Asperger's Syndrome Interview

so Asperger's syndrome it's difficult to boil down to a single thing because what it comes down to is that your brain is for lack of a better term wired differently than other people's and Asperger's syndrome is a specific brain rewiring that has a bunch of different effects and it manifests in a bunch of different ways but I would say that the most important manifestation of Asperger's syndrome is the inability to learn social skills through osmosis most children when they grow up they I mean humans are social creatures they run into other people and those people try to socially interact with them and they just sort of build up a library of social protocol you know what to do in certain situations through osmosis they just absorb it gradually as they grow up people with Asperger whatever mechanism is responsible for absorbing social knowledge it doesn't work as well and so because of that we often grow up not knowing how to interact with others socially and because of that we often end up being seen as the weird kids and that's not necessarily because we want to be weird it's because we don't know how to act normal I would say that even though there's a lot of stuff that goes into Asperger's syndrome if you are meeting somebody with Asperger's syndrome and you're unfamiliar with it your primary view would be this person is weird and I'm not exactly sure why and and it's because of the lack of social skills that they have Asperger's is on the autism spectrum so I mean it's related to autism but it isn't autism there are some things that make it different for one people with Asperger's syndrome tend to be more interested in social interaction than people with autism do so they try to socially interact anyway in a way that autistic people often don't but again because it's all on the spectrum like there are some lines and it's blurred and sometimes it's difficult to peg down exactly what Asperger's syndrome is and what isn't and I recommend you talk to a psychologist instead of just somebody who has it because I'm most used to my condition not how the condition is generally I believe that it's called Asperger's syndrome the researcher who first named it and I guess discovered it in that they found that there is a category of people who are all exhibiting different symptoms you're saying how does it manifest with other people I know that for some people myself included often Asperger's syndrome could also come along with a sensory overload the inability to differentiate between important and unimportant signals in the world around you so just like I mean the feeling of your clothes on your skin is something a lot of people are able to tune out more often than for instance I would be so I tend to wear more softer come more comfortable clothing in order to try and reduce the unnecessary stimulation things like that it's people are more flexible when they have Asperger's syndrome it's something they've been that's been proven there's a correlation between flexibility and where you are on the autism spectrum I don't even pretend to understand why that is but I can't put my feet behind my head I mean like there's a lot of things that goes into Asperger's syndrome that I think are kind of tan jeddak to what most people at Asperger's syndrome would define as their main problem if they were asked you know how does it feel to be asked me so I was originally diagnosed with a DD because I had a hard time paying attention in schools and because of that I was working with counselors and the counselors thought that there was something strange about the way that I was developing people with Asperger's syndrome often tend to have stronger math and some science skills and things like that and so just based on the way that I was acting in school they thought that it would be a good thing to screen for and they did and they found out the type was definitely a speii and for a lot of people having Asperger's syndrome like I mean that's a label and we've been taught not to label people but I have always felt as though being labeled to somebody with Asperger's syndrome is actually a tremendous advantage because the moment that you figure out not this kid is weird but this kid is weird because of this specific set of circumstances it allows you to tap into you a set of resources that has been specifically developed for people with your condition so that you don't have to rediscover everything on your own I think that having a label gives you great power in that it connects you with other people who are able to help you and I mean once my parents that like they said that when they read the descriptions of Asperger's syndrome they just looked through it one line at a time said yeah that's my son that's my son that's my son and and it was like reading a book about their child and about how specifically to help their child and it was a great thing after that I started working with like speech and language pathologists and some counsellors and things like that I remember like they had these books that showed facial expressions it's like here are 25 different ways that people can have an angry face and so if you see any of these variants of angry it means that you're probably doing something that might be offensive you know something like that whenever my father would see me doing something wrong socially he would say okay Brennan here is a script that you can use so that if this sort of thing happens again this is how you navigate out of it and as I was growing up through middle school I basically just my way of interacting socially was that I would have a very extensive library of scripts you know this happens do this if this happens do this if somebody inexplicably looks you know frustrated with you apologize and ask them what you're doing wrong and try to develop a new script based on that you know just all these different ways of interacting and it wasn't until high school that I started being able to extrapolate from them general principles that helped me I don't know if it's going to be something that can be generalized to the entirety of the Asperger population I was diagnosed with a DD because I had a hard time paying attention in class and that was because I was really really bored in class like I mean my father was teaching me long multiplication and division when I was in second grade just due to the way that ass bees tend to be better at math and stuff like that I was reading when I was two years old I was like I mean all these sorts of things when I just got into school I was bored they were saying things that I already knew I had no interest in rehashing stuff that I considered to be beneath me so I would act out instead you know I thought that it was kind of interesting I would do something weird and unexpected just to see how people would react socially and generally it was with anger but sometimes not and so I they considered me to be a DD because I was off the walls and uncontrollable but that was mostly due to boredom not due to actual attention deficit disorder aspies have the ability to hyper focus in especially in their subject area almost to the exclusion of other things and so because of that like it we don't have a DD and it's the opposite we tend to be hyper fixated on one specific thing to the exclusion of everything else and that's what causes more problems than anything else I'm trying to think back of where I was at in middle school and what I wish I had known I contact is way more important than you give it credit for I contact is the way by which people signal interest in one another so even though people's faces are generally pretty boring and you don't want to look them in the eye because there are more interesting things in rooms to look at you should look them in the eye anyway because it is basically a way of saying you are worth paying attention to likewise if somebody is not making eye contact with you as you are trying to talk with them it's a pretty strong indication that they do not want you to interact with them socially and you should find some polite way to try and exit the conversation you know thank them for your time and leave in something like that I would say it's very important to realize that people are invested in trying to maintain their image if you ever do something that causes somebody to lose face whether intentionally or not then they will start acting in a more hostile manner towards you because they view use a threat so always be very aware of what people consider themselves to be good at and try not to challenge them in those areas always try to be aware of who might be watching the person that you're interacting with and try not to make them look bad in front of those people which might also mean that you need to pay attention to who the people are watching are and what they consider to be important especially with teachers teachers are a very bad person to accidentally embarrass make sure that there's turn-taking in conversation when I was younger I felt as though if I managed to retain control like narrative control over the conversation that it was less likely to go awry because the chances that somebody else would say something that would cause it to deviate off script would be lower but if you don't give people a chance to respond in a conversation then they become bored and no longer wish to interact with you so make sure to give them time and in all honesty you will have a better conversation even if it goes slightly off script if you give them the opportunity to say things than if you just try to be the person who talks the entirety of the time just don't give up you might feel like there are a lot of doors closed to you but there are also a lot of doors open like I haven't spoken too much about it because I don't like talking about it because I feel like it's bragging but there are strengths that come along with Asperger's syndrome you know you have a mind that works more logically and in some ways less emotionally and so that gives you a lot of power in certain fields and disciplines computing mathematics because of that there are people who will be incentivized to want you in their company or in their lives or something like that and because of that as long as you are able to act socially socially passable then I mean people are willing to forgive a few faux pas especially if they understand what's going on through practice you can become more socially adept it will come slowly and it will only come through hard work but you can train yourself to be more socially skilled as long as you don't give up finally like I would say do not allow the label to define you allow the label to help you I have a lot of friends with Asperger's syndrome that have missed out on a lot of offer because they have decided this is the way that I am I cannot change and so people should adapt to me instead of me adapting to them and when that happens then you dam yourself basically because you keep yourself from growing once you've decided that you are acceptable as you are and if anybody does not accept you that the problem lies with them you stop growing you stop learning it is always worth it to learn how to become more socially acceptable because in the end if you can do a decent imitation of normal then that will give people enough chance to learn who you really are and to value you as a person but if you can't learn to do a passable imitation of normal then people will reject you before they get to know you and if they don't get to know you then they have no reason to see all of your strengths this is going to be my high horse so I'm married with a child I'm married to somebody way better than I thought that I was ever going to be able to qualify for and I think that when it comes to being in a courtship relationship when a romantic relationship when you have Asperger's syndrome it's something that is difficult but not impossible the thing that you need to know is there going to be many people who are going to give you scripts social scripts about what girls want or how to date or things like that and they're all junk they're all junk the thing is is that every girl is different and because of that every girl has a different set of social rules that you need to learn that apply specifically to the girl in question and if that happens and you can end up becoming the perfect girl I mean the perfect a boy for a girl without necessarily being the perfect boy for any girl you don't need to be romantic you don't need to be a pickup artist you don't need to be suave you you just need to be the person who is right for the girl that you are interested in in my particular case I tried to learn the rules for courtship and I learned them from the religious leaders of my church and my parents and other adults who I thought would be in a better position due to their experience to be able to tell me these things than my peer group would because my peer group is just trying to figure it out on by themselves as well and but the problem was is that I learned an ancient and somewhat outdated method of courtship you know you bring them to movies in the now for ice cream afterwards you bring them to plays Mozart's Magic Flute and music compresses girls that sort of thing and when really what courtship is all about is getting to know a person I had been warned against hanging out you know you want to go on dates they should be paid for and planned out and paired off and that sort of thing but that actually came across as very intimidating to girls I would go out on dates with girls and they would say why is he bringing me on so many fancy expensive dates when we don't even know each other yet in the end what is most important is to figure out the social expectations of the girl that you are interested in and then adapt yourself to those social expectations be your own couple and reject the advice of the rest of the world because in the end if the only social rules that you learn are the ones that matter for the girl you're interested in then it the then that will all pay off for itself when you become the perfect person for that girl don't give up pass B's can get married I've gotten married that's the thing that can happen make sure that you establish a relationship with dressed as soon as possible and because the sooner they know that the reason why you're off around the edges is because you're trying and not because you're just weird the better off you'll be having a relationship of trust in which a girl can say look I find that sort of thing highly unattractive just so you know and you can say oh thank you for letting me know I won't do that again that's way better than just having the girl say okay thank you for your time and then leaving and thinking that you're weird the sooner that you can get into a style of relationship in which you have that open and honest feedback the better you will be at iterating over your social routines so that you can be better at not offending or disgusting or frightening girls I would guess strongly that Bill Gates has Asperger's syndrome just based on the way that I've seen him interact I don't necessarily have like a list of famous ass P people but I mean people who are for lack of a better term geeks or nerds the sort of people that you know don't talk as well or don't dress as well because you know that might look somewhat slovenly but are really smart and do amazing things in the field of math or science you know that those are people that I would personally relate to whether their ass be or not the the strengths basically I mean our minds for lack of a better term run on an operating system you know everyone else in the world runs Windows and we've run Linux in our minds and so a lot of the social programs that have been developed for Windows we've got to pour it over and figure out how to make work on that but our unique operating system also gives us strengths you know we can do certain things faster more quickly more reliably than others and that it can give us power okay here's a good example I was in college I think I was a sophomore in college and I had a wireless battery powered razor in my pocket because I had absent-mindedly stuck it there a few days previous and hadn't taken it out so I'm sitting there at a table with my friends and I realize I had forgotten to shave this morning and I was just feeling embarrassed that I was unshaven because that's the thing that you should I mean that is culturally acceptable in provo is to always be shave and I'm like well luckily I just have my shaver in my pocket so I took it out and I started shaving and then I just stopped and all of my friends are just looking at me and I stop to it and I think okay some whatever I'm doing must be socially inappropriate based on the facial expressions of like everywhere from mild embarrassment to shock that people are giving me what could I be doing that's socially inappropriate and I started thinking back I'm like okay I'm shaving that's out of the normal and it just popped in my head shaving is something that you do in a bathroom and things that you do in a bathroom are generally not socially appropriate in the Wilkinsons center and so I apologized and I said I'm sorry I didn't even stop to think this might be strange if he could excuse me for a moment and I went and shaved in the bathroom instead but like that was just something that didn't even dawn on me that shaving at a table with my friends would be a problem but but then like in retrospect it's like well yeah I mean that's just failure to generalize from things that are done in the bathroom should not be done in public that that's sort of the thing and if you can imagine especially for somebody who is young with Asperger's syndrome take a faux pas like that and then multiply it by like 50 per day and that's what it feels like to be asked you're just constantly doing things wrong all the time you're offending people you're making people angry you're saying the wrong thing and it's all just because you don't realize that there's a rule against it you don't realize that socially speaking there's an entire library of different things that are just unspoken but you're supposed to know and if you don't do them you're weird and nobody will tell you why and and that that I think is probably one of the best examples I could think of what it's like to be asked me my experience the speech and language pathologist has been that in addition to being able to help people with like affective disorders like stuttering or stuff like that that they also are able to help people who say the wrong things at the wrong times my speech and language pathologist was very good about being able to help run post-mortems on what I would do if I went in I'm like I was just talking to this kid and then suddenly he got angry and left she would say okay you know let's replay the conversation tell me exactly what both people said and we'd go through it and then she'd say okay here right here here is the problem you know you said this this caused him to think about this which caused him to become offended about this which is why he left like when I was in elementary school I I thought that having a large head implied that you were smart so I tried to compliment one of my friends by saying you look particularly big-headed today and they got upset and then my speech-language pathologists told me that that was because big-headed is an idiomatic expression that means like they're full of themselves or they're prideful and so I'm like oh that's something I don't want to do so the next time I saw that person I'm like I apologize you actually you're relatively small headed and then because I was trying to undo my earlier mistake and he got even angrier and so like I went back to the speech-language pathologist and said no not being small-headed is an idiomatic expression meaning they're dumb and so like I went back to the person I'm like okay look I'm really sorry actually you have a completely normal sized head and that's okay and then you just thought that I was weird and I mean so I mean like a speech and language pathologist if you do something like call somebody big-headed and then they get frustrated and you don't know why because you're trying to tell them that they were smart you know a speech-language pathologist is the kind of person that can help you debug what went wrong in in something like that a safe space for you to say I don't understand why people are getting annoyed at me what am I allowed to say what am I not allowed to say don't talk about the sizes of people's head it's just a lose lose lose situation you you can't win just just don't don't say anything in that regard the first thing to do is to build a relationship of unflinching honesty especially for people with Asperger's syndrome just the entire social dynamic around what you're allowed to say when can be very confusing to navigate and if you just have a policy that it's like look you can tell me anything at any time and I can tell you anything at any time it just cuts through the fog and suddenly you have somebody that you can ally with because instead of always having to be on your toes about like oh the text say the right thing at the right time you've got somebody who is also willing to dispense with the social game and just say what they really mean instead of saying what is supposed to be said and confusing convoluted situation once you develop that a relationship of trust then what you can do is you can start telling your ass beloved one when they are doing something socially wrong in a way in which they can feel trusted that you love them anyway a lot of people think if somebody is weird the best thing to do is to not mention they are weird because mentioning it it is going to make them feel worse about themselves but that's entirely the wrong tack to take for somebody with Asperger's syndrome if they're weird it's not because it's just who they are it's because they are trying to be normal and failing in some way and the closer that you can and the more quickly you can work with them to determine where that disconnect is and to help them be normal the happier they will be because they want to act normal they know that it is only by acting normal that they will be able to have healthy normal relationships with the majority of the world so that that's what I would say don't don't just ignore their weirdness but bring it up to them say hey you might not realize this but shaving is a bad thing to do at the table with your friends you know that this is something that you should probably do in a bathroom because otherwise you will get weird looks and people will think that you are strange that's something we want to hear we want to learn how to interact with others be patient with us we're really trying and we're trying the best that we can and if you give us the benefit of the doubt and explain to us where we're going wrong then we can fix ourselves and we will try to learn how to be more appropriate and more socially appropriate don't don't reject us necessarily because we don't follow the same social protocols I know that it can be very unnerving for people to have somebody who is not acting is socially in the way that you would expect them to be and some people would say oh it's dangerous you know if he's going to break these social rules what other rules are they going to break and in all honesty especially with an Asperger's syndrome not many were moral people we know that we aren't supposed to do anything dangerous we it might be uncomfortable to deal with us sometimes but but it doesn't mean that we are dangerous in any way and we respond to feedback pretty well

Channel: Lifey Health

Views: 466,364

Rating: 4.9214911 out of 5

Keywords: asperger's, syndrome, interview

Id: A6zqyYBnVnY

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2017