Lost a Lot of Friends

[SUM1]

4 of my so-called "friends" at school have, for reasons I don't fully understand, turned on me (i.e. get angry with me, go away from me) and another one just isn't talking or approaching me at all, and I've blocked another friend from primary school on Facebook since anything I said to him would upset him, offend him or anger him (I presume it's all due to Asperger's, since I don't do anything wrong), so I thought it'd be best just to cut contact with him to avoid offending him further, and one of the 4 who turned on me is having arguments and getting annoyed at my phobias and Asperger's, thinking their silly and not proper phobias, just me being annoying (which is obviously definitely not the case). I'm also having constant arguments with my parents.. I feel like I've now been left with no one - and it mystifies me that I lost all my friends at around about the same-ish time, but I didn't notice myself doing anything that might trigger that at all.

I'm starting to get increasingly worried.

 

[lostinspace]

This sounds like my experience when I was in school. At that time I had no knowledge of Asperger's. I assumed that once I became an adult the problem would go away, but instead it continued and became a very big problem that I just simply could not fix no matter how hard I tried. If I had known about Asperger's it might have made a difference, I just don't know. It wasn't until a few months ago that I knew what Asperger's was.

 

[DreamEagle]

Sorry to hear that SUM1, and I've been there. In the past, I've lost people who were "friends" due to my diagnosis. Some turn on me and others just simply slowly fade communications with me. Even without directly disclosing my diagnosis, which I hardly did to anyone in my college years, people still drift away, and I believe that they eventually find something about me that's "awkward". I try to live a normal life, but that's also hard, so lately I've just felt like being myself and isolating myself from other people in the sense of pursuing friendships. I'll still converse with people, but I currently don't attempt to make new friends right now. It can be rough, but I would use this time to reflect and find the things that you like to do to keep you distracted. Eventually, you'll come in contact with new people and might even make a new friend or 2 (hopefully loyal and open-minded ones).

 

[Loomis]

Often people begin acting differently toward me and I am nearly always clueless why. Aspies commonly are unintentionally annoying to others and lack insight into their alienating behaviors. We say and do things that a NT would not say because we lack social skills that would alert the NT that a statement or behavior is offensive. Sigh...

It is our lot. With age we can learn two things. We can gain some insight into social cues through empirical learning and we can train ourselves to accept who we are and become less concerned about how other people react to us. There is no point in becoming anxious; this is not easy to do but is worth the effort. We do not, however, try to act like a NT but instead do our best to identify which of our actions result in negative results to avoid experiencing the pain.

If our intentions are good then it is not my problem if what I do or say gets misinterpreted. I have done all I could do and I did what I did in good faith. That should be good enough. Of course there are consequences that happen because of misinterpretations but I think it is best to accept these stoically.