To me the OP seems to be confused about two important aspects:
“repetitive behavior” of the kind associated with the autism spectrum can be stuff which is considered socially acceptable. Movies tend to pick the most obvious stuff as a shorthand; documentaries are trying to be helpful to those whose behaviours are on the unacceptable side. Both are likely to include many people who aren’t conscious of how many people around them display socially acceptable repetitive behaviors. Toying with your pen or moving your hands sideways a few times just above the table are socially accepted, repetitive behaviors; flapping your hands at shoulder level is repetitive, socially unaccepted behavior. The media will always show the person who flaps their hands and make a big fuss out of how this shows that person to be “on the spectrum”; meanwhile, when a high-powered executive is shown toying with their pen it’s because they’re “high energy”.
“repetitive behavior” and “need for structure” are two different parameters; “acceptance of change” is a third one. “Doesn’t take changes well” depends a lot on who initiates the change and on how is the change presented: most people, ASD or not, are fine with changes that they initiate and prefer those which are offered to them to those which are thrust upon them. Nobody has said that being on the autistic spectrum involves a lack of creativity: ASD people are perfectly capable of initiating change and of being interested in changes that are offered to them; the label of “doesn’t take change well” refers to changes which are forced on them or of which they haven’t received enough warning.
I make a living by going to people’s workplaces and changing the way they work. One of the most important early tasks is to take a change that’s being forced upon these people and making them own it; making them feel like it’s “their” change and not the change that TPTB forced down their throats. And this task is so important because of that 2: no matter what personality you have, no matter who you are, having things forced down your throat is something nobody likes.
FFS, back when Asperger’s first became a popular term, the reaction of a lot of people was “but that’s just ‘being an engineer’!” Prefers not working with too much people, check. Is perfectly happy being with a lot of people so long as those fulfill certain conditions, check. Likes their stuff to stay exactly where they left it, check. Wants computer screen “just so” and will call the IT guys to “bring back my fucking monitor this minute! I HAVE YOUR MOTHER’S PHONE NUMBER, we went to school together! I don’t care if this one is newer and bigger! I like mine! I’ve been in this company for twenty-five years young man and you’re going to be bringing my monitor back or by God I’M CALLING YOUR MOTHER!”, check.
Aspidistra, that’s one of the two criticisms I have with the concept of an “autism spectrum” (aside: Is the 11 dimensions a literal count, or just figurative? It seems like it might be about right). The other is that a spectrum has two ends: If there’s an “autism spectrum”, then everyone is on it, and the people with excellent social skills are just on the equivalent of the far ultraviolet, X-ray, or gamma end.
To add a refinement to the “Autism Terrain” as I’m going to call it, instead of 11 dimensions, I find it more useful to think of it as a fractal pattern. Nevvie who is somewhere on that map is really good at a lot of stuff and I had no idea until my sister told me. In contrast, I have a coworker who also has a son that is diagnosed as autistic and to me it was subtly apparent right away. They both have different strengths and weaknesses, so while my nephew may be down in a valley, when you look closely at the details of his terrain, it looks like a peak
Very much, yes. The half marathons she runs are usually when she’s on acid. She also meditates on ecstasy, pot edibles and nootropics. She does very little in terms of addiction-prone drugs. I found exercise, meditation and psychedelics through her. I won’t go on much more than that because of the board rules.
Thanks very much for that. I’ll read up on it, maybe send her a lecture if it’s up to her standards.
Twice exceptional works the other way too. IIRC, Naomi Watts and Keanu Reeves both didn’t finish high school but you certainly couldn’t call them inept and they went on to have extraordinary careers.
As you correctly guessed, there are other issues involved. Getting her to reveal what she thinks is easy; If you get her started, she’ll give you a lecture-worthy explanation. Getting her to reveal what she feels is like pulling teeth off a T-Rex.
She’s good with children and great with animals. We take walks together sometimes and she has an easy time getting cats to approach her. She’s been told several times that dogs who are usually anxious around strangers are unusually friendly to her.
On the other hand, she tends to be oblivious or dismissive of signs of interest from men even though she realizes she has attractive qualities. She’s finished her medical degree and residency but she’s unemployed in a city with below 5% unemployment.
There was one time that struck me; I saw her watch a video of a mother with her son sitting in her lap a few times. The mother was being gentle and kind to the son like you would expect. I asked her why she rewatched it a few times. Normally, she would have clammed up at this point but she was a little high. She said that it was like the opposite of watching a movie. In a movie, you know it’s fake intellectually but it feels real emotionally. When she saw a mother being gentle and kind to her son, she knew it was real intellectually but it felt fake to her. She hasn’t had much contact with her mother or that side of the family since she turned 20. I’ve tried broaching the topic since them but she ices up pretty well. I know she’s tried therapy and I saw some SSRI bottles in her bedroom but they don’t seem to have done much for her.
She can be gregarious actually. She can be puppy-like when she interacts with me. She just seems to take a long time to warm up to people and I doubt she’ll ever warm up to most people. It feels like she can smell the dysfunction off some of them and it creeps her out which the other person sometimes senses and reacts badly to.
What have you found to help? Maybe I can steer her in that direction.
SzPD can be very intimate with select few people, actually (I can make eye conact with people such as my mom). I meant gregarious in the sense that one can chat up strangers and such(message boards are often less stressful for me). SzPD usually don’t reciprocate attraction with others either (mostly because I’m inclined to think everyone might be, it’s difficult to know who’s being genuine, so I play it safe and assume no one is. Plus, other more personal reasons I’d rather not publicize). I abstain from recreational drugs, but only because I’ve seen how it ruined lives close to me, but SzPD is prone to it.
And animals do tend to be at comparative ease with me, rescues particularly.
I’m no psychiatrist, however, and my just be biased towards what I (might) be. The doctor still wants to rule out Asperger’s, so extra grain of salt.
As for my own coping, I’m in the process of establishing some sort of independence, and just beginning treatment. It’s agonizingly slow to be honest; I’m just unable to tell what my responsibilities start, and what limits to expect of outside help reasonably are.
For what reason(s) do you think animals, particularly rescues, tend to be at comparative ease with you?
Can you go on about establishing independence? What sort of responsibilities are you taking on? Will eventually take? What kind of limits of outside help are you realizing?
It’s a fully rectally-derived statistic. But, y’know, eleven is the *best *number (it goes up to elevin!!)
May I hit you with another one of my pet theories … that a lot of the repetitive behaviour of ‘true’ diagnosed ASD/Aspie people is also a response to trauma rather than innate - that is, the generalised long-running trauma of being in a society in which everyone else seems to think differently from you in strange non-understandable ways. Retreating to familiarity and routine is what most people do under stress of whatever sort - you can’t step out of your comfort zone to learn new stuff if you’re constantly uncomfortable (not saying that this means your psych should necessarily diagnose you with it tho)
Relatable. I like her already.
It sounds like she was trying to learn something from that video - that she’s aware that that sort of parent-child bonding is a good thing, she hasn’t had experience of it actually working right, and she wants to really closely examine an instance of it working right so she can figure out the trick to how it’s done. I often watch movies in the same spirit - that is, I like to watch movies about people who are very different from me, because it expands my possible range of responses to a situation beyond just the small set of things that come naturally (’ oh … a person could say that, huh? Maybe I’ll try that someday…')
I’m a big believer in not worrying about labels and categories but just … what are you having a problem with? Fix the thing that’s actually causing you problems. For instance, not being able to get a job sounds like something that’s causing a problem, and maybe something related to a specific deficit in her mental toolkit - not being able to quickly warm up to a new person, or at least fake it well for interview purposes. Or maybe fear of the unknown situation. Whatever it is, I’d recommend that as a potential area of approach - to to tell her there’s something generally ‘wrong’ with her (however gentle you are in approach she’s quite likely to leap to ‘you think there’s something wrong with me’) but that there’s a specific situation that she needs a particular cognitive skill for, and (for instance) psychologists can help people gain cognitive skills, and if she HAD this extra cognitive skill she’d be able to do something that would help her life - like get a job
While that’s a definite possibility, I think it’s also probable that having that reaction made her realize there might be something broken or at least bent in her.
She can be quite blunt and is fine with the same bluntness if it’s meant to help. She often requests feedback from others and is unsatisfied because others try to be ambiguously polite instead of straightforwardly clear. When she cooks something new, she specifically asks people if there’s anything they like or dislike about it and if they look like they’re holding back on what they dislike, she gets frustrated. She doesn’t enjoy negative feedback but she still wants it. She wouldn’t have a problem with me telling her there’s something wrong with her, she’d have a problem with me not being informatively specific enough.
And yes, she doesn’t do well in interviews. I think her gut instinct, subconscious or whatever you want to call it keeps expecting people to be as impredictably shitty as her mother. From what she told me, her mother may have had a mix of borderline personality, paranoid or narcissistic personality disorder, went through a depression and became an alcoholic and not the jolly drunk kind. My stepsister tried to get help from other family members but they didn’t see what they didn’t want to see and were no help to her. It’s like someone who was repeatedly bitten by a dog over several years, developed a coping mechanism/gut instinct/worldview that a dog could bite at any moment for any reason and that no help will come and now has to live surrounded by dogs.
A lot of what you describe just sounds like a brilliant mind to me. There is such a thing as too brilliant. Genius is useful up to a certain point and then it becomes a syndrome.
The human mind is largely wired for finding patterns and identifying faces. So all of the images you posted are perfect examples of what happens when that tendency is brought to a very high level. Intelligence is the ability to find abstract connections between things and ideas. Those connections are obvious to the brilliant, not at all clear to the merely smart. This is why brilliance looks like insanity to even very smart people.
It is also true that brilliant people tend to pick up a lot of trauma in childhood. The ability to understand and remember what is happening between adults, on TV shows, in books and movies, etc. comes looonnng before the emotional capacity to filter and remove oneself from it. Genius kids remember all that stuff that parents feel free to say in front of the baby, but would never say in front of the seven year-old. Genius kids aren’t fooled when you spell things out, though they may also be smart enough to hide that from you. And there is a curiosity there that doesn’t quit, so they tend to dig into stuff and then be badly hurt by things they just aren’t ready to know.
The result of that can often be avoidance of social interaction. When one expects folks to either misunderstand or laugh at your thoughts, one avoids speaking, and avoids eye contact when driven to it. It’s not neurological, so much as a sheer emotional defense. That’s true of Autism too though. Autistic folks don’t lack empathy, they tend to feel it more strongly than most people, so much so that it becomes overwhelming. Emotions in general are far stronger for autistic people than for neurotypicals. So what you are seeing in those cases too is not inability to empathize, but avoidance of it.
What is very late to bloom for most autistic children is “theory of mind.” The ability to step into someone else’s shoes and predict how they might react given the information available to them. If the autistic person has the information needed to make the correct choice, there is an assumption that everyone else has it too.
Flat affect can be symptomatic of quite a few things, most common of which is depression. Has she always been this way? Might it be bothering you now because it has gotten worse? If so, put some thought into other symptoms, might she be in need of help?
I was still writing the above when you posted. Yes, it sounds more like a brilliant mind with emotional trauma, and everything you just said confirms that suspicion.
She’s been like that ever since her mother became an alcoholic. I think she had to maintain a poker face because showing emotion to a messed up adult having a tantrum can cause them to get even worse so the best course is to show no emotion. She must have done that long enough when her brain was developing that now she’s stuck. Sometimes I see her poker face leave. It’s usually when she interacts with cats and dogs and really gets into something.
How smart might we be talking? When is IQ so high that it counts as brilliant?
I think she doesn’t want to be a doctor because she considers it a waste of her potential but she doesn’t know what she could do instead. She’s talked a little about making a video game that would express what she’s learned, figured out and hypothesized about information warfare, emergent phenomena and the art of figuring things out. She has a book-length text file full of notes about it. Whenever she finds or thinks of something that has some info that seems like it could pertain to her game, she writes it down, not so much to refer to it later but more so that she retains it better and her subconscious processes in the background. She doesn’t like other people looking at it though so I don’t press.
I don’t have a working hypothesis for why some animals react the way they do. But a WAG is I don’t conduct myself the way their abusers did, possibly it’s my deliberateness. It’s not like I intearct with them enough to know for sure, but their owners have remarked on it positively.
Independence is finding my own living space, and possibly getting set up with a work-from-home job. I don’t know how to answer the rest of your question, but I think there’s some form of consent I should be better communicating but am not. I’m accused of being stubborn more often than I care to admit; mostly for fear of sinking instead of swimming, either by my of devices or by the undue influence of others.
My primary stressors are very specific people, those I’m unfortunately related to. Two have become somewhat less of a factor, but the other has become overwhelming on account of their increased presence.
For example, I’ll hoard new music for such an occasion that they’ll be absent so I can actually enjoy it. I haven’t listened to new music all summer.
Does anyone else agree with TruCelt’s “brilliant mind & childhood trauma” diagnosis? I know that if I come to her with that, she’s going to say something like: “Yeah, sure, I’m a stable genius, just like Trump! Seriously, 99 to 99.99% of the time, when someone says they’re a extremely smart, they’re delusional or overcompensating morons. What are the odds I’m the special snowflake? How presumptuous and narcissistic can one get? My character creator sure put a lot more points in the intelligence stat than the charisma stat but c’mon, if I’m brilliant, how come my life isn’t better than this?”
Well, I think we’re suggesting she might be an UNstable genius. Truly just kidding there; a person can be quite stable and still be suffering obvious results of emotional trauma.
Nobody can know for sure how smart she is without testing her, of course. But brilliant people generally have either very messy or very limited (minimalist) lives. It is especially common for a person who is above the genius level to have trouble settling on a career because they have potential in so many different areas.
For instance, a person who is studying medicine and also developing a complex video game. Why on earth isn’t she studying game theory and development?
How come? What governs whether they end up being messy or minimalist?
We don’t know the upper limit without testing her but where does brilliant/genius start?
I’ve seen her read Game Feel: A Gamer Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation and Flow by Csikszentmihalyi. She also watches a fair number of Youtube channels like Game Maker’s Toolkit. She acquainted herself with Blender and UnrealEngine. She takes notes when she plays video games.
I think she’s done most of the background learning and figuring out of what the game should be and now she’s intimidated at the prospect of learning modeling, texturing, animation, sound, (visual) programming and whatever other specific skillsets are required on her own. She tends to be perfectionist. To make an analogy, if she wanted to build a house, she’d probably be a great architect but that doesn’t mean she’d also be a good carpenter, roofer, welder, plumber and electrician. Tending towards the abstract means specific skills involving rote memorization tend to bore or overwhelm her.
Sounds like she’s not just a perfectionist but also in need of a lot of control. An architect KNOWS that he’s not going to be doing the plumbing, carpentry…
Not so much need of control as much as lack of money to hire other people. I think she’s hoping to make a decent prototype then use that to get specialists on board for a cut of potential revenue. She seems to have difficulty explaining exactly what kind of game it is to me. In the past, she’s had difficulty explaining what she had in mind to me but when she actually made it and showed me, it was both unexpectedly novel and worked well. She’s chosen a game that seems to have an abstract/surreal graphical style. But yes, when details enable her to comprehend underlying principles or apply them, she can pay a lot of attention to details.
