Hi Everyone

[Cyanide Lollipop]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a 47yo woman and I've recently discovered that I have Asperger's. I'm currently arranging to be formally assessed and diagnosed.

In January I met a man who has depression and OCD and we quickly became good friends. Later we had a short intimate relationship that was disastrous and decided to go back to being good friends. I purchased and read some books on depression to better understand his problems. To my great surprise I recognised my ex-husband all throughout the book. Although I didn't know a great deal about depression, I never suspected he was depressed. I also recognised my mother in the book. She was treated for depression when I was a child and for some years now some of my family members, including me, think she is depressed again but she denies it. Eventually after further searching for information I realised there was one characteristic that my ex has that does not fit the profile for depression. Then I learned that his second marriage has also ended so I contacted his 2nd ex-wife. She suspected depression too at first but then found one thing that did not fit the profile (a different characteristic to the one i found). She attended counselling because the marriage was going really badly and during one of the sessions the counsellor suggested that my ex sounds like he has Central Auditory Processing Disorder. She gave a checklist to wife #2, who checked off 8 of 9 indicators for both my ex and his mother. Then she did some more reading and eventually came across Asperger's and realised that my ex has Asperger's. She shared the information with me and I read Rudy Simone's 22 Things about AS men book. That book provided an excellent description of my ex. I thought to myself that I also have a few of these traits but I'm not autistic and I don't have a learning disability. Out of curiosity I then read Rudy Simone's 22 Things about AS women and got quite a surprise. It was me on every page. I then read other books by Liane Holliday Willey and Tony Attwood and that left me in no doubt that I do have AS too and I have auditory processing disorder. I realised this because at the same time, my friend was telling me that I don't listen to him. He is the only person who has ever said this. So i concentrated harder when he was speaking and realised that after my brain processes speech, some of it just disappears. Also, during high school when the teaching style changed to a lecture style, I went from being a straight A student to Ds. Soon after I stumbled across a coping mechanism that I've been using ever since and my learning disability went undetected.

Soon after I realised that I have AS, I realised that my friend also has several traits, and of course my mother is my AS parent. From what I can remember of my grandparents, my grandpa was probably an AS. I didn't plan to tell my friend but rather work it out for himself, so I shared some information about myself. He never made the connection. He is very keen to remain good friends but as I'm trying to build our friendship he is unknowingly tearing it down. So i told him that i recognise several traits in him, offered my support as he works through it, and explained that this is not one more problem but the key to solving his problems. He took the news well but hasn't done any reading about AS since then (although he does have a reading disability) and I'm having difficulty explaining his self-centredness to him.

When I told my mother I have AS and said I'm going to formally assessed, she responded with "Why fix something if it isn't broken?". She completely missed the point that now I understand why I have felt like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole all my life, why my marriage was a disaster and why I have so much difficulty connecting with men (well at least those who are single). There is very definitely something broken and I want to fix it.

The realisation is quite liberating for me as it explains my entire life and i now know what the problems are so that I can address them. However trying to reason with my mother and my friend is quite a challenge. Reasoning with my mother has always been difficult. At least i now know why, even if i don't yet know how to solve the problem.

 

[Aalo]

Hello Cyanide Lollipop and welcome to the forum!

That was an insightful story. It can be challenging not to spot AS traits in everyone once you're into the classification system. I've also done that and whether with some people it can be pointless and draining, with my family it really has been comforting in a way to think that it's not any abnormality in me. I wonder if you felt same way, or if it was a relief to be able to reason divorce totally anew. I think your mother has a point in that way, that diagnosis alone won't solve any problems an AS person is living with. Nor are we really broken, by the usual opinion, in a way that can be fixed in depth, but learned to handle. It's good that you find ways to get to know reasons for your behavior and self. This really is an interesting journey, good luck for you with it!

 

[Cyanide Lollipop]

Hi Aalo,

Thank you for the welcome.

I knew that my husband had some major problems. He refused to talk about them, refused to go to marriage counselling and refused to deal with them, so eventually that left me with no choice but to end our marriage. I knew he was raised by an abusive father and just assumed his problems were in some way connected to that. Interestingly, he also used to tell me that I was so selfish, which I thought was absurd, and since he never elaborated on that I didn't think any more about it. But in hindsight I can see how some of what i did would have given that impression. Also as the marriage went bad we began to live separate lives anyway. When I walked away if someone asked me what went wrong with my marriage, I really didn't have a good answer. I could tell you some things that I didn't like, but I was completely confused and bewildered by my husband's behaviour. Now that i understand AS, everything falls into place. I can now see that our marriage was doomed from the start and there was nothing I could have done differently to prevent that.

The other worry I had was not wanting to repeat the same mistake with subsequent relationships but really having no idea what the mistake was, nor how to spot the warning signs. As far as I was aware, I was not picking the same type of man over and over. Each man was different. Now i realise I was looking at the wrong traits. My other great frustration is that many of the men I meet are married and pretending to be single. After a couple of them I got really good at detecting them within one or two meetings. Google and Facebook helps there too. But my experiences were giving me a really bad impression of men. Common sense told me they aren't all bad, as I know some really good men married to various women that I know. Now I understand that I am the magnet for sexual predators and so I'm seeing a higher ratio of bad men to good men. I now also understand why I am not attracting available NT men.

After my marriage ended, my mother once told me that the best relationship involved living in separate houses. That really appealed to me too for some unknown reason. It left me rather confused as to what I wanted from a relationship because on one hand I wanted to find my "soul mate" but on the other I wanted to live separately. I thought the two were mutually exclusive and besides, it would be difficult to find someone else looking for the same things. I've since learned of AS + AS couples living in separate houses, or in separate bedrooms, and they are very happy.

I've also noticed that after a lot of interaction with people, I have this overwhelming need to be completely alone. It has been an amazing revelation to realise that on a subconscious level my body has known what it needs, even though I was not aware of the reasons for it. I've been working in a new job for the last 18 months and it has been kicking my butt but i couldn't work out exactly how it was doing that. It has a lot more people interaction than my previous job, including a couple of very challenging people that I'd dearly love to give a piece of my mind and I struggle to refrain from saying something offensive to them. In an attempt to be more efficient, I used to schedule multiple meetings on the same day. Since working out that it's the people interaction that is tiring me, I've been able to reschedule a lot of my workload and I'm feeling a lot better.

I understand that I'm not broken. In fact, I don't want to be an NT at all. My mother has no friends left at all. One by one she has driven them all away. Our relationship was very bad because she criticises me all the time and of course i took it personally. Now I understand why she does it, so I try not to let it get to me. Last year she ended a friendship of over 50 years' duration, over something very trivial and she made a lot of nasty assumptions about her friend without any proof whatsoever. When I tried to reason with her, she could not see that she was making assumptions or being silly. she makes comments occasionally that indicates that she is hurt by other people who reject her, but she cannot see that her behaviour plays any part in this. It is always the other person's fault. If she wants friends, then there is something there to be fixed. Over the years I have noticed that she displays no empathy for me whatsoever, and her comments are frequently very hurtful. Now I know she is capable of feeling empathy in some situations, although I'm not certain that she always feels empathy for my bad experiences.

Recently i told her that when my grades slipped at high school i was very distressed by that. I had no idea what was happening, I took pride in my work, loved learning and knew that I was intelligent. My father started berating me for my falling grades. Neither parent did anything to get me any help and I didn't think to ask anyone for help either. They didn't go so far at school, so they didn't even understand the subjects I was taking. It got that way that as end of term approached, my anxiety would increase. On the last day of term I didn't want to go home and I dreaded handing over my report card. Before my father even looked at it, he would tell me to fetch his belt because he was going to hit me with it after reading the report. He absolutely terrorised me for two years. Mum said he did it as a joke. I pointed out that I can't read body language and I used to take everything far more literally than I do now. In addition, once I found the coping mechanism for my learning, I needed to spend more time studying and also needed to spend time alone. So he berated me for living like a hermit in my room and not mixing with the rest of the family. My mother cannot understand that my father stressed me out and she doesn't understand that he did anything wrong.