Richard@DecisionSkills wrote:I see plenty of evidence of parents having loving, caring, healthy relationships with the autistic child and the child responding in healthy, loving ways in return.
Interesting. I've met just one self-declared
female aspie, an adult, and I wouldn't have known if she hadn't told me. I thought maybe it was a gender thing, that she'd be considerate and thoughtful.
Now it occurs to me that
parenting may determine whether an aspie grows up to be capable of healthy relationship or not. One or both parents could be modelling good relational choices, or they could lack empathy themselves, be dismissive or infuriated and even punitive.
What troubles me in my marriage is that *I* have disappeared. It freaked me out when a woman friend told me "that's not you talking, it's him". I immediately knew she was right. Because it's his way or the highway, I'm not the woman I was before we started cohabiting. Quietvoice's posts here,
and her signature, describe my situation very well. I'm not someone who screams and yells and blanks people. I do all those things around him rather than smack my head against the nearest wall or tear my own eyeballs out.
I've just looked at my very first post on this forum
viewtopic.php?t=60580&p=603221#p603221 and more than ten years later I see what I didn't see at the time. It was when I started down the pharmaceutical road, when I started being perceived as "difficult" by my friends, when my career and finances were in tatters. What I didn't see, or at least didn't acknowledge in that thread, was Who Else was involved in my downfall.
this idea that all people with autism are some monolith, incapable from birth of any semblance of a healthy relationship I think is wrong on many levels.
I'm thinking just one, the word "all" in that sentence. You'd have to cohabit in an intimate relationship with a top-of-the-range adult aspie to know that, and if you got
isolated with one of them you'd be fighting for psychic survival as I am now. They have a way of getting rid of your friends—or worse, they change
you so much that you get rid of your friends yourself.
His self defeatist attitude is pretty well ingrained at this point. He has constructed elaborate defense mechanisms to shield him from rejection. Still, twenty years is sufficient time for potential change. Twenty years is time for advancements in our understanding of autism.
It would be nice to think so—but unlike Sheldon Cooper, who changed almost beyond recognition with the love of a good woman, I doubt a 30-year-old worst-case aspie is capable of change, much less the older one he'll be if/when these advancements take place. I agree he shields himself from rejection; I see H doing the same. Naturally that makes matters worse for all concerned.
I'm not buying that Algorithm is so helpless, a victim of neurological wiring that he cannot help.
I think he probably
is, but he's much more likely to victimise those around him than to acknowledge he's a victim himself. Whether he's educable, or happy, is a different question.