I see a common pattern in autistic people!

You are nice.

OK an idea. How aware is she of her own feelings? Ever? If she's weakly aware only, she could be taught to pay more attention to them and then imagine the other person having them too. This may need a lot of practice though. I don't know how helpful this idea is but I'm throwing it out there anyway.

Why I got interested in this... I also score low on that generic EQ test online where if you are below a score of 30 you could be asperger/autistic. I scored 22 just now. I do find I sometimes need to be reminded of other people's needs but I find it helps me if I see openly expressed emotions. I can then either viscerally take them up or make it a rule to not do a certain something again to a certain friend. That gets a bit more complicated when it also depends on specific circumstances. Overall I work more out of instinct than this rule based approach so I don't really view myself as truly on the autism scale, but the rule stuff does improve on my behaviour beyond part of the behaviour automatically taken care of by the instinctual emotional side.

So anyway if she doesn't like overt emotions - which could've been a good method but you are telling me they scare her - then maybe focusing on her own feelings is what would help her learn about other people. That's just a guess tho'. I do know a girl who's learned like this over time. She is also scared of too openly expressed emotions. So, instead, she focused on her feelings then asked others who were adept in the area of understanding personal feelings to confirm things and over time she got better. She was pretty bad before that with how to treat other people. So that's the visceral side of the learning (with some conscious effort at understanding the feelings) which can account for a lot of improvement already. Too bad your friend is not able to keep rules in mind like I do, though. Maybe she could with some practice, again?

But then she'd have to be committed to practicing all this. Motivation would be that she'd have better relationships, people would care more! This is what I experienced myself.

One more problem in that area is, if she's had many negative experiences and consistently enough, she'll probably have resistance against the entire idea of working on this to have better relationships. Somehow she'll have to "self start" the process. I don't know how that happened for the girl I know, for myself it happened by accidentally getting a positive experience when I was put in a receptive state (kinda a combination of trying to change my own attitude for a second, purely out of frustration, along with getting lucky really in receiving the positive response - but long story here).

Hope my above post makes some sense - I'm only talking about my own experience and about limited experience with other people's processing this issue for themselves. If some of it was too trivial, sorry.

I do want to add, that you explaining things logically is cool but I do believe it's possible she may need to also feel the logic through her own experience of feelings. Somehow she needs to get there. Well so this is my take on the issue.

Yes, makes sense. She is definitely not asperger's, she is more severe, like moderate autism. She is quite good at understand other people's emotion if you sort of push it to the front of her head, if she compares to self. But she cannot trigger this process herself. And she cannot keep it in mind for very long.

She has said she wants people to like her and I say she needs to understand where she is at. And what is different. And learn skills to socialize. But she doesn't understand that because it gets too abstract for her how I explain it. She tries to get it into the concrete and absolute and in detail. She wants me to analyze every of her social situations to tell her who did wrong, her or the other one. I try to explain I cannot be a teacher for every situation in life and sometimes there is no right and wrong like that. She says that is the only way she knows how to think.

She gets very frustrated when people take a step away from her. Not to leave her but to let themselves breathe. Then she tries to "manipulate" them to care by telling everything wrong that has ever happened to her. I try to get through to her I care, but it is hard. She is already angry and think I will abandon her.

Glad it makes sense, what I said.

Sure, there isn't always a right/wrong or whatever. She needs to find the attitude where she can be open to hearing an analysis that does not primarily blame the other party or anyone at all. I found for me such communication analysis worked best when the other party made it clear he/she was not going to blame me for anything while analyzing because it helped with my attitude - or if I already had that attitude of openness to fix things up, then it did not even matter who I was talking to. She also needs to find strength in standing alone but with developing that positive experiences too may be needed first. I do think a therapist specialized in this would teach this stuff most effectively. Does she not want to see a therapist?

We don't offer that kind of help to the undiagnosed, and getting a diagnosis here takes about two years. Also I don't she would qualify for the waiting list since she does not have citizenship in this country. There is no going back to her old country. I wish she could get the help. Where she comes from it is "shame" to have any mental difficulties so she always had to pretend being normal. I'm sure it takes a toll on a quite severely autistic person.

What the **** takes two years for getting a diagnosis? O_o But really, I'm curious. Which country is this?

This Friends Always

I don't think autistic people are manipulative, IMHO.

I am lost.