Re: Re: : What does hurt look like? Roger's little story.

[Guest guest]

Here's how some of this can work, and Thanks, Helen, for the memory prompt.

Years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in El Paso close to my sister, I became attracted to a woman who was probably as "out of it" as I was. For years she had spent some time doing administrative or other career work in the New York City area, but hadrecently attended Washington University in Missouri on a B'Nai B'rith Jewish Charities foundation scholarship which paid for her social work schooling and expenses "full boat" in exchange for her agreement to work at any Jewish Community Center supported by the foundtion for five years as a way of discharging her debt. She ended up choosing El Paso of all places, despite the fact that she had no contacts there and New York would have been an easier location for her (based on her life-long upbringing there. She was the program director of the Jewish Community Center and was just at the start of her five-year term of service to satisfy the terms of her scholarship/grant.

A couple of things of note. She made her career choice rather late in life, somewhere in her mid or late thirties. She was also the child of parents who were concentration camp survivors. She was only mildly involved in things religious, but the career prospects of being a social worker were attractive, and so the deal was struck. She was naive, really not worldly, and, as things turned out, a poor risk assessor and money manager. But I get ahead of myself.

Both of us were quite inexperienced as middle age folks, and I think I'm taking a good guess at believing she was somewhere on the spectrum herself. I wouldn't doubt that one or both of her parents -- as she was an only child -- were somewhere on the spectrum as well. Certainly being a survivor of the camps is enough to make one loopy in anything looking like "life after."

This is long before I was diagnosed, and at a time when AS had not made it into the DSM. So who knew? Nobody.

Anyway, I met her during one of my infrequent visits to El Paso to see my twin sister who'd moved there to accept employment soon after getting her MBA at Michigan and not doing well at her first post-graduate school job with Borroughs in central Florida.

During one of those early visits to El Paso, I became involved with this woman. It was hot and heavy physically, and the "romance" was to come later. Things got to a point in our long distance calls that it was pretty clear to me that she had marriage plans and much of the traditional claptrap of adult committed relationships in mind. While her intentions were, on the surface, somewhat alarming, I felt as though the very physical distance between us would make that issue more manageable, especially were things to get more serious, and I hoped they would. I just wasn't ready for a "rushing into anything."

This was not in accordance with her timetable. The biological clock was ticking, and there were prospects of children and the whole package in a deal I wasn't anywhere ready to consider. But I get ahead of myself.

Comes a competitor, a suitor more in line with her expectations. A new arrival in El Paso, the guy has more access to her, to her time, and attention, that I had at long distance. For a brief time, I didn't know about him at all, even though he was seeing her in between my infrequent visits according to gentle hinting reports from my twin sister. What I didn't know -- and what no one knew at the time -- was that he was a professional confidence man. He was the son of a Rabbi in Montreal or Quebec or some major Eastern Canadian city, and was promising some pretty attractive things to her. I found all of this out much later. What I became concerned about was her intention of abandoning her "post" in El Paso long before her mandatory time of repayment service to the Jewish Federation was over with, and how she'd make good on her obligations to pay back the federation. But that was just a bit of noise in my head, and apparently not a major concern to her.

Upshot: in the midst of "my" relationship with her, she becomes enamoured to this fellow's ministrations, and as I found out later, he had started to hit on her credit card for his ordinary life expenses. This didn't seem to bother her at the time, as she reported later to me that she thought she could handle her affairs very well on her own. Only later did I discover that his tapping of her assets was quite serious, and he had run up a considerable personal debt on her credit. Most importantly, once I heard of this arrangement, I was powerless to do anything about the situation being at long distance back in San Francisco with her in El Paso.

And so it came to pass: He did such a number of her head that she was persuaded to leave her job in El Paso with no future assignment within the Jewish Federation to preserve her scholarship grant, and the next thing I heard from my twin sister in El Paso is that she and her fellow had gone back to her family base in New York. I believe she had gotten a job there, but wait, there's more. Not satisfied with what he had drained from her credit card, he convinced her parents to let him borrow their family car as his vehicle. I don't know what kind of a story he ran down to them all, but it must have been convincing. There was some money involved from her parents, but all of that was rather mysterious. I'm sure he did a thorough job of cleaning out their financial closets.

Cut to the next to last scene: he absconds with her parent's car, some money from them (the exact amount was never disclosed), and has "escaped" to Canada, where Daddy the Rabbi finally gets the first call from my "ex" and her parents. They make inquiries, and in a revealing conversation, the Rabbi lets them know that his son has done this numerous times, and he can't and won't be held responsible or accountanble for any of his adult son's antics.

Of course he couldn't, but that's not the point.

Talk about trust run up the flagpole, shredded, and flown upside down. All parties agrieved by his conduct had nothing to fall back upon other than their own gullibility and naivete. As far as I know, some thirty plus years later, he's still at the same game.

Point: In the complex arena of trust, I fell into a thought pattern that had me feeling very very bad about what a poor judge of character I was in having become involved with HER. Yep. Somehow I felt responsible for her gullibility, and angry at myself for having been bamboozled into caring about her in the first place. Don't ask for an explanation. There really isn't any that makes sense.

But this one personal example does illustrate just how twisted and distorted the autistic adult mind can get around matters and people beyond that mind's control. Or even a right to make any claims.

So, when I hear stories of people's trust being destroyed, this whole can of worms replays itself on a mental loop, and momentarily, I'm back to "my own" situation which actually has nothing to do with what I could have controlled or been responsible for. Lots of dots disconnected; lots of causality to look at, and no emotional logic or reference point to offer self-correction or even a healthy amount of learning from the experience until decades later.

Hey. Sometimes we come to understandings very late. Sometimes is better than never, and now is superior to "even later."

That I can write intelligently about this whole conundrum some thirty years later is enough for a start.

N. Meyer

Re: : What does "hurt" look like? > >Hi , >The most difficult thing about violations of trust is that usually, in an effort to understand *why* this happened and try to protect one's self from it happening again, the victim does take a lot of ownership for what happened. Too much. > > and I could tell you a story about a con man .. once married to a former ASPIRES member, I won't go into detail here but it seems that NO ONE this man has comes into contact with has any defenses against his schemes. He got a lot of good, smart people. > >I'm sure a lot of his victims feel stupid, feel they "should have seen it coming." But when someone sets out to manipulate they go into territory that normal people can't even anticipate. They lower the bar of human decency that much. > >We can do a post mortem after we've been done over and vow "never again" but chances are, nothing quite like that will ever happen again anyway. > >Some are more naive than others yes, and that makes them more vulnerable, some (but not all) AS especially. But you don't always have to be naive to be deceived. It does suck and I am sorry. >- Helen > > > >> >> Well this thread has gone a lot further down the road than I imagined it >> would at the beginning, but there's one thing about the hurts that >> people have suffered and have been describing here that no-one has >> mentioned yet. >> >> It's the question of whether we've aallowed these hurts to be inflicted >> upon us in the first place because of our naïvity and our attitude >> twoards conflict. >> >> Could there be a common element operating here whereby we're trying too >> hard to be nice and accomodating to others, so when certain others >> perceive our soft accommodating niceness they're emboldened to take >> advantage of the situation to their advantage and to our detriment >> because they don't expect there'll be any comeback? If we'd been >> able to have a more assertive attitude towards others, not been quite >> so intent on avoiding confict in the first place, ready to stand up and >> argue more, and to have generally adopted a more aggressive stance from >> the outset, do you think potential perpetrators might have thought >> twice and been deterred from causing our hurts in the first place? >> >> Thinking about it in my own case, perhaps my naïvity and my attempts to >> be accommodating and nice were partly to blame for the two big hurts >> I've suffered. Anyone else see similar personal characteristics as >> possible contributors to what happened? >> >> >> > > > > >------------------------------------ > > "We each have our own way of living in the world, together we are like a symphony. >Some are the melody, some are the rhythm, some are the harmony >It all blends together, we are like a symphony, and each part is crucial. >We all contribute to the song of life." > ...Sondra > > We might not always agree; but TOGETHER we will make a difference. > > ASPIRES is a closed, confidential, moderated list. >Responsibility for posts to ASPIRES lies entirely with the original author. > Do NOT post mail off-list without the author's permission. > When in doubt, please refer to our list rules at: > http://www.aspires-relationships.com/info_rules.htm > ASPIRES ~ Climbing the mountain TOGETHER > http://www.aspires-relationships.com >