writefln and ASCII

[Steve Horne]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:47:26 -0700, "John Reimer"
<terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote:

>Your post was well within the toleration margin of this group.

OK - so maybe I'm being paranoid. Sorry.

>And if that's the worst Asperger's can do for a person...  

Try spending a life with people always getting upset every time you
speak. You realise that people are misunderstanding what you say so
you try to say it more carefully and more precisely, never realising
that people take that as being ever more patronising and insulting,
apparently ignoring the message in favor of this 'metamessage' thing
that you have no clue about.

You try to make friends, and just piss people off, always getting it
wrong. And when you get overloaded with stress and can't cope any
more, but no-one understands why and you have no explanation either,
so the 'metamessage' that gives off is apparently 'I reject you'. So
then, those people have no tolerance for you when you do turn up.

And all the time, there are people willing to exploit the outsider as
a convenient victim and scapegoat. Who understand that because your
non-verbals are all wrong and because you are always going to be an
outsider, that you will never be believed and that they can exploit
that.

One neuroscience study says people with Aspergers experience the
maximum levels of stress that the brain is physically capable of
experiencing an an everyday basis. Spending every day in a world war 1
trench might be *almost* as bad as having Aspergers. And yet Aspergers
is called mild, because it exlcudes some symptoms from classic autism,
as if total blindness was just mild deaf-and-blindness.

And of course with a life like that, where every social contact
results in traumatic stress, and where you can never be accepted by
others, in the end it's easier to pretent that's you wanted to be a
loner all along. But it just isn't true. You can't wipe out social
needs so easily.

But clearly it's you that is broken. Everyone says so, and everyone
else copes fine with this social stuff that's so hard and painful.

And so you embark on a 30 year mission to work out what's wrong with
you, and to try to fix it. 

You invent cognitive behavioural therapy pretty much for yourself. You
spend years training yourself to feel the stress and do it anyway,
practicing everything you can to be more socially acceptable. You
swallow hundreds of psychology textbooks. Social psychology, abnormal
psychology, cognitive psychology, etc etc. Training yourself to reject
those irrational ideas like 'people just naturally reject me' and 'I
can't get this right'.

Only all that just leads you into more and more severe cycles of mania
and depression, until you break down completely.

Well, I say 'all'. But lets face it, there's much more. All those
attempts to develop more natural body language, to adjust your
conversational style etc - those deliberate attempts to control your
nonverbals etc all create a clear impression that you are deliberately
manipulating and decieving people, and that you can't be trusted. Not
to mention the fact that book knowledge is naive and simplistic, and
even that is impossible to do in real time when you have to think
about it all the time (plus follow the actual topic of conversation).
Things just go from bad to worse.

And at the end of the 30 years it turns out that actually there is no
fix. Those irrational beliefs were never irrational at all. Your brain
never quite wired up right at birth, and as a result you cannot do the
things that other people don't even realise they are doing to make
themselves socially acceptable.

Apparently, as close to a good explanation as you can get for autism
is that the evolution of larger brains is recent. Evolution isn't a
perfect process. If you get an excessive dose of big brain genes, your
brain growth can be too quick for the processes that wire it up in
early childhood.

Exactly which symptoms you get is a matter of chance, but there are
particular trouble spots. The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are
key problem areas, and the interaction between them in particular.
This is why so much goes wrong with instinctive non-verbal
communications channels - facial expressions and tone of voice, and
even 'reading between the lines'. It's why people with Aspergers have
problems with organising themselves and with obsessive/compulsive
thoughts and behaviours - the lateral prefrontal cortex holds the
working memory. And it's also why there are so many problems with the
stress response - the amygdala triggers the stress response in reponse
to instinctive and conditioned triggers, taking its cues direct from
the sensory processing areas of the brain. To cancel the stress
response, you need long distance connections from the prefrontal
cortex. Fragile long distance connections. Without them, every single
bullying or other stressful event conditions the stress response to be
even more paranoid, and there is never any way to uncondition it.

And when you have a permanently active stress response, that in itself
does physical damage. Brain cells literally fire themselves to death.
And so the defence mechanism gets regularly activated - clinical
depression, the bodies desperate attempt to mitigate the damage from
the stress response. But of course no-one understands that either.
Even psychologists are in denial of what neuroscience has proved -
that using drugs or whatever to magic away depression is like
destroying the immune response to magic away a fever. In the long run,
it just causes more damage.

Not to mention the simple fact that our distorted social experiences
mean that we can never learn the things we need to learn either - we
learn from different social experiences.

But what the hell. We're just geeks and freaks after all. Even people
with other disabilities know that its OK to look down on us, to
pretend that there's nothing really wrong with us beyond the fact
that, of course, the "there's something wrong with them" attitude that
justifies the victimisation. And since everyone knows that the world
is basically fair, that bad things only happen to people who deserve
them, then clearly we must deserve it all.

Oh, and five years after diagnosis, I've had pretty much everything I
ever worked for taken from me. As for help, there has been some,
unofficial mainly. Without it I'd be dead so I hate to minimise it.
But right now I haven't had any real help for years. And lets face it,
that help means that although I've lost my job, I do recieve basic
incapacity benefit - though not disability, of course, because I can
see and walk. And although I've lost my home and been forced to move
away from the only support network I have ever had, I'm not actually
homeless.

I've been in a waiting list just for a counsellor for years, for
christs sake. Just for someone to talk to since I'm completely
isolated. Even my own mother and father cannot accept me as what I
actually am, rejecting it out of the fear that if its real then it
must somehow be their fault, or by some magic power they should have
understood and helped better when I was a child. Meanwhile, all those
people with dozens of friends and short term problems get help on tap
- counselling in a matter of months, for instance.

So why don't I just help myself? You forget. I already spent 30 years
trying to do that. After all, avoidant personality disorder is
widespread among people with Aspergers - thats *social* avoidance,
caused by the constant traumatic social stress and failure to ever
form normal peer relationships. And compulsive self-reliance is a
normal symptom of avoidant personality disorder. We don't sit around
passively letting stuff happen to us, as the stereotypes say - we
obsessively work towards trying to understand and solve our problems.
My case, where I've gone to the extreme of studying cognitive
neuroscience, is a bit extreme but what the hell. It's not like I
could have been out meeting friends or anything instead.

So no, it's not the worst Aspergers can do.

Now you know what happens when I really rant about an actual, real,
serious grudge. Seems with a single line you pushed me from my normal
bottling-it-up with a slight passive-aggressive leak, to a full temper
tantrum.

Sorry. It won't happen again.

Time to get back to distracting myself from this stuff. Though I dare
say that that coping strategy is against the law according to
psychologists too.

-- 
Remove 'wants' and 'nospam' from e-mail.