writefln and ASCII

[John Reimer]

Steve,

Normally, I'd avoid responding to something that might be controversial...  
ok maybe I would anyway :)... but you seem like a open fellow.  I'll be  
straight shooting concerning my thoughts on this.  I assume you understand  
that I have no ill intent or desire to offend, and that I merely am  
sharing my thoughts on the matter. I do care, as my lengthy response on  
the matter hopefully reveals.


> 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.


I tend to think that "friends" are over-rated.  Just have a very few that  
are devoted to you (and you to them, of course) and worry less about the  
others that probably aren't trying very hard to know who you really are  
(or, perhaps, they are too caught up in themselves to care).  People are  
fical and undependable, as a rule.


> 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.
>


Yes, that's the ugly reality of human nature in this world.  People prey  
upon other's weaknesses... corporations tend to do that too.  Corporations  
are more dangerous because beaurocracy makes them increasingly impersonal,  
which separates the decision makers from seeing the immediate effects of  
their actions.


> 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.


I have very little faith in "neuroscience" having the faintest idea of  
what makes the human brain "tick".  From Freud to now, it's been an  
amazingly arcane amount of guesswork that often amounts to almost useless  
monikers for "things they don't understand" -- it's become a case of  
choosing labels for those that don't fit into societal norms.  I'm not  
denying the relevance of Apserger's or Autism.  I'm just saying that what  
is labelled a disease these days has become pseudo-science of conjectures  
and theories in a changing social climate (for example, many past  
generations had social norms that would be considered "misfit" today).   
Perhaps you've had a look at the altercations and disagreements that occur  
between neurologists and psychologists concerning the workings of the  
brain.  That can give a picture of how clueless these branches are about  
what's "really going on in there".


> 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.


People are social creatures, true.  That can never be denied. Some more  
than others, however.  But we suffer in proportion to what we feel we are  
missing out on.  The more we long to be accepted, the more painful the  
rejection becomes.  Often, though, we seek to be accepted by individuals  
that have the wrong motives or an abysmal character. Sadly, few look  
deeper than the skin, feeling no obligation to persist beyond that  
(because that's too much work). Friendship is an investment that few are  
trully committed to: thus, if we hear that a certain person has many  
freinds, I highly doubt the truth of that observation; it's more likely  
that that person has a social knack of attracting attention and  
popularity, something that doesn't hold to the death.  If having friends  
is the social norm, then I feel little obligation myself to be accepted by  
the social "norm" of today.  I'd rather count on a special few dependable  
creatures for that comfort.


>
> 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.
>


I can see this can be hard.  But I think you highly overestimate how many  
people are really coping.  True, these people are coping perhaps in the  
social aspect.  They may even find that socialization is an escape from  
the painful realities of this world.  But much fewer people are really  
/really/ coping, than you might imagine.  Socialization for them is likely  
just a balm.  You may not be able to use that resource as the same kind of  
balm, but you may adopt other methods of coping.  My point is that many  
people are in pain in other ways, and are just barely coping no matter  
what their outward appearance may try to show.  Yes, people do cope  
differently with different stresses.  Some have no trouble handling  
situations that would send another crazy.  But, that, once again is no  
irregularity in human nature.  There's always something else missing in  
one individual that is present in another.  Often these things aren't  
readily apparent, however.


> 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'.


Like I said, I strongly believe that you won't find the answers in  
psychology.  These are full of information about behaviours and  
experiences that can't be grasped, seen, felt, nor trully experimented  
on.  So, these books are full of the most imaginative descriptions that  
amount to desperate attempts to analyze how the brain functions. Since the  
brain is so poorly understood, disagreements and unknowns abound in those  
fields.  Their study is as limited as their perspective that the brain is  
merely a chemical/electrical entity (which granted is the limit of their  
perspective).


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


When I write all this, I don't belittle this fact.  I feel for those that  
experience this.  But in my experience, there are many ways a person can  
arrive at the same point of mania and depression.  Simple physical pain  
can also accomplish this.  I'm not arguing this point with you, of course.


> 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.


That is the nature of learning to do almost anything complicated and  
sounds much like me trying to improve my communication abilities on the  
job.  I'm sure, despite how you feel sometime... the process of learning  
how to do these things does bring about minor successes over time... if  
one persists.


>
> 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.


Well, I assume you mean, "not wired up the way the social norm is".  There  
is a huge burden and peer pressure to be socially acceptable in this world  
and it's fostered in the public school system (if ever there were a  
cloning system, that's it)... but that seems to change with the time.   
It's my personal opinion that expending energy to adopt the social norm is  
not the greatest ideal to persue, especially if it means circumvent being  
honest about yourself.  While I say that, I do admit that I find myself  
trying hard to be accomodating and pleasant socially.  I succeed most of  
the time, but I still consider it work in some situations (That's coming  
 from a person that has no claim to Asperger's :) ).

Really the whole root of the matter is whether we are willing to give  
without receiving.  Whether we are willing to forgo our pride and ego, at  
the expense of recognition (this is my observation for myself and may have  
no relevance to your situation, I admit, since I don't really know you).

If we depend on others to fulfill our purpose and acceptance as a human  
being... I think we are tight-rope walking on a thread.


> 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.


Hmmm... if this were the case, there would be no standard at all as to  
which brain is wired right. Your brain would be just as valid as any other  
as long as it could survive.  A theory of evolution does little to clarify  
anything in this case.  It does more to make one wonder why there aren't  
millions more miswirings, in the grand scheme of things, if evolution is  
an accurate model of life.  Despite this one "difficiency", your brain  
does function /mostly/ like other human brains.  It's much easier to  
postulate that a genetic contribution or environmental influence, yet  
unknown to all, was a contributing factor... no need to go back millions  
of years to describe the problem. :)


> 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.


That describes some electro-chemical observations of the brain perhaps.  
However, there is /no way/ a scientist can know that there is no way to  
uncondition it. Such statements have got scientists in trouble before,  
much to the surprise of many.  So most honest scientific journals these  
days will qualify that they "just don't know."

Please don't take this as my saying that there is no reality in this  
condition.  I merely stating that, physical observations of brain function  
are severely limited.  Scientists don't have a complete perspective, so  
it's much guesswork as to what is going on, or what can and can't be  
overcome.


> 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.


Yes, that must be a challenge in a world that demands people to fit in or  
get out.


> 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.


I've seen that attitude before.  It seems to be a defense mechanism.  It  
shows that the same sort of intimidation and rejection exists in any  
sub-culture, the only requirement being that the culture be filled with  
human beings with the same social advantages or disadvantages.  So we'll  
see the "misfits" (ie, any set of nerds, like those of us in this D group  
:) ) treating each other the same way to some extent too.


> 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'm sorry to hear all that. This must be very hard. :(


> 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.


Hmm... Have you considered the searching for the Christ you mention above?  
No, I'm not being facetions. I'm serious. You may have been looking  
everywhere but the right place.


> 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.


That's fine.  You express yourself very well... can't complain about  
that.  I hope you don't find my responses more aggravating.  If this  
discussion gets too big, feel free to rant to my email address instead. :)


> Sorry. It won't happen again.


No problem.  You should see some of my past rants... I'm surprised I  
haven't been summarily booted :D... oh right, this list is not moderated.  
pheww...


> 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.
>


Pyschologists have no law!  They have one big pot that they brew and it's  
full of conjecture and hypothesis... well that's being otpimistic...it's  
almost entirely guesswork and many ideas are hotly debated with their  
neurologist counterparts.  Psychology appears to be about the messiest and  
most indeterminate of sciences.

Sorry for my long post in return.  And please don't take any offense from  
it. :D

-JJR