APD with a crumbling marriage

Cross-posted from the General Forum for new members:

Hello all, I'll be posting in the APD sub-forum of Personality Place after this initial post. It looks like a quiet place, which of course is what I feel most comfortable with.

Biographically, I'm a 52 year old male who was adopted at age 1 after being born to a very young and neglectful mother. My adoptive parents were rigid evangelicals who shunned worldly things and read the King James Bible daily, out loud. When they reached the end in the book of the Revelation, they started over in Genesis. In retrospect, my early childhood was a perfect setup for what has taken place over time.

I learned to read at an early age, and was generally interested in school. I was a high achiever throughout high school, college and graduate school, and my first job out of graduate school was an attractive one.

Thanks to the overwhelming power of inertia, I am still in that job over 25 years later, but my career is in tatters. I have been married to the same woman for 24 years, and the marriage is barely cordial. We have three wonderful children who do not understand why Dad is so quiet. If I weren't taking the MAOIs (Nardil), I'd really be quiet.

That's it for now. I don't know how often I'll be able to post at the APD sub-forum, my wife has given me a book to read, written by a man who suffers from Asperger's syndrome. She does not exactly dispute my APD diagnosis, but as there is little written about APD, she regularly thrusts books at me that deal with other more famous disorders involving social reluctance and awkwardness. So it goes.

It occurred to me that I should have typed AvDP in the introductory post, rather than ADP. I'm an avoidant, but not lacking in feeling or empathy.

Hi, I'm not much good with advice (and am avoidant too.....) Thinking of you and sending hugs (if ok)

PM me if you ever feel like chatting or venting! I will reply... and talk

Thanks for the response and the offer, I may do that. It's ironic that I've not logged in since I registered, and your post was only two days ago. My personal situation is exactly the same as when I posted.

I corrected my classification to AvDP so as not to misclassify myself as suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder. I also denied that I have a lack of empathy.

As luck would have it, the book that my wife assigned me to read eventually discusses empathy, and the Baron-Cohen empathy quotient. The author of the book, who self-identifies as having Asperger's Syndrome, reported a quotient of 19 out of 80, which is quite low. I took the online test myself and answered the questions carefully, trying hard not to judge myself either too harshly or too easily. As a result, I had many answers where I "slightly" agreed or disagreed, and only a few where I strongly agreed or disagreed.

My score was 18.

It's not obvious to me what the real significance of that low score is, but it is enough to make me do some additional study.

G'day frameadvance,

One thing that I see in your favour is your wife handing you a book to read.
To me she wants you to get better and is still part of your life.

I pushed everyone away including wife and kids and now standing on the outside looking in.

You're still on the inside of a crumbling marriage, which means (to me) that you have been given support and things have a chance to get better.

The title of the book doesn't matter, it's who the book is from and that their trying to help.

Snap