying to catch up on the verbal input of others, (even though i speak a million miles an hour myself etc) and take into account their non-verbal actions - well...i lag behind and it all gets confusing. on occasions, it is months later when a lightbulb in my brain has gone on and i have said "AHA...they were making a fool of me."

i have had a lot of social naivety. it is very painful. i really hopeyou are ok greentea. i always relate to your posts and their insights.

it happened at school - the ridicule and the hurt.
It happened in the street when i was young and a teenages - because i dressed eccentrically and was odd.
It happened in my career with other women artists who would roll their eyes at me and belittle me because i am like a big superbrain kid with lots of talent who just cannot be pigeon-holed easily.

I need to keep myself very safe from the kind of people who don't get me at all. it makes the real world and my career a struggle, (as i've said in another thread,) but that is ok. I am slowly realising i wouldn;t want to be any other way, but the reframing of my life from the vantage point of a new AS paradigm and reality IS a big process.

Over the years, I also developed a VERY aggressive streak - probably a consequence of all that hurt. And I have extraordinarily good verbal skills - i am a little slow off the mark...but get me going if i have been hurt and I can really stand up for myself these days. But again. this is a part of my AS - it is like having a massive meltdown. I wasn;t like this when i was younger. But i still tend to stay away from people too, because i am scared of losing it in public or in my career context...because as i have said in other posts, i cannot regulate my emotional reactions to things very well. IT's like a hideous verbal assault at someone. It may be warranted given the cuckolding, but when i go off, i go off...and everybody hears about it and knows about it. All very difficult to deal with........

I've been there myself. All you can do is pick up the pieces and do the best you can. Learn to use your Aspie superpowers the best you can. I severely limit the number of people in my life because I just don't trust anyone. My family is super "normal" and always supprted me even if they didn't understand me but I can't say it made much of a difference. The only way to learn anything is to make mistakes. Unfortunately we Aspies have to make a LOT of mistakes in the social realm before it starts to make any sense. We are wired for logic, fact and reason and not much else. Social behavior is all about emotions and we just don't have much, if any of that.

I really relate to what everyone has posted so far in this thread. I feel like I finally became an adult in my early forties, and I'm just learning to deal with social situations in an effective manner.

The thought that a more nurturing family life would have perhaps helped with my autistic symptoms sometimes comes up when I'm reflecting on the crap I've been through, yet I wouldn't be the person I am today with a different family. Because of the backgrounds and choices others made in my life, both directly involving me and not, I wouldn't have the life I have now. There are regrets, but I realize this is an emotional response to all of the hurt.

I am able to deal with the "disability" of Aspergers with the deep abilities I have gained through AS.

People finding out in their youth are so much luckier, in that they KNOW from a young age. They can learn how to deal with their neurology in a world that doesn't understand, and can develop effective ways of dealing with their lives. At the same time, all of my hard earned knowledge gives me the ability to understand all kinds of people in dealing with difficult social situations. I can parse a social situation in a clear and rational manner, and present it in a way that people can see it in a completely different way.

It's too bad that there aren't more studies on older adults with AS. It could illuminate some of the issues and clarify what might work with younger Aspies. Such studies would also show what older aspies need in order to function better.

Once I was at some kind of social gathering, and overheard a woman (who was looking towards me) say
"Her helplessness just brings out the bully in me." And she said it with a smile, like she was proud that she
could be a bully and get away with it. Unfortunately, there are many people in the word like that, people who
love to feast on someone else's humiliation. I guess it makes them feel superior and powerful. They're trolls.

Personally, I've never been able to be happy about someone being humiliated. (Well, I did laugh when I heard about George Bush ducking a shoe.) Where this kind of bullying is most distressing is when I am at the mercy of some picayune medical technician. Nurses who go out of their way to make me look ridiculous, or purposely expose me to public in some state of undress, or stick an unsterilized thermometer in my mouth so I wake up the next morning with a painful throat, or give me an allergy shot right on top of the lump where I just got a tetnus shot, a male orderly who burst into the room where I was undergoing a pelvic ultrasound -- not once, but three times because he was "looking for something," the time I was being checked for possible petit mal and the technician gooped up my hair, stirred it up like a fright wig, and tried to make me go straight out to my car without letting me look in a mirror. She was smirking so hard -- I could go on and on and on. I don't go to doctors any more.

I've been told by some people I am naive because I sound childish and things I don't understand and stating the obvious or saying things people already know. I was extremely naive when I first started posting online but I think I am less now.
It drove lot of people crazy and drove them into bullying me and I started to hide it from the community I was posting in and started to pick fights.


I know I'm still gullible but the stories or things people say have to sound totally out of place for me to know its BS or find it real difficult to beleive because it sounds unreal.
In my teen years kids would try and take advantage of me and I would think of comebacks to prevent it.
One time, these 7th graders told me when I was 14 to bring my Barbie dolls to school and I asked them why and one of them said "So we can play with them." I bring them to school in my backpack and keep them in my locker instead and didn't bring them on the playground during lunch. When the girls asked about them, I told them I have them in my locker and they are there for us to play with and I asked to see their dolls too. I showed them my dolls and the next day my mother told me to not bring them to school again. She said they didn't think I'd have guts but I did.

I still don't have all my trust but I started to slowly get it back because I knew that was the only way to get men. I had to start trusting people again.

The Barbie dolls is a good example of what I mean.

I hear it was a size 10




Just a few months ago this one guy at work, who looks late twenties or so, maybe early thirties, convinced me he was in his fifties and that he has good genes. I thought he was full of s**t but also didn't see him as the type to BS, so i ended up believing him. yeah, he's in his late twenties, what a fool i am.

Last edited by prillix on 20 Dec 2008, 7:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

This topic has been in my thoughts the last day or so. Am currently with people and beginning to notice the times they violate my boundaries (physically and mentally) in ways they do not do to others. One of them (not a relative and much older) randomly grabs me on the hands and legs to check their temperature (I get freakishly cold). They care but convey it as if I am not a fellow adult (and I'm not in early adulthood).

Am less naive than in the recent past, yet it still took me a day to register it. I don't knowingly invite it, so cannot determine how much is others' issues and how much is something I am unknowingly conveying (eg being childlike, unassertive).

I think we fail to take a place in the hierarchy, and as someone said recently, if you don't have a place in the hierarchy, your place is at the bottom.

Yes, this is true. To have a place in the group, you must establish in the minds of each of the group members, what your value is and how you "fit" into the structure. Unfortunately, where you establish your role or fit in the group, is all in the abstract social imaginations of each person and the group as a whole, using the abstract social skills we lack.

Maybe you are the troubleshooter, who fixes things, or the charmer who gets everyone to feel good, or the specialist who does something special for the group like organizes its crayons. But you have to establish and play that role and keep reinforcing it in the social imaginations of others. So you are not only IN a role, when you have a place in the group, but you are constantly called upon to PLAY and ACT to impress that you are in that role, to others. So any time someone talks about troubleshooting, if you are the troubleshooter, you have to make sure you out-talk them, or block their attempts to undermine you, and be able to project (negotiate) "I'm the troubleshooter here" impression. A lot of socializing between NTs is negotiating who is in this role and who is in that role in the group, and constantly testing and undermining or acting out for each other in various poses.

So if you don't have the skills to reinforce in people's social imagination minds that you are the "troubleshooter", they won't recognize you as such, even though they know factually that troubleshooting is your job. If you can't negotiate or convincingly claim any particular role in a group, not even a role as entertainer (class joker or charming guy), you become pointles. You don't exist except as a clinger-on (even if you are really doing important stuff) in the hierarchy and you will get eliminated as soon as someone in the group gets a grudge against you, wants the chair you are sitting in or wants your job.

This is like the "omega" wolf:

"The omega wolf ranks lower than any other wolf. It usually sleeps away from the other pack members and may not engage in much social behavior, like howling or greeting. The other wolves may make a "game" of picking on the omega wolf, biting it and driving it away from food. At other times, the omega may be tolerated or even accepted into group activities. This wolf may be able to eventually work itself back higher in the rank order or it may eventually choose to leave..."

In NT human society, the establishment is all through these conversations and other ways of socially establishing yourself in the hierarchy, at least somewhere, or you fall to the outside (bottom), even if you have a concrete job in the group.