this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
140 points (100.0% liked)
Neurodivergence
3275 readers
35 users here now
All things neurodivergent and relating to the broader neurodivergent community (and communities).
See also this community's sister subs Feminism, LGBTQ+, Disability, and POC
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Goddamn! Sorry this happened to you. Most of my family is shite too but this is out of this world. Any idea why your family was this terrible? Like simple misunderstanding doesn't feel like it cuts it.
Did you get diagnosed for ASD in the end?
My dad is a QAnon/MAGA nut who manufactures ghost guns and thinks Antifa/FBI did Jan 6th, thinks Tom Hanks' son kills, rapes and eats babies for their adrenochrome.
He's never wrong and it's everyone else's fault that no one likes him.
Raised me listening to Tom Leykis (basically a radio DJ who did the whole Andrew Tate manosphere thing on terrestrial radio 2 decades before it became an internet content genre) and Rush Limbaugh (arch conservative political radio talk show propogandist).
Oh also a drunk. Had to sell the house I grew up in because of his third DUI breaking his finances, had to get an interlock (blow and go) installed in his car for 7 years.
My mom did a whole lot of drugs as a kid and basically has the mental age of an 8 year old, as well as an apparently novel form of neuropathy.
Incapable of taking responsibility for literally anything, complains all the time, very religious, legitimately doesn't understand words or concepts you'd be introduced to after middle school.
Together, my mom and dad raised me as fundamentalist christians, only for me to later find out they were not raised that way, they became that way after doing all the drugs and sex and partying, and lied to me until extremely recently about their anniversiary date, because it turns out I am actually an unexpected child and they got married 5 months before I was born.
My brother also did a lot of drugs as a kid (while I was getting almost all A's in highschool and two simultaneous bachelors at Uni), is extremely thin skinned and explosively emotionally unstable.
He thinks that when the previous Chinese President was publically detained during a massively televised Party meeting/conference and subsequently never seen or heard from again, that this was actually him being put into Witness Protection... because of threats on his life.
He also thinks I should just do shrooms with him (not in a medically supervised setting) to better my mental health, and would get angry when I would tell him I'd prefer to listen to my doctors.
... My family is all a bunch of insane narcissist idiots, basically, and would routinely tell me how its not fair that I had a succesful career, constantly complain and hold everyone else to standards they miserably fail to meet themselves, and they would routinely get me to agree to collective plans to pay for things, and then they'd totally fuck up their lives and guilt me into financially fixing them (when I was an adult), as well as constantly dumping all their emotions and problems on me.
EDIT: Oh right, how could I forget the time I was going through normal puberty growing pains and my dad was convinced this was rheumatoid arthritis (a condition that essentially never develops in children) and thus forced me to get a spinal tap against my will, which was botched and still causes me pain everyday, and then spent the rest of his life gaslighting me and everyone else about how that never happened.
EDIT 2: Sadly no, I've not managed to get the official diagnosis. The waitlist for the adult autism diagnosing PHD is over a year, and I had to move halfway across the country to find a shithole I can rent with SSDI.
I ... still have the recommendation email to the specialist ... telling me that they are available to see me now, 1000 miles away, from about a year and a half after this all kicked off.
I am still working on regaining my ability to walk, after a whole bunch of my muscles and ligaments were torn, bones broken.
Goddamn.
PS this is not the first or second time I hear of someone being a drugged up party animal in their youth only to turn fundie religious in middle age and fuck up their kids and family.
Yeah...
(I added a bit more to after you replied)
I am fairly sure that my brother's actually schizophrenic girlfriend came out of the FLDS cult, and may have actually personally met/known that guy from it who just got convicted.
In a way, I'm glad all of this happened, in the sense that my family probably thinks I am dead, and I will now never have to deal with any of their insane bullshit ever again.
... though it would have been nice if I did not have to nearly die every other day for about a year to achieve this, lol.
Yes, grab on to those silver linings. Little compensation I know, but you're now much tougher. Little in life could faze you. I know from my situation and the horrified looks people give me when I explain my early life. Then I see the same people struggle with things I consider trivial.
Yeah, this entire thing has finally endowed me with self respect, and that perspective shift you talk about.
Always had impostor syndrome before.
That's gone now, haha.