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1:12am August 11, 2014
Anonymous asked: Hey um sorry this is probably going to be long and rant-y and stuff but I need someone to talk to right now and you always seem really mature and reasonable which is good because I am very impulsive and unforgiving and I need to figure out how to go forward because I can't continue this way. Okay let me start and I'll just explain things as I go. I was diagnosed with autism, Inattentive ADHD, ODD (oppositional defiancey disorder), bipolar, anxiety and depression in third grade. I have mostly...

…gotten all that under control more or less. I’m in highschool now. I got through all it with my wonderful, supporting, and caring mother. I’m lucky enough that even though I still act kinda weird and such for the most part I have earned my peers and teachers respect as a fellow human being. I still have some issues with bullies but luckily I can handle advanced classes when they are available and there typically are less bullies there. I tend to take on more then I can really handle more…

…on. But she thinks Obama is a Muslim terrorist etc. She then talks about her hateful views etc and nothing we say can change anything. Most of the time I just try talking about something else etc. and just try leading the conversation away. But she is always condescending to me which Is like the number one thing to do to get me to hate you. She treats me like everything I say is wrong because I said it and talks down to me and says things like ‘you don’t know what you are talking about…

…you’re just a kid’ and she is also really rude to my mom and her husband and the rest of the family. I don’t think she has ever said sorry in her entire life and mom admits she has never heard her say sorry and just tells me I need to just be more mature. I’m the kid here not her. My mom has been in therapy for most of her adult life because she even admits that her mother is emotionally abusive. But my mom loves her and so doesn’t want to ruin her their relationship and just wants us to…

… Put up with her and maybe one day everything will be happy. But that isn’t happening. My uncle ran off to California the second he turned 18 and so my grandparents disowned him. (I also want to point out that he is the smartest person in my family and I wish I could do the same) I can handle her most days but I am sick right now and feeling just plain icky and school is next week and so I’m stressed about that and so I was stupid and blew up at her. I’m crying in the other room now, …

… But explaining this whole thing really helped. Thanks. I mostly needed to rant. But I need to figure out how to avoid this in the future. There have been times when it just ends up with me crying and running out and her calling after me calling me baby and ret*rded etc. She has also stated before that she doesn’t believe any of my diagnoses and just says I’m a brat who is just getting away with misbehaving by claiming to have the disorders. I was professionally diagnosed before I really…

… Even knew what most of those were. I really want to be able to put up with her for my mom but I have a lot of issues of not being able to back down when anyone is being rude to me (that’s the reason I ended up going to get diagnosed with all this stuff to begin with) I’m getting much better but a lot of time when it’s a bully like her I have a hard time convincing myself to do any calming techniques or to leave because she’s hurting me and I can’t just keep taking it all the time you know?..

Wow.  First off, I might be mature, but I’m also recovering from meningitis, so my brain is kind of topsy-turvy right now.  I’m not sure what advice I’m capable of giving, or would be even on a good day, for a situation as complicated as that.  

I would say to try to remain aware that your autism diagnosis is real, that it’s not just an excuse to be immature.  They don’t, so far as I know, hand those out to kids for being immature.  It takes more than that.  (I was diagnosed when I was 14, and I still have little idea precisely what they saw that made them immediately think autism, but that’s the way my mother tells it, is the doctor immediately thought of autism on meeting me, and then collected a developmental history and test results that corroborated that.  I assume you probably went through something similar, but younger.)

People say rude things like that all the time, whether it’s family or not, and especially a lot of old-fashioned people tend to think that diagnoses are just these new-fangled excuses for children not to need to be taken care of the way they were in the Good Old Days (much of which was abusive).  So definitely be glad you have the diagnosis instead!

I missed exactly which relative you’re having trouble with – an aunt, a grandma? it sounds like a grandma from what I can piece together – but either way, it sounds like she’s a bit of a bully herself, and used to getting her way.  My dad’s mother was a bit like that.  She hated me for being in the psych system.  There was one point when she actually invited me to her house, but when she found out I had psychiatric diagnoses, then suddenly instead of letting me sleep in her house, she made me and my whole family sleep in someone’s trailer out on the street because she didn’t want me in the house possibly influencing the kids at this family reunion or something.

I think you get hateful people in every family.  And even though you’re the kid, really the only thing you can do is put up with them and try to be more mature than they are.  Which is ridiculous when you’re 16 and they’re in their seventies or eighties, like I was when I was dealing with my grandma being a jerk, but it’s the way the world works sometimes.  I’m shocked you’re doing as well as you are having to live with someone like that.  My father is autistic too and his mother never let him forget that he was supposedly “heartless” for not doing everything she wanted, when she wanted it.  She never used the word autistic, but we all knew what she meant.  She was even upset that his first words were “see the moon” instead of “mama” – a classic autistic thing, but she took it personally.

If I were you (and I’m not, so I feel bad trying to give any advice at all that I might not be able to take in your place) I would try and avoid her as much as humanly possible.  You’re probably already doing that, and I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know.  But for me, the only thing that keeps me from blowing up at people like that is avoiding the hell out of them.  Which can be hard if you live in the same house.  The other thing is to sort of pretend you didn’t hear them.  Like not lie about it exactly, but when they say something nasty, just repeat in your head something like “I’m okay, you’re mean” (I got that from a book that talked about how ignoring bullies doesn’t work but replacing bully-talk in your head does work) to remind yourself that they are the problem, not you, and then go on as if they didn’t say anything, if you can manage that.

Other people may have better advice, but if it were me, I’d be trying my best to do “I’m okay, you’re mean”, and avoiding them both physically and mentally.  Avoiding them physically means avoiding them in the obvious sense.  Avoiding them mentally means not allowing their words to get into your head, substituting your own words instead.  (And Dave Hingsburger’s “I’m okay, you’re mean” remain the best ones for me, for dealing with bullying types.  You might find others, but I like those ones because they’re short, to the point, and they make it clear who the problem really is without inflaming me into doing something I might regret.  I got it from a couple of lectures I attended by Dave Hingsburger, but he also talks about it in his book The Are Word, which is the only book about dealing with bullying that I’ve ever seen go beyond the useless advice of “Just ignore it”.)

Notes:
  1. just-another-nerd37 said: one side of family is all like that i often ended up very suicidal especially dealing with my grandpa i wasn’t allowed to say anything against them i would try and listen to music in at least one ear and hide small stims
  2. withasmoothroundstone posted this