Words typed online can be deceptive

I think many older people are scarred by  childhood memories of bullying, nobody cared back then, you were thought of as being soft if you couldn't cope, at best it was suffering from "nerves" being bullied at school was thought to be character forming.

TheCatWoman said:

I boot strapped myself into university and it was one of the only places I felt fully accepted

It was trying to   please my parents by getting to university while knowing I lacked the necessary independent living skills that set the scene, alongside what my current care co calls bullying related trauma, for a lifetime of severe mental illness. Not forgetting a major learning difficulty in the shape  of more  than mild EF , for which,then, there was no help and support.

I doubt many of you will be able to see why the above was the starting gun being fired for a lifetime of abject failure, in the way that success and failure is usually measured.

It was tough when there was no diagnosis available, anyone who wasn't accademically able was thought of as a bit slow and were funnelled into the "factory fodder" route and for girls getting married and having babies as soon as possible.

Niether of my parents were well educated, both havng left school at 14, my Dad woiuldn't have been allowed to stay on at school due to reverse snobbery and his parents needing an extra income. I don't think anyone even thought about it for my Mum, in her case I think it was sexism, being educated enough to be a good enough wife.

I was bullied at school enough for me to keep bunking off, I bunked off for nearly a whole year, when I got found out I was just told to get used to it because that was what life was like, or to stay away from the bullies, hard to do when they're hunting you like a pack of dogs after a fox. There was never any mention of psychiatric support or help, psychiatrists dealt with mad people and if you saw one it was a source of shame for the whole family and carried a risk of total rejection and even worse "no man would ever want to marry you".

Despite knowing my background and history of abuse, which I won't go into here, when I was an adult the general consensus from the medical profession was that going on the contraceptive pill would solve everything. It took until I was 36 for anyone to recognise that I really do have back problems and now have osteoarthritis and probably had since my teens and that I have cPTSD. It took until I was 50 to get an ASC diagnosis and I got and had no support afterwards and there still seems to be no way of getting any help.

The whole lot has made me a very strong person, sometimes to strong for my own good, I'm very bad at asking for help, because I'm used to there not being any and being castigated for asking. Now when I ask for help there still isn't any  and sometimes I get told I'm too resourseful and then I get really frustrated, and upset.

I boot strapped myself into university and it was one of the only places I felt fully accepted and valued and had good relationships with tutors who wanted me to succeed. I didn't care if I got a first or a third I was there for pleasure and my tutors supported this, seeming to find me as a fellow traveller in thier love for thier subject.

I was brought up solidly middle class. My father was senior enough in the F.O  to have a Who's entry but not senior enough to have an obituary in The Times. We had been an upward mobile family. Working class aristocracy to lower middle class to middle class(my father). My father got  a scholarship to King Edward's Birmingham. The vast majority of teenagers in his neighbourhood left school as soon as it was possible to do so. He had a short spell as an army officer  before joining the F.O.  Passed the written exam to join the A stream(fast track,brainy enough) but failed the oral(not made of the right stuff?). I looked up the family history  of Christopher Curwen who was a colleague of my father in Bangkok. He went to head MI6. His background was much posher than my father's. Obviously 'made of the right stuff'.

I started off developing what we now call social anxiety soon after starting at Felsted. That was due to the bullying. It was followed by increasingly severe depression. I saw a pdoc for the first time a few months before I was 17. As an independent adult I've slid right down the social scale due to severe mental illness. The two most middle class things about me now are the way I speak and my left of centre, social libertarian,  politics.

I didn't go to to university. I never had a paid job.I'm poorly qualified,educationally, by  current day standards. I was not a good student. Nor was I a terrible one. I was  a mediocre one. I've recent found out that was due to rather poor executive functioning. I had no friends. Have had very few in the 67 years I've been alive.

I started to sense there was more going on than SMI during the last few years of the previous century. Reckoned it might be NVLD/ASD by the first few years of this century.  It took nearly 20 years to get an Asperger's dx. It only happened because I moved and was seen by a new   pdoc. who referred me to be assessed.    It also  helped, more than words can say, that my daughter had put the record straight as to how I really was .         

Another thing are the words used to describe us and how we are, words like "disregulated", what psychobabble! I know I've been told I'm wrong and obviously I disagree, but to me that word comes across as patronising, dismissive and alienating. TO me it's posh for "I don't like what you're saying, I'm uncomfortable with your emotions, your feelings of frustration, anger or grief are invalid!". Does anyone ever tell you how you're supposed to feel? Are your feelings ever valid? Are your feeling natural and normal under the circumstances?  

I agree with you and I was actually going to start a similar thread. I've never seen a psychiatrist so I don't know what they're like and I've seen a couple of psychologists who were quite good.

Like you I'm good verbally, but some practicle skills I lack and just don't seem to be able to get my head around them, or not in the way they seem to want me too. There seem to be some tropes and stereotypes about people with ASC and/or learning difficulties, there are also plenty around class too. In the past I've been told I must be good at maths because I'm dyslexic and all dyslexics are good at maths, a way of compensating for being poor with words. For a long time it was thought that women and girls couldn't be ASC and it's something that I think is still a struggle to have accepted, especially when one is older. I've been told I must be good with tech, because I'm ASC and all people with ASC are good with tech, I feel like my diagnosis is being called into question because I don't fit the stereotype. I have problems wih memory, somethings get stored straight to long term memory without ever being in short term memory, so there's no synaptic links whereby I can access this information. I know I have be shown numerous times how to C&P, but everytime it's like the first and I struggle through it step by painful step, then forget it again straight away, thats when people get really frustrated and angry with me, they never stop to consider what it's like for me being this way, if they find it frustrating, how do they think I feel?

I've often been told I'm contrary, aggressive and playng games. I think some of this is because I ask questions instead of passively accepting whatever I'm told. When you link that in with the above memory problem, it becomes really fraught and I'm not believed. Some people are totally unwilling to adapt how they teach or explain things, I've had various people over the years give me different coloured overlay sheets to counteract the dyslexia, they get really cross when I tell them they don't work for me. How many times do I have to try and read things through different coloured overlays before somebody actually believes that they dont' work and I'm telling the truth?

I think social class can play a big role too, having failed at school and been brought up working class I found that there were expectations about what I could and couldn't be expected to do. I learnt to speak "posh" and that really messes with their heads, I can actually understand and use big words, I can discuss things in their own language and believe me it makes a hell of a difference to how you're treated.

A Guardian reading hairdresser with a degree really messes them up, they dont understand how I could do both and don't seem to know how to engage with me.