But please remember that not all aspies meet every one of these characteristics. My daughter has problems w/ coordination, understanding non-verbal social cues, reading others' facial expressions. She is also a talker and doesn't always know when to stop. However, she is extremely empathetic and can be extremely social in the right environment. Her language is advanced and she gets along much better with older teenagers and adults, as well as her loving on all the babies in our church congregation.
I'm appreciative of everyone trying their best to understand on here the realities of Asperger's - one thing I have to commend the people here at Websleuths is their willingness to research and look at all sides of an issue. So thank you for being so fair.
There are as many different combinations of symptoms as there are individuals with autism or Asperger's.
My son will hold long winded conversations that he tries to drag you into with him. Not one sided ones though.
He fits number 2 perfectly, except that instead of having only a few facial expressions, he has overly exaggerated ones.
He has obsessions, but many of them are broad, and he is prone to compulsive behavior, as well.
He can be compassionate, in fact to an extreme, but he does have trouble understanding why other people have the feelings they do, and he can feel incredibly threatened by emotions he is not familiar with, such as embarrassment, which he doesn't feel, apparently.
It is incredibly hard to understand and it can even be hard to recognize, but at least most everyone here is willing to try. I think the most important thing to understand, for everyone, is that while some people with autism may be violent, others won't be, and the statistics for those that will are actually much lower than those that are supposedly "normal". Autism is not a mental illness or a form of retardation. I see it as a processing error. Like a laptop that has been dropped, and instead of being too badly damaged to work at all, it has just enough of an error that it can't find the appropriate files and programs unless it is provided with an alternate way to locate them and open them up. That is what therapy, early intervention, and special education are meant to do.
