Hi. I'm Mike. Someone on an Aspergers forum asked the question, "Why do I have Aspergers," and I wanted to reply, but somehow I lost him. I don't know the complete answer to his question because the answer is different for everyone. I know a couple of causal circumstances, and I hope we can pool our experience, learn more of these causal circumstances, and maybe write the yet unwritten Book of Aspergers, and maybe make a buck, and maybe help people. I own a publishing house, and if we work together I promise The Sterling Book Company will publish our book.
One of the causal circumstances, I'd like to call them psychological mechanisms from now on, I've discovered in my family. My wife and I are peculiar parents. We saw our newborn as the supreme explorer, vulnerable and ignorant, he asked the ontological question, what's it all about, with ferocity and purity. We didn't correct him, tell him what to think, how to think, who to worship, what to value. We didn't correct his manners, or his grammar, his behavior, or his hopes and desires. We moved behind his explorations as his research assistants, collaborating with him, conversing with him, making knowledge and understanding with him. Our friends and family thought he would turn out to be a sociopath. But he was okay, and my brother and his wife, my wife's sister, raised their child the way they thought we were raising ours, but there was a problem. They didn't correct their boy, and they didn't punish him either. He could get away with anything! Because we seldom punished our boy, a child seen by his parents as a conquistador of understanding has a significant sense of his dignity; small and rare punishment suffices. My brother and sister-in-law had never seen us punish him! Taught by us, so they thought, they never corrected or punished their boy. The thing is, when you don't punish a child she thinks she's powerful, she dominates adults, but at the same time, at another level of thought, she knows she is not powerful, she's living on her parent's dime, she can be choked to death in moment by an adult. This dual knowledge is confusing, and confusion creates fear, and the child reassigns the emotion of fear to the more desirable emotion of anger, and the angry child misbehaves. Having invoked the dire mechanism, my brother and his wife watched as their son began to suffer in the throes of Aspergers.
That's just one psychological mechanism, I know a couple more, but that's not much. If we work together we can discover many more. You recall your experience, try to figure out some psychological mechanisms operating within it, and write them here, like a story with a moral. Then we group them together in chapters with titles that suggest the operative mechanisms, "Failure to Punish," and we have our book. I've done this before, and almost succeeded. I told a class to write a book, they began to write stories from their experience for "The Breaking-Away Years," the stories were vivid, dangerous, provocative and one day, as I put it to myself at the time, "the stories dried up," they became banal, sentimental, and false. This was a disaster, I'd already spent the big bucks from our book (divided 20 ways), and I needed to make a pep talk, but a good pep talk would have to be based on my knowing why the stories dried up. I had no idea. I thought, and thought, and thought about it, and then with sinking heart and dawning admiration, I understood why the stories dried up, and I understood no pep-talk could bring them back. As they told their stories, my students began to have an intuition of what the stories, taken together, were about. They were about how, if all goes well, children become superior, in the content of their character, to their parents. Well, it's what parents say they want, isn't it? The next day I went to class and told my students their book was dead. "Dashed upon the shoals," I said, "of your sublime modesty."
Will you write this book with me? You don't even need me, you can do it yourselves, and if you write this book you might change the world, and you will certainly change yourselves.
One of the causal circumstances, I'd like to call them psychological mechanisms from now on, I've discovered in my family. My wife and I are peculiar parents. We saw our newborn as the supreme explorer, vulnerable and ignorant, he asked the ontological question, what's it all about, with ferocity and purity. We didn't correct him, tell him what to think, how to think, who to worship, what to value. We didn't correct his manners, or his grammar, his behavior, or his hopes and desires. We moved behind his explorations as his research assistants, collaborating with him, conversing with him, making knowledge and understanding with him. Our friends and family thought he would turn out to be a sociopath. But he was okay, and my brother and his wife, my wife's sister, raised their child the way they thought we were raising ours, but there was a problem. They didn't correct their boy, and they didn't punish him either. He could get away with anything! Because we seldom punished our boy, a child seen by his parents as a conquistador of understanding has a significant sense of his dignity; small and rare punishment suffices. My brother and sister-in-law had never seen us punish him! Taught by us, so they thought, they never corrected or punished their boy. The thing is, when you don't punish a child she thinks she's powerful, she dominates adults, but at the same time, at another level of thought, she knows she is not powerful, she's living on her parent's dime, she can be choked to death in moment by an adult. This dual knowledge is confusing, and confusion creates fear, and the child reassigns the emotion of fear to the more desirable emotion of anger, and the angry child misbehaves. Having invoked the dire mechanism, my brother and his wife watched as their son began to suffer in the throes of Aspergers.
That's just one psychological mechanism, I know a couple more, but that's not much. If we work together we can discover many more. You recall your experience, try to figure out some psychological mechanisms operating within it, and write them here, like a story with a moral. Then we group them together in chapters with titles that suggest the operative mechanisms, "Failure to Punish," and we have our book. I've done this before, and almost succeeded. I told a class to write a book, they began to write stories from their experience for "The Breaking-Away Years," the stories were vivid, dangerous, provocative and one day, as I put it to myself at the time, "the stories dried up," they became banal, sentimental, and false. This was a disaster, I'd already spent the big bucks from our book (divided 20 ways), and I needed to make a pep talk, but a good pep talk would have to be based on my knowing why the stories dried up. I had no idea. I thought, and thought, and thought about it, and then with sinking heart and dawning admiration, I understood why the stories dried up, and I understood no pep-talk could bring them back. As they told their stories, my students began to have an intuition of what the stories, taken together, were about. They were about how, if all goes well, children become superior, in the content of their character, to their parents. Well, it's what parents say they want, isn't it? The next day I went to class and told my students their book was dead. "Dashed upon the shoals," I said, "of your sublime modesty."
Will you write this book with me? You don't even need me, you can do it yourselves, and if you write this book you might change the world, and you will certainly change yourselves.
