It may be that your wife is focusing on the problems your Aspergers causes in your relationship with her, but it is probable that much of her frustration is from parenting young children while your attention has been intensely occupied with your new job. Her suggestion that you are not trying may reflect being overwhelmed herself by your diagnosis. She may be more sure than ever that she will need emotional support to raise her children (who may be on the spectrum too), and since the diagnosis was about you, she may think that you are getting permission to abdicate the hands-on aspects of fatherhood because of your special challenges. If you tell her that you love and need her and reassure her that you intend to use therapy to improve your communication with her as well as to help you understand the challenges your children will be facing, I believe she will come to some peace about all this. You can use the strategies you will learn in therapy to make your anxiety more manageable, to improve your change-skills and your social thinking, and to cope better with the distractions that take you away moment-by-moment from what you need to be doing. Keep in mind that your improvement will be gradual and that your wife may need some built-in relief (a weekend away with a girlfriend–or a visit to a day spa or some such) on a regular basis to renew her own strength and courage. That being a better partner will require harder work for you with Aspergers than if you were normal is a given, but you are blazing a trail for your children. You need to help your wife determine (from observation) whether any of your children also need an assessment. This is essential for early intervention. You will learn a lot yourself from observing how professionals help your children to accommodate and mitigate their differences. It’s key to understand that you are not to old to learn and you will improve with effort throughout the course of your life. The people who love us often love us the most in our weakness, and your wife married you in spite of your Aspergers. So tell her that you love her and that you want to begin again. You will need to discard anything mean that she said (it is often legitimate concern expressed badly) and realize that she is as frightened as you are about the future. In my own marriage, I have found that my husband is much more anxious about finances whereas I am more anxious about the children, and this reflects our own areas of responsibility. When one of us is unreasonable (and/or angry) about one of these two subjects, we are being driven by a primal fear of failure. When our children had trouble because of their Aspergers, it left us scrambling on both fronts, and that makes it a special challenge to our marriage, since before this crisis I would be reassuring him about money while he would be reassuring me about the children. Challenges like this can make or break a marriage. Your assessment was about finding out what kind of help you need, now don’t be afraid to go find it!

James,

It’s essential that when you feel that everything is your fault that you remember that NOTHING in a relationship is ever one person’s fault. In my marriage, I also take on a lot of the “If it weren’t for me, everything would be fine” BS, and my husband does his best to drag me out of that place, because it’s a place of severe distortion. (I am fortunate that my present husband can give me this perspective; my previous husband simply saw me as the problem whenever we differed.) We call it “getting me out of the bad guy chair.” You must get out of the bad guy chair and then chop it into kindling and burn it.

You are dealing with the self-loathing of any minority person who has not yet taken hold of the idea that everyone is equally fine, just as they are. Unfortunately, we do not live in a world that gives us this message, and so we have to give it to one another. Wishing that you were someone else, wishing that you were “normal” (and please find me this mythic normal person, because I’ve never had the pleasure) will get you nowhere but suicidal thinking, and PLEASE do not go there. You have every bit as much of a right to be here as anyone else, just as you are, today.

You do not have a disorder. You are not a collection of deficits. You are not impaired. You just operate differently from your wife and from most people you know in real time. That’s a lonely place, but don’t make the jump from it being a lonely place to you being a bad or incomplete person. You have been accommodating yourself to the world all your life, and it is perfectly fine to expect that the people closest to you will accommodate to your needs as well. It’s a balancing act. It’s not up to you to take on all the blame, nor is it all on your wife to take on all the responsibility. The key, I think, is for you to get to marriage counseling, and to start looking at your strengths and what each of you can take on in the marriage so that you both succeed and so that the marriage is healthy. And I think it’s crucial that your wife understand that when she unloads on you, you simply absorb it and feel sick about yourself. There are other ways she can frame her feelings so that you do not feel sick about yourself. (I am a veteran of getting people to frame things properly so that I don’t end up feeling like their feelings become a permanent part of my genome.)

I’ve been thinking of you ever since I read in a previous post that you feel like your self confidence is shot. I am slowly coming out of that place, and it takes a lot of work and self discipline. Please write to me any time. I think we’d have a lot to say to each other on this theme. It’s essential that we spectrum folks reach out to each other and not feel like there is something wrong with us. Different does not mean wrong. Different just means that we live in a world that isn’t set up with our differences in mind, so we have be more resourceful in navigating things than we might have hoped.

James, in one of your previous posts, you mentioned: “When well guided, I work better than your average person, tend to get on with things without a fuss, and I’ve been well liked by various people that I’ve worked for for these reasons. When I work in a disorganised place, or for bosses who are underhand, then I fare far less well.” There is so much at stake in our intimate relationships that it is more difficult to get perspective, but you have said yourself in this quote that you need some structure (and trust) and with it you perform very well. I think you have highlighted how loyal you are and how hard you work when you are not distracted. These are wonderful strengths to bring to marriage. You are still reeling from the implications of your diagnosis. Only think though, while you have been adapting your whole life to a kind of exile, you found a marital partner, became a father, became skilled with computers and found gainful employment. In this blog, you have been painfully honest at times about your weaknesses, but your strengths are also apparent. When you and your wife have had a chance to adapt your marriage to play on both of your strengths and shield you from both of your weaknesses, you will find your fighting stance again. I did not mean to imply that you are a lesser person than her in any way. But the stance of “I know my rights” is less helpful to a marriage than the “I accept my weaknesses” stance. If you do seek marriage counselling, make sure that your counsellor has a good understanding of Aspergers, as this will be essential. To me marriage is very much about learning to joyfully carry each other’s burdens.

If it is difficult to find a marriage counselor who understands Aspergers, you might between your wife and yourself set up some arbitrary rules for a regular approach to airing your mutual grievances so that you are not blindsided again. Having lived life “in the headlights” so to speak, trust and intimacy have some weighty baggage attached to them.

aahhh James, I feel for you. Nearly everything you wrote, from “stimming/zoning out” via special interests to marital conflict. The most obvious difference is that I am the wife who can only contain the pressure of frustration for so long and then the lid blows. Then I am a mixture of you and your wife because although I am the one losing it I am also unable to verbalize any of it in any coherent or constructive manner. If he feels attacked and attacks back, I am doubly screwed. All systems shut down and I end up sucking up and feeling like NOTHING is worth the effort, pain and frustration.

Hi James,

I’m sorry you are feeling so badly about yourself and the argument. It sounds like your wife didn’t really fight fair because she was attacking you and criticizing you instead of saying what it was she needed from you all along. So what would have helped from your perspective? What should she have done differently? Would it have helped to tell you that you were too focused on work and that it was becoming your latest special interest? If she had would you have recognized that and been able to give more at home – or does the special interest thing just need to run its course? Would it have helped you if she told you that she was getting upset before she blew up? Not that it was a good thing that she yelled at you – but would you have heard her if she had told you in a calmer voice that you weren’t plugging in at home? Sometimes people develop this anger/yelling pattern because they feel like it is the only way to get through. I don’t think that makes it right – but I can understand why she blows up at you – it makes an impact and you actually hear what she is saying. From your perspective what is a better way to do this? How else should she have gotten your attention? I don’t mean this to sound critical of you – I’m really asking what is the alternative? How does someone get through when the special interest focus takes over?

Thanks for all your kind comments and suggestions.

Will bear them all in mind.

I’m doing ok right now, and will write more soon.

James