u/SeaDoor2666

Family and partner abuse is serious and I know that anyone can experience it, but from childhood through the entirety of life, I feel like autistic people are often far more susceptible and frequently targeted. I also know that there are significant numbers of men and boys who experience abuse but statistically speaking women are more likely to go through it.

The reason I say autistic people are more likely to be targeted is because they are largely (with exceptions) trained by society to believe that they are wrong by default. People inside and outside of their families consistently treat them like they don't know what they're doing or saying and that they always misread the situation. While I and others on the spectrum do miss or mistake social cues, that shouldn't be treated like the default by others who don't have all the context first.

This leads to two things:

1 - Other people are more likely to dismiss an autistic person when they go to them about someone who they think is acting strange or suspicious. They are less likely to receive help or be listened to.

2 - Their internalised thoughts that they are always the one in the wrong or that they don't understand what's happening often prevents them from talking to anyone about it when someone displays controlling, manipulative, or abusive behaviour.

Whether they know the person is diagnosed autistic or not, abusers know this. They can tell. They know who has low self esteem and they know who is more likely to allow them to do these things. They go after outcasts and people who have already been conditioned to accept behaviour that seems strange to them.

That's also what creeps me out about the 'autistic girlfriend' fetish and men seeking girls who are specifically 'a like autistic'. It's perfectly fine to want a neurodivergent person if that's the kind of person who typically matches with you or who you relate to, but it's the submissive, ignorant, and isolated way a lot of these men portray these women that makes it feel creepy and predatory.

I'm still in high school and I've never been in a relationship, so I obviously don't have the best experience or authority to be talking about this. This is just my two cents. What I have seen, however, is the relationship between my parents, as well as between my mother (now divorced) and other men.

My mother, like myself, is a bit of a social outcast, and we don't mind it that way. We always have each other's backs. I've seen her go through a lot.

My father was never a kind person to her or to me, and she accepted it because she was told that as a woman it was her job to get married that she was always wrong about what was happening because her social skills, like mine, suck ass.

I've watched her go through years of being married and years of being divorced. She's had a few boyfriends, some of whom were liars, cheaters, and manipulators.

We talk about it sometimes when we get into late night discussions and she shares her experiences with me. From what I've seen, a significant factor in her life choices has always been the way other people, including extended family and her parents, always treated her like a clueless black sheep.

I pretty much live in a state of perpetual stress and overstimulation. I find that nothing really seems to help with my stress much except taking a shower, which I do whenever I feel exhausted and stressed out.

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It can be a hot or a cold shower depending on the weather but I just love the feeling of the water and the relaxing white noise. It's usually not a long shower but I typically shower multiple times a day both for stress relief and because I can't stand the sensory feeling of being even the slightest bit dirty. I usually shower right after school because high school stresses me out so much I come home feeling like I want to collapse.

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The thing is that there are two problems: the lesser problem, which is that I can't always just get into the shower whenever I want because I might be out of the house, and the bigger problem, which is that my parents sometimes get annoyed with this behaviour. I think it's because I'm wasting water and it's expensive.

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Any ideas? Your experience?

I'm autistic so I pretty much live in a state of perpetual stress and overstimulation. I find that nothing really seems to help with my stress much except taking a shower, which I do whenever I feel exhausted and stressed out.

It can be a hot or a cold shower depending on the weather but I just love the feeling of the water and the relaxing white noise. It's usually not a long shower but I typically shower multiple times a day both for stress relief and because I can't stand the sensory feeling of being even the slightest bit dirty. I usually shower right after school because high school stresses me out so much I come home feeling like I want to collapse.

The thing is that there are two problems: the lesser problem, which is that I can't always just get into the shower whenever I want because I might be out of the house, and the bigger problem, which is that my parents sometimes get annoyed with this behaviour. I think it's because I'm wasting water and it's expensive.

Any ideas? Your experience?

For context, my parents have been divorced for almost a decade.

My dad and I never had a great relationship. He learned all his 'parenting' information from 1980s family sitcoms. When he and my mother decided to have a child, what he wanted was the perfect white-picket-fence family, like in the sitcoms. He thought it would make him look great. I was never that kid. I don't think that kid exists.

For the first 6 or so years of my life I didn't really know my dad. We lived in the same house, but we never spoke, and he moved into a separate bedroom on a different floor of the house from my mother and I a couple weeks after I was born so he wouldn't have to hear me cry. I never liked him and he never liked me. Many of our rare interactions were him yelling at me for something petty.

Then came the divorce. It was a source of a lot of trauma for me, not because I thought it was my fault (I didn't), or because I wanted them to love each other (the thought of my parents even liking each other felt strange to me), but because my dad was threatening to cut me off legally from my mum, whom I love very much.

After the divorce was when I was diagnosed with autism, at about age 7. My dad was the one who said that there was apparently something 'wrong' with me. Initially, my mother didn't believe him because she'd never had any problems, but my dad persisted because he and I would get into countless fights and I would always either meltdown or shut down. It turned out he was right about that and my mother had just gotten used to doing what made things easier for me without actually questioning it.

After I was diagnosed, however, my dad made no effort to help me with anything related to my autism. It was like he just wanted a pat on the back for putting all of the blame on his defective kid. If I had a problem, his solution was to yell at me until it got worse. Eventually we stopped talking and I started avoiding him like the plague.

He's a narcissist. A complete narcissist. All of his problems are apparently my fault, as he tells me on a regular basis. But he still wants that white picket fence.

So he's turned to dog-training me into a 'normal' person. What that means is he's decided that I'm not grateful enough for everything he does and that I don't spend enough time with him or talk to him enough. What he wants is a teenage girl from a sitcom who still wears pink frills and calls her dad 'daddy' at age 16. That's not normal. He's decided that the reason I don't want to talk to him is because I'm broken, so he got me ABA. I was 14 when it started. 14! You cannot give someone a thumbs-up and an ice cream or whatever at 14 years old to make them love you. He thinks I'm stupid. If he wants me to like him, he could try apologising for the last 15 years of trauma and distance. But he won't. He'll just keep saying it's my fault. And then, when I'm old enough, I'll leave.

And then one day he'll tell everybody that his evil ex-wife and wretched child were plotting against him and that's why I stopped seeing him the moment I turned 18.

How I can't wait for that day.

I don't like people very much, so I don't usually talk about these things, but I just wanted to put some sort of account of my situation out there. For some reason it feels easier to put this out there to people who don't know me personally and have no real reason to care, and whom I never have to encounter again outside of this sub.

I've always known my dad was a narcissist and a sociopath. I always knew he was an abuser and a controller and a liar. That was nothing new, but when I started reading 1984 a while back I realised how accurate it was on a smaller scale in my house.

My parents divorced a while back. I'm still a teen so I can't yet make my own decisions about who I want to spend my time with, but hopefully I can gain some sort of control soon, because I have problems with having separate houses that don't even involve my father's personality.

I'll start off by saying that he's an absolute liar. I've grown up assuming that every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie. I know not just based on every account of him I have from anyone else, but also the fact that he blatantly lies to my face, and sometimes he lies about me to someone else while I'm actually in the room. I can never say anything, because everyone he knows would always take his side over that of a dumb kid.

His lies are also ridiculous, like that he 'saved an entire country'. Yes, he has told me that. No, he wouldn't tell me which country. When I asked for details and the full story, he said that his name was taken off the entire project as some sort of plot against specifically him for some reason, even though he apparently did all the work. I wanted him to at least elaborate, but then he switched to telling me I wouldn't understand.

He tells me things that are supposed to make him look good, like that he does all the work for everyone, that he pays spousal maintenance to my mother (he doesn't, I've seen records), that he pays for everything for me (again, he does not), and that he's all righteous and moral, even though he does illegal shit all the time.

His lies directly contradict each other sometimes, and he refuses to acknowledge it. I know what he's told me, but he always insists that he didn't say it or I'm making it up or I don't understand.

I generally assume most of what he says isn't true, but the thing is that I can't prove anything. Ever. I have no documentation of what's real and what isn't, and my memory is so bad I'm starting to suspect I have a diagnosable memory condition. It may be trauma or autism related, but I don't know. I wouldn't remember a time when I could remember, would I?

I can't dispute him because I have no proof, and without solid proof (or even with it), he'd never even let me speak a word.

A lot of what I take to be true comes from my mother. She at least seems to be honest, and shows me her flaws when they come up. I feel like I can trust her and I always have, which is backed up by the fact that she always offers to try to find proof of something if I talk to her about it, since she knows my memory and my reality is seriously fucked up.

He doesn't let me have my own opinions either. I won't say he's a MAGA person, because he's not *that* extreme (we don't even live in the US), but he definitely won't let me talk politics or make fun of politicians, a process which is actually vital to democracy. He hates it when I make fun of Trump, even when it's just for something dumb, like his dancing. He also doesn't usually allow me to watch the news. It's insane that my dad would rather let me watch a bloody horror movie than the current news.

It's like he wants my perception of reality to come only from him, which makes sense because he sees me as essentially an extension of him. He'll lie with a straight face. He will erase reality so far that I have to wait for my mother's custody to catch up on the news and speak truthfully and have some sort of grounding contact with factual and objective truth.

Sometimes I get legitimately afraid that he'll get inside my head somehow, even though I never listen to him anyway.

Sometimes I doubt that what my mother says is true, and although I always come to the conclusion that it is, I feel guilty for rethinking it, even though she actively encourages me to think for myself and never trust anyone blindly, even her. She always says that it's okay to have doubts and that she's actually scared too, because she sometimes loses the proof she has of reality and doesn't know if she can give me a clear picture of what's real.

I'm also a little bit scared I'll turn out to be more like him than I think.

All that to say, I don't know how much of this I'll remember when I'm older, and I hope I can get away from him before he breaks my brain any further.

I just found this sub and I know there's a section of Reddit for pretty much everything, but it sort of surprised me that this was an entire group. I don't like people very much, so I don't usually talk about these things, but I just wanted to put some sort of account of my situation out there.

I've always known my dad was a narcissist and a sociopath. I always knew he was an abuser and a controller and a liar. That was nothing new, but when I started reading 1984 a while back I realised how accurate it was on a smaller scale in my house.

My parents divorced a while back. I'm still a teen so I can't yet make my own decisions about who I want to spend my time with, but hopefully I can gain some sort of control soon, because I have problems with having separate houses that don't even involve my father's personality.

I'll start off by saying that he's an absolute liar. I've grown up assuming that every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie. I know not just based on every account of him I have from anyone else, but also the fact that he blatantly lies to my face, and sometimes he lies about me to someone else while I'm actually in the room. I can never say anything, because everyone he knows would always take his side over that of a dumb kid.

His lies are also ridiculous, like that he 'saved an entire country'. Yes, he has told me that. No, he wouldn't tell me which country. When I asked for details and the full story, he said that his name was taken off the entire project as some sort of plot against specifically him for some reason, even though he apparently did all the work. I wanted him to at least elaborate, but then he switched to telling me I wouldn't understand.

He tells me things that are supposed to make him look good, like that he does all the work for everyone, that he pays spousal maintenance to my mother (he doesn't, I've seen records), that he pays for everything for me (again, he does not), and that he's all righteous and moral, even though he does illegal shit all the time.

His lies directly contradict each other sometimes, and he refuses to acknowledge it. I know what he's told me, but he always insists that he didn't say it or I'm making it up or I don't understand.

I generally assume most of what he says isn't true, but the thing is that I can't prove anything. Ever. I have no documentation of what's real and what isn't, and my memory is so bad I'm starting to suspect I have a diagnosable memory condition. It may be trauma or autism related, but I don't know. I wouldn't remember a time when I could remember, would I?

I can't dispute him because I have no proof, and without solid proof (or even with it), he'd never even let me speak a word.

A lot of what I take to be true comes from my mother. She at least seems to be honest, and shows me her flaws when they come up. I feel like I can trust her and I always have, which is backed up by the fact that she always offers to try to find proof of something if I talk to her about it, since she knows my memory and my reality is seriously fucked up.

He doesn't let me have my own opinions either. I won't say he's a MAGA person, because he's not that extreme (we don't even live in the US), but he definitely won't let me talk politics or make fun of politicians, a process which is actually vital to democracy. He hates it when I make fun of Trump, even when it's just for something dumb, like his dancing. He also doesn't usually allow me to watch the news. It's insane that my dad would rather let me watch a bloody horror movie than the current news.

It's like he wants my perception of reality to come only from him, which makes sense because he sees me as essentially an extension of him. He'll lie with a straight face. He will erase reality so far that I have to wait for my mother's custody to catch up on the news and speak truthfully and have some sort of grounding contact with factual and objective truth.

Sometimes I get legitimately afraid that he'll get inside my head somehow, even though I never listen to him anyway.

Sometimes I doubt that what my mother says is true, and although I always come to the conclusion that it is, I feel guilty for rethinking it, even though she actively encourages me to think for myself and never trust anyone blindly, even her. She always says that it's okay to have doubts and that she's actually scared too, because she sometimes loses the proof she has of reality and doesn't know if she can give me a clear picture of what's real.

I'm also a little bit scared I'll turn out to be more like him than I think.

All that to say, this isn't entirely down to narcissism, but it definitely ties in with it, and I hope I can get away from him before he breaks my brain any further.

I'm very confused. For the past few months, I've for the most part been really attached to this girl in my class. No idea if she feels the same or even if she could, but this is an entirely different question.

Most of the time when I see her my heart starts going strange and I feel nervous but also excited and I know that I like her. I find her super cute and sweet and I know that I want to be with her in a romantic way. I've even on occasion fantasized about how we could possibly get together some day.

But then every so often I sort of forget about her, not her existence, but just my feelings for her. I suddenly couldn't care less. It's really strange because most of the time I feel a sort of crush reaction when I see her, and then sometimes I look at her and feel nothing.

I've been thinking a lot about what this might mean. I've thought for a while that I'm probably queer. I do, after all, feel these things for another girl. I genuinely find her attractive. But then sometimes I couldn't care less about her or our relationship and I wonder if those are my true feelings, or if my true feelings are romantic. I've begun to wonder if I'm actually queer, or if I'm the kind of queer I thought I was, or maybe I'm somehow unconsciously tricking myself into thinking that I like her. I don't want to do anything or come out to those around me until I know for myself, but I can't figure it out. And what if I made a mistake in one of the times I feel things for her and ask her out or something, and then realise I don't like her in reality? I'm already terrible with people, and this isn't helping.

Is it hormonal? Mental health related? A trick of my mind? I'm so confused.