Mormon Aspie

“You don’t believe a single word I say;

If I said black was white, you’d say it was gray.”

                                    –Pet Shop Boys, “A Different Point of View”

People who study Asperger’s Syndrome observe that three of the most common challenges we face are: difficulty “reading” people (though recent studies indicate that it may actually be a deficit in self-awareness); a hyperactive sense of morality and justice; and inflexible, black-or-white thinking that seldom allows for nuanced perception or variation of shading between the two extremes.  Put the three together, and the result is interpersonal chaos.

I have seen this in my relations with other people.  Perhaps the most extreme instance, repeated many times over, is my tendency to reduce every interpersonal difference to a moral issue, with me usually on the wrong side of morality (given my habit of taking the blame for everything that goes wrong).  From my perspective, there is no such thing as a mere difference of opinion or a personal preference; there is only good or bad, right or wrong, true or false-and I am nearly always the latter. 

This has often led me to consider myself massively inferior to those around me.  Since they are “normal”, then any degree of any kind of difference between me and them must surely brand me as “abnormal”-and we all know that abnormal is bad, right?

Over the last week or so, I have returned to the book Feeling Good by David Burns-the classic cognitive therapy text.  Probably the greatest contribution Dr. Burns makes in his book is his list of the ten cognitive distortions which we frequently make:

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see your self as a total failure.
2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.
4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
   1. MIND READING: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out
   2. THE FORTUNETELLER ERROR: you can anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the binocular trick.”
7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn’t, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him” . . . Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
10. PERSONALIZATION: You see your self as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Right there, I see myself committing #1 and #10, with #8 strongly implied.  Every time I read over this list, I am reminded that life is far more nuanced and open than I am inclined to believe. 

An additional challenge comes from LDS belief and culture, which emphasizes that many things are black and white, particularly with regard to obedience on one hand and sin on the other.   But in most cases, this only applies where sin is in fact an issue.  Much of what I face on a daily basis, where differences between myself and others are concerned, does not involve sin at all but simply a difference in perspective and behavior. 

I’ve learned to be patient and forbearing with the personality quirks of others; perhaps it is time for me to be as generous with my own.

A great deal has happened over the last few days (such as my article being published by Meridian Magazine), and hopefully I’ll get back to those events some time soon.  Right now, however, I want to focus on an insight I gained from a book which is something that I’ve never considered before.  It may have some bearing on my social difficulties.

In order for people to connect, they need to be brought together voluntarily, without coercion; they need to enjoy being together; and they need to share common interests, goals, and principles.  This last point is the one that I had never thought of, at least as far as it affects my own behavior with others.

Whenever I get together with other people, and other men in particular, I usually do it out of a sense of need:  I need them to help me with something, I need to let them know how I’m feeling, I need their approval, and so on.  Of course, this immediately sets us up on an unequal footing; not only am I making demands upon them (whether spoken or implied), but in a way I am making myself their inferior-they have something that I don’t have.  Of course, what I really need is mainly to feel better about myself, and since that is something that only I can do, I am asking the impossible of them.  As a result, I feel resentful, and they feel put upon.  My whole approach is, “Here I am-I’m empty; fill me up!”  The larger the group of people (who see each other as equals) I approach in this way, the more lopsided and unequal I see it as being, and to prevent any awkwardness, they just leave me alone.

It would be far better to approach them from a position of strength; in other words, I have something to contribute as well, and as I do so, I will be filled with a sense of belonging, which is what I am looking for all along.  Rather than demanding to be made to belong, I can assume that I am equal to the others and everybody can relax and have a good time.