I actually think you are missing a step and I don't think it is necessarily an attitude problem. I think the first step is finding some healing from the past emotional trauma that many of us have went through due to not meeting common milestones while everyone around us meet them without any problem. And many of us experience being an outcast beginning in kindergarten or even before and that just keeps getting reinforced over the years. And going through all of this and not even knowing why we were outcasts or how we were different exactly. Trauma experienced as a child (complex trauma since it is not from one singular event such as a car accident) is a deep trauma. When we were kids, was the answer to these problems to simply "change our attitude"? No, we did not have much a chance if the adults such as parents or schools did not know what we were going through and why. This is an incredibly sad failure of the adults in our lives when we were kids and society as a whole. It is damn near impossible to have a good attitude when you get your emotions pulverized on a daily basis.
I'm not sure you have heard of the polyvagal theory or not, but I think it explains what those with ASD are going through on a daily basis. Basically many of us a stuck in a cycle of fight or flight and freeze. Many of us are caught in a continuous loop and it can be extremely difficult to escape. Our vagal nerves are not working properly which makes it difficult to engage in social functions. I think it is possible to escape this loop but it takes a lot of work and some of us have been in it our entire lives so we don't know anything different. While being in this loop, it causes dysfunction and additional difficulties in life from work to relationships which can cause additional small traumas to pile up. It is a vicious cycle, and one which myself, and I suspect many others have not been able to escape on a day to day basis.
So I think the advice to just simply change ones attitude is unhelpful at best and at worst simplifying the solution down to this is a bit of a slap in the face. It discounts the difficulties and pain we have experienced despite how much effort many of us have put forth without seeing much in the way of success.
This.
I know what it’s like to have been an outcast for so much of my life, dating back to Kindergarten/First grade, having had little-to-no friends when I was a kid, never having more than a small circle.
Do you think I’m not traumatized by all the nos I got from girls in high school, especially women in college? How long it took me to get my first date, my first, my first relationship, how it feels to be told you’re a good person, a nice person, how you have a lot to offer, only for someone to seldom take you up on what you have to offer. If someone would be lucky to have me, as I’ve sometimes been told, why not make yourself the lucky one?
It’s like telling someone like myself to just be happy, even though I’m also clinically depressed.
I feel like it’s fashionable to shame people like us, to put us down, to say we’re not entitled to anyone.
I can tell you I am very much entitled to my feelings, and my feelings of being bitter - more towards those who turned me down and hurt me when I was younger, who denied me some of those high school/college experiences.
For women who turn me down now or decide not to see me again or sever contact or say now’s not the time, I feel more hurt than I do hate (not really hate with women now).
But those women who hurt me back in the day, who contributed to my trauma, that animosity will never go away, not even if a swimsuit model jumped into my arms tomorrow wishing to spend the rest of her life with me.
Change their attitude? It’s hard to blame anybody who doesn’t.
