writefln and ASCII

[Steve Horne]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:08:52 +0200, Don Clugston <dac at nospam.com.au>
wrote:

>Steve -
>I don't know why I read a thread with a boring title like "writefln and 
>ASCII" -- but I'm glad I did. I've read your post several times to try 
>to get a better understanding.

Ah. Be careful with that. Consider...

1.  Balanced and reasonable
2.  Mostly accurate
3.  Venting out of control

Multiple choice. Which is the odd one out? ;-)

>FWIW, in your posts I've read you've come across as highly intelligent 
>and friendly. You'll always be welcome here.

Thanks.

Just at the moment I'm wishing I hadn't posted, though. But I did.
John has written a lot that deserves a reply, but I'm not properly
rational right now and I can't think straight. Give it a few days and
I'll probably hope the topic never comes up again.

There's something that I need to say right now, though, and I'll just
have to hope I'm rational enough that it makes some kind of sense and
that I don't end up regretting it tomorrow.

When I said about that 30 year quest to be socially acceptable, that
sounds (even to me) so much like I spent all my time going out being
needy. That is just so far from the truth. And of course, venting, I
paint the world blacker than black. No, I don't believe it either.

When I said that I pretty much invented cognitive behavioural therapy
for myself, and then immediately vented about the long term failings,
I of course didn't say that it wouldn't have gone on for so long
without at least superficial successes.

Well, the fact is, I realised by about age 18 that most of the bad
that was happening to me was actually simple cause-and-effect reaction
to what I did. I left school at 16 believing that the world just hated
me automatically, but the world outside of school could only sustain
that belief for so long.

What pseudo-CBT did for me was allow me to conquer those immediate
self-destructive patterns. In the long term it replaced them with new
ones, but that's besides the point - I _am_ getting to one, honest!

I went back into education and did well. I became employable. And I
made a point of going out to meet people.

When you have Aspergers, you can go out and meet people all you like,
and you will never have friends. Its not a prejudice thing or anything
like that. If you make the right adjustments, you can have
acquaintances by the hundred same as anyone else, every one of them
initially open to friendship. But there's a kind of wall that you hit,
that exists for many reasons - not just one or two - that makes it
impossible to get past that.

What I have come to understand from book learning and from experience
is that friendship cannot happen without certain processes happening,
and without maintaining a pretty delicate balance. One of the
fundamental balances that needs to be maintained is that of personal
disclosure.

The truth is that I'm a very good listener. If you actually do care
about other people and how they feel, there's only a few hurdles to
overcome.

But you can't become someones friend just by listening. Its out of
balance. It makes people uncomfortable. You can't just soak up
everyone elses feelings. You have to share your own life too. And you
have to start small and build up gradually, in balance.

At the acquaintance level, no big deal. Superficial conversations are
no bother. We can all share our feelings about the weather.

But at some point you hit the fundamental fact that your life
experiences are different to everyone elses. Talk about your real
life, and that is always going to be too much for them to deal with.
There are no real bite-sized portions. There is no real ordinary life
to talk about.

So either you hide your real life, or you reveal too much too quickly.
There is no possible balance - no middle ground.

Of course it's not just people with Aspergers who have this problem.
People can be sympathetic. The vast majority of people will not be put
off immediately by this kind of disclosure. But the sympathy runs out
pretty quickly. After all...

1.  The nonverbals are wrong. Cue distrust and a feeling of being
    manipulated.

2.  It's hard to hear a disclosure like that without hearing a demand
    for sympathy. While most people have a lot of time for people who
    are already their friends, that doesn't make them responsible for
    all the worlds problems. That's the demand that people will
    percieve, even though you're just trying to find something to
    talk about.

3.  The feeling is that you should be talking to someone who is
    already a real friend anyway, not an acquaintance. As I said, it
    is out of balance.

But what happens when you quite simply have no real friends? When you
quite simply have no normal life stuff to disclose in the process of
building friendships? Answer...

1.  You hide everything, and everyone percieves that as you not
    letting them in.

2.  When you do disclose, no-one is ever comfortable with you again.
    You're either a charity case or a needy irritating pain or
    whatever.

3.  If you're really blockheaded, you don't spot the signs until you
    really push people past the tolerance level. People are convinced
    that you're deliberately winding them up and get hostile.

4.  Run through 2 and 3 enough times and you get fed up with it, for
    obvious reasons.

In other words, hiding everything and accepting that you can only have
the most superficial acquaintanceships is the only real option - the
easy life, the comfort zone.

Of course in that situation, you do get needy. You get to the point
where a week or so on a technical newsgroup is the biggest outlet
you've had in two or three years, and that's enough to open that fatal
crack in those mental blocks.

But in real everyday life, it's listening that I miss much more than
talking. Maybe its because talking always ends so badly, maybe because
there's so little in my life I'd want to talk about, maybe it just
means I'm an emotional vampire, whatever.

But I find people to talk to. Begin an acquaintanceship. Listen. And
just at the point where I form some kind of bond, starting caring
about that person as an individual rather than just as a fellow member
of the human race, that's the point when that person gets aware of the
imbalance. And so it ends. Most people stay superficially friendly,
but thats it.

Over and over and over and over again.

The only real exceptions are the people who really are on the take,
the people who talk to get your trust and then exploit it, and the
people who are even more needy than me. There are some people who
really are genuinely desperate for someone to talk to. But even that
is always short term, and then the imbalance hits.

Well, almost. Occasionally, just very occasionally, you start to get
to the point where maybe that person might consider you a friend.
Trouble is, that's also just about the point where you're too
overloaded to cope and burn out. You just can't deal with anything
much at all for a while. To them, it presumably seems like just as
they've make an effort to be open despite the wierdness, you vanish
off the face of the Earth for no reason, or maybe you're physically
there but just totally mentally absent. Either way, you can't become
friends with someone who isn't there.

When you're frustrated and angry it's so very easy to say that other
people are uncaring or prejudiced or whatever. It's not just bullys
who need scapegoats. Victims need someone safe to blame, even when
they're just victims of cruel fate.

But what really hurts, for my money, isn't being actively attacked or
rejected or ignored. It's when there is simply no-one and nothing that
you can really care about. When one way or another the chance to care
is always cut off. When there really is nothing outside yourself.

People with Aspergers are infamous for their strange obsessions.
Perseverations, some call them, and that term ties in with
neuroscience, with problems with the lateral prefrontal cortex and the
working memory. Not to mention another infamous Aspergers trait -
hyperfocus. And of course when you are disconnected from societies
standards its easy to form socially unexpected hobbies. There's lots
of explanations, including the popular 'they're just wierd'.

I have particular sympathy with the working memory thing because of
personal experience. I know full well that no matter how much I want
to focus on one thing, I can keep on realising over and over again
that I've been thinking about something else for the last twenty
minutes. It's no fun fighting your own brain!

But it doesn't cover it all. And there's always a key point to
consider. Why would the working memory form an abnormality that
results in this pattern? Is it really just a broken connection? Maybe
it's just habit, or conditioning. Maybe, when there is nothing of
meaning in your life, no-one that will tolerate your caring about
them, the easiest thing is to distract yourself from that. To redirect
your caring toward something artificial and safe, because even
superficial caring is better than nothing. And when that pattern
carries on year after year, it eventually gets hardwired.

The term, IIRC, is 'displacement activity'.

Simon Baron Cohen is supposed to be one of the top experts in autism.
He has drawn connections between autism and sociopathic personality.
He points out that where sociopathics are very good at communicating
with others, very good at giving the impression of caring, they
consistently use that ability to manipulate others for their own
benefit. There are strong social skills, there is a strong appearance
of caring, but there is no real caring at all. He acknowledges that
these things are substantially independent of each other.

Yet then he insists that people with autism cannot actually care about
others. That the lack of social skills and the inability to appear to
care must imply a genuine lack of caring. In autism, he say, they
simply cannot be independent. He offers no reasons or evidence, even
though on other things he apparently can't move on without listing
every piece of evidence he has well past the point of absurdity. It's
just his belief. His intuition.

It's not true of myself. It's not true of other autistics I've met.
People on alt.support.autism have posted experiences remarkably
similar to my own where they've made efforts to try to empathise with
others, tried to help others, and screwed it all up big time making
things worse. It's often a huge concern - not just the resulting
hostility but even more the hurt we've caused and feel responsible
for.

The appearance may be of being selfish and caring only about no. 1.
And yes, at times it is the truth. With social contact being as
distorted as it is, it may even be the only truth that others ever
see, for some of us. And for all I know, maybe for some autistics, it
really is the truth - just as its true for some non-autistics.

Even so, appearance and reality are not the same thing.

This is probably going to look just as passive-aggressive (you have to
feel bad because I feel bad!) and attention-seeking as my last post
seemed even to me, looking back. But if people are going to take ideas
away based on the stuff I say here, I don't want it to all be my
saying "the world is evil, everyones evil". I don't want it to be the
impression that people with Aspergers are just needy selfish idiots
who expect to take all the time and never give, and throw temper
tantrums when it doesn't work out.

It's an easy impression to get. It can easily end up fitting all the
observed facts. Even some of the experts support it. But it's just not
true.

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