Relationship with Aspergers! Advice?

[Brettdl]

Hi All

Seeking some advice for others about how I can approach my situation.

Ill fill you in. I have suffered from depression, ADD & mania most of my life, you know the hyperactive kid!. I lived with it until i met my girlfriend.

After 8 years of hearing her call me "energiser bunny" and telling me how anxious i make her feel, of her making me feel defective for my bouts of mania and craziness, and let me be clear I find being me really hard sometimes and also writing this down makes me think "why am i with her?" - we have 3 wonderful children who i love with all my heart. Anyway, she has suffered from severe depression all her life and now has been diagnosed with Aspergers/Autism and guess what, i am now supposed to accept her personality and adjust how i deal with her. All these years my personality has never been considered or understood, I was expected to medicate myself to the point that i had so much medication i felt out of body & slow.. Now i am expected to accept her condition & they way she thinks. I'm glad in way that I know now why she is such a "difficult" person, but that still doesn't make it easy to have my self-esteem at record low levels over the past years!!!!

I don't think this it fair that i am again the person who has to adjust, i really don't, and my depression and sense of worth has been shattered. I find myself doing what she should have done and researching the condition and trying to work with it. I'm no angel, but i guess i feel cheated that she has tried to change me and now i have to change ME again.

I don't want to abandon the situation, my life as a kid was full of that! I need some advice from anyone else who has a Aspergers person in their life who can help me out.

[Beltane]

hi, welcome!

Living with any mentally interesting condition is definitely hard work at times, though i firmly believe that if we can get a handle on our issues we can achieve great things using the extra special parts of our brains that we seem to have. for instance, i have bipolar, anxiety, depression, and i find it makes me a super creative person with great emotional intuition and insight. i'm also fairly intelligent (if i do say so myself) as i read almost constantly due to my antisocial nature.

so i hope you and your partner get to a place where you can both celebrate your strengths. but first you have some issues you need to work through. and thats working through the bad things having a mental illness does.

I highly suggest you get therapy- both of you. you (as in you) can get therapy to learn to manage your stuff, live your life to the fullest, overcome the worst of your issues and learn how to better interact with HER. SHE can get therapy to do the same in HER life and better interact with YOU. AND you can get therapy TOGETHER to better manage your relationship and communication to achieve a healthy, happy relationship together.

She absolutely needs to learn how to manage her condition- she cant expect you to simply accept whatever behaviour she exhibits. i can personally attest to the fact that i KNEW very well in the past that my behaviour was cmopletely unacceptable- in the extremes of my depression, hypomania, anxiety etc i have been capable of extreme selfishness, extreme irritability and anger- constantly lashing out, constantly looking for reassurance, always blaming other people for my pain.

unfortunately depression, anxiety, bipolar, adhd- any and all of these brain problems can and does warp how we think- we can be prone to thinking in really unhealthy ways cos thats just what these brain problems do.

so it of utmost important that she learns to manage this condition and realise that she does have the capability to think in warped unhealthy ways AND take those behaviours out on other people (including you). you unfortunately also have the same capability. but you both also have the capability to learn to manage and overcome those unhealthy behaviours, and learn healthy thoughts, coping skills and behaviours.

(i dated a man with Aspergers and i consider him an inspiration- he has overcome so much to achieve wonderful things! but he had MASSIVE problems when he was younger- hes had to work to get to where he is now! and hes wonderful now!)