Category: Uncategorized
-
Comfort Item(s)
Comfort items can be trinkets, clothing, blankets, really anything item that can bring comfort or assurance. My comfort items have changed over the years and I also have comfort items for different scenarios. When I am feeling overwhelmed, lost, and/or alone, I often put on my Dad’s high school football sweater. I also used to…
-
Protective Physical Stance/ Body Position
This past summer, while taking a class to learn a new hobby, I was made aware of my body positioning. During this class, each of the participants were working one-on-one with instructors to learn body movements and timing. As I watched my classmates practice the sequence, an instructor asked if I had hit my shoulder…
-
Following Along – Listening to Others
Listening to other people’s stories is an important aspect of developing and maintaining healthy relationships with friends, family, peers, significant others, and the general community. However, struggling to listen to or being engaged in conservations/information outside of your areas of special interest is common for Asperger/Autistic individuals. When talking through this specific tendency with my…
-
Sensory Overload ≠ Meltdown
A couple of weeks ago I had what I would have previously called a meltdown. I was overwhelmed and went into a lower level of functioning where I was having a hard time functioning at all. I would swing between being “okay”, deep crying, and blankly staring into the abyss. When I would try working,…
-
Learning to listen to myself
Learning to listen and pay attention to the emotions and physical sensations of my body has been an interesting journey. I am by no means saying that I haven’t felt emotions or physical sensations, quite the contrary, but now I am trying to listen to the signals my body is giving me and interpreting them…
-
Rationalizing lies
Something that I have always been good at is rationalizing my way into or out of a decision. I never really understood why I did this, but recently I realized that I likely have to rationalize my actions because lying (even if small) is not a strong suit of mine. Nearly a decade ago now,…
-
Need for explicate language
About a month or so ago, I learned a characteristic about myself that, apparently, everyone else in my life had already known, but never specifically stated. I have a big personality. It blows my mind that I was completely unaware of a defining characteristic of how the outside world perceives me. I learned of this…
-
Learning emotions: being excited vs being in an excited state
Until recently, I didn’t have the capacity to differentiate many of my emotions. I’m not sure if it’s the wisdom that comes with age, conversations with my therapist, the settling of many years of reading and listening to researchers dissect and explain emotion, or some combination of the three; but slowly gaining the ability to…
-
Deciding not to share
When I was first validated by my therapist that I was on the spectrum, with what we both recognized as Asperger’s Syndrome, it felt like everything finally made sense. I finally had some reasoning behind why I didn’t “pick up” on clues other people seemed to easily recognize and some explanation behind specific quirks and…
-
Breaking through the mask
Once I had finally found a therapist with Asperger’s Syndrome experience (so much so that Asperger’s was the topic of her dissertation), I was beyond excited. At last, I thought, someone who will understand. During the first couple of sessions, Dr. Gia and I worked through my most recent (at the time) relationship that had…
Asperger Female 