Life with Aspergers

So, you've been looking through the lists of aspie traits and you've found one called "taking things literally". You read about it and it says,  'The person may not understand jokes, sarcasm or figures of speech, such as, "It's raining cats and dogs."' They might look outside for falling animals.... Awwww.... How cute. So, you ignore it and move on to the  next symptom. My latest post over at Special-ism looks at an example of what taking things literally really means and why it's important to take this issue seriously; Hop over and read it; Taking Things Literally; An Issue that Matters by Gavin Bollard http://special-ism.com/why-taking-things-literally-is-an-issue-that-matters/

Over the last few weeks, I've read several blogs where aspies have described their interactions with the law. In every case, the incidents were blown out of proportion by the tactics of the police and the social difficulties experienced by the aspie. I too have had difficulties with the police (and other aspects of the law). Misunderstandings My first major police incident was as a teen being pulled over for speeding. At the time, I had an old car which took forever to warm up and I really knew very little about cars. The car was misbehaving and I thought that maybe it needed to warm up (in actual fact, it was overheating due to a burst water filter). I tried going fast to warm it up - and that was when the police turned up behind me. I told the police that there was something wrong with the car and they just laughed and said "yeah, what? the brakes?". Luckily I knew to just keep quiet otherwise I'm sure they'd have tried to take things further. Following the W...

It's funny but I usually don't feel like I get tripped up taking language and expressions literally. Not the way classic aspies do anyway. I'm generally clear about my expressions when I use them both in real life and on this blog. If I decide to use one: for example; "beat around the bush", I'll usually enclose it in inverted commas. Even when talking, if I use an expression, I'll either use a different inflection or I'll draw virtual inverted commas as I use it. So yeah, I like to think that I'm immune to expression problems. Even so, I've had my share of bad ones most notably my "bring a plate" cringeworthy example. I don't think I'll ever recover from that. It was very, very embarrassing. Then of course, there's the time I asked someone how badly they needed to use a toilet because ours was "only for emergencies". My wife, of course loves to remind me of the time I changed a tyre by throwing the old one a...

I've often talked about how I believe that marriage encounters helped save my marriage but I've never really gotten deeply into the mechanics of the thing. Funnily enough though, the more I talk to aspies in marital crisis, aspies who have survived the crisis and aspies and partners who "crashed and burned", the more I understand exactly what marriage encounters armed me with and why, out of all the various marriage support agencies in existence today, it stands out as the one offering the best chance to couples with at least one aspie partner. Whether the organisers realise it or not, the marriage encounters programme is particularly tailored for the aspie mind. Spoilers As part of this series of posts, I'm going to have to "spoil" some of the secrets of Marriage Encounters. For this, I apologise in advance. If you're already booked in on a course, or if you're definitely going on one, you should probably ignore these posts - I think it's...

How an Individual Education Plan (IEP) is Structured An IEP is designed to be a "flow-on" document where the issues are identified up-front and the remainder of the document covers methods of dealing with them. The IEP will start with a bit of information about the child, the diagnosis, who is present at the meeting, etc. I'm not going to cover this bit as it's simply box-ticking on the form. The first part of the IEP will attempt to ask and answer two questions; 1. What are the child's strengths and interests? 2. What are the perceived weaknesses of the child? It is important to get these questions properly answered as the entire remainder of the IEP will reference them. This post will attempt to provide some background on the sorts of things that should be in these areas with particular emphasis on their relevance to the aspergers condition. Keep in mind though that aspergers manifests itself differently from one individual to another and that all c...

Social interaction is very difficult for people with aspergers for a number of reasons including; Difficulty Achieving and Maintaining Eye Contact Difficulty reading body-language and tone Problems using non-verbal gestures and tone Intrusions from the Special Interest (Disinterest in other topics) Difficulty keeping away from Detail Short Term Memory Issues Language Issues I've already covered eye contact in earlier posts, so I won't cover it again here. Body Language and Tone I don't think that the aspie has any trouble determining when someone is annoyed. That sort of body language and tone is usually strong enough. Most of the time, the problematic body language seems to come from humor or generalizations. For example; I have terrible problems when someone insults me with a smile on their face. I'm never sure if it's a genuine insult or "just mucking around". If I assume it's a genuine insult and retaliate, I could start a fight. If I assume t...

Much has been made in the literature about the rigidity of the Aspie. A good example of this is their "resistance to change". Often the observed behavior isn't a resistance to change, but a binding to a particular rule or rule set. The aspie is, to a certain extent, controlled by rules. The impact of these invisible rules on their behavior should not be underestimated. It is often a source of conflict and can also be the source of aspie depression. Where do these Rules come from? The majority of the aspie's rules come from their own environment. They can be communicated directly or implied. In some cases, the aspie will completely misunderstand directions and create an internal rule that isn't necessarily in their best interests. Changing these rules is difficult, especially when they've been in force for an extended period. An example When I was quite young, a grandparent saw a boy give me a "suck" on his chupa-chop (a lolly on a stick). Obv...

In my last post on taking things literally, I covered things that were mainly from a child's perspective but this time I want to cover a more adult view. Wordplay and Jokes There seems to be a widespread belief amongst doctors and related practitioners that asperger's people don't get jokes, don't understand metaphors, and don't read body-language. This is wrong, very wrong. From what I can gather, based on my own experiences and on reading posts from a lot of other aspies, wordplay is fun and we definitely understand it. Also surprisingly, aspie children understand it too. My earlier post with my son talking about becoming a joey illustrates that. I'm inclined to say that not only do aspies understand wordplay but that they may often be better at it than non-aspies. Due, at least in part, to their need/ability to consider multiple-meanings for phrases. I touched on this in my earlier post. So, where's the problem then? It seems that the problem is ba...

The literature often talks about Aspergers people taking things literally. The most common example of this being a child who is told to "pull their socks up" actually bending down to do so. Now, before I go into the whys and wherefores, I'd just like to ask my "normal readers" to stop and think about this line for a minute. What exactly is it telling you to do? What would someone with less familiarity with the English language think? I'm forever explaining things to my kids as "the English language is really quite silly" and "they shouldn't really do things like this but..." because a lot of the problems stem from the language itself. I'm not sure why normal people pick these things up faster than Aspergers people but I think it's to do with usage. Asperger's kids often have at least one asperger parent and while they've long since learned what these words mean, they don't use them in everyday speech, hence th...