I agree. I think that’s something that my Mom missed. I’m not saying I begrudge her that, I think she just wanted me to fit in. She never made a big deal about my accomplishments, not because she wasn’t proud, but because she wanted me to stay grounded.
I had overachiever friends in high school, but I didn’t resonate much with them because they had relatively stable home lives. The people I ended up being closest to were average students who had their share of challenges fitting in, both at home and at school.
I remember how humbled I was when I finally got to my dream college and I was surrounded by gifted students. It was good in that the level of dialog improved considerably, it was a challenge in that I was used to being the smartest kid in the room, and I sure as hell wasn’t any more.
Makes me wonder if the far more common case of swearing at computers is due to the same mentality or the opposite.
I don’t think I had to learn to look people in the eye, though in some situations it does make me uncomfortable, and I start worrying if I’m doing it too much or too little. I never purposely tried to learn social skills, and this thread is makeing me think I should. But I’m not really sure where to start. A lot of the advice I see online seems very basic, and lack of intelligible feedback is a big problem.
What is sensory overload? I don’t remember that or ‘going blank’ being part of the description, though sensory sensitivities were.
Accidentally signaling something you don’t feel and had no intention of signaling is one of the more unfortunate aspects of the condition. Great way to alienate people and get into big trouble.
Oh yes. But it’s an important thing to learn, and having a decent social life more than made up for not feeling exceptional. For me there was also a huge increase in the difficulty of the material - I had to work really hard to keep up for the first time in my life, and thats a lesson I wish I’d learned much earlier.
That’s an interesting thought right there. I do remember when young sometimes feeling sorry for certain non-human things. Usually living things like animals or trees, though. It’s hard to recapture very young memories after so long… we lived in a different world as children…
And that’s when my ADHD became really apparent. It was missed because I had a lot of other psych problems making it difficult for me to function, but in retrospect, ADHD 100% exacerbated my inability to keep up with my work. I had to withdraw from college for about a year. I later went back and aced my final year, which I am really proud of because I did it despite poor mental health and untreated ADHD.
I didn’t even discover the ADHD until I was 34. What happened is, for the first time in my life I was neither depressed nor anxious, yet I remained perpetually overwhelmed and still had difficulty completing tasks. Why was life so damned hard when I was doing so well mentally? I wonder how many cases of severe depression are perpetuated by untreated ADHD.
Very true. I was a science star in the sixth form in UK secondary school (AP track in high school, for US translation).
It was a reality check to get to a good university and discover that there are lots of people at least as smart as me, and some smarter… a start on the realization that I probably wasn’t going to be Einstein or Dirac…
But as you say, it was good to have peers who were interested in the same things.
I have a couple of friends who did not go to university, and they still have the mentality of being the smartest person in the room. One sometimes has to intellectually wrestle them to the ground to get them to listen to reason…
It must be a very common experience, since you have to be pretty clever to get into a good university, but only a few can be top of the class there. Makes me wonder how many dopers did continue to feel they were smarter than others as undergrads. Perhaps I’ll make a poll.
I wonder, as it has not been mentioned at all yet: did (m)any of you try to self-medicate with alcohol, dope and cigarretes? Psilocybin perhaps? Did it help?
I did not know what I was doing, but I think it helped.
Not “feeling sorry for” but my son does sometimes tend to get overly attached to things. Like the other day he realized I tossed out a piece of cardboard he had scribbled some roads and whatnot as part of something he had worked on last year. I threw it away months ago not thinking it was anything important and he didn’t notice until recently. But when he did notice, he was inconsolable for hours.
That’s really the main problem with autism IMHO and how it’s different from “being really smart and weird” or just a collection of awkward behaviors. They often have these emotional reactions to things that we don’t get or behave in ways they think is funny but is actually weird and off-putting because they don’t recognize that other people aren’t finding it amusing.
This is much more like me, too. I did have friends until middle school/puberty (I wasn’t good at playing with dolls, but at least I could do enough of it to last for a playdate), and then… I had no idea how to talk to them, and just stopped. People didn’t dislike me (they did dislike another kid who made a big deal about her academics, which I didn’t), I just effectively became invisible.
Then my parents sent me to nerd camp the summer after seventh grade, where I met other kids my age who had intellectual interests! It was literally life-changing. I definitely had some social awkwardness and social missteps there too, but there were other kids who were also socially awkward and I didn’t have trouble making friends there. High school was a little better than middle school, because I could, for example, hang out with chess club at lunch. Then I went to second high school, which was a magnet academically-oriented school, which was just so wonderful.
You know, I’ve never heard it said quite this way, and it’s really true. I wasn’t able to figure out how to be friends with people who are unlike me until I was around people who were like me and could figure out Elementary Friends 101 with them. And as an adult, even though I have a relatively wide range of people I am friendly with, my closest friends are people I have a lot in common with, which I think is pretty standard. If I were never around people I had a lot in common with, I think I would just not have close friends at all.
Hm. I’m not sure how replicable my method is – I have the advantage of belonging to a group (church) that a) is extremely social and has forging bonds between members as a major goal, b) has regular (at least weekly, often more) meetings at which socialization occurs, and c) as you might expect, there are a LOT of people who have way better social skills than I do, but at the same time (because it’s a very accepting group) there are some who don’t. So I have a regular way of both engaging in conversations myself and watching other people engage in conversation (as well as a reason to want to continually improve), and then I evaluate both of those things: what went smoothly about the conversation, what made that person (possibly me) seem awkward, how did the other person smooth it over so that the conversation as a whole wasn’t awkward. (This is an example that happened in church choir yesterday. In this case the awkwardness came from the first person’s dogmatic tone of voice coupled with the fact that he was correcting others, and the second person did graciously accept the correction, which made the whole thing less awkward. The way to make it less awkward for the first person would have been either to say it in a less dogmatic tone of voice (which might have been difficult for this particular person, who just talks like that, but if I were doing it for myself I’d break down more things like “stressing each word comes across as dogmatic, as does putting too much dramatics in one’s voice, so tone both of those down a bit”) or to try to couch it as “we’re all having trouble with this.” The second person, as he accepted the correction, had a much softer tone that came across as, “I’m willing to accept correction,” which matched his words (he was trying to clarify what the first person was saying). (I could break down his tone as well, but this comment is long enough…)
I do the same thing with my own conversations: afterwards I think about which parts of that I thought were awkward and which parts went well and try to figure out how to fix the awkward bits. And for a lot of small things, especially if I’ve felt awkward in an exchange or if I’ve struggled to come up with an answer to something on the spot, I come up with scripts afterwards, often based on things I’ve heard other people say that made me feel good (a simple one is that when I play music at church and someone compliments me, I say, “You’re so sweet to say so,” or “it’s such a pleasure to play with X” (if I’m playing with X and it is a pleasure )).
I’ve been doing this for years and years now, so it’s almost automatic – it required a lot more conscious thought when I was younger. It does rely on at least having enough social skills that one can identify more-or-less reliably when something seems awkward and when it doesn’t (though I think my meter for that has also gotten much better over time), and also that one is able to perform self-correction without getting too anxious or down on oneself (not the case with my daughter; her inability to do any kind of self-correction without deciding she is a bad person is something we have been working on for literally years and I think/hope we are making some progress).
I was just quoting another poster. But I’d say that I’ve seen autistic kids get really overwhelmed by too much noise or people or whatever. Actually both my kids got overwhelmed by too much sound when they were little, though they’ve both grown out of that. My daughter also got overwhelmed by too many kids around and would just shut down and not say anything. She has also mostly grown out of that, though she will always be an introvert and says less and less the bigger the group is.
I do have a memory of going blank. In fifth grade, I had lost a teacher’s library book and we had a talk about it, and she was very disappointed. I was feeling desperately sad and guilty and disappointed in myself, but I guess none of that made it to my face or words because she told my parents that she was even more disappointed by my utter lack of remorse. (I don’t blame this teacher, btw, who in every other interaction I fondly remember as one of my best teachers ever and the absolute best thing about elementary school. She just had no way of knowing.)
That’s where I was going. Knowing that my son is very high level autistic and intellectually gifted, is something that allows us to be able to identify things that might be autistic, versus things that are him just being a bit of a weirdo independent of his autism.
My son expresses love through his beep beeps, two stuffed squishmallow Lighting McQueen racecars (we started with one, but he found the backup and I could not deny him. He calls them Beep Beep and Another Beep Beep, respectively.) It’s not just that he loves those cars - a lot of kids get attached to stuffed animals - it’s that his entire way of relating flows through the beep beeps. If he meets someone new, he gives them a beep beep to see what they do with it. If I say, “I love you, son,” he replies, “I love you beep beeps.” Sometimes he tells me the beep beeps love me. Sometimes he asks me how many beep beeps are in a dollar. Sometimes he brushes their teeth, the first sign we ever saw of pretend play.
For whatever reason he has turned them into a social proxy for whatever skills he’s lacking.
His latest idea of “humor” is to pretend he doesn’t understand something and give the wrong answer. “2+2= 5. Bahaha!”
His teacher mentioned this during our conference with her, she said the other kids are not amused.
My husband said, “Who would have thought our son would be the class clown?”
I said, “In order to be the class clown, though, you have to be able to read a room.”
I gave some incomplete information in this thread. Prior to DSM V, there was Autism Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, and Asperger’s. The DSM-V eliminated Pervasive Developmental Disorder (which could now be categorized as ASD, Global Developmental Delay or Unspecified Neurodevelopmental Disorder, depending on the presentation.) At the time, Asperger’s did not require repetitive and restricted interests to be diagnosed, however thinking around this changed as “stimming” was recharacterized as repetitive behavior. The new criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder folds together what used to be Autism Disorder, Asperger’s and some of the individuals that would have been diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.
So my key error was in omitting that Autism Disorder was a thing prior to the DSM-V, it just had a more narrow definition. As research advanced, it became apparent that actually these three things had a lot in common with each other and should be united under one “spectrum” disorder.
Ah, thanks for this – I had thought that “autism” was a thing previously to them being combined, but I didn’t know for sure, my kid being pretty firmly Asperger’s
An interesting question. If I meet and talk to someone I don’t know, my default assumption is that they mean more or less exactly what they say.
If I know them better, I may decide that they are:
. someone who likes to maliciously wind people up. (I have a brother in law like that), or
. someone who has recognised me as a playful kindred spirit who understands jokes and subtexts.
What you’re describing is most likely a result of neural pruning falling to occur. I’ve never heard the reverse happen.
It’s complicated because researchers don’t fully understand autism and there is a lot of discussion about what actually it is and whether there are various subtypes etc. But we do know that some people are diagnosed during toddlerhood, say around 18 months, with a condition that is evident from much earlier on, and then some kids develop in a way that appears typical until they are about three years old, and they experience a sudden regression of skills. I think this is what the parents mean when they make dramatic statements like that. The kid was behaving typically and then suddenly he wasn’t.
Research indicates (I have no idea how robustly) that children who receive an earlier diagnosis tend to have less severe symptoms in the long term. (Earlier meaning 18 months vs 3 years.)
Around the age of three, this is a prime time for neural pruning, and when it does not occur, you will likely see a sudden regression of skills. Some parent might describe this as the lights going out.
My son was in between these. We knew from an early age that he was different, but not why. We suspected autism, but when we watched videos of autistic kids vs typical kids, our kid was not behaving like either of those kids. He had a speech delay but by the time we got him to an evaluation, he’d been caught up. He was in the monitor range on the MCHAT.
When he was 2.75 we knew he was delayed but weren’t sure whether he could catch up on his own. He didn’t start daycare until then, and we said okay, let’s put him in daycare and see how he does. Surely it there if a problem, the caregivers will note it.
That they did not.
But around the time he turned three, everything just changed. His language regressed considerably and he began to demonstrate more obvious stereotyped repetitive behaviors like hand-flapping and rocking and spinning and all that. He also began counting incessantly. I mean constantly. And of course now that he was in daycare we could note zero interest in his peers.
Even though his daycare and our pediatrician were slow on the uptake, Dad and I knew this kid was not only autistic but also needed immediate intervention. I don’t think I was quite prepared for the results of the reports, in terms of the severity of impairment, because of how much laypeople around us were downplaying it. The first developmental psychologist watched a single video we sent of my son freaking out over the countdown timer on our toaster oven and said, “Yeah, I’m definitely going to help you get services for this kid.” (My son watched that timer, yelling out the numbers and flapping in ecstasy, for the entire fifteen minutes.) She did the full ADOS-2 but she was 100% on board from a thirty second video before she even met him. By the end of the year we would have four evaluations with four different teams all to confirm this diagnosis.
I have looked at older videos of my son to see - did we miss all this? No, he appears a lot more neurotypical in earlier videos and the older he gets, the more apparent his gestures and body language. He never behaved neurotypically but right at that pruning age everything just kicked into overdrive.
Now what I don’t know if you can have autism without this failure to prune situation. Maybe there are different neurotypes that lead to the same condition.
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