Published on 12, July, 2020
I am a woman who is married with 5 kids. I was diagnosed in the last year with high functioning ASD and felt very positive about the whole thing as it answers a lot of questions I had about why I behaved the way I did when I was young and how I behave now.
I got myself through university and trained as a health care professional. I worked in a very busy and sometimes daunting environment. I was very unhappy there. I didn’t fit in, got comments made to me about taking longer to organise myself etc etc. But I was very good at my job as I could connect with clients and families. Sometimes getting too emotional in the process and taking on their worries as my own. This again was exhausting.
I have moved settings now and work with younger clients who may have ASD among other problems. I disclosed to my supervisor and to my surprise was met with questions like why I arrived at thinking I have ASD and how they thought I was normal. This got into a very awkward discussion of how socially awkward I feel.
I explained that I am professional and can connect with people in the structured environment of work and am very focused. Basically justifying how I have been able to work in my profession for the last 9 years. I feel like she was asking me how I can do my job and see traits and problems that ASD clients have when traditionally ASD in itself is associated with poor communication.
I have been trained over the years to learn how to make people like me. It is exhausting but I can do it. Also I am very analytical and can focus on what is going on and can project the problems I see into what problems the client can have in the future. This is insight I have learned over he years through experience and learning.
I guess what I am getting at is that, with my diagnoses, I feel now that my ability to do my job is being questioned by my new manager. This upsets me greatly. I worked very hard, and struggled to navigate the social gauntlet of university and the work place, now to be faced with this.
In turn, will health professionals like the GP and health visitors automatically assume I am a terrible parent as well. I just feel lost. I’ve never felt like I fitted in, have learned to not speak at times when I would like to for fear of saying the wrong thing.
Sometimes when I do let people see glimpses of the real me, I get funny looks as my humour doesn’t match theirs or I can seem a bit immature in my silliness. This is something I have learned from even primary school where my class mates made nasty comments when I made up little songs or acted ‘uncool,’
My family and friends for the most part get me. As u can imagine, they are a very select few. My husband has a similar sense of humour and we get on great but my ‘organised chaos’ approach does sometimes cause conflict from time to time.
Has anyone any idea what I can do or any similar experience? I wish I hadn’t disclosed this to my boss as I now am in a state of panic.
I'm not in that position myself, but read or heard stories that sounds pretty similar about autistic people working with autistic clients and having problems with typical colleagues, so hope other people can answer properly.
It sounds rather like your manager may have a rather narrow idea of 'ASD' in relation to the young clients and may be trying to see how that applies to you, after you disclosed, to see if it has any bearing on how you do the job, not whether you can do it. Clearly you have been doing a related job and were qualified for this job, and nothing has changed just because you have a label. Or another way of looking at it is that she may want to know whether she needs to make any reasonable adjustments so you can do the job. Do you think there are any things that would help, either in getting the job done or to make you more confident in dealing with any problems that arise? If you get a chance to respond on that, then it may help frame it as an Equality Act issue just in case that's not already being considered.
Gii said:questions like why I arrived at thinking I have ASD and how they thought I was normal
You mean there was an assumption that no one working there was autistic? Or that they didn't believe you could be autistic? Or that your behaviour passes perfectly as neurotypical?
From those actually considerate typical people around me who know a bit about autism/ASC, I have heard stereotypes ('don't like strong emotion', 'don't like change' etc) that don't exactly help self-confidence. It's easy for them to forget that autistic people are very diverse, more so than they've been taught or from experience. So it is with 'associated with poor communication'. Any difference is more complicated than that: it doesn't mean you can't communicate and in fact you may be able to communicate in a particular domain more clearly than most people, and you may find you communicate with autistic clients better than typical people do. That positive experience is something I've heard more than once, and supports the idea of being 'on a different wavelength'. A communication problem is not an individual thing, but between two or more people. I wonder if they have ever heard Damian Milton's description of the 'double empathy problem'. It may be a difficult question worth asking, but if the workplace regularly works with autistic clients and they have at least one autistic staff member, have they ever had any autistic-led training?
Gii said: will health professionals like the GP and health visitors automatically assume I am a terrible parent as well
That seems like an unrelated situation, although you may want to consider how you disclose there. I would hope your family and friends can support you there.
Hope I haven't misinterpreted what you wrote too badly.