Just waking up to how naive I am about relationships

[Perpetually_confused]

I've only recently started to understand myself as autistic having been diagnosed with ADHD one year ago I have been on a journey of self discovery. Unfortunately I am just coming to realise how naive I am about relationships. I have realised that most of my closest relationships are very one sided and I put up with A LOT of crap from people, always giving them the benefit of the doubt. I'm in my 40's now & it's really quite depressing to come to this realisation. I feel like I am very easy to bully & gaslight because my memory is so bad due to ADHD I just forget about peoples bad behaviour & normalise it. Also not being in touch with your feelings makes it so hard to pay attention to your intuition about people.

I am on a healing journey now & have been for several years but I didn't realise until recently that the reason I need to do so much healing is because of all the abusive people in my life!! I'm starting to cut out a lot of people & really reevaluate a lot of my friendships in my life which I never did before & carefully consider who I want to be friends with & who I want a relationship with.

I was in an intimate relationship with another autistic man but I broke it off recently because we were not looking for the same thing and I'm proud that I managed to do this as this is difficult for me due to my codependent traits. I would like to remain friends with him though because I don't want to lose his friendship and I feel like our friendship was the strongest part of our relationship. He is the first person that I feel like has seen me for who I really am & really cherished those parts of me such as my sensitivity & creativity & empathy & warmth. It was so refreshing as up until now I feel like a lot of the people I have been close to haven't really seen me for who I am including my own family. Almost like they just didn't notice me because they were too involved in themselves. I do need to be careful though that this doesn't end up being an extension of our intimate relationship.

I want to also try & make more friends with people on the spectrum & hopefully develop a support network of some sort, I can imagine that there must be a lot of late diagnosed people in the same boat.

Anyway I'm kind of rambling but just want to share this. I guess I'm just shocked in realising how little self awareness I had. I honestly thought I was a good judge of character, turns out I was completely wrong about that!!

 

[Tom]

Just a side thought about self awareness/knowledge. I've heard it said it is the most difficult knowledge to gain, and my own experience is that has a lot of truth to it. I think it is reflected in the world wide tendency thru out history to lean on the opinion of elders.

Looking to nature, I recently learned that deer while they stay in smaller groups usually will combine at winter into larger ones and follow the oldest female who knows the safest spots and feeding areas.

What I am getting at is don't be too hard on yourself. 40s may seem old but in life thats still part of the learning curve.