Hi, I'm new here! Asperger's and family life..

Hi, I’m new here.

I am a 32-year-old male and it’s recently come to light that I have Asperger’s. Whilst the discovery has helped explain my whole life and why I am like I am, I’m struggling to cope with normal life. The main reason for this is the drastic change in my lifestyle over the last 2 years. I’ll try to give a brief background without going into too much detail:

I had clear autistic traits from a young age from my peculiar playtime rituals to my OCD hand washing (I sucked my thumb and I needed it to be clean!). When I started primary school, I refused to talk. Something I now know is called selective mutism which I still suffer from today albeit in much different circumstances. I wouldn’t even answer my name for the register. The school phoned my mother and asked what was wrong with me.. After they got fed up with me their solution came in the form of a new boy joining school – it was known he could be a bit of a trouble maker. So, they sat him next me in every class to ‘bring me out of my shell’. It worked: my personality flipped on its head and my behaviour deteriorated rapidly.

I don’t specifically remember too much after that. I eventually developed a way to socialise and communicate with people by replicating their traits and language, I still do this today. I was very popular at high school and got on with every type of character, I felt fine. The only time this mechanism fails is when I come across somebody who is exactly like me, its horribly awkward. But I used to put that down to them, not me. I realise I’m dragging on so fast forward:

For 10 years I worked in the same company (from home) and was married to someone who worked shifts. This meant I was getting a lot of alone time without realising just how important it was to me. This allowed me to fit in perfectly with everyday life, I could adapt and cope. We have a child together but the marriage eventually broke down. This was the first big change. I then changed jobs – I managed a team of 10 and commuted to an office everyday, it was incredibly demanding. It was not to last though as the company went into liquidation and I was made redundant on the spot. I now how a different job but still have to commute to an office. During this time I have a new partner and we have 3 kids between us and we’ve moved house twice.

I’m forced to be social everyday and my senses are very often overwhelmed and I get very little alone time to recharge. I’m very bad at going and getting my alone time though – I don’t want to abandon my family; I feel awful doing that. I have days where I’m ridiculously high and I have more energy than the kids but I also have days where I’m so low I don’t want to be around anyone or anything in the world. The worst part is I can’t communicate how I truly feel because I lack the ability to. This is when words become physically stuck in my head again (my selective mutism, I can’t talk about my inner most emotions) – this causes conflict because I appear to be functioning very normally until I breakdown and need my space. The cycles of my ups and downs are becoming shorter and shorter and are causing arguments and problems. We both have read a lot about Asperger’s but we seem powerless to cope with the issues it causes…

If you’re still reading, I thank you! I think what I’m asking is does anybody have any coping mechanisms or suggestions I could try? (Or maybe just some supportive words) I’ve read a lot but not actually addressed the community – what are your experiences on coping with family life?

Thanks for your time, it took a lot to write this. I've spent the previous 5/6 hours lying in bed in the dark after a particularly bad episode..

Parents
  • Hello and welcome! I’ve had two periods in my life where I’ve had a lot of change and a lot of stress in a short space of time and both times it has affected me really badly. The first was when I was 14/15 and in the space of a year my dad (who I lived with) met a new woman and got married; we moved house; we moved to a different town; I moved schools; my dad died; my step mum kicked me out and I had to go and live with my mum who I hated. I felt fine, because I usually do but I clearly wasn’t fine because I went completely off of the rails until I was 20. The second time was 2013-2014, we moved house; I had our middle daughter soon after; my stepson got kicked out (the 3rd of 5 times to date) and came to stay with us briefly and my eldest daughter had anorexia really badly, oh and my husband started acting like a complete idiot so that didn’t help either. That all had a really bad effect too. I don’t quite know how to explain it because every time I try to explain it to someone the explanation that I give doesn’t quite describe it accurately. I basically just had to shut off from certain people that were being really unhelpful and concentrate on getting my eldest better and looking after a newborn baby. I realised during that time that certain people that I had previously thought that I could trust, perhaps weren’t so trustworthy and it was also when I grew up a bit, prior to them I’d been a bit too reliant on other people’s opinions, I was quite bad at making decisions for myself. But I realised that other people’s opinions are exactly that, just their opinion, not fact and I started using my own judgment and learned to keep my own counsel about the majority of things. I’m sorry I have completely gone off on a tangent talking about myself but in doing so I was trying to show that I understand the effect that a lot of change in a short space of time can have on an Autistic brain. You can’t change what’s already happened but my advice for the future would be, if at all possible, try to avoid having to many changes in quick succession. Just have one change at a time if you can and give yourself a chance to fully adjust to that change before you change something else. I do understand however that life is life and sometimes lots of changes will happen all at once and they cannot be avoided. In this case I would advise having as much ‘down time’ as possible, because this is when we process information and change and anything else that needs processing and also try to concentrate on doing what you ‘have’ to do and don’t try to do extra things on top of that. I hope that this is a halfway useful answer?

  • I relate to that too.

    I don't think this goes off topic at all. To the contrary. I came to believe that for an autistic person, when pressure is too high, one of the standard procedures should be eliminating, blocking off toxic people. People that one trusted, but that proved to be abusive, people that undermine us, destroy our confidence, don't acknowledge out value and contributions, demand us to engage on their terms, focus on them, while never actually meeting our needs the way we feel is helpful to us. People that don't value us for who we are and prevent us from functioning.

    This:

    I basically just had to shut off from certain people that were being really unhelpful and concentrate on getting my eldest better and looking after a newborn baby. I realised during that time that certain people that I had previously thought that I could trust, perhaps weren’t so trustworthy and it was also when I grew up a bit, prior to them I’d been a bit too reliant on other people’s opinions, I was quite bad at making decisions for myself. But I realised that other people’s opinions are exactly that, just their opinion, not fact and I started using my own judgment and learned to keep my own counsel
Reply
  • I relate to that too.

    I don't think this goes off topic at all. To the contrary. I came to believe that for an autistic person, when pressure is too high, one of the standard procedures should be eliminating, blocking off toxic people. People that one trusted, but that proved to be abusive, people that undermine us, destroy our confidence, don't acknowledge out value and contributions, demand us to engage on their terms, focus on them, while never actually meeting our needs the way we feel is helpful to us. People that don't value us for who we are and prevent us from functioning.

    This:

    I basically just had to shut off from certain people that were being really unhelpful and concentrate on getting my eldest better and looking after a newborn baby. I realised during that time that certain people that I had previously thought that I could trust, perhaps weren’t so trustworthy and it was also when I grew up a bit, prior to them I’d been a bit too reliant on other people’s opinions, I was quite bad at making decisions for myself. But I realised that other people’s opinions are exactly that, just their opinion, not fact and I started using my own judgment and learned to keep my own counsel
Children
  • Reducing pressure as much as possible is also a really high priority. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded then look at what is essential and what isn’t essential, where can reductions in workload be made, can things be done in a slightly different way which will make them easier to manage?

    Yes, this,absolutely. Choose to drop non essentials and do things in a way that enables you to function. Unapologetically.

  • Thank you and exactly! I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. I absolutely do not function well when other people start putting pressure on me or when I am in a high pressure situation. I usually just want to escape from that situation ASAP and hide! As for toxic people, I blocked my own Mother out of my life 10 years ago because well, she was just emotionally abusive and extremely controlling and would you know I came off of antidepressants the next year and I haven’t had an episode of depression since then! I’ve managed to end up married to a man who in terms of personality is pretty much the doppelgänger of my Mother, a massive control freak (I’m sure Freud would have a field day with that!) it’s not a situation that I can escape from for reasons that are too long and complicated to go into here but I have learned (and have had to for the sake of my own mental well being) to emotionally detach myself from him and to apply my own filter to everything he says and avoid him as much as possible. I had to distance myself from my mother-in-law too as I realised that she wasn’t quite as good a friend as I had thought she was. Luckily she’s socially savvy enough to know that I’m very hard headed and seems to realise that she needs to play ball. Definitely cutting toxic people out of your life is essential, especially for someone with ASD, you shouldn’t have to put up with people in your life that are having a negative impact on your health.  Reducing pressure as much as possible is also a really high priority. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded then look at what is essential and what isn’t essential, where can reductions in workload be made, can things be done in a slightly different way which will make them easier to manage?