That doctor has no idea about Aspies and how ideal social life looks like 😛
My abusers/neglectors perspective pt. I Mother
One of the overly frequently encountered “helpful advice” one get when being on the receiving end of systematic long term abuse and/or neglect is that we are supposed to see things from the POV of the person being so hurtful to us. I do think this is one of the most destructive pieces of advice you can give to a victim because it keeps them from becoming a survivor and keeps them in a state where they excuse their abuser/neglector.
Also by and large the people being hurt are trained to see things from the hurtful persons POV anyway to such an extent that they often do not even have an own perspective. It’s all about the person actively hurting others and never about the person being hurt. We call that victim blaming.
To put some words where my words are I’d like to present you with the perspective of my parents. Because you know it’s all about them and I’m not good enough if I don’t. this advice is filled with so much wisdom and why haven’t I thought of that myself yet?
“mothers” childhood as told by her
Mother had a hard childhood. Which she does not hesitate to remind everyone of frequently. She was the third child and third daughter to her parents who had severe relationship problems and somehow thought having another child would fix things. Mothers two older siblings are 8 and 10 years older respectively and Mother always was the little annoying tag alongs.
My grandfather was one of those sexist idiots who was obsessed with having a Y-chromosome carrying offspring. So my mothers gender is her first failure in life. There’s this story floating around in her family that her birth certificate states that she is male. Apparently everyone thinks this oh so funny. Her second fundamental flaw is that she did not keep my grandfather from cheating. Obviously this is the task of the youngest child.
Grandmother allegedly found him in flagranti when Mother was 7. Before then they lived together with my grandfathers parents. Divorce was heavily frowned upon by the state and the church. So logically grandmother was punished for standing up for herself and consequently instilled a sense of worthlessness of this idea in her daughters.
A Narcissist’s Love Letter
Being a Child of Narcissists – what we need to give to ourselves
Being a Child of Narcissists – what we need to give to ourselves.
This is a very apt statement of what I need and I think many other abused/neglected and non abused/neglected people have the same needs. However I am doubtful that abused/neglected folks know how to do that. I shall try to switch my mindset. I have already stopped beating myself up mostly. I feel it might just be more covert now but maybe just working on sniffing out the bad stuff and stop doing that is already a plan for now.
confidence, self mothering and other potential healing tools
Over the last few months I have done a lot of reading about healing from being raised in a neglectful family. If we are going to assume that neglect is included under the umbrella term of abuse I found a meagre pile of resources, some of them moderately helpful. If we define neglect as a beast of its own as some people researching in the field do, I have found nothing I can recall from the top of the head that was even moderately helpful. Despite seemingly remembering that neglect is by far the most common way to acquire a mental injury no one seems to talk about it, no one has any healing to offer. The neglected, oh irony of ironies are still neglected.
From the aforementioned meagre pile of somewhat constructive advice I compiled this:
– being raised in any version of a non supportive household will cause your brain to develop differently
– among the dramatic difference in development is a loss of natural tendency to explore and learn, instead all energy is funneled towards mere survival (which is still not achieved by many nonsurvivors…)
– to date there is no known healing tool available that actually rewires the brains of those hurt by the people they are required to trust the most
– since the people you grow up with are usually your only possible way of acquiring food, shelter and mentoring you learn that whatever they do is safe and are conditioned to seek out similar people in later life
– any healing that can take place is essentially geared towards rewiring as in unlearning and relearning every experience you made in early life
– usually being raised in a non supportive household means that even finding ways of starting your journey to a healthier life is severely difficult because you were conditioned to fear, hate and run from supportive things
my journey pt. VII meet the family
The term “Narcissist” and how it might be detrimental to healing past the anger stage
Recently I came across this page for . The dictionary was somewhat helpful in finally understanding the me.
However the site got me pondering the matter of narcissism again. I’m struggling with the term narcissist and have been for a while now. My main bone of contention is how it seems so loosely defined that apparently every abuser is a narcissist to the point that the two terms seem to be interchangeable, so why have both? The core of narcissism seems to be a fundamental lack of empathy which in turn informs their abusive and/or neglectful behaviour. Narcissism and abuse/neglect seem to be causally tied together. Also many people I am reading about seem to permanently use the narcissist label to throw blame, hate and vilification towards whoever hurt them.
I am also curious about male narcissism and how things affect sons. My one grandfather might be classifiable as an enabler, but I’m not so sure about the second grandfather and my father. It feels a bit like autism with gender reversal where you only describe half of the spectrum (the male symptoms in autism and the female symptoms in narcissism) and pass it of as the whole thing.
the art of the walk
I have been recently asked how I learnt to go for a walk and the more I wrote about it the more I realised the therapeutic benefits of working on that particular issue of mine so I thought I might as well turn it into a blog post. Maybe some other hurt soul finds a way to lessen a bit of the pain. 🙂
I had a flatmate who i was regularly walking with. Her routes tho and on her initiative. But through such things I was aware of the general idea of walking for the purpose of walking. She now moved away and my new flatmates and I do not get along. Through the walks with my exflatmate I had some idea of how my surroundings looked like. In the beginning I would walk our routes, uphill among houses and alleys. I also began to walk to the the city centre instead of taking the bus. Since my sleep rhythm is somewhat more normal I didn’t always need to hurry to barely arrive at the supermarket at closing hour. So I could take my time take in surroundings. When I have been in a hurry I wouldn’t really notice anything, now I’d maybe see that this way extends to some unknown over there asf.
I love dogs so I would sometimes see dogs and their owners who looked friendly to me and I would ask the owner if I could introduce myself to the dog. Only one person has said no so far. Many people even are happy that they meet a dog lover. I really feel connected to non human animals so that kind of socialisation helped as well. Eventually I began to realise the path to the city which I used (pedestrians only, next to a stream) was part of a bigger path alongside one of the cities streams so I followed it up a little more and eventually began to explore the part of it that were less concrete influenced and more about trees and undergrowth. I grew up near forests so I liked that plus people there are normally rather relaxed walking their dogs (or jogging, pushing their toddlers for their nap, but i do not chat these people up. No doggie, no talkie).
I’d say I always felt people would judge me somehow. I had this obsession about always needing to have an answer to the question no one ever asked me where I was going. I felt “justified” in groups but never alone. Neglect teaches you helplessness and nonexistence. The less you are seen and heard the better for you. Going out for a walk FOR NO REASON is a quite obvious violation of that rule about neglect. Part of it is literally about carving your own path, being a person on a basic level. Existing. I still worry about so many pointless things when going for a walk (what if I go to far and I can’t walk back and my battery has died or I have no reception… blabla) but I plan to gradually overcome this and dare I say it might even increase the area I’m covering by using my bicycle, having picnics… you know getting daring 😛
Some of this might not help you. Maybe you are afraid of dogs of the idea of talking to anyone gives you nightmares or you don’t like nature the same way and would prefer the houses. But in the end the walk is about exploring. It’s mostly about you personally I guess. Another forbidden concept to explore around neglectful people. So you need to find a way to ease yourself into walking that works FOR YOU. The growth I have written about here took me a year. Each new addition to the walk (even the taking more time while walking anyway) took me weeks of anxiety getting myself convinced that it’s OK to do this and then even more weeks to get used to the idea of actually doing, trying to be less jumpy about it.
The walk starts with accepting the idea that YOU determine what is right and wrong for you. You can decide when you walk, where you walk and how long you walk. Who you talk to and what you say. A very complicated concept for me. I guess the best way to start is to open yourself up for experiments and review them, confront your fears little by little.
(autistic) relationship dynamics
I have recently been asked by a reader about a quote concerning autistic relationships. I feel quite honoured and flattered about being asked about my opinion by a passing acquaintance. 🙂
Also I thought this is an important topic for many of us one way or another so I might as well share it with a wider audience. This is the starting piece:
“Far too many people on the spectrum spend most of their days with people who carry around memories of, and are often too overwhelmed by incidents of, prior misinterpretation. This is no fun. In travel you can start over, and reinvent yourself. If somehow a relationship gets weird, you can leave and go to the next town, the next block, or whatever the case may be, and try again.” — Michael John Carley
First of, I have no idea who Mr. Carley is and am thus not familiar with his work. The reader in question told me he is on the spectrum himself and that’s pretty much all the information I have. Just in case there are ardent Carley fans out there willing to accuse me of slander. I have no reason to personally attack the man, it’s all about what he said and what I think about it. 🙂
For me punctuation and sentence structure in the quote is a little bit confusing. As I understood it it’s about people on the spectrum often being surrounded by people of whom they remember how said people misjudged the autistic person, misinterpreted them and so forth and how this is very painful. A possible way to counteract this is proposed as travelling and starting anew with other people.
Continue reading
Autism Acceptance 101: What’s The Big Deal?
very good post outlining what is wrong with awareness and light it up blue and suggesting what you could do instead. the only thing id like to add is that i do not feel anyone would need to be “aware” of all the boring nitty gritty unknown disagreeing details about the spectrum to accept me. awareness is work, just accepting i dont like onion is much less energy consuming. 🙂 go read this
revelations of loneliness
I have not written in a long time. Meanwhile I have contacted 60 hospitals treating traumatised patients, lost another long term friend very suddenly and both came with ugly revelations. But I am a person who has an uncanny ability to see a silver lining in every terrible thing that has happened to me and this ability has not left me.
I think for the first time in my life there is now no one I communicate with on a daily basis. I’m well and truly lonely and it’s given me time to think and understand some things. My biggest lightbulb is that my biggest problem was not that I was abused. Rather I have been emotionally neglected. Pete Walker has linked the pain coming from emotional neglect to a scenario that made me understand A LOT.
He said all (human) children are hard wired to know they should not be alone, they rely on their parents to defend them from predators, nuture them and keep them warm asf. So the fight for the parents attention to a young child (Walker cites the age of six) is a fight for survival. I’m pretty sure the idea that we are safe from my often invoked saber tooth tiger regardless of our elders actions or inactions does not compute yet for our brains.
Emotionally it’s still being left to fend for oneself when young = being in mortal danger.
So the pain I’m dealing with does not come from abusive messages such as I’m not worth the oxygen I breathe or whatever else verbal abusers say. My pain comes from not being acknowledged to exist at all. By the very people who are responsible for my existence. Which in a way is akin to not actually existing. To me it feels more brutal than killing me. But that might be overdramatising things and I’m not a fan of measuring my own pain against other peoples pain. Pain is pain. I just feel a need to verbalise my own, make me realise what happened. I’ve not even been worth my parents time to insult me.
rootless introspection 