so confused about AS diagnosis

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It seems like all the reference info I've found about diagnosis is very rigid, treating the AS diagnosed like they must be very entrenched in repeated behaviors like physical gestures and superfluous memorization of details within narrow types of interests.. that AS individual is almost always wholly confused by facial expression or figurative language. That their speech must be monotone or arhythmic, non-expressive.

Is the diagnosis typically this rigid for the type of impacts on the person?

I am really looking for feedback from anyone who has gotten AS diagnosed as an adult and what types of impacts you had in both childhood and pre-diagnosis life.

I had a really hard time too when I was first diagnosed. Some books that I bought made me feel really bad about myself. Read Temple Grandin's books....they are what really helped me. But it does take some time to sort things out, Im still sorting. At first I sort of went through a grief type of process. I mean at first I was relieved, like, ah aha, this is why. Then everything kind of hit me and it was hard to take. My best advice is just educate yourself....Id get some counseling if that is available to you, from someone who knows about Autism and Asperger's in adults....read Temples books....Tony Attwood is also really good. Ive also learned a lot just from being here...communing with your own kind is very helpful!

I was dx'd as a child, but let me say that no, that's not true. If you look at it, you'll probably find that you do it more than you think, but no one fits stereotypes, regardless of how accurate they might be in general. Like, I never cared about lining up toys (that sounds so OCD), I just played with them.

So if you've gotten dx'd and are now worried, just remember you're the same person you were before your dx.

Sorry if this is irrelevant. I'm guessing you got dx'd, read up on it and found some stuff that wasn't true of you. If that's incorrect-- if, for instance, you're doing research in order to write a paper-- then disregard this.

More and more, I come to realize that I have no clear idea how I appear to others. So I really don't know how rigid, how obsessed, how clueless I really am. All I have to go by is how people react to me and now that I'm an adult, they aren't so honest as they were when I was a child. Mostly people just avoid me or ignore me now but as a child they tormented me. Not just the other children, but adults as well because the rules are different for adults when they're dealing with a child than when they're dealing with each other.

I don't think my speech is monotone but I have been told I talk "funny." I've also had a bad tendency all my life to be told that I was rude and when I say I hadn't meant to be rude I am told that what I said would have been innocent but I said it in a rude tone of voice. I have to really focus on my voice when I speak to keep it from being too loud or in the wrong tone of voice. It takes all my focus to keep my voice "nice" and then I don't have focus left over to control other things that I need all my focus to keep "nice" like my facial expression or the things I am saying. After years of seeing what upsets people and working hard to keep all those "systems" in control, I have come to the conclusion that other people have a sort of autopilot that keeps everything in line automatically but I have to think about everything intentionally and it just takes more processing power than my brain has (and it's a fairly intelligent brain.)

I am not almost always confused by facial expression or figurative language but a lot of that is because I have spent four decades learning things. I know what "over the moon" means. I know what "died of embarassment" means. Because I've heard most of the common figurative terms now, I don't get confused by figurative language because I've learned it. However poetry still throws me for a loop (to use a figurative phrase!) because the authors are working not to use phrases that are common and often used so they come up with new figurative language that confuses me. For example, for years I loved T.S. Eliot's poem about Prufrock because I thought it was beautiful and magical. Then someone explained to me that it's really about an old man who feels like his life is over and there is no more joy left for him. Once it was explained to me, I could see it and I don't like the poem anymore now that I know what it means because it's just sad and gloomy, not magical anymore. I do remember being upset by figurative language as a child when I was just learning it. Like I got sent to the principal's office and a kid said, "she's going to chew you out" and I was terrified that the principal was going to bite me!

Facial expressions, too, I've learned. Although sometimes I think someone's happy when really they're about to cry because some people's face makes a big smile right before they cry. My face apparently settles into an expression that others read as anger/sorrow if I'm just relaxed and not focusing energy on making a smile or otherwise making a face that other people will find pleasant. My natural default face makes people stop me and ask me what's wrong. So many times I have been enjoying a beautiful sunset while I briskly walk for exercise and been stopped by a stranger who wants to know what's wrong. I guess fast walking and my default facial expression look angry or troubled. I suspect a lot of the times I have been told I was rude when I didn't mean to be rude were not just voice modulation but not paying enough attention to how my face was sitting. Also, I've been told I was rude when someone surprises me with a statement that I'm not sure how to respond to and I'm struggling to figure out what to do and say. I guess if I was supposed to be happy and say thank you but instead I was confused and said, "uhhh..." it was an insult to the person who said something nice to me. It's probably much more complex than that, though. I often suspect that things are more complex than I'm able to see . . . but how can I know, since I can't see it?

Superfluous memorization of details within narrow types of interests. I can see how people might say that about me. I have an excellent memory -- for some things. If I'm interested in a topic, I can rattle off information about it for an hour without even trying. That's part of why I decided to try to become a professor. One thing professors do is stand up and talk for an hour about interesting stuff. I think I can do that. I will probably come across a little bit like Ducky from the show NCIS, with lots of obscure info and strange asides, but I figure as long as I get the important information that's going to be on the test in there somewhere, it will be okay. Especially if I give students study sheets with all the important topics they will need to know. And assign good readings. But, yeah, I "collect up" a lot of information about things I'm interested in and sometimes it's something academic but sometimes it's something like my favorite brand of shoes. Someone stopped me and asked me about my shoes and it's a good thing they really wanted to know details because I went on for at least twenty minutes about my shoes. Then I apologized because I realized I'd gone on for twenty minutes about my shoes but fortunately the person said it was okay and then asked more questions about the shoes so I guess they really did want to know.

I was mercilessly bullied as a child. It started with words but as my peer group got older it turned to blows and dangerous pranks. Once some classmates or neighborhood children (not sure which) put a live poisonous snake in my family mailbox. I always checked the mail when I came home from school and there was a snake in there and it struck out but missed me and fell out on the street and it was a water moccasin which is a very poisonous snake that lives in the rivers back east where I grew up. I lived a couple of blocks from a tributary to the Ohio River so I'm guessing someone went down there and caught it and someone said, "wouldn't it be funny to put it in her mailbox?" Or maybe they thought of the mailbox first and then went looking for a snake. I'll never know.

I've had rocks and bottles thrown at my head. A girl threw bleach on my shirt in a science class. Another time a girl hit me in the head with a board that we were supposed to be rolling marbles down to study laws of physics. The bullying even extended to my baby sister (ten years younger than me) when someone wrote my family phone number on the wall of an adult bookstore with my sister's name (she was four years old at the time.) Classmates would taunt me with strange, obscure, often sexual things and then publish them in the school newspaper in such a way that I would recognize the taunt but none of the adults would.

Adults bullied me as well. My fourth grade teacher made me sit in a large cardboard box and told the whole class she had to put me there because it made her sick to look at me. That was the most obvious. There were other teachers who greatly upset me and I only realized they were bullying me when I'd overhear my parents talking about the situation. And my parents were at the end of their rope and spent a lot of time shouting at me but I can't remember most of what they said because the shouting would send me into a sensory overload where I'd get tunnel vision and then black out and just sit there terrified that I was going to stay that way -- blind and deaf and paralyzed -- for the rest of my life.

There has been less bullying since leaving school, but it still happens from time to time. Relationships with men are very depressing for me because men push me around and manipulate me, often abusing me in ways I'm not able to recognize until years after the relationship ends. I had a lot of mixed feelings about my diagnosis -- though I've had nine years to come to terms with it and I accept it much better now than I used to. But it was also a big "aha" moment because for the first time something explained everything with no missing pieces. And as I've worked with coming to acceptance of it over the years, more and more I realize how hard I was trying all those years to "get it all right" and how I wasn't the worst person in the world but just don't see a lot of stuff that other people take for granted.

So now I have to be extra careful about who I let too far into my life because I frequently can't see when people are playing me or using me. It either has to be pointed out to me by someone else or I get more and more upset but can't figure out why and then after I'm out of the situation and have lots of time to think it through I start to understand what was happening. I like to think that I'm tough and can take care of myself but the truth appears to be that I'm very vulnerable and even with all that I've learned over the years about what to watch out for I'm still easily victimized by others.

I don't know if I answered your questions or not. I tried to and I hope that I at least answered some of them a little bit.

The DSM diagnostic criteria does take into consideration adaptive skills. Subsequently, many people like myself who have advanced right brained / artistic ability often fall way off the autistic radar.

I could never relate to Temple Grandin even though I am a logical and visual thinker, simply because I was brought up having to conceal my difference. However, the life of Donna Williams bares so much resemblance to my own, for like myself, she was traumatised into highly complex and creative adaptations and distortions of her personality in order to survive.

In the next 10 years or so I believe we will see an explosion of Right brained HFA's that will contribute to ending the geeky, monotone, and emotionally cold stereotype that the medical world still holds towards us.

I was lucky when I got Dx'd, as my psychologist had HFA too, and knew all the tricks of highly advance adaptive skills born out of adversity and refined through right brained dominant thinking ability.

How can I know if I'm right brain dominant or left brain dominant?

My strongest skill is writing. I love math but I'm far from a math genius and I dropped out of a math degree when I hit Discrete Functions because I couldn't handle such abstract math. I'm an artist (of sorts), working mainly in fibers and cloth. I'm an amateur musician and play several instruments (but can't keep in tune with fretless instruments like voice, fretless bass, etc.) I love to spend hours solving math and logic puzzles and I love to read, mainly non-fiction but sometimes a little fiction. I love blending colors and textures but what I love most about knitting, macrame, and weaving is using math to shape a project before I start executing it.

I see left brain and right brain in my interests and strengths. How can I tell which I am?

It actually does.

If you read on in the book, it says individuals may learn, via good rote memory through trial and error, scripts to use in social settings.

That's about as adaptive as you can get in regards to the social aspect.

OP: it's pretty much that, plus more.

Aspies can be extremely creative in many disciplines. My husband sent me this great essay on growing up with undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and music critic Tim Page and I found it to be very inspiring. It's probably already been linked before on this forum, but here it is again:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007 ... _fact_page

Hi Sparrow you might find this of interest

donnawilliams.net/leftandrightbrain.0.html

I know so many autie artists, poets, musicians and some philosophers who have been incorrectly dx'd as having exclusively psychological disorders........their difference was masked by their non- stereotypical autistic features. Backed up by a diagnostic criteria that is well past it's sell by date.

If was to write another book, it would be called, "You Can't be autistic because" In the last 3 years since my Dx I have got to know and read about, dancers, professional athletes, counsellors, psychotherapists, bodywork therapists, policemen and women, all in-directly playing their part in educating us all that the autistic spectrum is as wide as it is deep.

Thank you. That was very interesting reading what Donna Williams wrote and then taking the quiz myself. My result was:

You responded as a right brained person to 8 questions, and you responded as a left brained person to 10questions. According to the Hemispheric Dominance test, you use your left brain the most.

That's pretty evenly split but more left brained, which makes sense since writing and language in general is my strongest life skill. Now that I think about it, I'm surprised I didn't come out more left-brained because my experiences with asperger's are far closer to the typical male experiences than the typical female experiences and ever since I first started talking to people online, back in the mid-eighties, people have assumed that I am male any time that I use a name that doesn't specifically correspond to a gender (for years I went by "Firefall Gypsy") and don't openly reveal my gender.

All very interesting stuff. Thanks!

I was only formally diagnosed this month, and I forestalled letting our doctor make the diagnosis for a couple of years. It was a matter of deciding whether or not I was willing to apply a label to my ways & means, or not. I don't have medical insurance, so I had the freedom to choose and dictate the time line and all.

I think it's a realization, and a relief for me. But there's a contradictory emotion here too. On one hand, it feels great to let myself have slack for some of the mannerisms that I used to try to force myself to change or fix. On the other hand, I have a fear of ever "giving up" on anything, and I have to work hard to keep a very strict barrier in place between the basket of AS symptoms that I will not be able to fix, and the other basket of things that I must continue to work on to improve. I pride myself in self-discipline, and in doing any job the best I can, and leaving no detail forgotten. Whether it be my own physical fitness, or any job I'm doing. I want it done right, and done completely. It's hard to accept that maybe some of the things I've wanted (and tried hard) to change over the past 30 or 40 years, cannot be fixed. But maybe by letting those lay aside, I can put more effort into those other things that I can indeed improve and fix.

I don't know, I guess it's all still a little new and a little confusing.

Charles

i don't think that's accurate. i think AS is primarily defined by your consciousness being more inside your head and less out there in the world.

Thanks for all the thoughtful replies!

To clarify, I've become confused while researching- as it appears that the diagnosis descriptions given must then be only manifestations of the actual traits that they observed in children. I have found very little on adult diagnosis, but it does seem so much more correct to abstract the traits as much as possible and see how they could manifest for either left or right brain dominance. I noted that on a wikipedia entry regarding diagnosis, it mentioned there has been disagreement with the way DSM has defined the diagnosis requirements.

I found one individual's webpage with the most useful tools so far, with quotient test questionnaires for several areas, compiled from various resources.
The page is at http://homepage.mac.com/lpetrich/Asperger/Index.html

Taking each of the assessments landed me well in the range that was outside neurotypical male range and into potential AS range. But, I could not reconcile how I feel with the rigid diagnosis information provided on a lot of the other resources I've come across. They seemed to portray the AS diagnosed individual as almost "single threaded", mind-wise. It seems so much more accurate to allow for evolution of the impact of the traits with the maturation of the mind.

I am trying to get scheduled for an evaluation so I can have help identifying strategies to improve and grow socially and emotionally. I don't want to be cured. I feel unique as I always have, yet empowered by the idea that I might identify with this vast community going through the same thing as I've been.

Thank you for this........very interesting

Your Empathy Quotient (EQ) is 23 out of 74

Your Autism Quotient (AQ) is 33 out of 50

Your Systematizing Quotient (SQ) is 26 out of 78

Yes, very interesting stuff. I'd seen some of it before but some of it was totally new to me.

Your Autism Quotient (AQ) is 46 out of 50
Your Empathy Quotient (EQ) is 14 out of 80
Your Friendship and Relationship Quotient (FQ) is 17 out of 135
Your Systematizing Quotient (SQ) is 65 out of 80

I would love to see an explosion of Right brained HFA's. It could be the dawn of a new cultural movement.