How to be successful

Janie wrote:Paracelcus,
I just realized that you have no idea who I am. I am not SPD, just a concerned friend of someone who is, or whom I strongly suspect is SPD. I'm trying to educate others who deal with his family so that they will accept him and let him be who he is and stop trying to force him to be social, or get in therapy, or get on meds, etc.

Just out of curiosity, does the friend know you are trying to educate others about it? I don't know the exact situation, but if someone was telling my coworkers that I had SPD and what it was, I would be a little annoyed. Frankly, my coworkers nor my family know how much time I spend by myself, so they don't even have enough information about me to start thinking I have a problem.

Granted, in your case it sounds like they are already starting to intrude on your friends life, so the situation may be somewhat different. I'm just thinking, once some people have a disorder that they can firmly say, "He's suffering from that" they might view it as something wrong with him even more, and try to fix it harder.

It might be different for your friend, but I tend to manipulate people's perceptions of me a lot. I would rather people think I had AvPD than SPD, because in the former case they would think they were making things worse by trying to get close to me, whereas in the latter case, given someone with SPD won't care as much, they won't be pressured to stop.

But as I've said, the situation sounds quite a bit different than my own. This thread just seems to be going downhill a little, so anything to turn the conversation around

I do not plan on discussing this with his parents but with mutual friends who interact with the family. I want everyone to stop making suggestions to his parents for ways to 'fix' Steve. I want them to be able to accept him as he is and help his family to do the same. Nothing more than that.

Janie wrote:I do not plan on discussing this with his parents but with mutual friends who interact with the family. I want everyone to stop making suggestions to his parents for ways to 'fix' Steve. I want them to be able to accept him as he is and help his family to do the same. Nothing more than that.

Hmm...maybe tell them that the fact they're intruding in his life will only make him worse. At least with me, when people start to pressure me to do things I don't want to, I generally withdraw on a large scale. When my parents put pressure on me to do excellent in school, I just withdrew from school. Didn't want to deal with school + parents, and parents aren't something I could opt out of, so school went.

If he's anything like me, you could make a good argument that by pressuring his parents to pressure him, they're going to make him withdraw from optional (but important) things in his life.

Also, depending what kind of person he is, it might be bad for his self-esteem.

Judging from the way his parents have treated him, I don't think that he may have any ego at all.

I will try to stir the parents from putting pressure on him to get out of the basement and go do something else. They forced him to work last summer but not sure if they will make him work again. In a year he finishes colleges and they will expect him to work. But I suspect they will let him continue to live in the basement.

This is all assuming that the parents would listen to anything that I said. The dad might listen, but the mom probably wouldn't and she's a much bigger problem for Steve than dad.

Encourage Steve to move out?
That way he is away fro mhis parents, can gild truths about how often he sees other people to placate his mum, and give him a lot of alone time. I know that the more alone time I get, the less I mind having to see people occasionally, and just not living in the same house as other people is sooo nice. When my housemates go home for holidays, I'm often still here for a week or so by myself, and it's such a nice feeling, such a relief, so relaxing, even though when they're here I avoid them and rarely speak to them. Even if I can't see, hear, or otherwise sense another person in the house, just the knowledge that there's someone else in is enough to negate the nice 'aloneness' feeling. (Though bear in mind that I don't really know if I'm schizoid or not so don't take my advice .)

hi, im glad someone started this topic, especially someone new like dex.

there has been some good reasons for many people to consider me the odd one out from a social and professional point of view. my personality assesment has been consistant with the symptoms of aspergers syndrome and schizoid personality, and from reading some peoples responses it is clear to me that we have quite a lot in common.

as for the issue of success - here is a brief of my life.

i was an underachiever in school even though an IQ test by the school psychologist put me in the high range. i did have a drawing hobby that i dropped for some reason and never resumed it, and around the same time i developed a fear about swimming at the beach.

when i entered high school, i continued to be an underachiever academically, but i was well known to the teachers for my in depth questions and interest in natural knowledge. during my teen years i was a prolific reader, had a very boring and straight forward life that lacked adventure, friendships, and most normal growing up experiences.

i eventually completed my high school diploma through correspondance education with little contact with my peers of my age.

latter on i did hold a job as a guard mostly for a couple of construction sites, and a parking lot patrol. it was a crummy job i was under appreciated and undervalued, and i felt disrespected by the manager and boss, which i why i left.

after that i resumed beign especially prolific with reading at the library so i guess you could say i have a good intellect without the need of supervision.

for the past four months i have been unemployed and looking for work, but also studying at home a lot with correspondance courses and preparing for new tech training classes to open up this coming february.

i have also been running my own business by my self in a retail store, that i have now closed down due to a number of violent incidnets in the same street i was working in, and i did lose a lot of money because of this. i have recently come out of a very depressing stage in life because of it all.

in a nutshell i am pretty confident that i can aim towards success and get what i want from life, but i just seem to find it a little difficult to put all the pieces together at once.

Fish,
Steve lives at college but doesn't like living there. He comes home every weekend, goes to the basement and plays video games. He's in his third year at a large university but has never done anything on campus, never attended any event, any club, any group, never gone out with anyone, no socializing of any kind. He has no money. He doesn't like working. I don't know what will happen when he graduates from college within the next year. His parents are generally rather passive although it's clear that they wish he would get involved in something, have friends, date, etc. I could imagine him living in their basement for years to come. I cannot imagine that they would ever force him to live somewhere else, although they did force him to get a job last summer for a couple of months. It's VERY expensive to live in this area in an apartment alone. A one bedroom apartment, in a decent neighborhood, costs $1,200 to $1,600 a month, plus phone, internet, etc. So there is no way Steve could live on his own unless he had a fairly good job.

Until the last few days, after reading here, I thought that Steve was probably quite content. I still generally think that but after the thread about happiness, I'm not so sure. I hope very much that he's ok with who he is and how he lives. He's a nice kid, just different.

Yes, my area is pretty high cost of living as well. That's why I have the misfortune to have housemates.

Anyway, the simple solution to the cost of living is to simply live elsewhere. That's what I plan to do when I finish uni. Of course the not having a job thing does make that tricky, and that isn't something I can help with.

Fish,
Places with very low cost of living are usually places with very few good jobs. Cities have jobs but it's more expensive to live in cities too. That's the trade off.

What kind of work will you do when you finish the university? Will you be able to do that work in a small town or rural area where it's cheaper to live?