Part 5 – My Venture Into Asperger’s – Eye Contact
This is Part 5 of 10 of My Venture Into Asperger’s and it is a biggie for me. As usual I will start out with a personal story and then show how that links into Asperger’s. This post is primarily about my struggles with eye contact.
To most people eye contact, that is looking into the eyes of the person you are talking to, is a normal process. To me it is quite painful and it always has been. It is as though I am looking into that person’s soul and that is just someplace I don’t want to go. Whenever I do it it is almost as if I freeze up and stop thinking. I have never understood why I feel this way when so many others don’t.
Even in my early childhood I imagined that something was seriously wrong with me. Why was eye contact so painful? As I got older I managed to have “roving eye contact”. That is I would occasionally glance into someone’s eyes while mostly looking elsewhere . That worked pretty well for many but then there were those who almost glared at me when I did that.
As I was graduating college and ready for the job interviews I knew I had to do something as people would find out I was defective during an interview if I didn’t look them in the eye. Fortunately it didn’t take too many interviews before I landed a job. I almost took the first offer officially given in order to not have to do anymore interviews. Looking back I think the lack of eye contact was also probably one of the reasons I had few second dates.
When I became deaf at the age of forty in some ways it was almost a God’s send. I could now just watch a persons lips and therefore didn’t have to look into their eyes. People would understand that was what I had to do and therefore not expect eye contact. It actually made my life a little easier, at least in that issue…
Now lets see how this relates to Asperger’s:
An Aspie Point of View — Eye contact hurts.. no, not in the painful sense but it’s quite uncomfortable. I always feel that I’m revealing more than I want to with eye contact and that I’m receiving more information than I want to know.
This was my primary “aha” moment in my discovery of Asperger’s. I found out that my pain in making eye contact was not just me but others felt it too. It was soothing in a way to understand it might be a neurological problem shared by others. I wasn’t totally weird after all. This revelation started my journey where I discovered many other personal aspie characteristics.
I like being a unique person and in a way Aspergers helps me be just that. Wouldn’t it be boring if all of us were the same? I am now half way through this planned ten part journey into Aspergers but maybe it will go beyond that point and into a regular weekly post. It is that important to me and I hope you will get some additional insight into this syndrome.
Recently I visited the Zoar Village in central Ohio that is one of the few villages where the whole town is on the National Register of Historic Places. As is often the case Zoar was platted by by Germans escaping religious prosecution by the Lutheran church in the early 1800s. It was a communal colony but unlike most did not discourage gawkers so it has a rich pictorial history that I hope to bring you more of in future posts. For now just enjoy some of the buildings found there. It shamefully seems that many of these type sites are falling out of favor with tourists so if you are in the area give them a visit and maybe a small donation.
In order to live any sort of reasonable life, you cannot be constantly flipping out about the inevitability of onrushing death.You’ve got to summon up some combination of looking past it, and accepting danger without panic — what we might call courage. Some unusually idealistic people have even been known to argue that mortal danger is worth chancing to preserve a certain form of government, where innocent people, no matter their ethnic or religious background, can go about their business free from state oppression.
Christians talk a lot about “faith.” At points of her life, Mother Teresa did not believe that she believed in God. Does that mean she didn’t have faith? Well, she was an ordained sister in the Catholic Church, and she devoted her life to following the teachings of Jesus. Objectively, she was a Christian, no matter what she subjectively believed. She practiced what a friend of mine once called “the faith of the body” as opposed to the “faith of the mind,” a concept captured by the proverb “Act as though ye had faith, and faith shall be given to you.
The title of this snippet post might be confusing to some of you but bear with me. I am not a gambler in almost any form but I have been playing roulette a lot lately. Mail Roulette.. It seems we have a new mail delivery person on our rural route. I’m pretty sure that all of them for the last half dozen years have been contract employees. That is they are not postal workers with life time employment as seems common to most governmental bureaucracies.
Our last couple of carriers were less than amazing but this new one takes the cake. He just can’t seem to get all the mail in the box for the same address. Last week all of our mail was delivered to our next door neighbor. This week half of it was to the neighbor behind us. Today I got something for neighbor number one in my box. Now I can understand it in some areas on his route that don’t have any numbers on the boxes. I guess the people living there don’t get much company so don’t see a need to let others know where they live.🙂 But our boxes in my part of the road are all clearly labeled with at least three inch letters.
I know the USPS is struggling to stay in business but maybe they need to find cost reductions elsewhere beside those who directly interface with their customers. A better way would be to eliminate Saturday delivery entirely but of course politics would not allow that. Answering to a dysfunctional congress they have a rough time even existing I guess.
This is Part 4 of 10 of My Venture Into Asperger’s. As usual I will start out with a personal story and then show how that links into my study of this syndrome. This post will among other things be about my struggles with criticism.
One of the major things that has challenged me throughout my life is that I just don’t take criticism well! To avoid it I often studied things so that I was the semi-expert who spoke with knowledge that couldn’t be questioned. I now look back on my life and see where my sensitivity to criticism caused difficulties with interaction with others. As an example, I was pretty much on my own for the first forty years of my life so I was just not used to being criticized. That is until I got married and then I was exposed to criticism in spades. My wife, like many others as I understand, was determined to fix me and I just didn’t think I needed fixing. Her attempts, which I most often take as criticism has been the central kernel of conflict in your marriage. I often have the feeling that “my wife doesn’t think I can even flush a toilet without screwing it up!” Since recognizing my sensitivity to criticism I have worked hard to handle it but with not much actual success. 
In both religion and economics, absurd belief too often leads to atrocious action.While the consequences of misguided belief are well-documented in the study of religion, we rarely use comparable standards to critique the religious-like faith bestowed upon our current economic system. We believe that economic “growth” is the single most important key to unlocking the sacred doors of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, the facts of the matter and narratives of the masses reveal a far different picture. As our globalized fiscal cycle is now calibrated to impose repeated tragic failures, and because it seems to legitimize inequality and destruction of the Earth as virtuous and inevitable, the time is long overdue to expose the false beliefs and oppressive impact surrounding our contemporary economic edifice.
There will be much more later but I wanted to give you a quick pic of my recent three day adventure into central Ohio and particularly the Zoar Village. If you are into history it is an awesome place.
I admit that I am very “Spock like” in my approach to the world. I always seek a rational understanding of my surroundings. Logic drives my life and I simply can’t understand how others can sometimes be so illogical. I, for instance, can’t understand why anyone who has ANY exposure to Mr. Trump would think he belongs in the Oval Office. There is simply no logical way to rationalize that vision. It has to come from someplace I don’t recognize.
What was missing in the relationship were daily words and gestures of affection, tangible expressions of love. People with Asperger’s syndrome have difficulties with the communication of emotions, and this includes love (see Chapter 6). When a partner said to her husband with Asperger’s syndrome, ‘You never show you care,’ he replied, ‘Well, I fixed the fence, didn’t I?’ The person with Asperger’s syndrome may express his or her love in more practical terms; or, to change a quotation from Star Trek (Spock, examining an extra-terrestrial: ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’) in Asperger’s syndrome, it is love, but not as we know it.
When I came across these pictures in my database I began dreaming of Pittsburgh and particularly the Heinz Museum. Don’t miss it if you are in the area. Pittsburgh is different from any other major city I have visited. It has a raw edge to it that is a legacy of it steel industry heritage.
But over the past few decades, as the country has developed a more multicultural common culture, national institutions that tend to be based in diverse, cosmopolitan cities — especially the federal government and mainstream media — have attempted to foster greater social cohesion by promulgating a civic ethic of tolerance and sensitivity regarding an ever-lengthening list of potential points of tension or difference.
“I know when the last time we followed the same economic policies he’s [Trump] recommending — cut the taxes like crazy on the richest people in America, double the debt and have no money left over to invest, stop regulating the financial institutions, repeal the healthcare law with nothing to replace it, stop enforcing all these environmental laws, global warming is a hoax invented by China — Last time we did that kind of stuff, it didn’t work out too well for us,” he said.Clinton later added:
Even as a young child macho was a very negative trait to me. Simply speaking I hated it. I’m sure the word macho means different things to different people so to the right is the definition that I use. IN my mind macho is almost synonymous with being a bully. There is nothing manly about it. I knew being a boy I was supposed to be macho but the idea of aggressively dominating others with a self-conscious attitude was just not possible for me. It was against every fiber of my being.
A man with Asperger’s syndrome appears to have a ‘feminine’, rather than ‘macho’ quality – the ideal partner for the modern woman. The man with Asperger’s syndrome is usually a late developer in terms of emotional and relationship maturity, and this could be his first serious relationship, while his same-age peers have had several long-term relationships already….
Fully tackling this problem will probably require congressional action. Luckily, there are many things a president can do to partially alleviate the problem. Since she’s looking increasingly likely to take the White House, Hillary Clinton would be well advised to start taking this problem seriously.
For some reason I have been thinking about my last Canada trip in 2011. Maybe it is because I envy them that they don’t have to listen to all the ugly things coming out of Mr. Trumps mouth. Or maybe its because I might consider moving there if he is actually elected. We traveled along the St. Lawrence seaway for quite a bit of that vacation.
I’m far more frightened about a Trump presidency than I am enthusiastic about a Clinton presidency. And why shouldn’t I be? The prospect of Donald Trump being the most powerful human being on Planet Earth is genuinely terrifying…. Among other things, Trump is impulsive, ignorant, vain, petty, bigoted, insecure, and possessed of an almost pathological narcissism. Every president faces crises during which the lives of large numbers of people, both in America and around the world, depend on that one individual’s judgment and calm. It’s little exaggeration to say that in the wrong circumstances, Trump’s copious personality defects could result in absolute cataclysm.
The title above may seem strange coming from a deaf man but I really do think we have to stop using sign language interpreters for public announcements. Its time to move on to better ways. Way better ways…
By giving all children the opportunity to learn about the beliefs and values of diverse groups in society, the government would be providing for their education in some of the liberal democratic values on which the State itself is based. They include openness to a range of views along with inclusive and respectful citizenship.
Autism is something that I have never studied or understood to any degree. I have always wondered why I never even heard of it until the last few decades. Did it just pop up or was it just known as something else? This post will start a study into the Asperger’s Syndrome which is officially part of the Autism spectrum. I was recently shocked to learn, at least from a layman’s standpoint, that I have several characteristics that are common to Asperger’s Syndrome.
described as having ‘old-world’ values, and being less motivated than other men for physically intimate activities, or for spending time with male friends.