COPING: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR PEOPLE WITH ASPERGER SYNDROME Marc Segar

[Vicious Retard]

The work on Marc Segar's survival guide stopped early in Marc Segar's life. Marc Segar's survival guide does not say anything about managing a job, getting married, or raising kids. The aim of this book is to collaboratively write an updated survival guide for autistic people. Right here on this page. Feel free to start right here by clicking on "edit this page" and start writing!

Marc Segar's list of "typical" behaviours of people is interesting[1]. It does not mean that these behaviours are desirable, nor does it necessarily mean that they are helpful for atypical people, other than for understanding how they are different from a majority of people. What I find much more helpful is what typical and atypical people have in common, because that is going to be the basis of mutual understanding, when it happens.

First of all, only few people are good in all these things Marc Segar lists. To use the list to value oneself against what is normal may be harmful rather than useful. If the Monotropism hypothesis is right to some degree, the difficulties for autistic people are multitasking - to think of all these rules all the time is extremely stressing for single-minded people. Lots of typical people feel the same, even if their capacity to multi-task may be better than those labelled as autistic. Besides, if you are a male and try to assimilate with normals in order to get a girlfriend, there might be a risk of becoming a nice guy syndrome.

The key for understanding other people and being understood is to understand that what people feel often matters much more than how they look, dress or behave. People's empathy labels them attracted to what feels good, and pushed away from what feels bad. That means people like you more if you feel good, and like you less when you feel bad. Thus working towards yourself feeling good rather than pleasing other people's norms is the key for social interaction. If you work on feeling good for yourself, other people might pick up on it. On the other hand, if you feel insecure trying to pretend to be someone else, people feel that as well and might turn away after some time.

These talks by Dinah Murray might also be helpful: Finding and maintaining a niche and Creating social space for autism, and here is a list of links from the Autism and Computing website. A detailed practical Field Guide into the behaviour of neurotypicals from an Asperger perspective was written by Ian Ford - Field Guide to Earthlings.

The key for understanding the sexual world is that neurotypical people use Baseball metaphors for sex, but do not talk directly about it in public, with friends or a date, instead use slang and sexting. Neurotypicals by themself often don't know how to game the current "slang" and reach a "home run" which is part of how sexually successfull people discriminate themself towards women.

The key for understanding love relationships is that neurotypicals play subconsciously games to stimulate each other's feelings, wait for the others emotional reaction and then conclude whether they fit psychologically to him/her. A summary of those games can be found in the research on transaction analysis (a very good book explaining the process with clear language, unfortunately only in German: Transaktionsanalyse für Dummies)

It is worth noting that the question "what is normal anyway" keeps re-occurring when talking about psychology in general, and that question may possibly be answered in the works of five- time New York teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto and author Thom Hartmann. The central premise behind these works is the fact that the compulsory school system is designed to "socialise" children into the work force by making them docile, predictable, willing to take the word of leaders as truth, and dependent upon others for a sense of self worth. This goes a long way towards explaining neurotypical behaviour, and why neurodivergents don't fit in: Neurodivergents simply fail to be socialised this way.

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/alistair/survival/survival.pdf