Apologies for the title, but I did not now how to formulate myself shortly, haha, and English is not my first language.
We are a family of 4, and autism has suddenly become very salient in our daily life.
My wife and I are both in our mid thirties, and we both got diagnosed with ADHD within the last two years, and now the suspicion of a autism diagnose suddenly came lurking as well. I think it’s a quite normal progression, as the ADHD medication have had a lot of positive effects, and made us more calm, which might have given more space for our autistic traits to stand more out.
We’ve suspected our daughter of having ADHD since she was a toddler and perhaps also being gifted. She’s blowing our minds all the time by her reasoning capabilities.
It’s a bit unrelated to my post, but my daughter is stubborn as hell, and has always been like that. Her speach development as delayed quite a bit, but when she was two years old, she got angry with my wife and said to her: “If your mom, when you was little, did not listen to what you said, you would also have gotten angry”. While she was complete red in her face, both feet solid placed in the ground, and her arms in her sides and tears falling down her face. Mind. blown… That was so impressive of her. In general she seems more emotional intelligent than many of the adults I know. We’ve also taught her a lot about emotions, to help her navigate her intense inner-self.
My wife is kind of the same way, and every day my wife have this mirror put up in front of her, and it’s quite intense.
We “blamed” our daughter’s intelligence for her intensity, her repetitive role plays, her justice sensitivity and insane memory. But we are now seing that many of her traits are more likely to be caused by autism.
My wife is in a study group where there are others with autism and one day they got to talk about it, and they were surprised that she did not think she had autism. I started reading up on autism, and I read this AuDHD book that compared many of the shared traits between ADHD and autism, and it became clear that my wife’s challenges are much more related to autism than ADHD.
I might also have autism, but I don’t think I am as far out on the spectrum, and it is not really affecting my life I same negative way, as my wife. She’s always had issues with anxiety, depression, burnout, low self-esteem, more burnout, sensory overload and she fears she will never be able to hold a job, which she has not done in the last 6 years.
We are not in a financial situation where we have the option to get professional help, but I’ve always been good at education myself on topics we’ve been struggling with, but somehow I’m kinda of overwhelmed, as I think it is really difficult to find reliable materials on autism in girls.
What I’m looking for is advise on books, educational material, your experiences, kind words, that everything will be alright, and what to do from here.
We are in the process of involving professionals for our daughter. Our municipality have this free service where you can talk with a psychologist about your children and they can help with support in kindergarten and later on when she starts in school. But, I prefer to also find out as much as possible about autism myself, and also in order to help my wife and our everyday life. We are stressed and kind of burned out all the time, and we need to do something to help ourselves, as this does not seem sustainable.
Hope it all makes sense. I’m sleep deprived and my brain is not really functioning at the moment.
Giftedness is not really a well defined thing, and different contexts mean different things with them. What is common though is the overlap of ASD, ADHD and giftedness traits, as well as the wrongful diagnosing of giftedness as the other.
An absurd simplification of how these differ can be that ASD have lower filtering of input, ADHD can’t always choose their activation, and gifted people have two or more intensities.
Where someone with ASD might be overwhelmed by emotions, and ADHD person might feel it deeply and/or suddenly fall out of it, a gifted person will often be able to express great intensity, depth and often nuance, especially with expressive training (which the others typically don’t).
Or another example: Where an ASD person might be physically uncomfortable with a wrong color matching, an ADHD person might not be able to avert their focus from it, a gifted person will be upset that the nuance is wrong. Close, but hopefully I managed to convey some nuance.
Whereas the gifted person might benefit from some of the same strategies as ASD/ADHD, there is much that they won’t. Early development of intelligences, arboreal/branching thinking, high complexity thinking, high intensity (especially in their sensitivities: emotional, relational, verbal, intellectual, physical, and others not as well studied), and high perception of detail, need a bit more care to not become self destructive (perfectionism, burnout, poor confidence) or maladaptive (outsidership, manipulative, trouble with authorities).
I don’t know of good resources for children, but some books that helped me as an adult are:
The Rainforest Mind - Paula Prober
The Gifted Adult - Mary Elaine Jacobs
Living with intensity - Daniels & Piechowski
The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You - Elaine N Person (also good for ASD)