my dad's in denial of my diagnosis....

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let's just say my dad has ISSUES. according to my mom's beliefs he might even actually have Borderline Personality Disorder, which seems to have a toll on controlling his emotions, not letting especially vulnerable people--people with a diagnosis like mine especially--feel comfortable around him most of the time (yeah haha...there is a most of the time but when said BPD has problems cooperating with someone else's differences, it's a whole other story. competely and utterly) and maybe a few more problems here and there. ahem, actually maybe i didn't even need to have put in parentheses what i just went to great lengths to have done, because that is just the issue i constantly deal with off and on, off and on.

i don't live with my dad and can't cuz of problems with his living situation, his heavy schedule as a constantly involved and traveling pianist and piano teacher, and him just being an all around pain in the ARSE which i wouldn't be able to stand, now that i think of it again, 24/7, knowing my luck having my disorder which actually is denied belief by a big contribution to opinion in my dad's side of the family, and that's his parents. my grandparents. they love me probably because they have to because--well i take that back, they'd probably...PROBABLY love me if i weren't that close with them in the family and had the disorder. Ok, let's skip all that petty talk. It's not just my dad, but my grandparents as well who think Asperger's being me and my whole life struggle is a whole load of B. S. well, my dad knows it's something i have, i take it back, but my grandparents shudder to think that anybody push it on them that i even have Asperger's at all, god forbid they be hypnotized into accepting that i am what i am and i have to deal with it and this is why i may have trouble communicating when i AM with the family which is during holidays and i have that sparse little time to establish conversation with the family and hold up my ability to keep my additional bipolar from giving me cold feet and ruining my reputation and on and on and on...note that i'm not just rambling but trying to scope out some ways that i can remind myself to dodge what my grandparents recently said about my lack of social attention and pep and involvement that was expected of me to keep up with the constant intellectual and all around fast fleeting babble that was made up of what this perfect yet entirely dysfunctional piece of blabbermouth *cough that my family *cough thought they could get away with being. are you getting the gist as i talk my butt off here, where i am actually comfortable enough to socialize? this will end shortly, i promise. you can have a word in edgewise.

of course i probably don't have to worry if my dad eventually found out i typed this about him cuz most likely i won't ever need to mention that i use this website at all to help me out with this conundrum that is my life, my life that was constantly tossed and turned with the change of scenery in acceptance and treatment by others and ways of maturing and discovering the new found glory (no pun intended) that was that being aspie wasn't such a sin after all. Well, this was my dad's take, which affected my mom's take on my dad: he stopped giving my mom child support (my parents are divorced) which gives my mom reason to further HER lack of trust in my dad just as much as my dad lost faith in the way my mom 'keeps getting in the way of all the good things that are happening to you' like not getting a job, that mainly being the latest issue he discussed so far between then and the time i have typed this. i should also add that my mom was upset about me spending all her money to get gifts for everyone on my dad's side if my dad was doing absolutely nothing to give support to help my mom pay all the expenses that came with my therapy, our joint therapist and paying off the debts that came with a previous program i was involved with to help handle independent living skills which had a huge financial chip on my mom's shoulders.

my grandparents' side of the matter? "You're not 'autistic', you're 'artistic.'" And just this past christmas i was feeling confident enough to show my grandma's graphic-designer friend my latest success of a project that my graphic design class ended up being, which i decided to bring to the christmas celebration, which of course i did and of course being me i forgot that her friend was jewish and wasnt supposed to celebrate christmas...so i mindlessly led myself into showing my grandmother who crabbily slammed my sense of confident proactiveness in creating an ad that was a potential foundation for special needs kids sort of promotion, which was a direct mental link for her to my pushing my autistic diagnosis. i hate to call her a shmuck...but at least i can do so as long as i'm on here and it's between me and my mom only that i use wrongplanet.net.

damn it feels good to kvetch. i would further explain how much thanksgiving sucked as well, but first i want to hear NOT what a pain in the ass i was to all you readers by me typing to the point where the point at hand may have been lost in all the babble, but what you though of all the blabbering on and how to deal with an entire side of the family--or at least a huge part of it--that was actually childish and disabled in their own right to be as discrimintative as they were that i was being discriminated through mental disorder labels. isn't that one big complicated oxymoron?

and please please PLEASE if you have had the time to read this, at least type a sentence or two of any sympathy or thought or advice. this is a huge issue for me, and there has to be someone out there who feels for this kind of family hellhole that has b***h slapped me just for having what i have and being who i am. thanks for reading and understanding.

I was once diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and then I got an assessment that this was wrong and that I had Asperger's instead. There is a lot of overlap between the two disorders. (black and white thinking, extremes of mood, impulsivity, relationship problems, even self-injury.) Many more males are diagnosed Asperger's and many more females are diagnosed borderline. I believe people should take a closer look at these so called "borderlines" and look for autism.

Women are getting the wrong treatment and being stigmatized in the process.

I feel very strongly about this. I even wrote a book about it, called Borderline and Beyond. I'm not writing to promote my book. I'm just explaining how passionate I am about this issue.

My family was in denial too. Then, my dad bought books on AS and he could see how it fit. Now, he is a big supporter of me.

Yeah, that sucks. My mom is also in denial about me having AS. Even if I got an official diagnosis she wouldn't believe me. Same thing with my stepdad. My biological dad is the only family member I have that actually takes me seriously about it. And thats only because he's almost finished getting his masters in psychology. My mom seems to think that I want to believe I have AS so I can use it as an excuse to blame my problems on. Yeah.... right. lol. I feel she has no right to make such statements unless I actually do start blaming my problems on it... which I haven't. The only thing we can really do is move forward and hope that the non believers come around eventually...

You've got my sympathy for sure. I'm not 100% sure I have AS, but all the online tests say I probably have, so does my wife who teaches autistic children, and I keep seeing more and more things I have in common with diagnosed Aspies on this forum, so I'm pretty much convinced.

Nobody's denied my condition yet because I've only told my wife and 2 friends, but I've seen before how a lot of Aspies get told "no you're not" when they mention it. I wouldn't even dare to mention it in my workplace without a DX to back me up. Let's face it, it's a pretty woolly concept to the uninitiated, and it smacks of somebody trying to get out of something. Unfortunately I've started to see that a lot of my problems at work are very likely down to the bosses not knowing I'm AS - expectations of multi-tasking, working in crowded environments, interruptions galore that I'm supposed to take in my stride, poorly-explained duties, etc. The work I do now is only affected slightly because my current boss is very soft with me and accepts my strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately I have to do a different kind of work from September to Xmas every year, and their huge NT expectations are being ratcheted up every year.

Anyway, long and short of it is that I'm scared stiff of telling them and not being believed.

My only coping strategies are:
1. Try to get a diagnosis and hit them with it - "if I haven't got AS, what the hell's this then? Or are you a psychiatrist all of a sudden?"
2. Meanwhile don't mention AS as such, but if I fail to meet an "AS-unfriendly" demand and seem to be headed for disciplinary action because of it, mention the individual impairment that is causing the problem - "I can't think with all this noise and interruptions." If they say nobody else has any trouble, I might say that it's strange that they've only just noticed because I'ver always been like this and I've worked there for 18 years without getting any complaints.

Of course that's all workplace issues while yours are more social & family issues. You probably wouldn't want to follow my way of solving that - if I don't get on with somebody I shut them out of my life. I prefer loneliness to trying to fit in with people who just don't want to know about my problems. I know there are decent, sympathetic people out there, so I don't need to go cap in hand to anybody for company. So unlike the people at work, they've got no power over me and so they can believe what the hell they like for all I care. It also makes me fearless if I have to argue with them, and if anybody ever does that denial thing on me, I won't be short of a few challenging remarks and awkward questions to throw back at them, and they'll wish they'd kept their crap to themselves by the time I'm done.

But I don't recommend you take that attitude up - maybe just try to be more assured about your own beliefs and throw the odd verbal punch at anybody who tries to undermine them. I get mad when I hear of cases like yours and I'd like five minutes with your father just to tell him what I think of his behaviour

I think I'll shut up now - hope my words haven't offended anybody. That's not what I want at all.

My mother has said in the past I don't have it because I didn't have enough to have it and then she says it's not a big deal that I do have it but then she acts like it is a big deal and worries about me because of it.

There is a subset of people of Aspergers who seem to display some traits of BPD. My sister is one of them - it would seem that this subset is largely found in female ASDers, especially the capriciousness of emotion, based upon my own interactions with people with ASDs which is self-admittedly not much.