Expectations by “ABFH”

When did you first become aware that you were different? Maybe you were two years old, or three, when you noticed that the other children could do a lot of things you couldn’t. Some of them could already read. Others were doing arithmetic, playing musical instruments, or using computers. Even those who didn’t have such skills all had special interests of one sort or another, and they seemed to know a lot about the subjects of their interests. You couldn’t do any of that. Your worried parents took you for a developmental evaluation. A psychologist, after observing your chatty demeanor and your lack of any focused interests, diagnosed you as suffering from Oversocialization Spectrum Disorder. The symptoms of this neurological disorder included preoccupation with social concerns, often resulting in the performance of dysfunctional and destructive rituals as a way of maintaining group identity, and inability to focus intensively on one interest. Because you were only two or three years old, you didn’t understand much of this. You only knew that sometimes, after that evaluation, your parents would look at you and suddenly burst into tears. In the hope that early intervention would help to remediate your deficits, your parents arranged for therapists to work with you in reading and arithmetic. But you weren’t developmentally ready to learn these things as a three-year-old, and you struggled and felt stupid. You got frustrated and had tantrums. You developed a few nervous ...
Source: The Autism Acceptance Project - Category: Autism Authors: Tags: Autspoken Source Type: blogs