Shocking

I understand that the goal of people being here is to vent and improve their social skills. It’s good that we have self-awareness of our lack of skills. However, I’ve also been noticing a number of Redditors on here are also extremely depressed and/or anxious about it. A ton of self-blaming and feelings of embarrassment and that there’s something wrong about themselves.

The more I read some of these posts/vents/rants, the more I find alarming that some of these depressed, self-blaming people are entirely clueless that what they’re describing are totally traits compatible with the Autism Spectrum. If this is the case, your lack of skills is totally not your fault. You are not broken. It sucks but your brain is wired differently such that you don’t pick up things the way it’s expected.

It’s shocking nobody has yet pointed that out to some of these people so that they could explore this possibility with a trained professional. They apparently have not had the chance, and as a result, they keep hating themselves and keep getting stuck in depression and mental health problems.

I’m not pointing specific posts out. Just wanna put this here, hoping that this could potentially help somebody on their path to learning about themself.

You might also ask, I already went to psychologists or therapists and in the past they never said this was a reason? Psychologists specialize in different areas of psychology and if they’re not trained in this specific area (which most are not), they’re not trained to recognize signs. I’ve heard of cases where it took 8 or 10 therapists before one of them pointed this out to them. The common experience of many coming to this realization is immediate relief, and usually mental health gets to improve significantly just by knowing this small but important piece of information.

That said, spectrum or not spectrum, this is not a post calling for people to look for excuses to not work on themselves. Whether or not you have ASD as an explanation, your social skills learning curve should still hopefully be trending up. You should still work on management. To summarize, the point is you should stop blaming yourself. You’re not broken; you’re possibly just different.