Hello from a mental health worker with Asperger's...my intro

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Bartolome
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14 Oct 2012, 10:58 am

Here goes, I guess.

I am a 27 year old adult living with Asperger's as well as clinical depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (from years of bullying as well as over 2 years of emotional manipulation involved in my last relationship with a woman). My apparent social ease might offset the appearance of my insecurities: I was the recipient, at a young age, of some very excellent cognitive behavioral therapy, which has helped me greatly, but can only take me so far. I think, in my professional and personal life, I am reaching those limits.

I work as an Intensive Case Manager for a major healthcare network, coordinating services and resources for clients who are primarily on the Spectrum (I'm an ASD specialist, one of few ICMs who works almost exclusively with that population). This means that at work, I face my own demons, constantly. I work with kids to build the supports that they need, that I wish I had when I was their age, but back then, nobody was talking about Asperger's. I never even heard of it until I was a teenager.

I want to also say that I'm not particularly open about my Asperger's. It's a guarded subject and I have only discussed it with very few people at my office, and only when it was relevant to a client's treatment for them to hear from an adult who had many of the same experiences growing up. But that is a fine line, and my anxiety rides that line like a roller coaster, scaling peaks and racing through valleys.

I've been going through a difficult time recently; a friend of mine, whose friendship I valued very much, recently told me that he had no interest in being friends anymore because we were no longer "compatible." This is a man who used to call me "brother." The way he broke things off with me was so cold and clinical, like he hadn't a single regret. On top of this, I am dealing with a very difficult case that makes a lot of ghosts from my past resurface. All my cases are difficult, but this kid... I see him struggling with the same things I struggled with, and I see him headed in the same direction: isolation, depression, attempted suicide, hospitalization. His intelligence isolates him, as my intelligence isolated (and continues to isolate) me. I can't help it. I've overcome so much, but I still intimidate people. I don't have children, but I look after this kid like he was my own. His Mom and Dad's parenting skills are notably deficient; Dad does a lot of drugs in the basement; Mom plays Farmville all day and ignored him when she's not constantly criticizing him or putting him down, or trying to sabotage him, make him appear like a little devil, like there's always something wrong with him. All this is because the boy's Asperger's Diagnosis is her meat ticket, and her only "social life" is the services offered her kids, which are covered by their subsidized welfare. They're her meal ticket. It's disgusting. And the fact is, as similar as this kid is to the kid that I used to be, I had a strong support system at home. He doesn't ever leave the house unless I take him somewhere (he's been to the waterfront 2 miles from his house exactly three times and didn't even know what an escalator was until a few months ago... and this kid is considered academically gifted! He is being stunted, emotionally abused, and smothered. It's hard for me to watch because of the negative emotions it stirs within me.

The gift he has for numbers, I had for words. My peers didn't understand me. My thinking was so far beyond theirs; I was fascinated by science and philosophy as well as literature from a young age, by hypotheses and theories and critical analysis. But my genius wasn't recognized. I even had to repeat kindergarten because the school was considered that I wasn't emotionally ready for first grade; this, and the fact that despite my peers now being on average nearly a younger than me, and yet I was still smaller than most of them, always getting picked last for teams, resulted in a number of crippling personal insecurities for me very early in life. I HATED gym class. It was humiliating, degrading, invasive. School knew I was gifted, but the longest time wouldn't let me participate in the gifted program because of my "emotional problems" (PTSD and at that time undiagnosed Asperger's; I had a lot of outbursts, mostly triggered by other kids, who were bastards to me, but also by my own shame and rage). Finally, in 8th grade, when they let me in, it was too little, too late. So much regret. So much anger. So much shame.

I left first grade reading on a 4th grade level. I read "1984" and "Odd John" when I was twelve. I loved science fiction, especially Star Trek, and I couldn't understand why the other kids had to make fun of me for this. Why couldn't they just leave me alone?

I know the answer, and it's the same thing I told that kid: other kids sense the vulnerabilities of people like you and me, and they try to provoke us because they know how we'll react, and how our reactions would get us, not them, in trouble. Story of my life. I don't care to see it repeated. But I can't walk away. I could never forgive myself if I did that.

In my work as a behaviorist, people have become very transparent to me. It's like I can only see their flaws now. I've become very good, practiced, at reading people in that professional context: I can predict behavior, preemptively avert crises or at least prepare for them, knowing they're coming. I think once you understand a person's self perception, that person is basically transparent. I am a big believer in complexity, in messiness, in chaos, despite my ordered, rational, logical, skeptical approach to the world.

I see a psychiatrist who is also a trained therapist and I intend to talk to him soon about maybe changing my meds, if I've developed a tolerance or something like that (I was technically a pre-med major, through the Human Biology Track of the Anthropology department at my college, so I'm very knowledge about psychiatric practices, and I have a good collaborative relationship with my doctor). My problem is that I can't turn off my brain. No matter what I do. It's the worst kind of workaholism. When I was working on my novel (I am a writer, trying to get published), it wasn't so bad, but when I finished the novel, I guess the floodgates opened.

Then my relationship with the person I mentioned above soured. I tried to reach out, to put our friendship back on the straight rails, but my efforts were at first ignored and finally rejected outright. I accused him of having only "allies, not friends" (we met through our mutual participation in an intellectual and activist-oriented philosophical movement. This guy was my biggest cheerleader. He saw me through thick and thin, guided me through my last, disastrous relationship with a woman who was every bit a sociopath and habitual liar, and then... well, intellectually our paths diverged. I tried to maintain our friendship. I really tried. And when he told me he no longer wanted to be my friend, I was angry and told him to delete my account on the blog that he started. I regret that, and tried to appeal to him to restore it, but that didn't work. So I joined this community to try to find my voice again.

I should say, I'm generally distrustful of social networking. I don't consider most of it "social" (considering that I am a behaviorist, a specialist in ASDs, with an ASD diagnosis myself, I think calling social networking "social" is like calling video games "exercise.") I usually avoid forums (except TVTropes) like the plague. But today, out of anger and loneliness, and wondering who would miss me if I just "disappeared," I deactivated my facebook account. I guess I wanted to see if people would really miss me. I also think I was using facebook as a crutch for validation, and there's all kind of problems inherent to that scenario.

I am going through so much emotionally right now, and I have always suffered from a hyper-awareness, a devastating self-consciousness. I don't like to use the phrase "overactive mind," but right now, I wish I could shut my mind off. Meds don't work. Alcohol doesn't work. Nothing seems to work. I'm losing interest in things that I once enjoyed; I feel I'm becoming more distant from the rest of humanity, like I'm becoming something inhuman. I mean that metaphorically, of course. I don't believe in the supernatural.

I have no interest in religion, spiritualist, mysticism, or any "capital M" Meaning or "capital T" Truth. I approach the world as a scientist despite my emotional damage. I don't trust people very readily either, largely because of my last (extremely damaging) relationship. I'm terrified of even asking a woman out for coffee, totally paralyzed. I am a workaholic. I love my job, but I need something else other than stressing and worrying about 30 vulnerable kids to redirect my passions and occupy my time constructively.

Am I that bad of a workaholic that I am addicted to the urban soap opera that is my professional life? That professional mask serves me well, puts me at ease, but I have trouble taking it off at home. I feel compelled, even at social gatherings, to talk about work. Just another validation, really. I mean, I'm sick of being patted on the back and being told that I "took such adversity as life offered me and met the challenge, turning that adversity into an advantage in my work with the (rest of the) ASD population. This should not be. I should not look forward all weekend to dealing with 30 low income families of Autistic children and their myriads of problems on Monday.

I am not a religious person. I have no interest in God or any other supernatural crutches. The kind of validation I am looking for is elusive; I don't think there are many people with my experience, and frankly, with my objectivity and clinical detachment. But even I can't detach from my emotions, and I go into these schools every day and face the reservoir of shame and regret and anger within myself that threatens, every day, to send me back to an inpatient unit. Those of you living with Asperger's know that Anxiety is very often our worst enemy; I'm looking for a social forum to dispel that anxiety. I don't know if I'll find it here, but I suppose I have got to try.

I also have got to try to rise above the need for validation. Like I said, I'm sick of being patted on the back, and being praised. I want someone to call me out for my selfishness, to tell me that my obsessive attitude toward my work with these kids is nothing more than selfish wish-fulfillment, deeply intertwined with that reservoir of negative emotions within my mind. I guess I'm looking for anti-validation. For criticism. The same kind of criticism I have offered others (and I am a harsh critic); it's a shame that people take things personally when they invest in them emotionally).

I don't know. So I'm reaching to the community, for the first time in a long time, without that professional mask I love so much. I'm looking for intelligent people who can understand my experiences, which frankly have been endlessly traumatic since my earliest memories (I have a very long, detailed and accurate memory). All this trauma has made me, today, a very dark person. I feel like a storm cloud follows me every where I go, and the only thing that wards it away is my professional mask, a mask I can't hide behind forever.

I don't want to be an emotional cripple for the rest of my life. But my emotions have always been my enemy, despite my having learned to put them on hold at work. I am trying to hold on to my humanity without bitterness, or cynicism, or jadedness, but these things are creeping in regardless.



Last edited by Bartolome on 14 Oct 2012, 12:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Bartolome
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14 Oct 2012, 12:21 pm

I really hope I can get something out of joining this community. Like I said in my intro, I'm skeptical of the internet, of social networking, and of web forums. I hope I can make some friends here and find supports.



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14 Oct 2012, 2:17 pm

Welcome to Wrong Planet!


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Bartolome
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14 Oct 2012, 3:13 pm

Thanks! It's not what I expected. Much more mature. There's my suspicion of the internet again. But I think I'll enjoy this place. And hopefully get something out of it.



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15 Oct 2012, 7:14 am

Welcome


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15 Oct 2012, 7:33 am

Welcome!

You seem like a very nice fellow!



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16 Oct 2012, 10:31 am

Welcome to Wrong Planet Bartolome!
I commend you for opening up to honest opinions and perhaps we can use each other as sounding boards that way? I could use some improvement myself, and I deeply respect people who have the level of commitment to themselves to make themselves vulnerable to honest open opinions from others. That can be emotionally rough ground to tread, however. Been there, lol, done that.

I can relate a little bit to your work, although it's been awhile since I've worked in healthcare. The detachment that comes with AS can be handy but I found personally it was never complete, but emotionally complex in a different way. Like I could treat 6 kids in a car accident with detachment, but was too angry to treat the drunk who hit them (but had to say so...nobody could see it at first). And normally I would be really detached about most things but that was a moment where coworkers went "Oh, so she IS human after all!", and relaxed around me a little bit, and were less self conscious about being emotional working with me (where they were embarrassed about it before). The tough cases can certainly be haunting. I had a Psych person I took care of on the side that ended up causing me to make more than 1 personal major life change choice. It is easy to get too wrapped up in one's job when you care about people, but relate to them in a different way like we do. It becomes like a special interest, maybe? One that is not always good for you? However it can be wonderful when/if you ever find good people. So far this seems like a good group. :)
I look forward to seeing you around WP, and getting to know you better.



Bartolome
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16 Oct 2012, 7:35 pm

Buttercup, and all others who have welcomed me-

Thank you. I was very depressed when I created this account, and part of my rationale for seeking a community here was my extreme hatred of facebook and things like it.

I am doing better now. I made an appointment on thursday with my doctor so he and I can try and make some adjustments to my meds, because I really can't live well with all the anxiety I build up naturally. It's like a reservoir with a dam that periodically bursts... and when it bursts, I have to be on guard because that's when I am vulnerable. I have worked so hard for what I have- a home, a car, a job I care about- and anything that threatens that, or which I perceive as threatening, puts me on edge when I get like that. I lose all my coping skills and spend the whole day in bed, crying and sometimes injuring myself by banging my head on walls. Fortunately, last weekend, it didn't get that far. I recognized the depression for the chemical state that it was, and made a doctor's appointment as soon as I could. Which is a lot better than I fared a couple months ago the last time I went through a major depressive episode, and was at the brink of committing myself for several days.

This time, I called up all my old friends to talk; they were all there for me, every single one of them... even my oldest friend in the world, who is doing the Peace Corps Extension program in Guyana.



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18 Oct 2012, 2:17 am

Hi Bartolome. I just spotted this thread tonight. I'm also pretty new around here. Your introduction was fascinating, especially your insight about how people have became transparent to you by understanding their self-perception. I appreciate what you revealed about yourself, your current circumstances and emotional state. I'm c. 30 years older than you, and have had a history of dysthymic depression, probably with PTSD of some sort from my family background (bipolar suicidal narcissistic mom, etc.), and in the last couple of years also got diagnoses of moderate ADD & mild Asperger's syndrome. Quite a little co-morbitiy stew. ;-)

I'm not in the mental health field, but have been on the other side for decades, frantically trying all sorts of therapies ranging from barely useful to totally pseudo-scientific& mystical to pretty darned decent in recent years in attempting to have a life where I wasn't doubling over from depression, anxiety, an overwhelming sense of inconsolable grief and loneliness. FWIW, whatever I've done (including taking meds for the last 17 years) seems to have been at least partially successful at shriveling and boxing those ghosts-- I wouldn't call myself emotionally crippled any more, just limping. But you're 27-- your quest might be an infuriatingly long-term project. I think you have an advantage in that you have a developed scientific, rational, non-religious view of things. It can keep you sane in the midst of the emotional tumult you've described, and keep you from pursuing too many thngs you'll later regret. I was greatly helped by by my exposure to literature about skepticism, critical thinking, science, reason and atheism over the years; I was much better able to judge what kinds of therapy and personal development might be genuinely helpful to me, rather than just getting lured from one bag of disappointment to another.

I hope to see you again here. :-)


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18 Oct 2012, 6:23 am

Hi and welcome to WP. Sounds like you are doing some real good out there! :)


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Bartolome
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18 Oct 2012, 4:45 pm

I am. It doesn't seem to take away my own pain. I am scared of becoming emotionally compromised.



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18 Oct 2012, 9:57 pm

Welkome to WP

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