RAD vs AS

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I'm struggling to figure out if I might have had RAD vs. AS, or both. (Warning: Long Post)

I was adopted at 14 mos old, and it seems many of my AS-type problems seem to overlap with RAD. My psychiatrist however doesn't believe I have RAD because I've been in relationship with my husband for 8 years and doing well. But some people also think that AS people can't have long-term relationships too!

Anyway, my AM (adopted mother) said I didn't point to things to share interest with her. She said she had to teach me every little thing like waving Bye (reminiscent of how I have to teach every little thing to my PDD-NOS son). She attributed that to my being in a new, foreign country.

At some point things changed with my awareness. I started to notice and compare myself to my sister (their biological daughter) and hated how different I looked as a minority in my family and in general. My sister was older, had more privileges, and seemed to be treated better. She was spoken to in a sweet voice and I was spoken to with impatience. I interpreted this as their hating me and began to see everything through this lens. I got hand-me-downs and got yelled at a lot and hit, and this was further proof to me of their favoritism, and I got angry at them, perpetuating the vicious cycle. I used to escape into the Cinderella story and relate to the main character. Things I was accused of: lack of cause-and-effect thinking, gullible, book smart but no common sense, no sense of direction, clumsy/klutz, annoying, immature, whiny, stubborn, obstinate, black and white thinker, nerdy, pedantic speech, laughing but (supposedly) did not know what I was laughing at, was always touching things I shouldn't be touching, interrupted a lot, went on and on about the same things--yet somehow I was a "normal" child. I had OCD tendencies and mild prosopagnosia. I was terrible at team sports (score goals for the opposite team, hit a softball and neglect to run to base), was teased and bullied, was not so good at making or keeping friends, and was terrible at pretend play. My AM told me the kids teased me because they were "jealous" (because I was talented, smart, blah blah) but I thought she was lying to me to patronize me, because it didn't make sense why she would pick on me too (for example calling me "Chinese" when she got angry). I was sort of obsessed with talking about my AM as an abusive force. She did do some pretty emotionally abusive things (perhaps due to her frustration over my behaviors?), and was physically punitive (but perhaps I was oversensitive due to sensory issues, I don't know?), and ACS did come over to the house once because a neighbor saw her chasing me around the backyard whacking me with a broom because I had been poking at a Mickey Mouse sticker on the dashboard of her car earlier that day and refused to find it for her when she realized it had fallen off and gotten lost. We fought a lot and I often yelled at her "I HATE YOU", and to "LEAVE ME ALONE!" I could be quite rude to her. She would laugh at me and spit in my face or use the wooden spoon on me. I complained a lot about her to anyone I could. I exhausted my "friends" who didn't care so much to hear about her as much as I needed to tell my story. I could not be physically affectionate to her because I hated the smell of cigarette smoke on her, I had terrible allergies and got frequent nosebleeds. I thought that if I acted "good and obedient" that would mean I approved of the way she treated me, so I was determined to not validate her or show happiness. Maybe due to AS (or terrible anxiety?) I picked at all my scabs and had bruises from being clumsy. She would get even angrier I suppose because people thought she was the one doing it to me. I had hard time falling asleep due to the way the sheets felt amongst other things, and when I did sleep I frequently had terrible nightmares, yet I managed to excel at school, drawing and violin. I would escape into my books, art and music. I read voraciously. I studied maniacally, spending hours doing homework, getting everything precise, memorizing pages of text. Yet still I felt stifled and micromanaged and felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin all the time. I spent my childhood figuring out ways to escape. At age 9, I planned to run away with a friend. When that friend told me she changed her mind (a betrayal to me!), that she wanted to work it out with her mom because she really did love her, I thought she was joking. I thought she was brainwashed, or lying to me, because I believed nobody really loved their mothers, that they only said they did because it was expected of them. Even my AM accused me that I didn't know what love was. I assured her that I did, and gave her a dictionary meaning of the word Love. Anyway, I blamed her for everything that went wrong in my life, the suicide attempts, the running away from home, the eating disorders. I felt so alone, and alienated kids at school (even if they said something nice to me I would dismiss them thinking they were just saying it because they felt sorry for me, because I believed they couldn't really mean it). I felt pathetic and worthless. I am now wondering if I may have instigated some of the bad treatment from my AM because she didn't understand that I wasn't simply being an oppositional brat to consciously manipulate (although I was angry at her most of the time). I wonder if a kid can have AS and RAD at the same time or maybe I was just insecure? I wonder really where I'm at in all of this. I spent much of my efforts on becoming "mature" and overdid it. To the point that I got into trouble with men. I thought I was impervious to any more hurt, so I developed a thick skin and often put myself in danger. I worked any job I could so I didn't have to go back to that house, compromising my morals and sanity. I became different personas depending what I needed to accomplish, but always felt alone, insecure and needy. In so many ways am shocked that I am still alive today.

Anyone have any insight here? I don't want to keep bugging my shrink about this. Would I have acted the same regardless of who adopted me and wind up with the same result--frustrated, angry adoptive parents? Was this all due to RAD or AS or PTSD or BPD? I need to figure this out--anyone please help!! !!

I don't even know what RAD is, but it doesn't matter. Regardless of which diagnosis, or combination, it really is it does sound to me like you were neurologically predisposed to behaviours and a life like that and would have possibly lived the same life and frustrated others.

The only thing that might have been different is if another family would have seen the signs and gotten you diagnosed and treated younger. But there's absolutely no reason to assume someone else would or wouldn't have the lknowledge to have done that, so there's no reason to blame your AM - because they didn't know, no one knew.

Whatever it is it is, hopefully you can get it pinned down and find treatments and coping mechanisms that will help you live a better happier free-er life from this point forward.

Reactive Attachment Disorder is hard to distinguish from autism at least from my reading of RAD.

If it is RAD it could have even started before you were adopted, depending on how you were treated then.

Have you looked up what kind of therapies they do for RAD? Is it different than the kind of help you would get for AS? BPD is mainly controlled by meds, I think.

If you don't trust your shrink's opinion than you probably need a different one. If you trust him, does he think it is AS or BPD?

What I would probably do to start off with is to find the DSM-IV online (I would not even deal with DSM-V, right now) and find the descriptions for RAD, AS and BPD. Take out three pieces of paper and grade yourself on each one according to the descriptions and see what it points to. This might help you rule something out, at least.

The psychiatrist who diagnosed me is a renowned expert in the field of autism and is often referred to or mentioned on many AS websites and in books. However I wonder if that predisposes him to seeing everything through the lens of AS.

I have looked at AS (girls), RAD and BPD symptoms and for all them I would say I fit 80%-90% criteria, some moreso than others depending on what part of my life I focus on.

My biggest dilemma is: What do I make of my AM? It is so hard to readjust my view of her. If I had a neurological condition (AS), then she certainly could not have recognized what I had (approximately 40 years ago) so I cannot hold her fully accountable for how (poorly) she treated me. However, if it was RAD, then she should have had some awareness of this issue before I was adopted and been prepared to deal with it. In her ignorance, she was upset that I didn't turn out to be "an obedient Asian kid" like she stereotypically thought I should be. If it was RAD, then I feel my anger at her is more justified as she is held more accountable for her decisions than if I had a neurological condition (AS) that was off the radar. I have this overwhelming need for the truth because so much of my life's perspective is hanging by a thread and I cannot rest until I truly understand what happened. I mean, if I acted with her how my DS acts with me, I can totally understand how frustrated and helpless she as a parent could feel--although that would not necessarily excuse some of her abhorrent behavior, it might explain why she may have treated it harshly like a behavioral problem.

The other pressing issue: Given my two sons are Dx'd with PDD-NOS, I would think AS might be the culprit, however my husband is not so "normal" either LOL
I wonder if RAD could be genetically passed along or converted into an ASD in offspring somehow?

I think I wouldn't blame her for being ignorant, either of RAD or autism. Most people aren't too well-versed in either one, even if they do adopt children. If you had either RAD or autism or both and they were not severe enough to cause extreme problems, your mother might have simply reasoned, "This is a difficult child; disability would be much more extreme than this, therefore this child cannot be disabled." That was what mine did, and my autism went undiagnosed until I was hospitalized.

You might benefit, I think, from reading about the social perception of both disability and mental illness. Your mom's generation was even more bombarded with myths than we were--ideas like, "Disability is always severe and obvious. Disabled people can't do useful things or have talents. Disability is a tragedy."

Your mom's mistake was not (IMO) the failure to see RAD or autism, but the failure to understand that symptoms which are not overwhelming and obvious may still need treatment. Maybe she bought into the ideas she was being hit with from all sides, that disability=wasted life. She knew you were capable and so she reasoned, starting from faulty premises, that you could therefore not be disabled.

Whatever she thought about disability, your mother was emotionally and physically abusive. Laughing at you, yelling, accusing you of being the problem in the family--that's not something you should do to a child. Your mother would not have been justified in doing these things no matter how badly you behaved. Some things are not justified, ever, no matter how hard the child is to raise, no matter how bad a case of RAD or autism the child might have.

What I see here is a mother who, in denial about her child's disability, decided she could physically or emotionally beat it out of her child. She didn't want the child she got, so she tried to turn you into the child she wanted. She rejected you in favor of the child in her imagination, and you got hurt for it.

I don't think the issue of whether you had RAD, autism, or both, is the main issue here (though it is of course a question you would like to have answered). The main issue is that your mom mistreated you and you are trying to figure out why--what to blame it on. I say you blame it on your mom's choices, because either autism or RAD is not justification for what she did to you.

I may be projecting here, because that was my problem as a child. Still, it does not seem to be uncommon, and maybe you are in a similar situation as I was.

Thank you-- I wish I could give each of you a big hug right now.

I guess my other question is: Would my AM's treatment of me possibly cause AS-like symptoms? If I didn't have a good role model, perhaps they were learned behaviors, or coping mechanisms? I think my family would often say inappropriate things to me and to each other, and maybe I was just mimicking them, not realizing how seriously "off" they were? Or would an NT kid automatically know appropriate peer interaction despite what was going on at home? I used to vow never to be like them, but perhaps in some ways I picked up on their behaviors and didn't realize it? Could sensory issues, being gullible, lacking common sense, and other AS symptoms, be brought on by chronic environmental stress?

What a confusing mess!

Most people who grow up in abusive households will end up with some fallout, so you can't expect that you would be the same as a typical child even if you had a typical brain. As for social skills, most of the time when an NT child grows up in an abusive environment, they will learn social skills appropriate for that environment--for example, how to pacify the abuser, how to detect a possible angry outburst, how to hide the abuse from outsiders, or how to preserve their self-concept in an environment where the adults cannot be trusted. (One common way to do this, by the way, is for the child to assume that it was their fault, that they were such a bad child that their parents could not help it, and that therefore the adults are trustworthy and right after all.)

These social skills are maladaptive in an environment where safety has been re-established, and so often cause problems.

Autistic children in abusive environments will pick up some of these skills, but not as easily as NT children do. They may be specifically targeted by abusive parents (there is often a "scapegoat" child in abusive families, but if one child is autistic they are more likely to receive that particular role). I used my concrete, logical thinking to intellectually distance myself from my situation. Sometimes, abusive parents use their autistic child's odd behavior as an excuse to mistreat that child, and the child will grow to see the autism as "bad behavior" which they can control if they only try hard enough, especially if they have grown up undiagnosed.

The responses to long-term trauma in autistics and non-autistics seem to be relatively similar; however, autistics do have more trouble finding help, because of their impaired social skills--though even non-autistics often do not escape the situation until they leave the house in adulthood.

Given I did not look like my adoptive family, it was easy to distance myself from their behaviors. My sister (their bio daughter) used to complain to me, "Why don't you just LISTEN to her (AM) and do as she says instead of arguing with her?" I used to get upset because I didn't like or agree with the things I was told to do or not to do, especially since those same things weren't also expected as much from my sister. Or I became oppositional because I didn't like the way those directives were said to me (angry/irritated tone of voice), or I thought the things that were expected of me weren't reasonable (Why couldn't I walk on the carpet, so what if I scuffed the rug? Why do I have to chew with my mouth closed if my nose is stuffy? Why do I have to stop whining if I'm not being listened to anyway?) If I didn't like the reasoning behind it (I did not sit well with "Because I said so") I didn't feel like I should comply, because I just saw these things as unreasonable methods to control me where I did not feel I should be controlled. All I wanted was to simply be myself and to be loved for it regardless, just as my sister was. If my AM said, "If you do that, people won't like you" it wouldn't have made any difference because of lack of cause-and-effect thinking--I already thought nobody liked me anyway, so why should it matter. So, this of course infuriated my mother, who I viewed as a control freak (but perhaps I was the control freak?) and maybe she really did want me to grow up socially correct but I was resistant and frustrated the hell out of her. I really can't make heads or tails of it, even now. Which came first here? The chicken or the egg?

My educated relatives thought my behavior was because I was gifted. My AM thought it was because I was adopted. I still have no idea.

Last edited by mikassyna on 21 Mar 2013, 12:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I understand wanting to know for sure, so you can get a better perspective, but to me, if she was a bad parent, she was a bad parent. I don't think knowledge of RAD was widespread among non-psychologists until relatively recently due to issues with children adopted from Roumania and Russia (and ex-Soviet territories.) who were/are largely neglected in their respective countries' orphanages. You don't know how you were treated prior to 14 months. You probably don't remember how you were treated for the very early part of your adopted life, either.

Having AS or any other nature caused neurological condition does not get the parent off the hook for bad treatment. Yes, I can see why it is more heinous to actually cause the problems in the first place, but it seems like unless you need to know for better more effective treatment, there are better things to focus on. If your mom is toxic still, today, don't deal with her and just focus on feeling better about yourself.

JMO

I want to make peace with myself. I want to understand who I am, as being adopted this is a touchy issue and always has been. If I do have AS and this has been passed along to my children, then I would like to understand this and maybe wonder if my biological mother or father may have been afflicted.

Also, my AM has old films of me as a little girl. I really want to get copies of them to share with my children, and also analyze to see if any AS symptoms were noticeable. My AM is the one who controls that, and I have to make peace with her in order to obtain this piece of the puzzle to better understand myself. I hate to feel I am using her, but she also controls access to my father who, due to his stroke, cannot use the telephone without assistance. She always did say that I only went to her when I wanted something, and I guess that hasn't changed much even now. I don't really know what I could ever get from her emotionally. I often see this trait in my son with PDD-NOS. I barely exist to him until there is a need he needs me to fill. Or is this true for all children, NT and AS? I honestly don't know what "normal" is and am endlessly frustrated by this realization.

In all, I think forgiveness, even if unwarranted, might be good for me. However, I can only truly forgive if there is something forgiveable (there is that black and white thinking again, sigh). I try to relate to her as a stressed-out mother, and that is about as far as it goes. I could never do or say the things to my children that were said or done to me, no matter how many times it may have crossed my mind, but I also have a lot more support in my life (financial, practical and emotional) than she did.

Your inquisitive nature & need to know, writing style, formal vocabulary etc all point towards AS as well.

One of the most powerful things you could possibly do for yourself would be to stop trying to place blame on anyone, yourself or your AM, and forgive - both yourself and your AM, because you didn't know, she didn't know, and you can't change the past.. but if you hold onto the past, and grudges, and all the rest of this you won't be able to live in the present nor have a better future. Time to let go and truly forgive everyone involved regardless of what their actions & behaviours were. That doesn't mean they were justified, or that you endorse or encourage similar behaviour, only that you forgive them for having done it because they didn't know any better for whatever reason. Only then will you be able to begin moving on, forward, and up in every way.

And if you really want to keep exploring something RAD, check this out: http://www.colormerad.com

edit: As for determining your own AS diagnosis, have you read any books on it? I've read a few, and started with this one which I found extremely helpful:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Guid ... ny+attwood

If you haven't read this, I highly recommend that you do. It describes outward AS traits, but also goes into detail about thought processes and things as only a Dr. like Attwood could put together from interviewing so many AS patients. When you read these things, only you will know if you do them/think & feel like that, or have intuitively learned to use them as coping mechanisms. It may also trigger memories from childhood, or questions you might be able to ask of your AM or someone else who knew you as a child. Pick it up and give it a read. You might notice things in your children, too, and then recall doing those things yourself.

Thanks goldfish. I do have the book. And I have read so much on the Autism Spectrum that I think it has become a "Special Interest" to me LOL

I do see myself in many of the descriptions for AS, but I also see myself in the descriptions for RAD and BPD and giftedness. This is where things get confusing to me because many of the symptoms have waxed and waned over the years or taken different forms. Then I will read about someone else whose variant of the symptom seems a lot more clinically correct and I then question whether my perspective of what I thought was the same symptom actually qualifies as being a symptom at all. On the online autism tests I don't even feel my answers are that accurate because I have too many questions about the questions themselves.

Argh! No wonder an old friend used to call me "Space".

What about uniquely AS traits like the prosody of your voice when you speak? I've noticed this can be especially evident in Aspie's when they're recalling encyclopedic knowledge of something and delivering a monologue like a little professor. Not only is the Aspie prosody there, but it's identical to the previous times they've delivered the same message. This is noticeable in short repeated phrases, too, it's as if each time they're accessed/recalled and delivered from memory that it's the same recording playing back from an audio file on a hard drive.

Or the gait to your step when you walk? If you have that physically recognizable trait, or it's easy enough to notice. I don't even have to video tape myself and watch it to know I do it now that I'm conscious of what it even is & that it exists as a "thing," in the first place. I also notice it in AS family members and friends. I haven't been around all of my extended family that I strongly suspect (know) are also AS yet to observe their speech and walking, but I'm sure I'll notice it in more and more of them as well - as I certainly have in some relatives and friends already.

AFAIK, these two physical/outward traits are very unique to AS/ASD and aren't potentially part of some other possible diagnosis. It's also possible that you have multiple accurate diagnoses, and if so, so what? What is knowing for certain which one(s) it is going to change any? It could be all of the ones you've considered, and if so, so what?

My AM did tell me that I did talk like a "little professor" about things I learned. At the library my AM would yell at me to put half the giant pile of books back at the library because "no way" could I read all of them by the time they had to be returned but (ha!) I proved her wrong. I could speed read the books and be able to recite the entire stories, perhaps not exactly verbatim, but recite scene by scene from beginning to end. One day my AM decided to quiz me when I read a giant pile of books in one afternoon, because she didn't believe I could have read all those books so fast, much less remember what they were about. I remember her randomly pulling one book out of the pile and asking me what was it about. I asked her what the first line of the story was. Once I heard it, the entire story fell out of my mouth, almost word for word. The look on her face was...priceless.

As to my walk, I was always getting criticized for it. For that and my terrible posture. However, she now tells me it (my walk) doesn't bother her anymore because after "observing many chinks over the years, (she) now realize(s) that all chinks walk the way you do." When I ask what she means by that, she says, "like Charlie Chaplin." Did I mention she's racist and she somehow managed to adopt a child from another country?

Now, I used to turn my toes outward because I saw cartoon characters drawn that way and depicted that way on TV. For some time I drew people standing that way too, so I figured that was how people were supposed to stand(!)

My husband also hates the way I walk and hates that I slouch so much. He thinks I'm going to turn into an old lady with a hump on my back. But when I try to stand up straight, I can't even get that right--I lean too far backward. It just takes too much energy to keep trying. I also told him that when I try to walk with my toes pointed forward it feels awkward, and my butt swings from side to side. He says guys love seeing that. I said it makes me feel off balance so I prefer not to do it thankyouverymuch.

When I was a kid I never fantasized about marriage and babies (except perhaps my Cinderella fantasies where I was rescued from my evil stepmother by a prince, but babies and marriage weren't part of that fantasy either). I fantasized about becoming a rich and successful brain surgeon and buying a big house with a gigantic library I would sit in every night to read in, Sherlock Holmes style.

Little prof, reading/memory & recall abilities, these are all ASD traits.

But I was talking about the sound of your voice, not what you say. The prosody, made up of rhythm, flow, inflection & annunciations, etc. There's a very distinct pattern to the Aspie voice that follows an almost sing-songy up/down sound & rhythm that's a bit "choppy," due to various word types in our vocabularies being stored in different parts of the brain. It's the recall and assembly into sentences process that doesn't quite bring things together in perfect NT synchronization, and the end result is a unique sounding vocal pattern. It's easier to detect in some than others, and IMO easier to detect in males/lower voices than females/higher voices.

And I wasn't talking about being pigeon-toed. That is not related to ASD. I was talking about the "gait," to our step that gives our steps a bit of an odd/awkward bit of a "bounce," mid stride. It's difficult to put into words, but easy to pick out when I see someone doing it. I notice that I do it, as do my brothers & AS friends. Some more subtly than others, and I think it becomes more pronounced when I walk quickly w/ long strides than if I'm taking my sweet time. I notice it more often then, anyways. The closest animal walk I could compare the motion to is how a horse tends to move vertically up and down a slight bit while walking slowly - but that's not all that much help if you can't observe someone doing it.

If you do a search for it, Tyrl0n posted an audio clip of his voice in this forum a few days ago and it's a decent example of Aspie prosody.

PS

I was also very capable/talented as an artist. I focused on minute details and tried to get my drawings as close to photographically real as possible. I would spend hours copying photos from encyclopedias and books and newspaper comics. I didn't understand or appreciate abstract art until many many years later. Up to that point I only liked the Renaissance artists and hoped to be like them one day.

As a kid I could never get the whole social thing right. When I would brag, I would get criticized for bragging, because that was "bad". So when I started not accepting compliments then I was told that I was "fishing for compliments" and that was bad too. It was too confusing. Then sometimes I would get a compliment that was just plain unwarranted (or so I thought) because it was a sloppy doodle that took me a couple of minutes to draw. I would say to the admiring kid "That's stupid!" for liking my picture, not realizing that I was hurting their feelings in the process of trying to do the right thing. I just kept doing the wrong thing time and again.

Then one day I stole some things from home and made some drawings to sell on the playground. Kids actually bought the stuff, I couldn't believe it, really thinking how dumb they were. But I was the dumb one because I announced that I would give all the money I made to anyone who would be nice to me that day. I got into trouble for "conducting commerce" on schoolgrounds, so the money was confiscated. Later on a classmate told me that "You know, you don't have to buy your friends." I looked at him like he had two heads, because he obviously didn't know how desperate I was for someone to like me. For the life of me, I just couldn't figure out the formula!