Healing sibling relationship...

Quirky I do admire all your efforts to keep your family grounded, talking and together. Psychological intervention and family therapy etc just wasn't around in my youth. Feelings and emotions barely got mentioned let alone strategies to facilitate them. Working on relationships of any kind just didn't happen. So I bumble on and am ill equipped for such things. I am interested in the subject of siblings. Apart from 2 nieces diagnosed with dyslexia no one else is. But Ithink there are plenty of signs that aspects of ND are within my family. As those of you who have read some of my other posts will know, I have only recently had the asd diagnosis. So some of the things other people are talking about bring up memories or ahah moments but I'm finding it quite difficult to see what my place in the family is now. Also the memories generated are not particularly comfortable so I'm sort of avoiding them. My diagnosis has essentially been ignored, some resentment has been expressed , no understanding or support offered.. why should they , they have their own lives to lead. My mum shielded me a lot and did her best to include us all and keep us as a unit. We don't live near one another.Now she is gone that has changed. I know I feel uncomfortable about it all but I can't untangle it. And because I can't untangle it I don't know if I am supposed to do anything about it or not. I suppose I'd like to know about other people's families brothers or sisters in particular. How you did fit as a child and how you do now as an adult and how you are as an adult bringing ND to the surface.

Quirky I do admire all your efforts to keep your family grounded, talking and together. Psychological intervention and family therapy etc just wasn't around in my youth. Feelings and emotions barely got mentioned let alone strategies to facilitate them. Working on relationships of any kind just didn't happen. So I bumble on and am ill equipped for such things. I am interested in the subject of siblings. Apart from 2 nieces diagnosed with dyslexia no one else is. But Ithink there are plenty of signs that aspects of ND are within my family. As those of you who have read some of my other posts will know, I have only recently had the asd diagnosis. So some of the things other people are talking about bring up memories or ahah moments but I'm finding it quite difficult to see what my place in the family is now. Also the memories generated are not particularly comfortable so I'm sort of avoiding them. My diagnosis has essentially been ignored, some resentment has been expressed , no understanding or support offered.. why should they , they have their own lives to lead. My mum shielded me a lot and did her best to include us all and keep us as a unit. We don't live near one another.Now she is gone that has changed. I know I feel uncomfortable about it all but I can't untangle it. And because I can't untangle it I don't know if I am supposed to do anything about it or not. I suppose I'd like to know about other people's families brothers or sisters in particular. How you did fit as a child and how you do now as an adult and how you are as an adult bringing ND to the surface.

I was a bullied miserable kid. My Mum bless her taught me a valuable lessons early about bullies - that they were scared of exposure, so making friends with the other targeted kids would keep me and them safe because we had witnesses. I experienced bullying even in University.

I was diagnosed dyslexia when I was 14 because my Mum got sufficiently pissed off the school claiming I was not trying. I had 10 sessions of coaching on the rules of spelling and on estimation so I knew if math problems were in error by a factor of 10 or more because I'd misread. Those helped hugely.

School was not the right environment for me, and I scraped through my equivalent of A levels only because the math teacher took time to rote teach me the methods tested in the exam (51% was a huge success). I failed English though but fortunately had a top grade from internal assessment the previous year that could be used as proof I could enter university.

I took a year out and worked in hospital kitchens and this taught me when to stand up for myself and when to ignore the bullies. I also experienced the benefits of being very fit for the first time in my life. School expected us to play team and ball sports and neither of these things is good for a DCD kid.

At university I was given access to the cal lab to the first word processing computers and I could write double spaced in exams so I could correct errors. I went from a middling B- student to a solid A student and got a 2:1 in my honours and a distinction in my PG diploma.

My diagnosis of DCD happened after I started work in the NHS and it was by chance because the OT specialist realised the wee new grad dietitian was like the kids she treated.

Through my work I've always looked for practical solutions to avoid messy writing and truly questionable mental arithmetic. It's lead into becoming an inadvertent specialist in health information systems... being ND I get obsessive interest and that's helped develop the specialist skills.

I've also got a strong diagnostic sense especially for ND and I've done advocacy for diagnosis on a lot of occasions often in workplace settings where the person is heading for capability. I've been fortunate to find bosses who like my skills and trust my judgement about people and their "other abilities." 

My weak spot is depression and anxiety. I'm not easy to live with and finding love with someone who "got" my brain was a bit of a tortured journey. Fortunately I wasn't particularly interested in having babies and later found out I couldn't so that made things a bit simpler.

SO sought assessment early on in our phone based courting. Although we'd known each other previously he'd been married and we'd been out of contact for 6 years before life put us back into the same circles and we realised we needed to try a relationship even if it was long distance. 

8 years on and I'm in the thick of step parenting in a ND family. My extended family have some diagnosis and some undiagnosed NDs. 

It helps that we have a term we've used for several generations in relation to the women who were ND and convention breaking. We have called them "tiger women" (William Blake's Tiger, Tiger), and so even the fierce independent women have a space in my extended family. The modern world has benefited us in that we do respond to modern antidepressant meds and we know the risk of addiction we carry alongside the gifts the ND bring us.