Autism & Selfishness

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The term autism first was used by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908. He used it to describe a schizophrenic patient who had withdrawn into his own world. The Greek word ''autós'' meant self and the word “autism” was used by Bleuler to mean morbid self-admiration and withdrawal within self.

Autism could therefore be translated as “Selfism”. NTs without any knowledge of the spectrum confuse “Selfism” with selfishness. Has anyone out there been accused of selfishness, as an adult and/or a child, by a relative, friend, co-worker and/or acquaintance? I know I have been so accused throughout my whole life, and while in some cases it was without doubt genuine selfishness, in the vast majority of cases it was entirely “Selfism”. But the NTs in my world did not have any knowledge of ASD, and so they pigeon-holed my behaviour into the compartment where they (no doubt honestly) thought that it fit. But the confusion of NTs between the two very different terms caused me untold suffering as a child and as an adult, and that confusion is very damaging, I think especially to a child with ASD.

I have certainly been accused of selfishness throughout my life. Until it was suggested that I might be autistic (and later confirmed), I found those comments very hurtful. Also very damaging - in the absence of any other explanation, I took the comments at face value, and internalised them in the form of guilt and shame. This ultimately lead to depression and the worsening of my ability to cope with the non-autistic world.

What I haven't worked out yet, is the best way to try and educate the people who I love to see my behaviour for what it actually is - that the inattention and apparent lack of compassion is not because I don't care, but simply because I cannot resist my mind being elsewhere, or I have simply missed or misinterpreted their social cues. Despite my best attempts at explanation, and pointing people at the many resources they can use to learn about autism, I'm beginning to doubt that many non-autistic people are really capable of understanding this - but still hold out hope that I'm wrong about that!

I do feel selfish a lot of the time. I get frustrated easily and kind of demand my own way sometimes. I will help others and be nice, but really I may be complaining about it in my head throughout. And I know there are problems in the world, but I'm just so inert and too focused on my own life and don't do anything about them.

I have often been told by my family that I lacked the ability to care about other people.

Little do they know that I am able to feel the pain of others acutely. But when other people took advantage of me in the past, the message I got was that I was a horrible person because I did not have nearly enough empathy for the people who were taking advantage of me.

I have had people tell me that I am incapable of caring about what other abuse victims lived through, because of my Asperger diagnosis and my past as an alcoholic.

People have their prejudices. People love to pigeonhole the ones that surround them. Shades of grey confuse everybody without exception. And people are only willing to have an open mind when it comes to other people who share their personal and cultural mores.

We can't take any of this personally.

That's an interesting comparison you make. It's a generalisation of course, but I think that it is true that people do often deal with physical illness and disability in a different way to people with a different psychology. I can think of several people in my life who seem to believe that developmental disorders and mental ill health simply do not exists, and are nothing that cannot be solved by simply "pulling our socks up" and getting on with life.

Strangely though, I find that more educated people can be even worse to deal with - the ones that have seen Rain Man and a couple of Temple Grandin documentaries, and think that they already know it all. A person with no view on the subject is an empty vessel with room for some new facts, but with someone who considers themselves well versed already, you have to deal with intellectual inertia and confirmation bias as well (I know whereof I speak, as I was probably one of those people myself until a year or so before my diagnosis!)

To come back to the original subject, I think there's another kind of accusation of selfishness that is specific to people who are late diagnosed. The people around us who have seen us apparently "coping" for so many years, find our newly discovered autism to be a selfish claim in and of itself. As far as they could see, we coped fine so far, so how come were talking about accommodations for our disability now all of a sudden? How selfish of us! Can't we just carry on coping like we did before? I have encountered this even from people who are well aware of my previous history of mental health and relationship problems - folks I have come to think of as open minded and sympathetic over the course many years.

They don't realise that actually our previous "passing as normal" was an extremely exhausting act which, at least in part, was performed to avoid the people around us from being affected so much by our weird traits - an act which, ironically, benefited them a lot more than it did us!