SPD Support Forum

Hi, I have a few questions about things that are different for me than they are for people in general... and I was wondering if any of them are related to s.p.d general?

I was just wondering if anyone here had (as a kid, in the past?) or still has, anything they really like to learn about/read about/do, more than a "normal" amount, and whether they think it is somehow a part of S.P.D ?

( I realise that an intense interest or obsession can be a trait of Aspergers/Autism, but have read various articles, documents, sites and checklists, and I don't think I identify with the majority of things on the lists )

sighhh...this is going to be another long post..

As a kid I used to be absolutely obsessed with animals - I would *only* play games where I could pretend to be an animal, only wanted to play with toys that were animals, I only drew animals unless forced to draw something else for school project, and when we had Library time/ class at school I refused to read anything that wasn't about animals. I managed to read through every animal non-fiction book the junior school library over a year or two, and always asked the Librarian where there were more? ..(she was lovely - she kept ordering in new animal reference books for me). I also used to do 'extra homework' and write 'reports' on a different animal / mammal species (about diet, distribution, behavior) etc. every week which I asked to be graded..

Instead of imaginary friends I had imaginary animals, and until about 11 or 12 (this is embaressing) liked to move around the house most of the time on all fours... like an animal. (helloooo later-in-life back and wrist problems -__- !! )

I never understood why I was bullied so much in school... until I saw a home-video of me at age 7, my parents showed it to me last week...I was stalking my dog around the back yard with our video camera pretending to be David Attenborough and spurtting off facts about dogs sense of smell, hearing, sight, natural instincts passed on by wolves etc ... such a dork -___-

Anyway I soon learnt that it wasn't acceptable to go on and on about these things and was informed that no one cared, and I was really weird and boring. My Parents asked my teachers to help me make a plan on how to make friends..

I managed to expand my interests a little bit to playing violin/ being in orchestra, drawing and a few other things. was totally in love with the harry potter books which helped me talk to friends a bit. But mostly I just sat with my friends at lunch and just listened, and observed.

I became very unwell for a while after grade 7 with Anorexia, depression, self injury, etc, and lost interest in a lot of things.

I am generally much better at talking to people now, and dont really have too much of an issue, as long as they dont rely on just me to keep the conversation going. and with the TAFE course ive started on companion animal services - I feel very happy to be back to studying Animals/behaviour, I feel I can talk to the people in my course because they also have some shared intersts. I do have to pull myself up though becuase sometimes in class if I am interested in something - I wont interrupt anyone... but I will keep asking questions, and wanting the teacher to expand more and more on things im intersted in or "oh, speaking of such and such.. is that the same as for e.g animal? is it true that such and such? can you explain why that is??"...which gets class a bit off track...

When I get excited about something that I know a bit about, or really enjoy (animals, harry potter, some 'geeky' pop culture things) I tend to ramble on and on... but at least I know to stop if I think they are getting bored.

One other question:
I do have trouble with reading some peoples facial expressions..of course I get the obvious ones (not so with Autism??): happy - smiling, sad - frowning, scared - wide eyes, jump, open mouth etc... its when they are very subtle ..especially when someone is "tired"..it keeps me guessing - are they bored? angry? sad? .. have I done something wrong? Does anyone else have issues with this?
I have ended up in some bad situations as well because I am actually terrified of offending people, saying no, or standing up for myself. - I will think about it for hours and hours, or days, if I do and feel very guilty.

My boyfriend says I am Naieve, too eager to trust people and think almost everyone means well.....but im not sure how to change this? any suggestions welcome

I've been trying to write up a response but struggling with it - if you want a quicker response, there's chat, and a few of us in there can probably talk to you about some of this

have you read checklists for aspergers and autism in females? A lot of what you describe does sound similar. I've been researching autism and aspergers and finding a lot of similarities to myself as well, but then I found out about spd and sure I have that, not sure about austism/aspergers though. But autism in girls and women presents differently than in males so if you haven't read about that difference yet you may want to. Keeping in mind that aspergers is no longer in the diagnostic manual, then again spd isn't either.

I don't know if that obsession over one subject is specific to SPD, but it could also just be part of your personality. Lots of people have strange obsessions regardless of whether they have another condition.

I have seen some of the traits you mention in my daughter. She does tend to get over focused on one particular thing to the exclusion of other things. I don't know if it's the SPD or ADD. I recently read a book about ADD (Healing ADD by Amen) that gave a definition of Over-Focused ADD, which was something I'd never heard of before.

ADHD does includ hyperfocus and perserversion (if I can ever spell that properly) just like autism does. A lot of people don't give it credit for that, but it does include that.

However, meow_machine sounds a lot more like high functioning autism than ADHD given this description. Whether diagnosable I don't know, I'm not someone who could make a diagnosis at all, especially not over the internet, but a lot of that description sounds like it could match.

But autism isn't scary! We're just misunderstood. So if that happens to be you, its not scary.