Aspergers Syndrome and Adults

Many people who know people with Asperger’s Syndrome, or have someone with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) in their families write me exhausted and exasperated as to what to do to help the person with AS in their lives. Can you help someone with Asperger’s or is the help just perceived as too stressful and too intrusive? Do you feel frustrated and like your every effort to help the person with Asperger’s in your life just makes things worse? As a life coach, it has become apparent to me that this is a common experience for many a neuro-typical (NT).

As a woman diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in adulthood, perhaps I am still finding my way in some respects. I don’t know. However, this aspie is not quite getting social networking. I wonder, is it just me? I’d love to hear from other aspies about what they get or don’t get about social networking and social networking sites. What do you like about social networking and what don’t you like and why? Could it be that the word social, even from behind a computer screen, still packs a punch that leads to similar confusion online as it can so easily, socially, in “real life”? There’s something about being in my own world behind my computer screen that leaves me not so enthused about too much interaction what seems often intrusive interaction. Interaction whose purpose is at times not very clear.

Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome often struggle with a profound social isolation. Some feel it more than others. For some it is managed but for others it leads to despair and for still others it could factor into feeling like one wants to commit suicide.

Many who have Asperger’s Syndrome are either described by others or describe themselves as living in another world. What does that mean? Is that true? What is it about having Asperger’s Syndrome that leaves us, at least part of the time living in another world?

Adults with Asperger’s Sydrome (AS) really know what it is to live life and to exist, be and differently function outside of the Neuro-Typcial (NT) box which is all-too-often held up as the measure by which we all must be held to standard.

Neuro-Typicals (NTs) often wonder if those with Asperger’s Syndrome really feel love for others. As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), in my own experience, I think that what is more at issues isn’t so much what someone with AS feels or doesn’t feel but can they communicate what they feel or do not feel in a way that NTs can understand.

What is the impact of Jenny McCarthy’s experience with her son Evan wherein, according to McCarthy, her son is cured? Is he cured? Do people with autism or Asperger’s want to be cured? Is it something that needs fixing?

There is a legacy left in the wake of childhood and adolescence lived unknowingly superimposed upon what is the foundational hard-wiring of difference and social disconnectedness that are central to the reality and scope of Asperger’s Syndrome and that form different ways of thinking and perceiving that are outside the ebb and flow of the landscape of the stratum of social terra firma.

How should neuro-typicals (NT) treat those with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS)? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that communication is constructive and/or clear? Is it all up to those who do not have Asperger’s Syndrome to make things somehow better in relating for those with Asperger’s?

Learning that one has Asperger’s Syndrome as an adult is a different kind of challenge than those who find out with systemic and parental support and guidance in childhood. It gives one pause for much reflection.