How much do you think your ASD affects your personaltiy?

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Do you find that you have a very different personality when you are on medication? I feel almost NT on meds, I am MUCH less obsessive and have no rituals, really. This is why I don't agree with my Myers Briggs Typology. I think if I were truly an INTP then I would test as an INTP when I am on SSRIs or stimulants, also, but I already know that I would test as ISTP, which is what I feel I am closer to. It's the tendency to withdraw from the real world and obsessive attention to detail that make me an INTP.

Of course I know thata not being medicated at all IS my natural state and personality, by default.. I just feel like I have something else underlying the ASD traits that's closer to who I truly am, and when those specific behaviors are changed I'm able to act more like how I feel on the inside.

Granted, I don't take meds anymore. I'm going to try as hard as i can to find a balance that I can live with without them.

I respect your feelings and choices, but they don't really fit with my own understandings...which I hope sounds OK. I think a lot about how people's minds work and that kind of thing and have this kind of working model of "how it is" and what you're saying isn't fitting into it.

I take a stimilant for ADHD, and I feel a lot more like myself on it than not on it, so I'm sure that colors my opinions on things. It doesn't stop me from thinking on multiple levels at once, but it puts me more in control of how I'm doing that, which I like very much. My eldest son has taken just about every kind of psychotropic med there is at one time or another for a wide variety of issues and has had some nasty experiences as we've tried to find the ones that helped him without making him not himself. Without his meds he could not live safely in our home (he gets delusional and does dangerous stuff without realizing it), and in fact even with them he is probably heading for some in patient time. I hope it's short term.

I think of personality more as one's inner drives and preferences. We might say someone is friendly, but what that means to me is person is comfortable being more expressive, likes people, and has an inner drive to connect to people or something along those lines. That inner drive is the real basis for their friendliness. If that same person has anxiety issues that makes them uncomfortably fearful seek those connections they may be very unhappy over their lack of relationships. For that person taking, say Prozac (if that's the one that works for them), can be really helpful because it helps them fulfill the need of their own personality. That doesn't mean that every person who has a certain level of anxiety is helped by meds, it really depends on their own drives and desires.

Another person with the same level of anxiety might really like what that anxiety does for them. It may create a nervous tension out of which they are able to be great actors, or do some other thing that fulfills them.

Does that make sense? In my way of looking at things, the "symptoms" that the meds were treating are things that are for you not a problem. Maybe, just making something up as a random example, you really like structure and safety. For you the rituals and other restricted behavior is just super cozy. That same behavior could be a problem for someone else with a different personality, but for you, they are like Linus's blanket.

I'd say that the meds don't change your personality a bit, but they change some of your behaviors in a way that doesn't suit your personality so you are better off without them.

Any of this sound OK?

it's interesting question. what is "quirk" and what is "personality trait?" and how to know which is which? (uh oh. this might be one my mind for the rest of the day. )

I think being autistic affects me personally in almost every way.

I think that my morals are strong, because I have my little set of rules, due to my AS/HFA. So I guess that my personality has been shaped by the strong morals, influenced by my autism.

Not at all.

Well, it stops my personality from doing things it wants to do, but apart from that, nope.

However, it stopped others from influencing my personality growing up, so I'm as "real" as I can be, i.e., no outside influence.

A LOT when it comes to expressing myself.

Does anyone's personality go in the opposite direction of their AS tendencies?

I'm a Myers-Briggs F, though only weakly (INFP), and I wonder if this is one of the main reasons I'm not quite on the spectrum. I have a lot of AS traits, including some social ones, and I suspect I could've tested as on the spectrum when I was younger. However, as my Myers-Briggs type reflects, I do naturally think in terms of emotions and motivations, and have a deep and complex emotional life (so descriptions of AS as having an emotional range of "yellow" "red" "blue" rather than "indigo" "scarlet" "crimson" "maroon" don't resonate with me). I feel like I have the thought process of an aspie and the emotional life of an NT, and sometimes they pull me in different directions. Perhaps if I were a "T," this thought process would be stronger and I'd be diagnosed with AS instead.

More in the spirit of the original question, I wonder whether I test as a P because of ADD, or because of my actual personality.

I think all of it because the negetive things that happened to me were related to the AS. My parents suspect I have RAD as a result of my biological mother not knowing how to care for me and being a foster child for my first few months of life. Combine the lack of empathy resulted from the AS with an attactment disorder and you'd probably have a problem. My mum says is was hard to punish me because nothing mattered and I did not care. I also remeber enving kids with terminal illnesses and wishing I was dead as young as three. I think it was a combonation of how Make A Wish gave into the kid's every whim and being told how wonderful Heaven was. Plus I also sorta envisoned death as perpetual oblivion which seemed way better than my life. I didn't know about the concept of sucide or that it was physicaly possible to kill ones self but if I did know I probably would have attempted it at three as well. I was a morbid child. I almost blew out my brains just a few months ago so the morbidness isn't complety eradicated yet.

Autism is part of your personality.

I am who I am and it seems like a medication or chemical trying to change that would make me "not" me--my boss has said many times to not take something personally and I have said that if someone attacks my personality I do take it personally-I can take it no other way.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't introversion about being energized by time alone and drained by too much time socializing, and extraversion the reverse? So, one can be an outgoing, sociable introvert, or an extravert who likes reading and doing things alone. Of course if you're energized by socializing you'll tend to socialize more and be more outgoing, and if you start feeling tired after a short time and have to go home and recharge the batteries, you'll probably socialize less and be less outgoing, but I think that's supposed to be the effect, not the cause.

If this definition of introversion is right, then wouldn't someone with AS automatically be skewed towards introversion?