Aspies For Freedom

Hi everyone, Iam new here and have a question thats probably similar to so many questions on this section, so please except my apologies.

I only just found out about AS and found it discribes me and my lifelong quirkyness to a tee, so I took the two recommended tests and got 34 in one and 155 out of 200 in the other so both told me I was probably Aspie.

Now I read that AS is genetic and not envioromental, but I wonder if what happened to me as a child could cause the same symptoms as genetic AS?

I was given to various relatives from 18 months of age, grandparents mainly, but they died when I was 3 so I had to go back to my mother and her new husband who plainly didnt want me there.

Consequently, I was physically and emotionally abused most of my childhood, except for the few lovely years they put me in a Childrens home.
When I came home from school, I would be sent alone to my bedroom until school the next day, with nothing to occupy my intelligent mind.
Any contact I did have with my "parents" was frigtening, belittleing or violent so I figuered it was this that made me grow up to be such an excentric and nuerotic loner.

So many of the syptoms I feel I share include acting in a way that is quite odd compared to the norm, it made me very popular at school but increasingly from the teenage years, I got left behind socially as I did not understand the nuences of adult behaviour.
I cannot do small talk, its a foriegn languege to me, I figuered I was just shy, especially as I still have a problem with blushing, yet things I am interested in, I can talk expertly and to anyone about so then it seems Iam not shy.

Iam a perfectionist and procrastinator, am known to be obsessively knowlegdeable about my hobbies which I still maintain in adulthood, I allways thought it was just a substitute to fill the hole left by a lack of human relationships.

My writing at school was so bad the teachers couldnt be bothered to read, though when they did, they found the content to be exceptional.

I cannot help counting things, I can be watching a brilliant film yet find Iam distracted because I have to count things in the background, the number of steps leading to a house for instance.

My main hobby is my classic motorbikes, I cannot work on them if anybody comes near me though and spoils my train of thought, and I become most anxious if anybody goes near them.

I love my quietness and solitude and hate to hear sound sfrom neigbours for instance, but allways just assumed this was anxiety due to the violence I recieved as a child.

About the only thing that I do seem to not fit the AS profile in is my emotional IQ which is 126, yet Iam hopeless at discerning if a woman is interested in me, I wonder if I learnt to detect human signals as a defence mechanism as a child, yet cannot decern other aspects of human communication?

Put me in with a group of people and its as if Iam not there, just watching as its far to much for me, why I hate parties and will totally avoid them but I can be quite interesting one on one.

This post is getting boringly long so will stop but wonder if Iam naturally AS and would have allways been like this whatever my upbringing, or has my upbringing caused my odd behaviour and anxieties that just happen to match AS?

Thanks for reading this far.

I think upbringing and environment can definately cause a person to become withdrawn, but being withdrawn and having an Aspie mind are two different things - The biggest "tell" would be whether you adopt the culture of people around you over any length of time.

As far as test scores go, it's probably best to think of them as just for fun, as many people don't fit in to the categories the test writers were expecting.

A big part of choosing to place yourself on the Autistic spectrum is whether or not you choose it. If you find things in autistic culture that help you explain how your own mind works, then the Aspie label is going to be helpful for you. If you believe that your mind is like other peoples, and you need to overcome past experiences to fit in, then the label's not going to be useful. Or you could avoid labels altogether and declare yourself to be somewhere inbetween - it's entirely up to you.

hi nambo. you're welcome here

This rings bells with me. So here's how I've come to understand my experience and my AS self-diagnosis (which only occurred six months ago; I'm 60 years old). I'm Aspie. That's a basic neurological feature of my mind. My mind is unable to do some of the processing that's most basic ('intuitive' back brain stuff) in ordinary life. But my mind is also very able ('thinking' front brain stuff). So I've been able to simulate 'ordinary' behaviour pretty well for many years despite the great discomfort and unease that living in the social world has given me.

In addition to AS I experienced a major early infant trauma - I almost died aged 4 weeks. This shock was followed by some less-than wise behaviour by my mother - poor thing, she was out of her mind with worry and fear at what she had experienced with this, her firstborn child. As a result of this trauma I not only have the things that AS gives me: disconnected experience day-to-day and place-to-place, constant exhausting mental labour to 'make sense', constant surprise and uncertainty, always swimming (just about, god knows how) in an endlessly running  horizon-to-horizon tide of other people's (emotional) lives. I also have a deep sense that the world could end RIGHT NOW. That my energy and ability could be exhausted in the next 60 seconds. That I'm only one step away from a place where there is no help and no future.

It seems to me that these are two 'layers'. The basic AS anxiety and exhausting labour. And an overlay of terror and a feeling of being on the edge of life/death.

I'm suggesting that perhaps your childhood experience may have 'layered' over your basic AS nature, in the same sort of way? Myself, I find that this distinction helps me handle my experience, in the very mental, thoughtful way that my Aspie mind deals with all experience. The AS diagnosis gives me new resources to work with. It gives me hope. I'm glad to have found AS.

best wishes

If it holds true, a fairly simple way to look at this is do you interpret peoples body language by having to think about it?  Or do you have no idea what others body language means?  Or can you tell a person is being shifty and suspicious or loving and friendly just by 'instinct'?

The first two answers would more likely mean that you were a spectrum person anyway.

I can't surely say if emotional/physical/other abuse/neglect could make you this way, because I have also been through those types of abuse/neglect and Am diagnosed as Asperger's.

Thanks for your answers guys, Evil Z, even though Iam nearly 49, I have never adapted anyones culture niether would I want to, in fact, as I have grown wiser and learnt to cope and behave, Ive actually grown more confident with being the unusual person Iam and pity the ordinary mundane people, (except when I see them having fun so easily and allways with a pretty girl on thier arm).

Barefoot Doc, I too allways thought of myself as having to work hard and do by strenght of intellect and will, what to others seem to just do naturally. So I would say that a lot of what I do is acting, pretending to be normal, something I do quite well, but it is tiring as you say, and especially if Iam feeling somewhat exuberant, the real me can slip out and people think Iam quite mad.
But I have been diagnosed with Reactive attachment disorder, and Emotional deprevation disorder and the above applies equally to them as it does AS.

Patrick, I find your questions to be hardest as I feel I can say yes to all three, I do have to think about body language but to be honest, it was quite late in my life I even realised such a thing existed.
People have said, "cant you tell that she likes you", and I would have had no idea, but now that Ive read "if a girl starts playing with her hair when she talks to you, it means she likes you", Iam now aware that if a girl starts twidling her hair, I will see it and maybe wonder if she likes me.
But as I said earlier, Iam quite good at detecting nasty people right away, so wonder if this is a defence mechanism learned as an abused child?

One thing I just remembered about myself, I can detect the sort of person somebody is as soon as I see them, they dont even have to open thier mouth, and I do not recall ever thinking I was wrong about someone, this means I tend to fall in Love at first sight, (on the rare occasions I do), I guess this doesnt sound like AS but havnt said that, doesnt mean I can ever relate to them, when I was in my teens and early 20s, I used to hope I had been put here by aliens and one day they where going to come back for me.

Re the body language thing, one thing Iam useless at, and that is my own body language, and try and take a picture of me!, the result is hilarious with me thinking Iam taking a natural pose whereas in reality Iam looking like one of the participants in Monty Pythons Upper Class Twit of the year!

Hello & welcome nambo,
I have found your first post & the replies very interesting, I wonder just how many of us were abused as children & how this may have disguised AS, in that the resulting behaviour has been dismissed as ' it was my upbringing because.....'?

Thats exactly why Iam interested in knowing, I feel that I might have had a potentially happy life that has been ruined by what happened to me as a child, a bit like losing a winning lotttery ticket.

To find out I would have been the same no matter what, means I never had the lottery ticket to lose in the first place.

Nice to find out that there is a place for me in the Human race after-all as well!

It could be that both the aspie traits and poor parenting fed off of each other to make the entire situation worse.  

I wouldn't blame the bad parenting on the AS, but I can see how having a child with AS can make bad parents even worse - if the AS traits are quiet ones, it's so much easier to ignore the child. If the AS traits are noisier and attention getting the bad parents are more likely to abuse in frustration and confusion as to what to do about it.

And likewise, having bad parents can hinder any early social learning skills an AS child might have been able to do if he/she had had good, understanding, interactive parents.

A great gift we can give to ourselves is something I learned from Donna Willaim's book "Nobody Nowhere" (not that she meant to teach it this way, but it's what I gleaned from reading):

Parents are people and people come with problems and we didn't cause the abuse because of who we are. Likewise, blaming the abuse or neglect for our problems right now doesn't really do us any good to overcome much of anything - we are separate people from our parents and not tied to who they are and what they did.

I used to attribute my difficulties in life and especially early childhood as being a function of the way I was treated and this was reinforced by the things said to me in the funny centres I was sent to.

I think A/S goes further to explain my circumstances than any convoluted theories about being the 'middle child' in a large family.

Some sections of the child care industry seem quite hostile to the idea of A/S, perhaps because it is less justifiable to try to bend people to society's requirements if their basic mind-set is based on their neurology rather than on 'emotional disturbance', whatever that means.

Having said that though, my family was quite dysfunctional in certain respects, though not as bad as some people's. What is odd is that I have known people who have had a much worse time in life than me, yet have emerged as both much nicer people and far stronger, in terms of life success and social standing.

Largely I agree with what you say, but I believe that for some who have had  a very bad / abusive childhood the edges may be blurred.
I don't think that it is blaming, as much as 'being'. Some mental illnesses are caused by life experiences, so it is difficult to 'separate then from now' as one leads to the other.
( I'm talking mental illness NOT AS )

I see what you're saying and completely agree when it comes to mental illness.

Thinking about it further, I also think that people with AS could develop mental illness that is separate from their AS, but the AS could complicate the treatment of the mental illness, because as you said, the edges get blurred.

For instance, it could be difficult to sort out what behavior tendencies were caused by insecurity and self-loathing from years of severe abuse and which are a natural and normal introversion from neurology.