Aspies For Freedom

If I receive criticism or complaint from someone like my Manager or family member's for something I have or haven't done in the way they expect I should have done it ( including behaviour ) I always become over emotional in my reaction. I can get really hurt so easily by other people and often I 'feel' like I am going to cry, that show of weakness seems to make people do it even more. Rarely, I get really angry and that seems to make people happy to. It is as if people know I can be over emotional and over-react if they push me and so they do it more and more.

Does anyone else experience this? If so, what do you do to lessen the effect people have on you when you cannot leave the situation?

I do have an incredibly hard time with criticism if any of you have seen my posts on AFF (I write about the issue and act defensively also) and it is one of the major reasons I have such trouble with employment. I can't tell what other people (co-workers) are thinking and if I do get criticism, for me it's like confirming my worse suspicions.

Continuing on that last point, I think theory of mind plays a role in Aspergian inability to handle criticism.. that is why this is often one very stubborn trait, you can't rationally/logically override the problem.

My reaction to criticism in the workplace is to be furious. How DARE they question me, the FOOLS! (insert maniacal ego outrage and fantasies involving their suffering) Fortunately I don't work around people and have learned to wait to respond to critical emails for a few hours to let myself calm down and word my reply very carefully.

The only people I take criticism from are those who I have asked to instruct me or my best friend because I have given him that permission. In that case, I accept the input with grattitude. It is amusing how my friend can even correct my pronunciation in the middle of a highly emotional conversation and I'll just accept it as a foot note, say "oh okay, thanks" and then resume the other topic.

@ ^ : the discord between you and your mom appears to be more a symptom of something deeper than a cause.

Perhaps somebody's mom has trouble handling criticism too

I don't mind balanced comments on my performance, but pure criticism is a serious problem. When it comes from people I hardly know I can usually shrug it off, however in work situations I will often loose my cool. No use trying to fake like it doesn't bother me.

anbuend Wrote:

It can be really important to learn it's okay to be wrong.��

You're right. I've had trouble with that one. In college I made myself take entire courses over again if I got even one question wrong during the course. Anything less than a perfect score made me feel like I was nothing. I'm not as bad as I was about that. :-)

At least in the workplace I don't blame my mistakes on others. I really hate when coworkers do that.

anbuend Wrote:

It can be really important to learn it's okay to be wrong.��Once that idea sinks in, criticism doesn't feel as bad.

I haven't learned that yet, and I'm now 26. Is this a problem of "slow intellect" or just Aspie stubborness?

silky Wrote:

My reaction to criticism in the workplace is to be furious. How DARE they question me, the FOOLS! (insert maniacal ego outrage and fantasies involving their suffering) Fortunately I don't work around people and have learned to wait to respond to critical emails for a few hours to let myself calm down and word my reply very carefully.

The only people I take criticism from are those who I have asked to instruct me or my best friend because I have given him that permission. In that case, I accept the input with grattitude. It is amusing how my friend can even correct my pronunciation in the middle of a highly emotional conversation and I'll just accept it as a foot note, say "oh okay, thanks" and then resume the other topic.

Hilarious and wonderful and so well put!! This is the crux of the matter, I think. We want to be right. We don't want to LOOK right (as many NTs seem to deeply desire), we want to BE right. So if we make an actual mistake and a friend corrects us, that's great, now we are correct again. But if some idiot at work criticizes something, then "How DARE they question me, the FOOLS! (insert maniacal ego outrage and fantasies involving their suffering)" INDEED!!

grizeldatee Wrote:

The Puppet
by me

as cold boiling filled me i knew
it must go away for a while so
i willed it into a little box
closed tightly and put on a shelf
behind my eyes

then i watched me do the things that
must be done and say the things that
must be said and as a puppet
holding the little box closed
carefully take myself away

later alone in a quiet place
all alone in a safe and quiet place
the puppet was allowed to peek
into the box and died

Haunting. Thank you.

barefoot doc Wrote:

I didn't begin to learn this until I was 55. Slow learner? stubborn? or deep fear of letting go of control?

It was the latter, I believe. I began to learn to let go of control in therapy. For two years I had been controlling what I spoke about, rehearsing it for a week before the sessions while telling myself i was being honest. When I finally saw that I was being utterly dishonest and controlling I was, for the first time in my life, deeply humiliated. Going back into that session the following week, humiliated, a failure, having betrayed the relationship, was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had been sooo hung up on keeping control. And what I had done was sooo wrong, within the rules of that relationship.

What I learned was, it's possible to be totally wrong - completely humiliated by failure at the deepest level, flattened with shame - and get up and live again, and keep the relationship going; it's not the end, and although the shame of failing feels like death, it's not. Rather, it can be a rebirth. A great discovery. A few months later i found myself aware that I was never again going to hold - or want to hold - all the loose ends of my life, in a neat tidy bundle. There were going to be ragged ends, mess, unfinished things, mistakes, things misunderstood and impossible to correct. It's a new world. (It helped to learn to swim at the same time - taking your feet off the bottom of the pool a great way to learn to let go of control!)

So: on one hand, slow Aspie learning? and on the other hand, hope - you can cross the deepest depths of learning even at 55!

best wishes
I hope your learning sets in sooner than mine! Wishing you a happily messy life Smile

/michael

I think that is some great advice, but I have an issue with being told about slow learning... I simply don't believe it. I think this control problem is from Aspie stubborness.

Anyhow, some of this systematic/rigid control has to come in handy for something, seeing as there have been many high-achieving/famous individuals who had AS (which is a PDD.)

Yes I am an extreme control freak, but that's how I am. Systematic and rigid thinking. Oh well. That's AS for you.

In summary, yes I am an extreme control freak, as should be evident from my posts.  Self-obsessed, rigid, controlling, won't budge for anything or anyone, won't change for anything or anyone.  I don't treasure NT values in an NT world, and won't "change my mind" on that, and so who cares.  Not me.

But I can't just "oh... that's wrong.. now it is fixed!"  That does not work with AS, and what's more, I'm refusing help.

So.  I'll be myself, thank you very much!

If I may curse for a moment.
The task is to turn chicken *** into chicken soup (or poop to soup, if you prefer).

The ONE good thing that can be got from criticism, is a window into the criticser's point of view. For example, at the job I loved but was driven out from, my boss criticised ONE aspect of my job, which I found unimportant, and totally ignored the amazing improvements I had made in the workflow, which I found important. It took me a LONG time to realize that what mattered to me didn't matter to my boss, and what mattered to my boss didn't matter to me. Had I realized this sooner, I could have saved my job by a simple compromise of giving her what she wanted while still doing things my way, for the most part. Instead, I insisted on trying to prove to her how wrong she was, and shortly thereafter I resigned because she made the job intolerable for me. Live and learn.

I guess no one values my high regard for control and rigid thinking; what I take "symbolically" from having no replies to my last two posts is I should "live and learn." Now, how I respond to that symbolic impression goes with my controlling nature: "That's not how I do things."

I hope my point is understood, even if you other folks prefer "live and learn" to my personal "control freak" way. I see no reason to stop being so controlling.

I'm glad to see you're making some progress Michael.

Sorry that I came off as a jerk by trying to divert attention to myself in your thread. I sometimes forget about this thing called "empathy" altogether.

Michael 1

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