Considering my poor social skills and lack of understanding as to how to negotiate relationships, how do I find someone patient enough and understanding enough to do that “we” work with me? The only friend I have offline is my husband and he is at a complete loss as to how to help me. He has pretty much quit addressing my spectrum needs except in cases where he sees me headed for complete disaster. Otherwise, the best advice he has is, “quit overthinking things” since he doesn’t understand that it’s not overthinking for me: things don’t come to me instinctually and I *have* to think my way through interactions. He seems to believe that if I could just let go of all that “obsessive overthinking” and “just let things happen naturally” that I would relate to others perfectly. So, obviously, he has zero understanding of asperger’s and is not really any help to me other than making phone calls for me or telling me word-for-word what to say the next time someone says “x” or “y” to me. (Although what usually happens is that no one ever says “x” or “y” again and, instead, they say something else confounding that I struggle to answer and, once again, get myself into trouble.)

The relationship situation has gotten so bad that I’ve quit going to church and when I find another church to go to, I am going to be careful to avoid interacting with anyone if at all possible because my relationship disasters ruined my place of worship for me and I don’t want that to happen again – I have to keep attempts at social interaction and worship separate or one will mess up the opportunity for the other . . . and how does that make me a member of the Body of Christ if I can’t even talk to any other members?!

There is a center in town for treating asperger’s in children and adults but they don’t accept medicaid. That is the catch-22 for me: if they understand asperger’s, they don’t take medicaid. If they take medicaid, they don’t understand asperger’s and end up giving me advice that’s no more useful to me than my husband’s. And I have tried to negotiate with a therapist who doesn’t understand asperger’s to help them understand it and be able to work with me on what I need rather than what they have been trained that neurotypical people need but . . . we come full circle: I don’t have negotiation skills so I’m unable to get out of neurotypical-oriented therapy what my asperger’s brain needs.

Am I just stuck this way for the rest of my life?

I was reading the post above and I am amazed this woman actually found a husband when I for years have difficulty even falling in love with the same person who falls in love with me. In some ways, I am afraid of getting married. I guess the spectrum affects everyone differently. On the other hand, social conflicts for me are rare at church, and I get actively involved. The only time they come is when I try to get several people involved when I need something with so little response. I recently moved and switched churches, which actually I am glad for this because there so much more communication going on in the new church. However I do miss other single people around me.
Tell the client above I am working on starting a group for Christians on the Spectrum. The more people I find who are interested, the sooner I can begin planned meet ups.

To Brian: I need to work on it with someone other than my husband because in the nine years since I’ve been diagnosed, the topic of asperger’s cannot come up without it turning into a huge argument that leaves me in tears and him too angry to continue talking. He has never had an easy time accepting my diagnosis and when I ask him for help, the discussion generates into an angry lecture that makes me want to run away and hide. I think I need someone more neutral to the whole situation to help me.

I’ve long since gone through GRASP and there really isn’t anything here other than the one center I mentioned. I live in a metro area of 50,000 people and it is the second largest city in the state so that should give an idea of how rural this area is. When it comes to services for adults with asperger’s, rural automatically equals under-served. I’m willing to put in plenty of time to work on this. I’m in the process of earning a doctorate degree right now and I strongly suspect that if I *don’t* put in the time to try to learn what I am missing, my doctorate will be nothing more than a useless piece of paper.

But money is seriously lacking. We live on $600/month and that’s just not enough to pay rent, buy food, buy medical supplies *and* pay for expensive therapy that I really should have had as a child (if only anyone had known back then!)

To Natalie: I met my husband online. He is handicapped and needs me to take care of him. His condition has gradually gone downhill so I recently had to learn how to drive a car so I could get the groceries for us because he can’t even do something so small as go to the car, drive me to the store, wait in the car, and drive me home anymore. Without me, he wouldn’t eat or have someone to change his pressure bandages or any of the many things I do for him.

As for my side of things, I was very financially needy and had spent a lot of time homeless so I jumped at the offer of someone to take care of me. I have had bad luck with not being able to support myself because I can’t hold on to a job (now I realize that it was the asperger’s getting in my way but I still don’t understand enough about what I did wrong all those times to be able to know where to even begin to fix it so I can keep a job — which is a big source of concern for me because I will graduate in a few years and the university’s career assistance center is trying to teach me how to interview for jobs but everything I do is wrong and when I try to fix it, they say that everything else is wrong and they are trying to help me understand what is right but there is something lost in the communication and I’m just not getting it.) and before my husband came along I frequently lost my place to live because I couldn’t keep a job more than a couple of weeks (and no one ever told me why they fired me so I don’t know what to fix) so I was very glad to have stability. He is a good husband and doesn’t abuse me and encourages me when I feel like giving up on school and I feel very glad to have a stable life now (at least for now. I do worry about what I will do when he dies.)

But this whole thing of “have difficulty even falling in love with the same person who falls in love with me” . . . I have struggled to understand what love is and came to the conclusion that either I have no idea what love is and have never experienced it and may not be capable of experiencing it or else the gratitude I feel for the stability my husband brings into my life and my desire to help him with the basics of life in thanks for what he has given me and the happiness I feel at knowing that I am safe from abuse and homelessness and hunger . . . maybe all that is exactly what love is and I just took a long time to realize it because the descriptions I see of love are so confusing to me and don’t talk about things like gratitude for stability . . maybe because things like that are so basic and obvious to neurotypical people that they don’t even think to mention them.

Oh, and a group for Christians on the Spectrum sounds like a great idea and I hope God blesses your project. I have seen several groups like that online but never one for Eastern Orthodox Christians so I haven’t participated in the online groups. Over the years since I was diagnosed, I’ve only once found another adult (online) on the spectrum who is also an Orthodox Christian. I’m not really comfortable outside my religion and I’ve found that Western expressions of Christianity are too different from my religion for me to feel at home.

Sadly, I wouldn’t be isolated religiously if I didn’t have social issues. The parish church is just a few blocks from my house.

I think Autism Women’s Network is the group I left because one of the founders attacked my life choices. She said I was wasting my time getting a degree and I should just drop out of school and go get a real life. She told me she wasn’t saying that to be mean but that she is a former professor and so she knows that I’m wasting my time and that no one will hire me with my degrees. And she said she supported women with autism but she couldn’t stand co-morbidities and didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone with a co-morbidity. I think when she said that, she was hinting that I am one of the people with co-morbidities that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with but she didn’t say that directly so I might have interpreted that part wrong.

Of *course* I’m not going to drop out of college after I’ve gotten this far! I was a high school drop out and tried several times to go to college in the past but my life was too unstable to keep up with classes. It’s only been with my new life stability I have with my husband that I have been able to be successful at university and I am all the way to the doctorate program now after a lot of years of hard work and I want to be a professor so it would be very foolish of me to leave school now when I’m almost to the end!

So instead I left that group. I never had felt very comfortable there anyway. They said it was a group for support but they got mad if anyone actually asked for support and it always felt to me like it was really a group for very successful career woman who wanted to change the definition of asperger’s into some brain condition that makes women very successful in their careers. While that may be a true definition of asperger’s, it is not very useful to me as it does not match my experience.

There was social censure in that group if someone talked about something difficult or wrong with their life and I started to feel ashamed of my life because I am not as successful as everyone else in the group and because I felt like I was getting the social message that I had to hide my failures like some dirty little secret. I’ve long since learned that if I feel ashamed of myself in a group of people it means I need to find a different group of people to be with because it’s not good for my mental health to spend time with people who make me feel small and inadequate.

I have some good friends with asperger’s in my facebook and they do not make me feel small and inadequate. They make me feel like they care about the real me and they make me feel protective of them, wanting to encourage and nurture them. But they’re struggling as much as I am, some of them much more than I am in many ways. So we’re good for each others’ encouragement and self-esteem but when we try to help each other it feels like we’re a bunch of blind archers shooting arrows in random directions and hoping one of them hits. I wish I could be more helpful to my asperger’s friends and I wish they could be more helpful to me but I’m grateful for what we are able to give each other, which is support and encouragement and a sense of being valuable to each other.

You misread me, Brian. My experiences with my friends on Facebook have been absolutely wonderful. It was my experiences with the Autistic Women’s Network that were bad.

I do ask questions. People get really frustrated with me and sometimes raise their voice and say I’m asking too many questions or they say things like, “come on! You know the answer to that!” But I keep asking them because it’s the only way I have to know what’s going on. I just wish I knew a better way to ask that didn’t make people upset. Even my husband loses his patience when I ask questions and he knows me better than anyone and knows there are so many things I don’t understand unless I’m explicitly told.

Thanks for the advice, though. I do appreciate it because I know you’re busy and I don’t expect you to give away for free what you do to earn a living.