How Aspies React to Neurotypicals

This is truly how many Aspies feel when having to listen to neurotypicals speak.

Social Beliefs vs. Scientific Reality

Factual reality is fundamental to the Asperger understanding of our world. The social majority believe that they live in a magical universe. The supernatural dimension, which social people believe to be real, is a product of the human brain, and exists nowhere else.  

This divide is very serious and cannot be smoothed over by social clichés.

"Is all this thinking really necessary?" - My Mother

I thought too much. How do I know? My mother told me so. It began when I was very young and I could not stop doing it. My mind chewed on everything that came my way. Why this? Why that? I was told that thinking too much was unattractive in a small girl who ought to keep her mind on what other people thought and keep her opinions to herself. My mother told me that this negation of self was vital to securing my future as a wife, who must adopt her husband's thoughts, at least in public. It seemed to me that childhood was only a perverse rehearsal for the death of the intellect in this life, and for pot luck suppers in the next. 

 

An afterlife? I rejected the idea as silly. How could adults who worked during the week as engineers, accountants, and teachers, turn into pudding heads on Sunday? Did they believe the nonsense about invisible beings that lived in the sky, or were they pretending in front of us kids? If it was a pretense, why would they lie to their children?

There I was, barely aware of myself as a human being and with a huge mystery already pecking away at my mind. Why did this extraordinary gulf exist between how I experienced the world and how everyone around me claimed life worked? Why were children asked to be inventive and creative, and then told not to ask questions and to merely repeat ‘correct’ answers? This absurd situation taught me that I didn’t exist: only the ability to reflect what was told to me by others could make me acceptable.

Egalitarian Equality vs. Social Inequality - The Pyramid

In the day to day experience of an Asperger child, moments of peace are rare. Whatever you are thinking or doing, someone, either a parent or teacher or maybe another child, will interrupt you to ask that you participate in some activity, such as playing a game with a group of children. If you don’t respond, or you resist their prodding, or you state clear and repeated rejections of the idea, initial friendly overtures will turn into harsh words and disapproval. The adult will express personal disappointment in your reluctance and increase the pressure.

The simple enjoyable act of reading or thinking has now become a problem. The adult considers that whatever you are doing is not only unimportant, but it makes them unhappy and you are responsible for their unhappiness. You are told that choosing to be alone means that you are depressed or unhappy and that joining the group will cheer you up, which isn’t true. If you protest that what you are reading, or drawing or building is more interesting than what the other children are doing, you are apt to be yelled at and physically relocated like a disobedient dog. Waves of anger that were hidden beneath the adult’s formerly soft persuasive words hit like a shock wave. The other children see all this and learn one of life’s big lessons. Obey and conform. The effect of being used to demonstrate this social principal is visceral and devastating.

It is said that Aspergers people can’t infer what is going on in another person’s mind, but the big messages are clear to us. People will only like you if you obey their instructions, tell them what they want to hear, and not when you get around to it, but right now! Obedience demonstrates that a person will subordinate his or her happiness and well-being to the group. Rules are often designed to insult and confuse people, to challenge their morality or sense of fair play, for the purpose of testing their willingness to shed their individual identity and follow the herd. The Aspergers brain simply doesn’t understand this social compulsion, not because we are dumb, defective, dangerous or disabled, but because inequality of status is alien to our egalitarian need for fair play, justice and reason.

Modern society is ruthlessly hierarchical and undemocratic. People are sorted by class and caste and culture, by wealth, by age, by gender, by the illegitimate concept of race. This state of human affairs is archaic and destructive of human potential when compared to the “flat earth” picture of reality in the Asperger mind.

C/ ushistory.org

This structure is alien to the Asperger perception of 'how it ought to be.'

The building of massive pyramids was the dominant activity of ancient agrarian cultures because the pyramid was a physical model of the social hierarchy by which those on top controlled the status of the population. The same archaic social pyramid is strictly enforced today; only the titles have changed. Most astonishing is the belief on the part of the social majority that this manmade pyramid of social inequality, and the suffering it causes to millions of human beings, is as valid as the Laws of Physics, and essential to the structure of the universe.

My Asperger Parent

Although undiagnosed, my father was a classic Asperger male who had a terrible time invoking his social rank as The Father. He made attempts to use his status to make me “do what I was told,” but this effort usually fell apart, because deep down he didn’t believe that this was a valid reason for a child to comply with a parent’s wishes. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was thoroughly Asperger.

We developed a deep friendship precisely because he felt it necessary to explain that his requests and concerns had a rational basis such as safety or efficiency, or to quell worry on his part that I would make a mistake or a poor choice. His appeals to my practical good sense usually worked, but I never felt that I had to obey him just because he was my father. This encouraged me to make my own choices, good and bad, and to recover from my mistakes, a task that is infinitely difficult for a perfection-loving Asperger child. Honest exchange sometimes drove us apart, but I never doubted his affection or that he would be there when I needed help. He could and would set personal judgment aside. He wasn’t warm, emotional or full of praise. At times, overcome by frustration and anger at a social world he didn’t understand, he would vanish into the comforting order of nature and science. His knowledge base was phenomenal and he was never too busy to answer my limitless questions, sometimes imparting far more detail than I could possibly absorb. Best of all, he was like me and I was like him, but not exactly.

Each Aspergerger individual has his or her own personality and is affected differently by social constraints. Girls and women have traditionally been excluded from diagnosis and instead have been diagnosed with one or more mental illnesses, a situation that is improving. Females being overlooked as Aspergers can be partly explained by the traditional view that being female is in itself a disorder or defect in many religions and cultures, a social barrier that has been imposed as part of The Pyramid. Women are on the bottom by virtue of their 'crazy' gender.

 

It Was as if I Didn't Exist

Parents, teachers, pediatricians, psychiatrists, behaviorists, and other helper individuals see the problem of Asperger's children backwards to how the child experiences life. To the child, his or her differences, some of which are praised, such as intelligence, success in school, the ability to focus on a task, persistence of attention and novel manipulation of ideas, are then used to isolate or even exile him or her from society. How does one explain this ‘intelligence is good, but you are bad’ contradiction to a smart child?

The social person’s view is that this child does not conform to the scheduled physical, emotional, and mental behaviors that experts have decided are normal and necessary to being human, and therefore this child is abnormal - an unhappy and unnacceptable situation for the socially- obsessed majority. Variation from expectations (very narrow expectations at that) becomes the problem, and the child’s intelligence is judged to be strange, aberrant and a big part of the problem. The child’s intelligence, not as a thing-in-itself, but as a minority condition in society, is not seen as distinct from the emotional difficulties that an Asperger’s child does experience.   

In my case, teachers, the school principal, and our pediatrician briefly discussed what to do with me. Should I be bumped up a grade, be sent to a special school, or remain where I was? Their conclusion? Because I was socially backward I ought to stay with my age group in public school. Confinement among normal children would advance my behavior to some acceptable level and this would make me capable of functioning as a wife and mother. As for my intellectual abilities, these might be useful if I needed a job someday, that is, if my husband were to die.

This astonishing train of thought confirmed my observation that adults can be extraordinarily stupid and that their thinking cannot be trusted solely on their status as The Adult. The idea that contact with normal children would by some property of contagious magic make me normal, was ludicrous. The assumption that a female was fit only for marriage and motherhood, with a teaching job as a fall back to misfortune, sent a shockwave through my mind. The expectation of parents and teachers that I ought to be content, or even thrilled with such a future, demonstrated that none of these people knew anything about me. I was nothing but a source of irritation. Once a decision was made about ‘my problem’ I could be ignored.  

My internal experience of myself and my particular connection to the world around me were nonexistent for them, and I was ‘dealt with’ as if these personal experiences didn’t exist – as if I didn’t exist. This is profound isolation, and in my view, is more devastating than the Asperger preference for spending time alone.

Too often the story is presented as one-sided, with the ‘problem’ located within the Asperger child or adult, who must be trained to perform social skills that satisfy society, with little recognition that the unhappy situation is the result of a failed dialog between the individual and society. This dialog, which is social, seems an odd concept for the social majority to fail to recognize and understand.  

Asperger's Love Physical Reality

Asperger types are described as incapable of being social or emotional, but this is a misunderstanding on the part of the social majority. Unlike standard social interaction, which is pro forma and fleeting, successful Asperger relationships are founded on intellectual give-and-take and may take long periods of time to develop. The focus is on shared interests rather than shared emotions. Honesty and trustworthiness are prime requirements and these personal characteristics are non negotiable, hence Aspersers people may have few friends. Being social for the sake of being social holds little to no appeal; an Asperger individual may put in an appearance at a gathering if necessary, but then vanish as quickly as possible. Constructing and maintaining a socially acceptable charade, especially in which one has no interest, is exhausting. Many of us don’t bother – which earns us the wrath of the socially addicted.

The Asperger ability to experience deep emotional attachments to animals, objects, equations, theories, and classes of things like transportation, machines, space exploration or numbers may seem improbable or impossible to neurotypicals, but it’s true. Some, like myself, feel that a specific landscape, or rock formation, or river, or mountain range – indeed the whole of nature’s manifestations, ‘speak to us’ emotionally or spiritually. This intense feeling of being embedded in the environment is possibly what animism was originally, before this intense identification became blurred with the magical fear that active spirits, which are capable of conscious acts of good and evil, interfere with human lives. The Asperger’s prime attachment is to physical reality and not to a manmade ‘supernatural’ dimension. 

It takes time for the Asperger ‘get to know you’ process to work and most social people just don’t have the time or interest to wait, or to participate in growing a relationship. Asperger individuals often don’t ‘get’ that the neurotypical person isn’t interested in getting to know them or anyone else for that matter. We do see that the social person wants immediate superficial attention. Status seeking neurotypicals are out to ‘score a hit’ and the less invested in time and sincerity the better. We instinctively don’t like this shallow treatment of human beings.

Surprisingly, what neurotypicals fail to understand is that permission to lie is apportioned according to one’s location on the pyramid, with those in power having almost unlimited sanction to lie without consequence. No one should be surprised therefore by rampant social and economic inequality, but amazingly, supposedly socially savvy neurotypicals don’t have a clue. It is a given that politicians lie to get elected and then promptly do whatever their funders have paid them to do. This has been happening election after election since politics (a social endeavor) appeared, and yet neurotypicals never catch on.

One way for an Asperger to cope with the social charade is to imagine that each and every neurotypical is running for an office – even if it’s a tiny niche somewhere in the vast social hierarchy, and that each exchange with another person is only a campaign stop. Unless you have (relative) wealth or power, you aren’t worth a second handshake.

Every Person Counts

An example of the fundamental mismatch between social expectations and Asperger behavior comes from my own childhood. My mother was socially conscious; my father was Asperger. My mother was upset whenever my father did something that did not further her social goals, such as his habit of talking to the ‘wrong people.’ Wherever we went, my father would disappear for a few minutes because he was bored or tired of waiting. I was usually sent to find him, and invariably he would be chatting with a stranger as if he had come upon a long lost friend. This infuriated my mother. Why would my father waste his time with nobodies like mechanics or janitors or poor people? She never understood that my father saw human beings as existing on an equal plane and that interest in another person can have no more motive than the pleasure of chewing the fat. It didn’t matter that my father had no prior relationship to the person; it didn’t matter that he would not see him or her again. Amazingly, my father would often find out within a few minutes more in-depth information about a person’s life than my supposedly empathetic ’people person’ mother could be bothered with. 
  

I often went missing too, becoming wrapped up in the impromptu conversation between my father and the stranger. I learned a great deal from these encounters, not only about wrong judgments about how people look, but that every person counts, regardless of their social status.

 

Neurotypicals: No Help Wanted

The tendency for an Asperger person is to assume that someone who expresses distress wants help, but this is rarely the case. If an Asperger offers an observation or suggests a solution, the well-intended advice is likely to be received with hostility – logic produces the wrong answer. An Asperger may observe that neurotypicals attempt to resolve real world problems through manipulation of their own emotions, and even more frequently, the emotions of other people. For the social majority, the environment is almost exclusively composed of other people, so bad feelings, aggression, shame and bullying are ever-present.     

One might think that after being yelled at thousands of times, we Aspergers would ‘get’ that people’s stories of frustration (which often are the result of failed actions repeated over and over, or are due to a simple lack of practical or scientific knowledge) are not requests for help. We stupidly persist because it is in our nature to solve problems. If a person describes a situation that is causing them confusion and pain, and if I can unravel a tangle of erroneous beliefs and misinformation that is causing it, why wouldn’t I make the effort?

This desire to substantially aid another human being is considered a great defect. As a group Aspergers people are accused of being blind to the minds of other people, and that empathy, compassion, or any ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes is absent from our soulless bodies. The truth is that it is our desire to help in ways that produce results. Unfortunately the social definition of empathy rejects and excludes rational response and tangible returns. A theater of gestures, facial expressions, and words of sympathy and commiseration are not only preferred, but demanded and scrutinized by the gatekeepers of ‘normal’ as the sole measure of human feeling. It’s a cruel system.

This narrow definition of what it means to be human not only impinges on the freedom of Asperger types, but neurotypicals as well are stripped of honest communication by the well-policed forms expression that society imposes. The majority of any population - low ranking children, women, minorities and the poor, are required to stifle their thoughts and reactions in order to preserve the power of the social pyramid. Empowering people with the courage to speak honestly is socially taboo, because honest communication between people confers equality.