Topic: Question can this and ASD spectrum disorder coexist together

I have an official diagnosis of ASC and I am strongly Alexithymic. I'm not alone in this as the incidence of Alexithymia is around 10% in the 'normal' population but as high as 50% with those on the autistic spectrum. In other words it's frequently a comorbid condition with autism.

I also have autism spectrum disorder and alexithymia with a high pain tolerance and I am super sensitive to light touch and very clean cuts on my skin.Though I could be beaten to death and feel better than with one cut. I have difficulty expressing, feeling and identifying others emotions. I often use music to try to portray how I feel or how I think I feel.????

Will1234: That's interesting that you use music to portray how you feel or think that you feel. I also do the same thing. I also use pictures from movies or whatever to illustrate points that I'm trying to explain when I write emails and I frequently include links to YouTube music that has a relevance to the point that I'm trying to make. It's as though I'm unable to explain myself without the inclusion of additional sounds and pictures that I'm unable to supply myself. I have pretty high pain tolerance too but one single loose hair, touching the back of my neck, can drive me up the wall.

I often listen to NF as his lyrics relate to me like
Song name: know

I wanna know what it's like to be happy
I wanna know what it's like to wake up in the morning
And feel like it's real when I'm laughin' (yeah!)
I wanna know what it's like to sit down with my friends
And feel like they might understand me (woo!)

I like loads of different bands/singers playing a wide variety of genres. I tend to get stuck listening to one band or song for days or weeks at a time, then I'll move onto someone else. Generally I seem to prefer moody, melancholic songs but not always. I'm currently stuck in a loop of playing "Do It Like I Do" by Jack Goodacre, on repeat.

"Here I am, sitting alone
watching you letting go."

It's notched up 438 plays in the last five days, that's including today, but as it's only morning the total will be a fair bit higher by the time that I head off to bed tonight. I mostly listen to bands like Porcupine Tree, Beauty Of Gemina, IQ, Moonrise, Ignatius, Fields of the Nephilim and Lunatic Soul but there are many, many more.

Same

I tend to get stuck into 1 or two songs for about a week and then it changes which is unfortunate becauase I cannot popping my favourite song.

Pinpoint not popping

I don't think that I could state categorically exactly what my favourite song is, even if someone had a gun pointed at my head, because it changes, depending on the mood that I'm in. I probably have a hundred or so songs that I really, really like and maybe about half a dozen that I'd want played at my funeral :)

Jack Goodacre is now up to 486 plays. I think that I'll change to something else when it hits 500 plays.

I might just make a mix tape for my funeral with remixes of all my songs crammed into 10 songs for my funeral

I’m glad you’re active because I feel that it was important to discuss issues I face with people who relate to my situation, my best friends bipolar and I think I use him too much and it’s unhealthy as I almost use him as a therapist/friend.

I've thought of burning a CD with maybe four tracks on it to be played at my funeral. I think they impose a limit on the number of songs that they'll play.

The level of activity on this forum is its biggest problem. It's looks as though it was more active in the past but these days forums of all kinds seemed to be in a state of terminal decline. I used to post on a couple of big and active autism forums but nowadays the numbers of new posts on them can be counted in tens, whereas as recently as four years ago they were getting hundreds of posts per day.

It certainly makes a change for me to have someone to interact with here, until now I had been basically just responding to old posts.

Yeh you’re by far the most active user of a forum I’ve came across, which is good because just talking to a relatable being (you) is much more impactful and meaningful than talking to any therapists has been for me.

I would rather talk to people who are like me and watch videos posted by autistic people or Alexithymic people than neurotypicals who give talks on how shit we are as people. They always talk about the symptoms of autism like they are not hard to deal with but in fact they’ve never had to deal with.It just works me up.

I’ve been thinking about how alexithymia effects my reactions to my family. It’s annoying because I want to have an emotional reaction to things they’ve told me. My sister or my brother will tell me something and I am interested (my brother less) but I’ll just say cool in a neutral tone and people think I don’t care.

My eldest sister died suddenly three years ago and to be honest I was far more disturbed by the fact that one of my cousins, who I hardly ever see, decided to 'comfort me' by hugging me. That really irritated the fuck out of me. I didn't need or want to be comforted and I hate being touched by other people. It's an invasion of my personal space. I can handle doctors and dentists doing it, when there's a good reason for it, but not just some random twat doing it for no good reason.

When I've joined forums I've always tried to kick a bit of life into them, in the hopes that other people will respond and start posting too. So I often look through all the old threads and posts replies to anything that takes my fancy. But these days, all too frequently I've found myself joining forums and essentially conducting conversations with myself. There's so little activity on forums nowadays, even on the bigger ones like Wrong Planet and AspiesCentral. It gets boring after a while and then I tend to quit. This is the only forum that I still make any posts on but if you hadn't started posting here I'd probably have given up on it before very long.

Recently I've been doing online (free) courses, because I can learn about stuff that I find interesting and there are also comments sections were the other students actually respond to posts! I recently did a pretty good four week course called 'Understanding Autism.' I completed it in three days but I still have access to the comments until teh end of March so I'm still reading new posts and making responses when I feel like it. Most of the students are NTs, so I think it's good for the course to have autistic people taking part and contributing. Anyone can do the course and like I said it's free. If you want to check it out, it's here....

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/autism

I’m sorry about your sister.I can only deal with rough touch and hate people I don’t know touching me. If my sister or Jacob died I’d probably go mad and out of control expressing all emotions on that situation and just feeling like a robot in any other scenarios.

Don’t worry I won’t be leaving you in the forum alone

I might check the understanding autism thing out because it’ll probably help me make a bit more sense of myself

The biggest impacts of my elder sister's death were purely practical. We lived in my parent's house (they're both dead) and my sister did the shopping, cooking and housework. When she died I had no choice but to do it all myself. It doesn't bother me, but it did mean a major change to my lifestyle. If I want to eat I need to buy food and cook it. If I want clean underpants, I need to wash them because nobody else is ever going to do those things for me ever again, not any more.

Yeah, the autism course gave me stuff to think about, because I tend only to see things from my own perspective. So it made a change to experience other people's views and explanations of autism and its traits.

I’m always in fear of dying, if I can hear my heartbeat I’ll make a noise over the top because it just makes me think how it can easily stop and I can’t do anything about it. I think of never ever being alive after death and it makes me do stupid stuff like punch walls and I have a high pain threshold but your knuckles penetrating plaster does hurt a bit.

I have no fear of death at all. We all die eventually, it's just a natural process of life. We don't choose to be born and mostly we don't chose to die either but when it comes to the crunch we don't get any say in the matter. It's going to happen, whether we like it or not, but that doesn't mean to say that it's worth thinking about. It'll happen all by itself one day and thinking about it won't change that, but until then it's best to simply get on with your life and make the most of it, while you still have the chance.

That’s the thing I can’t deal with, I could die at any time. I’m not an unhealthy person I’m not fat, I don’t smoke, well not cigarettes. I have smoked weed but only like 3 times.
But it’s just .... argh
I generally would have no problem with watching someone getting beaten the shit out of or dying after being shot (unless I care about them) but i don’t know it’s just something I try not to think about.

I'm not fat, I don't smoke, not even weed anymore. I barely ever drink alcohol. I still walk and ride my bike to the local shops. But I've already had two massive heart attacks. All the healthy living in the world isn't proof against inherited heart failure. My eldest relative was a woman named Sarah Bothy, who lived to be over a hundred. She smoked like a chimney and had a tot of whiskey every night before she went to bed. In contrast I had a cousin who was a vegetarian, he played sports, walked, cycled and never drank alcohol or smoked anything. He died suddenly at a young age, due to cancer, which because of his healthy lifestyle wasn't spotted until it was too late to treat.

Fearing the inevitable is pointless. Having a pee is inevitable too but you don't give it a second thought until you need to do it. Death is the same, it'll happen one day and when it does then will be soon enough to worry about it.

I don’t want to fear it. I don’t fear death from most of the stuff I should fear. Like dangerous stuff because I know I had the decision to not do whatever it is that I did, but stuff inside of my body.

Every day I get up and check that my pet lizard Marshall (named after Eminem) isn’t dead and it’s not like he’s old cause he’s 1 this month.

Jute
Where are you?

In England. Or if you meant why wasn't I online yesterday? I had other stuff to do. Like I said I live alone, I have to do everything, that's required to run my house, myself and it takes time.

After I got home from hospital, after my heart attacks, for the first month of so I was ultra careful, worried that I'd have another, perhaps fatal one. I'd get into bed at night and be aware of every tiny erratic beat of my heart. That's no way to live.

So although I've changed my diet, to introduce more veggies and try to eat a little more healthily than I did in the past, I still have bacon and things like that when I feel like it. Not every day of course but I haven't removed them from my diet completely either. It's generally not what people eat, it's the quantity and frequency that cause problems. I decided that if I was gonna live, forever in fear of the next heart attack, I'd have zero quality of life and no enjoyment in it either. So I still ride my bike and I still go for walks and stuff. If I feel like eating ice cream or a chocolate bar I will, but in moderation.

Sorry,
It’s just when people aren’t home when they say they are or aren’t on a forum at the usual time stuff runs through my head like they’ve been murdered or died in a car crash.

I exchange emails with a guy from the USA and if I'm not online for a couple of days he starts to wonder if I've had another heart attack, been run over or abducted by aliens. Mostly it's because I get really depressed and just sort of shut down for a few days. I don't come online, don't listen to music or watch movies. I don't brood or anything, I just have a blank mind and don't think about anything. It happens pretty periodically, maybe once every six weeks or so. I usually have those 'black days' for maybe two or three days at a time and then I'm back to normal. Perhaps I'm Bi-Polar or something? I don't know. But I also have some days when I just have a lot of things to do like, laundry, shopping, cooking, cleaning etc.

Yeh but I don’t do it just for you. If my family say they’ll be back at 8 and they’re not back at 8 well i worry (probably due to anxiety).

At 8:20 and they’re not back and I’m not occupied then I begin to assume they have had a car crash and have died. I prepare on how I will react and plan the expected emotional reaction I case a true one doesn’t come for when the police officer knocks on my door to say they’ve been killed.

I then think about whether the guy who crashed into them was drunk and if he was what I would do to him if I found him.

I do the same in case I get burgled, I’ll plan what I’ll do to him if I catch him and what moves I’ll use and how to legally beat the shit out of him.

Once some drunk guy squared up to me in an alley and luckily I’d prepared for the event and Flores him then pegged it.

A lot of autistic people are sticklers for punctuality and they don't like routines to be upset by something upset. A lot of autistics also work out scripts of what they're going to say and do in advance, sending on what might happen. I'm different. Somebody once told me, when I was a little boy waiting for my dad to come home, that looking out of the window wouldn't make him come home any faster and I'd be better off just doing other stuff until he arrived. So these days I apply that to everything. If someone doesn't phone or email when I expect them to do so I simply assume that there's probably a perfectly good reason why not, which they'll explain when they do get in touch, then I just forget about it. Worrying about things that might not even have happened serves no purpose except to raise your own anxiety levels, often needlessly.

Yeh I get it by my perfectly good reason of someone not being on schedule is that they’re dead.

I make scripts for lies that I have to tell and questions I want to ask, it takes 10-20 mins though and is a massive waste of time.

Yeah, being dead is a perfectly good reason for not being on time, perhaps that's why they refer to dead people as the late mister so and so?

I never plan answers or stuff like that in advance. I never did mock exam papers at school. I just deal with things when they happen. However I do sometimes find myself replaying things over and over that happened, or were said, years ago. My mind comes up with smart arse responses that I should have made at the time, but didn't. It's annoying because it's bloody pointless. Nevertheless I still find occasionally find myself thinking about some shit or other that happened when i was in primary school or whenever. Then I snap out of it by asking myself.... why the fuck are you thinking about things that are over and done with, they're history, just forget about it.

I think of responses after something’s happened to. I need mocks to tell me what I’m good at and how good cause certain things I think I’m bad at I’m actually good at and vice verse.

I always had a good idea of what I was good at. Basically if I was interested in something I paid attention and I was either at the top of the class or very near to it. If I wasn't interested in something (like Latin and French) my brain just switched off and I'd count the holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles or put my hand in my trouser pocket and play with myself, or basically do anything except pay any attention to the lesson. So invariably I came bottom of the class in those lessons. Anyone who tried at those lessons but didn't manage to score higher than me would have had to have been brain dead.

I’m good at subjects I enjoy like maths, media, art and history.
My grade in subjects that are ok like English and Biology heavily depends on the other people around me if I liked them then I did well in the subjects. But if I’m sat next to someone I wouldn’t care if they died I would sit there every lesson dying inside. Using my pubes as puppet strings. Then the teacher would ask me a question out of nowhere and I would have an autistic shut down.

In grammar school we sat in individual desks, so there were fairly wide gaps between the rows. It was probably to discourage talking and copying. Throughout most of our lessons the seating arrangement never changed, unless we were in the science labs or doing art etc. I had no friends at school so I was totally indifferent to the other lads, except when they were picking on me.

I am lucky that I managed to find a friend, me and Jacob became friends after we got given detention for slapping each other.
I put too much of a load on his shoulders and to be honest without me I doubt I would have made it through many of the situations I found myself in.

After my violent sprees in primary I tried to change my reaction to people who picked on me, I would be really passive until they came close to me where I would pin them to a wall and tell them to fuck off. Or if they were just pricks i would just exchange words until it died down so I didn’t get detention.

I was a really skinny titch, so fighting back against bullies was generally not an option. They were mostly bigger and most bullies also have hangers on, they're rarely ever alone. So I mainly used avoiding tactics but....In year seven I was always being picked on by a lad, called Pete, in my class. One day, as we'd finished school and were putting our coats on he shoved me and called me a little faggot. Instead of just slinking away, as I usually did, I flipped my lid. He was way bigger than me but I guess I surprised him, he probably wasn't expecting me to fight back. Somehow I managed to grab his head and repeatedly bash it agaisnt one of the coat hooks. Some other lads fetched out class teacher to get me off the Pete. In the end nothing happened. Pete's head was bleeding and he got sent to teh nurse but the teacher told Pete that he was a bully and he'd got what he deserved. He advised Pete to just forget it cos if he didn't and picked on me again he, the teacher, would feel forced to intervene and get Pet expelled for persistent bullying. I wasn't punished at all. After that I mostly got left alone, cos the other lads all figured that I was a dangerous psychopath, even if I was a titch :)

At primary whenever I’d “assaulted” someone (which was actually self defence cause I never started nothin) I would always have to spend time at lunch in the deputies office at lunch for a week or 2.

Once this guy pushed me over so I turned round and full on punched him in the face, his nose bled for a while and when they new it was me I had to spend 2 whole terms in at lunch cause of previous convictions and that one.
It almost became a prison system.

I only assaulted someone twice at school, the first on, with Pete. I never got punished at all and the other one I kicked shit out of a lad in the toilets. There were three witnesses (two of his mates and another lad) but nobody grassed me up, so nothing got done about it. The lad started it and although he was a year younger than me he figured that I was a little pussy because I only came up to his chest. He was wrong. I always avoided fighting if I could but when I was forced into a situation where I knew I'd have to fight my motto was 'hit first and hit the fucker so hard that he can't hit you back.'

Now I am different, if they strike first then I have the right to engage the target.

If someone is dissing my friend Jacob or has a problem with him then they have a problem, I would fight to the death for him.

Someone picks on my brother as much as I hate him they’ll be dead soon.

Any criminal who is a threat no matter what weapon they have will soon be eliminated.

I have no one else to defend, just myself and my property. I keep a baseball bat at hand, which I wouldn't hesitate to use, even for a second. If I did need to use it on someone I'd literally beat the fucker's brain out.

I plan what moves to use on home invaders and street fights.
My choice would be a Jamie Oliver large chopping knife for durability and power against the larger fighters and a small clean knife for the small but skilled. I may equip myself with a blunt weapon in my other hand but purely for defence

I don't think about the need to defend myself. The baseball bat is simply leaning against the wall, within arm's reach of where I'm sitting right now at my computer. So if I ever had any need to defend myself, it's only a matter of reaching out and taking hold of it. If I was in the kitchen and I had reason to defend myself I'd likely pick up a knife or a kettle of boiling water, whatever was at hand. Upstairs I have an old Victorian ratting stick, in my bedroom, which would be almost as effective as a baseball bat for smashing skulls and breaking bones.

I wouldn’t use a kettle because it’s not accurate and you could easily burn yourself and for someone like me a burn or small cut is hell. I would rather an attacker beat the shit out of me.

I'd prefer not to use a kettle from choice but in an emergency I'd simply use whatever was at hand, including a kettle.

I’d rather use fists and feet, probably a fly kick first and then the eyes, knees, smash their nose on your knee combo.

It's not a matter of preferences, if it comes to an emergency situation, you just use and do whatever you can to come out on top.

I would go control and accuracy over a powerful uncontrollable weapon. It saves you the time of looking around for something.