Differences between mild Aspergers and severe Autism?

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Thank you. Yes,, that all makes sense. I know lately I have a tendency to emphasize my differentness and I'm trying to cut down. I hadn't really thought of the other side of that, of reacting to being told you're different your entire life. That's kind of the sense I had from Joe90, but I mean thinking of it as a systemic thing.

I've had the other reaction in areas that are not related to disability, too, but are outside the expected norm. I can relate.



No, this is fine. Not the wrong thing at all. Like Anbuend said, this makes a lot more sense.

I wasn't trying to criticize you, but trying to find a way to ask where you're coming from. If I came across as accusing or anything else that's negative, I'm sorry. I also agree with what DandelionFireworks said.

How does this fit into LFA/HFA severe/mild.

In high school I did not look at the world in a typical way. It was strongly related to my perception of time. Basically, I had no sense of future as something you could plan for. A specific, but simplified example was how I perceived college. I did not connect going to college with a career path. I saw the entities around me called doctors, scientists, engineers, artists, or what ever. I had NO CONCEPT of how people became these things. They were just there. Going to college was just something that the smart kids did. I really didn't have any sense of WHY they went to college. I could not integrate the idea of a plan (go to college, go to med school, go though residency, become a doctor) with just what a university education was for. I did not end up going to college right out of high school.

Move forward about15 year. Somewhere my sense of integration of time with planning and such things as an actual path through life had evolved. I was no longer perceiving everything has a bunch of disconnected entities in the here and now but that causality actually connected events and the states of peoples lives. At some point I remembered or came to believe I was smarter than most people and so I went to college - mostly because that's what smart people do. Again no strong sense of a progression through a series of goals and events existed in my mind, It was much clearer, but the time frames were not aligned in a way that made sense. I could perform well on an immediate task, I had long term framework of what had to happen to become say a physicist, but I had not connected the short term tasks (do a particular assignment, take a particular test) to the long term goals. There was still no mental map, no pathway through university to a PHD. I knew what I had to do in some large scale sense, but I had no real sense of how to plan a sequence of events in a reasonable manner that would allow success.

I tried to stick with college for almost 10 years, juggling classes, doing very well at first but ultimately I crashed and burned.

For the last 10 years I have been working in a small company the develops software. It has been rocky. This problem of bridging short term tasks with long term goals by a cohesive path has been severely limiting in any position I have had in the company.

That said, in the last year or so, my cognitive map has evolved and now I can actually SEE or SENSE pathways from the NOW that my mind tends to live in with the future I would like to live in. As strange as it may sound, I have never been able to PERCEIVE such a path, even if I could plan it out (take the right courses in the right order at university) on paper, such a plan was an exercise in pushing symbols around. I could not PERCEIVE the plan in a way that actually connected it to physical reality.

So now I am 52 years old. A very basic way of perceiving and dealing with the world has FINALLY started to come together. I SENSE future pathways in a a way that is intuitive to a 12 year old starting out in middle school. Basically it took me 40 years to integrate a perception of time into my physical reality in a way that is allowing me to MAYBE, just MAYBE, put together the pieces of a plan that will allow me to achieve some moderate goals instead of falling flat on my face yet again.

So what is this? How do you measure this very strong NOW sense of time that has followed me, literally a very real sense that future and past simply do not exist, this perception rooted in sensory experience of what is happening RIGHT NOW? Is it severe autism? It CERTAINLY impeded any progress through life, It has taken me 4 DECADES to adjust to a sense of time that might actually work in this world. My life, by actuarial tables, is two thirds over. My 'career' has been nothing but lost opportunities (some of which I had NO CLUE were opportunities until years later).

By all the definitions of HFA/LFA I am a high functioning individual. But there is this intransigent, impenetrable structure to my mind that has taken me 40 YEARS to work through just so I can MAYBE have a plan that will work out in "the real world". How do you measure a deficit like that? Talking about it in terms of mild or severe just doesn't make sense. I'm not even sure if I've explained it in a way that makes sense, but I know how I have perceived the world, how it has evolved, and how those perceptions have hindered my in ways that most people can't begin to understand. But I'll bet there are some autistic individuals that know exactly what I am talking about even if the words written here fail to rise to the level of a clear explanation.

And this issue with time perception is only part of how my interactions with the rest of this world are fundamentally different. Am I profoundly autistic because of these atypical perceptions, but just smart enough that I can survive by the skin of my teeth? I'm I mildly autistic because I managed to stay employed most of my life?

The categorizations just don't cut it, if you ask me.

Wow, my little one is 4 and NV and I assumed that we can't toilet train him yet because we can't communicate with him very well. I wonder why you can't talk to your son about toilet training, while at the same time I know it can't be that simple.
I'm ignorant still I guess.

Not speaking doesn't necessarily mean not understanding.

Speaking doesn't necessarily mean understanding.

Other things can come into play as well. Being able to understand the theory may not translate into being able to put it into practice.

I'm learning a lot by going through anbuends posts.

I'm not saying I have a NL condition what nobody has had in the history of mankind. I'm saying that I might have something what hasn't been diagnosed in people yet, although there might be lots of people out there with it. It might be a sister to Autism, it might be something completely different to Autism, it might be something similar to Autism, it might be something related to my anxiety disorder. I'm no doctor, so I'm not saying what it is and what it isn't.

It's just I don't seem to look at things in the same way other people on the spectrum do. Although I can relate to some people on some threads, depending on what it's about, but I have started a few threads where posters have disagreed with me and I then find out I've began a 10-page long argument about one thing and still getting nowhere. Once I showed a couple of threads I started to my NT mum and my NT friend, and they've got confused by the replies some Aspies had put against my opinion or something, and seemed like I just seem to have the same views as a NT. I wish I didn't. I wish I did look at views the same way as other Aspies do, because you think of things in a much cleverer way than people not on the spectrum.

Once again, sorry about what I said on the other page. Feel so embarrassed. I'm still confused, but if I admit that I don't get it, instead of getting everyone else to agree with my opinions, then I think things will be easier.

I don't think about things the way most autistic people do either, it just happens that there's a couple people here who do understand things in a similar way. I was pretty much one of the earlier people arguing against functioning levels and for a very long time I was doing it alone or nearly alone and nearly all autistic people thought the way I did. The way I think about things actually isn't due to cleverness. It's actually due to a lack of what most people would consider cleverness: I have a lot of trouble understanding abstractions. So for instance instead of seeing lots of autistic people and having my mind sort them into LFA and HFA and discard all of the differences as if they don't exist, I just see lots of autistic people and all their various traits whether they conform to standard LFA/HFA ideas or not. Most don't, by the way. But it all has to do with having a mind that cannot use abstractions very well, whereas standard views of cleverness are all about abstraction. I can't sustain abstraction long. I can sustain it long enough to write posts like this, but most of the rest of the day I don't even have enough abstraction to use or understand language.

I still don't think like "most aspies". (Most have way more of that abstraction and thus way more of accepting what they've been told. Abstraction helps people accept what they've been told, because it makes their minds filter out data that doesn't agree with what they already believe.) It's just that my views are reaching a wider amount of people now so some people are more willing to believe what I say, and other people always noticed what I was talking about but weren't as willing to say it because they were afraid of being thought wrong or stupid or something. And also there's just enough autistic people around on the net these days (when I started there were virtually none) that people who think similar to me exist out there I have a fairly rare form of autism in some ways, so people who think a lot like me aren't the most common either. I'm pretty sure that if you hang around you'll find people who do think like you do as well. I used to think I never would.

oh we do talk, but talking isnt feeling or doing. for my son, it seems to be at least in part a sensory issue. he cant identify the feelings in his body to let him know when he needs to go or has already gone. so he can communicate, but he cant communicate when he has to go to the bathroom because he doesnt recognize the sensations. he often cannot accurately tell us whether or not he has gone to the bathroom in his diaper. i only recently found out that his dad had toileting issues until he was around 9 yrs old. that history made my sons issue make a lot more sense.

thats a good example tho of the assumptions around not just functioning labels, but individual functioning specifics. we cant assume just because someone functions to a certain level in one area, that they can function to a certain level in another. you are right, it really isnt that simple.

I dunno. Might be autism. Might just be dyspraxia and anxiety. Neither would surprise me; I suggest not hunting for zebras.



It's a way of perceiving, a way of thinking-- it doesn't determine the conclusions you come to, only what cognitive skills are at your disposal to make use of while coming to them.





I want you to know that what you just did is very impressive. There are people twice your age, autistic and NT alike, who have never yet managed that. Alright, so you're confused-- let's deal with that instead of arguing. Do you have any understanding of this thread?

Not really.
Apparently most people on the spectrum take most things by fact, and most NTs take most things by opinions. I'm not saying it's true or not, it's just what I have read somewhere. Most things I take by opinion. I don't think of the logic behind things - I just go by what I see.

And the strange thing is, I don't feel different to people. Well, everybody are different to eachother anyway (that I have learnt in this thread!), and everybody has their quirks. Being NT does not mean perfection. But I still don't feel ''on the outside''. I used to more as a child, but that was because I always had ''the strop'', and would strop off just to seek attention, basically. But I know that that was not anything to do with being different. That was just me being very awkward, and deep down I knew that if I didn't keep stropping off I would easily be able to muck in normally with the other children. I realised that as I got to a teenager - and now I never strop off from people, and I've learnt that by not alienating myself, I know I can fit in with other people, and I have now - kind of - taught myself to become aware of other people, which has helped me realise that I'm not really that different to them. OK, I may get anxious about things like people looking at me in the street, but that doesn't interfere with every day communication. That is just something I worry about deep inside when I'm walking about on my own.
I have different ways, (like being extra anxious of loud noise), but those differences are minor, and are just a small part of life and a small part of me, and minor things like that don't make me into a whole different person. And I try not to blame everything on Autism. I don't look at parsnips and say, ''I don't like parsnips because I have Autism''. The loud noise anxiety is probably a part of the Autism I have.
I'm not saying everybody else on the spectrum are feeling the same way I am towards themselves. There are a thousand ways to feel about yourself, whether you're NT or NL, and I may have low self-esteem, but I know lots of NTs who run themselves down too, and sometimes I can relate to them. Other times, I can't relate to some NTs. Most of cousins go out partying now they're young adults, which I don't do, and I don't always associate myself with them so much now because I haven't got much in common with them. It might be because I'm an Aspie and find it hard to join in with party-people, but then again that's my problem. There are plenty of other ways of fulfil my life, without worrying about some stupid parties. I have a boyfriend who is NT and who I've been with for nearly 3 years, and we get on so well. I don't find it one bit hard to express my emotions to him, and he says (apart from my anxieties and my special interest with buses and weather), I am a really good person to be with and I'm much easier to get along with than one of his colleagues, who is NT.

Probably what I've said will probably start up another 10-page argument against it, but all that is how I feel about the world, truthfully. I may struggle, I may lack confidence, but there is no way I feel different when I've met so many other odd people in my life.

And let me tell you a fact. There's this family what my mum knows (but doesn't really like) who are all odd and weird and were nasty as kids and bullied other people, and they're all on drugs and get into fights - but the only really nice one of this family who she does like (as in friendly-like) is the one who is Autistic. He is the nicest out of the lot, and is the only one who has steered clear of drugs and landed himself a good job and is the most intelligent, and he lives in the real world, more than his family do (who are into drugs and fights and are living on benifits).

I'm NOT saying all families are like that, I'm just saying I know this one family who are all rough, but this one person from this rough family who has Autism has actually made more of an effort than the others have. If he had been born NT, he probably would have followed the rest of his family's footsteps. Not necessarily, though, but he probably might have. I'm not saying all NTs don't succeed. I'm just saying that being NT doesn't always necessarily mean excellent success in everything, just because they don't have the social difficulties we might have. I just wish I was NT because I wouldn't be so anxious about every little thing, like loud noise, crowds, and snow. But being NL doesn't make me a horrible person, and I have learnt to be more assertive now, but in the right sort of way, so I'm not always being ''too nice'' and I try not to let myself be take advantage of. Dealing with my anxieties properly will never be a strength of mine. I will always be an anxious person - that is what I was diagnosed with, and I may never get rid of it. So people can criticise me to ''stop being anxious and get a life'' til they're blue in the face, but it won't do me any good.

Oh, by te way - if it weren't for Autistic people, some things wouldn't have been invented, what we use today. So I will never run Autistic people down. The world needs you and your uniqueness and intelligence! (Even though some NTs can be intelligent people too, but I'm talking about Autistics at the moment).

Last edited by Joe90 on 18 Jan 2011, 6:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know I'm picking one thing about your post, but "into living on benefits?" Why is that a flaw? Did you mean that family specifically for particular reasons you did not mention?

No, I just brought this family up to prove that I am not dissing Autistic people, and that is a family who I know of, where somebody with Autism has actually got himself a life, rather than taking drugs and getting into fights when those NTs are also able enough to go out and find themselves jobs.

And I wasn't dissing people who are on benifits. I'm on job-seekers benifits myself, and I get a little bit of DLA too, but I'm using that money to get into employment. I may be taking my time more with this job hunting, due to my anxieties about various things, but that is not intentional. People who struggle unintentionally due to a disability are far more entitled to claim money for various personal reasons, more so than people who just don't want to work so they can just intentionally not do anything with their life except scrounge about on the dole all their life, not trying out anything, even though they are emotionally able.

It's all autism imo... ass burgers is mild but it can get pretty severe. That's my opinion.

What you're describing as fact vs. opinion sounds to me like the intuitive/sensing dichotomy on the Myers-Briggs test. Let me see if I understand. You're saying you and the NTs you know tend to see things in terms of "this is how things are" and the Aspies you know see things in terms of "this is the reason for why this is how things are?" Like, are you saying that an NT might notice that adding fish to an aquarium slowly makes things work out better, but an Aspie would know that fish are sensitive to changes in pH and temperature and that allowing those things to happen slowly makes fish less stressed, and stress makes them more vulnerable to disease? Is that what you're saying? If so, that's an interesting observation.

What is "the strop?"

Personally, I don't view autism as a collection of traits or anything. Like, if people were computers, some people seem to define autism as not having certain programs installed, or having certain programs installed, but I define it more in terms of a different operating system. Everything is different, but at the same time, it's not all that different. Like, you can run Scrivener on a Mac, but Liquid Story Binder is the same thing for Windows (or is it the other way around?) And they're different programs, but basically they do the same thing, so there's not really much point to stressing how different they are when they do the same stuff. But not every Mac owner has Scrivener anyway, because you choose which programs you want, mostly... that's how I see it. So you don't like parsnips, but it's not worth it to get into the details of the different way that came about from how an NT's dislike of them would come about because it works the same way or close enough.

What you've said makes perfect sense, though. (Buses and weather? I'd never have guessed. Neat. If you ever want to tell me anything about those, oddly enough, they sound interesting.)

Thank you for the clarification.

Well, when I was a child (between about 7 and 13), I was always finding myself storming off on my own when my cousins came over to play (who were around the same age as me). I liked them coming, but when they got there I don't think I could emotionally cope with too many other children at my house. I was always arguing with my closest cousin over nothing, and I was always hiding in my parents' bedroom in some sort of strop. I really wish I hadn't wasted most of my childhood stropping away from my cousins at week-ends, instead of just playing with them and making the most of my childhood days.

I wasn't like this at school, though. I used to play with my closest cousin in the playground, and we often let other children from our class play too. Usually I was ''the bossy one'' when we played games. I would plan the game out and give out the rules - I was pretty good. I never felt different at school. Well, I never felt different at home either, I just made myself look different by alienating myself.