FW: my diagnosis. bit long, I fear

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Sorry about that Inez,Curiously it shows up as complete in my Sent box. I’ll try it again. Au revoir, Ron.Subject: RE: my diagnosis. bit long, I fear Hello Inez,Well, the process towards an AS diagnosis for me started perhaps some 30 years back. I’ve always been fascinated by Psychology, and I had become terribly well aware that there were curious anomalies in my makeup that distinguished me from my fellow humans. I literally did a lot of research on myself, and typed out reams of stuff on what I observed. (classic Aspie obsessiveness) The various critical or bewildered comments that about me by my three wives, not to mention by a couple of girl-friends and other friends as well, only served to confirm that there was something very different about me. One young work mate about 50 years ago gave the puzzled assessment that he literally wondered if I’d come from another planet. During my second marriage, I started to consult with professionals about the problems I had in relationships. In hindsight, I suspect that virtually everyone I’ve ever seen shrugged me off in the long run as being unhelpable; but none the less, generally they encouraged me to talk and to learn more about myself. We must keep it in mind of course that AS was virtually unknown at that time. And all sorts of alternative pathologies were suggested or detected in me by the experts. The first hint of the truth was provided by my third wife, some 20 years back, when she brought home a library book on Aspergers Syndrome edited by Uta Frith. (this was probably the first book to come out about it). she suggested that the descriptions in the book really did resemble me, and on reading it, I had to agree. But neither of us took it further or thought too much about it, until a couple of years later, a Clinical Psychologist I was seeing, made the specific suggestion that I was an Aspie. Just a couple of years later when I shifted States, my new Psych also diagnosed Aspergers, and in the process, lent me Tony Attwood’s standard book. This was the real breakthrough. I knew I’d come home at last, and everything fell into place. I reorganized material from my old notes of self-analysis, and tabulated the details into Aspergers related classifications. It looked overwhelmingly convincing. For me, I was pretty convinced, but knew that I could not be sure until I’d had a specific diagnosis. The first books after Attwood’s that I bought just blew my mind. (Liane Holiday Willey’s Pretending to be Normal, and Edgar Schneider’s Discovering my Autism). I promptly wrote to both authors, via their publisher, Kingsley, and received back the most delightful and encouraging replies from them. Then, I naively and hopefully made a tentative phone call to Tony Attwood’s clinic in Brisbane, and, would you believe, it was the man himself who answered. (this was well before he gained his world-wide reputation, and got impossibly tied up in his time schedule). Tony was incredibly kind and supportive, and generously said he would be happily prepared to look at my loads of notes, despite knowing that there were lots of them. Well, it wasn’t too long before he got back to me and told me that all he had read gave every indication of Aspergers Syndrome. He further stated that a number of my points, he had marked with a highlighter, as being useful tips and suggestions for his own diagnostic practice. I felt free then to purchase several more books, and eventually found a Melbourne professional who could see me about a diagnosis, and who was not too expensive. (he has subsequently become terribly expensive, hard to get to, and a most popular lecturerer). He confirmed the previous assumptions, and diagnosed AS in me.I joined three or four Internet support groups, finally discovering ASPIRES when the forementioned Edgar Schneider put me onto it. All the other groups have gone by the way now, and ASPIRES is the only one I’ve stayed with. Its members have become real friends and family to me. From the start, I had the incredibly over-confident feeling that I had some things of importance to tell people about this Aspergers thing, and after joining the State’s Autism foundation, offered their Support Network a lecture, which I titled Confessions of a Borderline Aspie. This was a natural thing for me to do, since I am a professional speaker. That first session happened to be a considerable success, with an audience of about 130. It held some 25 professionals of various related disciplines, - some 30 persons with Aspergers, and the rest in relatives, friends etc. this session was perhaps more like a workshop programme running for two hours. The next two years, I followed up the lecture with one on the subject of A Compartment Called Marriage, and the third on It’s a big Alien World out There. I might add that nothing ‘saved’ my third marriage, though my poor long-suffering wife has remained close to me, despite having to live well apart. My ‘research’ of course, never ceased; and though I’ve fine-tuned much of what I had concluded about and thought over in those early days, my original lecture notes are today as relevant to me as they were at the beginning. In fact, I’m currently making use of much the same stuff I talked about then, in the return session I’m doing for the State Support Network, this coming Wednesday night in Melbourne. What were the main factors that led me to the study and locating of Asperger’s Syndrome? Certainly the marital relating difficulties I had demonstrated. Then there was the lack of real solid bonding to my children. My habits and ‘Special Interests’ were always off-beat, and all absorbing. My self-sufficiency, and discomfort in the business of being with anyone – old or young, male or female, for any length of time – these were key issues. And of course, I have proven to come closer to my beloved cats than to any humans. But the most direct and powerful thing was the way I was never concerned about human death, in any serious or heart-felt way. I was quite close to my birth family, but the prospect of losing any of them never bore any particular disturbance for me, - any more than did the thought of my own eventual passing, whether soon or far off. So basically, some of the most powerful inward emotional pressures in life seemed to have passed me by. And it had become quite evident that I was not any sort of Psychopath or Sociopath. Being diagnosed was just about the greatest and most useful thing in my life. No drawbacks for me. It opened up wonderful areas of life, contacts and activities; and it explained just what I most needed to know. I am 75 now. I have written about all of these things, of course, in my book Confessions of an Unashamed Asperger. And though I never until some five years ago even considered writing a book, it has proven to be most valuable and cathartic to me. It must be said that it was in the closed and safe arena of ASPIRES that I got to properly formulate my ideas, and to express them, as I wrote innumerable postings in which I attempted to deal with and analyse the curiosities of Aspie psychology that got raised in the many letters. Hope this explains things for you. Cheers, Ron Subject: selfdx vx officially dx Hello I was wondering, some of you have been self dx and others have been officially dx.How did you found out that you were and aspie, when you self dx, were there any reliable tests.Is there and advantage of disadvantage for being officially dx?What I mean, my husband is 59 now and has worked for almost 40 years without knowing, is it smart to officially dx now, or better not to? Inez