Aspies For Freedom

I think NT parents want a child to run up to them, give them big sloppy hugs and kisses and generally otherwise tell them "I love you Mummy/daddy."  
Whereas speaking personally I know I love, I love my parents, sisters, husband and daughter.  But I show them I love them by doing things for them or just by being there for them.  I get uncomfortable verbalising my emotions, and anyway the NEED to keep telling them something they should know by the fact that I am still here with them just doesn't often occur to me.  I asked my mother the other day if she minded that I don't like the physical contact of hugging and kissing and she looked surprised and said that no, I'd always been like that, even as a child, and that's just the way I am; she said it would feel odd if I suddenly came over all cuddly and mushy.  Acceptance like that from an NT is priceless.
Alison

I'm really upset that my efforts to at least try to understand the motivation behind autistic hate (and yes, i do consider it to be hate) are being used to slate autistic people.

My son is not broken, defective, in need of curing, sub human or somehow less than NT. nor is he Aspie, his diagnosis was severe autism although he doesnt present quite like that these days. I mention this before the OP brings up the low/ high functioning debate as further fuel.

I'd like to sincerely apologise to everyone in this board and reiterate how very  upset I am that my words are being used this way.

by autistic hate I mean hate of autistics not hate BY autistics.

Thanks Andy, I appreciate you saying that.

I LOVE my life, i'm not frustrated with it at all, or rather I am occasionally, isnt everyone? but I dont think that's particularly autism related, (often NT related!!)but just because life is frustrating at times.

Thank you Amy.

I think your right, I think the mom was just exploiting the sister. Seeing as she has no problem with exploiting her Autistic child.

Well, and thinking of those savants, who have invented a great deal of humankinds achievements - a lot of them were/are autistic. And new researches prove: the less autistic they get, the less genious they are.

AND what about human rights? It's kind of: every human is worth livin because he is human - no matter of any condition of body, soul or mind!

Sibylle

Greenlion, my kid is one of the children you are talking about- he was diagnosed at two with 'severe' autism and wasnt expected to talk, had severe meltdowns, smeared and ate faeces and all the etceteras that we are told are so much hell. He doesnt do these things now but he did daily for several years, so i think i have a good grasp on the issues.

I still wouldnt change him or cure him. Sure, sometimes his behaviour baffles me, but I'm sure mine does him. Its obviously going to be that way because he is very different to me on a fundamental (neurological) level, and that's with me having more than a 'foot in the door' spectrum wise, myself. What it must be like for a non spectrum person is difficult to realise, although i do sometimes wonder where all this compassion NT's waffle about has gone to...

Basically, I look at him and I dont see a person who is broken. Different, yes- his skills are different to what might be expected from an NT child, his responses are different. So what? I cant see how he has been victimised and harmed by his autism.

Yes, Greenlion, because those aspects were not the sum total of Boy as I know him. They were certainly behaviours I didnt like, but he does not have behaviours such as manipulation, unkindness, lying, vanity and so on that the neurotypical kids I teach have... behaviours that are normal but most undesirable and IMO just as awful to deal with as smearing- imagine if your kid was a bully? Imagine not being able to trust your child's word? Maybe some parents wouldnt care about that, but that, to me, would be utterly heartbreaking.

The meltdowns were lessened and virtually disappeared the more accepting I was of his differences. here's an example--- Alex used to headbang when he was upset/ excited/ experiencing any strong emotion, i would stop him, he would scream and scream and scream. Once I had figured out that he NEEDED that repetitive movement as a way to express strong emotion, I taught him to rock. And flap. Result: End of headbanging, end of resultant meltdown, one happy stimmy kid literally jumping for joy. Plus an added bonus for me in that I stopped surpressing my own stim-behaviour too- result one far less stressed mamma

  The faeces smearing was something we worked on and he got there eventually, which is more than I can say for many unpleasant neurotypical habits. Al still likes to get mucky but he does it with more conventional materials these days. The faeces eating was much more rare anyway and coupled with him putting EVERYTHING in his mouth anyway, gross, yes, but so was snails, leaves, drinking puddle water... to ME it was beyond grossness,but he didnt differentiate, it was just another interesting substance to squidge... again we worked on that.

Babies mouth things in order to find out about their environment, Boy did it for a lot longer than usual, so yes, in that respect he was delayed, (so you could read that as harmed-I wouldnt but you could) but then he learned to manipulate numbers/ read at a very early age too, and that was waaay ahead of his normal peers. That's not to mention his exceptional memory, his attention to details... yada blah... if the delays are harm, the benefits must be... well, benefits, right? So on balance, yes, actually, he doesnt look broken to me just different.

(of course its not his autistic strengths that make him a valued person, its the fact he is a person bbut I am using your argument)

so yes, acceptance has done wonders for us, and I'm most regretful of the two years i wasted wishing he was something he is not instead of seeing how wonderful he IS.

Yes, kids are still bullied for being different. But nowadays there is more awareness that bullying even takes place in very young social groups - so adults can interfere.

It seems that fear of strangers is an essential thing in human groups. It's got to do with self-defining who one is and territorial defences. Acting like this was useful when "we" lived out in the wild with low resources and we are not far away from our "wild" and uncivilised ancestors. In this way, autistic people are "strangers" to nt people - and the other way round as well.

So we got to activate our higher brain functions to be aware of our instincts and be able to act in a human and social way. I think that's something a lot of aspies or autistics have to learn by hard anyway - if they want to "function" in the nt world. So why not ask nt's to do the same?

I really had to take a lot of hard lessons to even halfway understand the reasons that makes most people act as they do. I can pretend to be nt for a while, i can "mirror" normal behavior, i can do chitchat (even if i don't like it) - i can do a lot of those normal things, but it "wears me out".

Once I understood that I am different and that most people not feel and think like I do, it was easy for me to study nt culture. There's a lot of literature on "what to do's" and "what to don'ts" in an nt world and of course it's not as easy to find the same kind of literature for the autistic world. But accepting the difference and trying to understand would make our life much easier.

Like a lot of us aspies, I don't want to be cured - it wouldn't be me anymore. I'd lose more than I could gain - that's MY opinion. It does not have to be someone elses! As a child I would have loved it if someone found a switch and made me another person - like having a lot of friends seemed desirable to me then. But the reason for my wish was only that I was not accepted the way I was - like not being too fond of parties and socializing and being a stand alone worker instead of working in a group. I always found that group members were not reliable, they tried to get out of what they had to do and if I'd have to do it anyway - why share my work with all those who just socialized while I was working?

Later I found out, that they had another style of work I did not completely understood.

So it's time we try to learn more about each other - both sides, preferably. But if nt's still want to claim the "empathy" for themselfes, they really should show some empathy to others than only nt's.

And Greenlion, I'm sorry if I overread some of your earlier statements and did not answer "to the point", but to me it seems you want to have arguments against feelings, like our feeling for not wanting to be changed. But feelings can't be argued against - they are there and they just can't be false. Only the reactions one has on that feelings can be false. If I really dislike or hate someone - that feeling is true for me and it is ok! Only my reactions on it can be false - like trying to hurt or kill that person. But I'm sure the more we learn about each other, about the reasons where we come from and what way led to the point we are now, the less feelings of  hatred we will have.

Sibylle
trying to be tolerant, but not too much with intolerance.

True, M.

Both of my kids have or had different therapies, including speech therapy, and they loved it.

Sibylle

You mean like when the speech therapist gives a child a assignment, and expects them to do perfect on it when they know it's too difficult for the child at a certian stage. Or when they don't do it perfectly, the child gets berated at or talked down to like they're a grand idiot. Or how about when a therapist says they will reward a child for their work, and when that child doesn't complete the work because it's too advanced for them..they're not rewarded, and then brought to tears by being yelled at and told to call their parents, to tell them what a bad child they are. All because they are being pushed against their limitations.

Yeah it's because something is wrong with that child. Those were all my experiences with a speech therapist. The problem wasn't me, it was the therapist who did not have patience with me. Don't blame the victim, blame the adult who should know better.

Thanks Crys, I just wanted to bring out that people who don't really know the entire picture, probaly shouldn't post their assumptions about others.

DW you're right. My bad. :$


Randomness:

Since this post is really short..I just thought I'd mention that this guy :fear:, looks like he's been exposed to the old THX sound promo.

Well apperantly Sojaw, you are one of those people who likes to assume that video games are a waste of time, and of no value to people. I've learned puzzle solving, and problem solving mostly from video games. I find it rather ignorant of you that you assume, that you can claim video games are the same thing to a NT child that they are to an Aspie child.

Maybe I do spend too much time watching TV and playing video games, but it's something I enjoy. In a society where it's constantly get up and go, and be a size 2 if you're female, you're considered lazy and ignorant unless you're out there being social. That is what it comes down to right, if you're sitting at home watching TV and playing video games, you're not out there participating in a social life and therfore are useless.

Not all Aspies can get jobs either, there is alot of stigma out there currently towards not hiring people who aren't totally outgoing 24/7. I'm sure you'd agree playing video games, is certainly better than adopting an addiction, like drinking or drugs, or running around being promiscuous. I know people tend to say, well you're just hating on people who don't spend all day at home like a recluse. I'm not, but I am also saying I'm not going to pretend that I'd love to spend my life trying to manuver through the stressful social world.

If work was about getting the job done and nothing else, then I'd have a job. It's about getting the job done, and buddy-buddying with your co-workers. It isn't about productiveness anymore, it's about socialization. If it was about getting the job done, then I wouldn't 9 times out of 10 call up a store, only to try and get information from some idiot who goes "uhh...I don't know if we have that" and have to guide them through the process of doing their job.

The video game companies have been looking into creating networks via the internet, to help other gamers interact with each other. Therfore making a social network that us gamers can feel comfortable in. Aside from all of this, do you realize it does take intelligence and persistance to win a game? It's not the original Mario Bros. anymore. Which is what amuses me about people who complain about their children playing video games, parents don't want their children learning complex puzzle-solving skills that can help them in school, and persistance and preserverence in solving problems. I don't think that is true, if video games help your child with those skills what is wrong with that? Video games are violent, only the ones they show on the news. If you look at Nintendo's history of video games, rarely have they ever put out a seriously violent game. If that worries you then buy only Nintendo.

There is no reason for someone to assume that someone is less of a person because they enjoy video games. Or to assume it's a waste of time, just because you don't understand it. If your child is acheiving at something, and it brings joy to their life why take that away from them? It really doesn't, and probaly never will make sense to me.  Pretending that raising a child today, is the same as raising a child in the 50's is just plain ignorant.