What Are People With Aspergers

How do people with Aspergers act?

It varies hugely. But we tend to be shy, we may speak in a monotone or with unusual vocal inflections, we tend not to make eye contact. We can be awkward in everyday social interactions — many Aspies can’t naturally read facial expressions and may not have expressive faces or body language either. Conversations can be punctuated by pauses as the Aspie thinks about what to say (not mine, LOL). Small talk is toxic to us. We can also go on too long about one of our special interests, or have poor timing in conversations. We can have meltdowns and shutdowns if faced with perceptual or emotional overload. Often, we don’t feel empathy, though we want to do good and do the right thing. We lack guile and rarely lie or play social games, but we can also inadvertently say inappropriate or excessively honest things, as children sometimes do. We can’t “read minds” — that is, if you aren’t direct with us, but hint instead, we won’t get it. We can be funny. We can also be Spock-like. And we also frequently have a childlike Peter Pan quality to us. Someone once described me, and the other Aspies she knew, as having a sweet disposition — but we can sometimes become enraged, and then watch out!However, lest you be scared off, I’d point out that my biographical sketch above is accurate — I know of only two people who guessed I might be an Aspie; those who missed the diagnosis included several clinical psychologists and me. Some Aspies are like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man — his character was based on two real life Aspies — but in practice, many Aspies are just slightly eccentric geeky types and you wouldn’t know. Typically, we become better at navigating the neurotypical world as we age and at some point, it can be hard to tell us from anyone else, because such eccentricities as we still exhibit overlap the behavior of others — for example, lots of people are shy and don’t make eye contact, not everyone is emotionally expressive, etc.

Why are people with Asperger's hard to relate to?

Assuming you mean “for someone Neurotypical” to relate to, the answer is pretty simple.Because most of you are not consciously aware of how many signals you exchange with your facial expressions and tone of voice and body language.You grew up with that, that language meant something to you before your native tongue. Mom’s smile, Dad’s frown, your sister crying… it all strikes an emotional chord even as an infant, and it is used to teach you how to behave socially. You take cues from this stuff more than you do from speech, if some studies are to be believed.Someone on the Autism Spectrum, on the other hand, doesn’t “feel your pain” unless you can explain it to them, or unless we have studied your alien-to-us ways and learned to decipher some of those signals that are innate to you. And we don’t really tend to understand all the subtle social rules that you’ve internalized, again in many cases since before you knew what “mama” meant.You see before you an awkward graceless tactless and blank faced person… maybe not even really a person, because they don’t respond right, don’t say or do the right things, don’t give out any emotional cues of their own nor respond as you would expect to your own cues.How can you relate to that?You don’t even know what’s wrong, what’s missing, it’s just somehow… not right.And humans, sad to say, tend to respond to “not right” in a fairly negative fashion.Your best hopes are either to make long term acquaintance with ASD people, and gradually get over your disease at our oddity, or to find ASD people who are fairly good at the learned-skill we call “masking”, which is to say, pretending to have those innate reactions by deliberately smiling when happy, frowning when sad, and so forth, studying the unspoken social mores and cues, and learning how to pretend to fit in.Many of us are pretty good at it. However, you probably aren’t having that same “hard to relate to” experience with any of them, you probably don’t even know they are on the spectrum. Maybe they seem a little odd or off, but you probably think that’s just eccentricity.So if the only ASD people you notice are ones that are hard to relate to, you think we’re all hard to relate to. And you’re…not wrong. But you’re not right either.Funny world, isn’t it?

Why do people with aspergers get offended easily?

I have a friend with a very strong case of Aspergers. She will interpret things differently than other people and take it as truth. One great example of this was when she visited me one day:My mom: “Oh hi! How are you? Are you hungry? Would you like some food?”Her: “No thanks, I’m fine.”later…My mom: “Hey, it’s lunch time, you guys want something to eat?”Her: “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”at around 5…My mom: “Hey you’ve been here for a while now, and you still haven’t eaten. You sure you don’t want anything?”Her: “That’s fine. I should be going soon anyway. It was nice here. Goodbye!”next day at school.Her (to our friends): “Yeah, I was at his house for a long time yesterday, but they didn’t give me any food.”See, that is technically not a lie. And it was how the day got stuck in her head.Only it was like this with her in every situation every day again forever. You would do something together, and she’d just remember it… wrong. It wasn’t like she was a bad person or intentionally lying, She just… interpreted reality differently from the rest of us.And if you’d try to point that out, she’d get really angry, like she didn’t understand what the problem was, or like you were lying to her.I don’t know if this is anything like your situation, but from my own experiences, people with Aspergers can seem to get offended easily because to them, it seems like you’re trying to lie to them about something they saw differently with their own eyes.Imagine having to go through that every day. People telling you that your life was different than how you remember it. How long before you’d snap?