Behavioral management?

[venusofthenorth]

How do you guys feel about your described diagnosis?

Do you deal with, improve or manage your condition?

How do your surroundings deal with you as a result?

[Clarrisa]

I am retired now so I no longer cope with a job. I was told growing up I had dyslexia. While working this always seemed like a double edged sword best kept to one’s self. Later on in life I discovered reading medical reports (which had been sent to me following a second opinion), I was believed by my long term doctor to have Aspergers. My second opinion agreed.

I remember thinking I have another thing to hide from my employers now. It did take me a while to process having Aspergers. I believe this was because there were no nearby support groups to help. Perhaps with the use of Zoom now this is no longer quite the hurdle.

I am taking weekly Alexander sessions to try to manage my anxiety. My anxiety has become worse during Covid-19. Everyone has their thing, & when the going gets rough I have always relied on the Alexander Technique or acupuncture. It seems I can’t control my current surroundings for the most part, only myself.

[PearCider]

There's two different issues there - the condition and the diagnosis. You'll still have had the condition since childhood, even if you never got diagnosed. There will be people out there now, possibly even reading this, who do not know and have never suspected that they are autistic. Some of them will have been seen as oddball or quirky by people who have known them but who never put it together that there was a reason.

Diagnosis first as you mentioned it first. It's double edged. It can give you some sort of status, and can lead to employers partially backing off as it's politically incorrect to needlessly give the hidden disabled a hard time. Especially if the ASD was the substantial cause of the employer grief in the first place, that can be helpful. It's even just possible that you may get better help or advice in obtaining an alternate post at the same employer if say an office shuts or a department downsizes. On the downside as has been pointed out, you'd probably have to declare it to an employer who may let's say think of other reasons not to employ you if they didn't want the aggro.

The condition affects everything you do and who you are. If Merlin the Wizard was to wave his magic wand tomorrow and remove it entirely from you, you'd be somebody else. You might not like the person you became, and maybe without entirely realising it you've probably kind of got used to yourself the way you are. In theory other people are supposed to adjust to you because ASD is what it is and is involuntary, but often they don't. They almost behave as if you're being awkward or have some sort of attitude problem, which means you spend a lot of time apologising and trying to find ways to fit in with other people, even though in theory you shouldn't be doing either.

You can't deal with or improve your condition. Sorry, but that isn't an option. Your brain works differently for reasons that are still being researched and appear to be at least partly hereditary. You cannot add to it capabilities that it doesn't innately have. What you can do is to find workarounds - ways of making it appear to the outside world that your issues are reduced. This is more likely to be fruitful where you have time to consider your response. Yes, I have got some workarounds using spreadsheets and a more elaborate version of risk analysis, but my workarounds won't necessarily work for you because your mind may work differently.

How do I feel about all this? I feel that I have a disability, not a blessing, though it can have positive aspects. I feel that I am often expected to be 'normal' by other people, even though I can't be. I feel tired of having to apologise for who I am. I feel disappointed that in the end my working life didn't manage to make effective use of the abilities I have, not even given 39 years to do it. I feel irritated that for decades all the clues were missed and nobody put it together, and frustrated that allegedly if it had been spotted in school all sorts of wonderful things could have been done and my life could have been better now. I understand though, that this is my perspective, and that others who interact with me may see it differently. Some of them may say, I try hard to make allowances, but he's so inflexible and I just get frustrated.

[Obsessed]

The diagnosis is only telling me "WHY " I do things, see things, or say things differently. It doesn't change you or make you any different from who you were yesterday or last week. It's you and just be you. You never see others going out of their way to be a different person and do things differently based on how others may perceive them. So why change you. You be you and let them be them

[venusofthenorth in reply to Obsessed]

Now that's a blatant lie if I ever saw one. Neurotypical people perform and alter themselves all the time, everywhere, especially with other people in order to be liked and accepted. "Socially acceptable" is a term for a reason.

[awilso]

it’s pretty tough to manage something you don’t know you are doing. I have so many “blanks” when it comes to normal day to day life and they are all masked through 50 years of practise.

I do however have a highly structured life and it is quite solitary although my wife u sweatbands me and loves me for it for which I am eternally greatful. As long as I can live in my bubble, everything works fine. I just have to avoid my triggers and I have managed to create a life that does that.

This all means that I am a happy relaxed Aspie who lives in his version of reality most of the time and occasionally has to deal with the real world and take time off afterwards to recover.