(This is a slight reworking of a post i started writing about a year ago, but didn't get round to finishing at the time, but which i thought it would be somewhat appropriate to resurrect for the next Disability Blog Carnival, of which the theme is "Relationships".)
The opening line of Sarah Kane's groundbreaking and incredibly intense play about depression, identity and psychiatry 4:48 Psychosis (written shortly before her own suicide, and only first performed after her death) is "What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive?"
This is the question that I have always wanted to ask the neurotypical world, and not rhetorically but in honesty. (I still haven't worked out whether Kane's intention was rhetorical or to honestly ask a question to which she genuinely did not know the answer - but, well, 4:48 Psychosis is a work which has such a huge emotional impact on me I find it hard even to talk coherently about it - suffice to say that, when I saw it performed as a monologue by an incredibly charismatic amateur actress in a very small, intimate venue in... I think 2002... I rank that as one of the defining emotional experiences of my life, and Sarah Kane has the rank almost of a deity in my head.) In any case, that line struck such a chord in me, that resonated so powerfully, that I count it as one of the things that brought me out of my denial and onto the path that led me to self-definition and ultimately diagnosis as an autistic person (and my path to diagnosis is something I meant to write about very early on in this blog, but somehow never got round to... after clearing my current backlog of things I want to write about, perhaps I will...)
Part of why it resonated so hard is because of the frustrating path that so many of my friendships have taken. For me, friendship is something incredibly important, in fact quite possibly the central value of my life (I wanted to insert a quote here from a book which I read part of while staying over at a friend's house a few months ago, Valerie Lehr's Queer Family Values, but have been having trouble getting hold of a copy of my own - basically, it's something along the lines of friendship, as an (ideally) equal and reciprocal relationship, being the paradigmatic relationship of a truly liberatory "family values", as the opposite of the hierarchical, non-reciprocal relationships of the patriarchal nuclear family). A core personal principle for me is that I never want to have an intimate relationship with any being which is not as near as humanly possible to entirely equal and reciprocal (hence my not having or wanting either pets or children). Despite this, it deeply frustrates me that, in practice, the majority of my friendships seem to end up decidedly non-reciprocal...
The most obvious way that this manifests itself is that I nearly always seem to be the person always initiating contact in every friendship - I am always calling my friends, but it's very, very rare for any of my friends to call me. In a few cases, I know that that's because people have social anxiety or communication-initiating issues of their own that make it very hard for them to call people, even if they know them well, and that they are genuinely appreciative of me calling them. In a few others, I know that they are the same with everyone, or that they simply never credit their phones because phone conversation isn't very important for them. In others, it's simply that they are busier than I am - but I can't help end up feeling paranoid when in almost every friendship I have ever had, there has been an obvious imbalance in terms of it always being me calling them, with that almost never reciprocated.
(I am currently lucky enough to have a couple of very, very valued friends who do actually call me, in part because I have talked to them about these issues, and that's incredibly important to me - but I still find it hard to believe, due to experience, that any such state of affairs will last very long...)
I have lost many, many friends in my life through this - when I have tried to get through to them for weeks or even months on end, and not succeeded once, and sent texts and emails which have also gone unresponded to, I ultimately, perhaps inevitably, end up simply giving up - although this is harder the more valued a friend they are, as for me deciding not to bother trying to keep in touch with someone any more is a very final and irreversible thing for me. (I also permanently lost touch with quite a few friends when I had my phone stolen a couple of years ago, and didn't have any of my numbers written down elsewhere, despite the fact that I managed to get a new SIM card with the same number, simply because none of them called me, and I was unable to call them.)
The thing is, I have absolutely no idea what a neurotypical person would do in this sort of situation - and I am also half convinced that neurotypical people don't get into that kind of situation in the first place - from my perspective, it seems that there must be rules for obtaining and maintaining reciprocal, mutually supportive friendship which I was never taught, but which most other people must somehow know and follow instinctively. I have no idea, for example, how long it's "normal" to wait for your call to be returned after you have called someone and not got through before trying to call again - but I also strongly suspect that most neurotypical people don't face that dilemma in the first place, because they do get their calls returned - and I don't know why...
There's another form that this non-reciprocity takes, which is subtler and somewhat more difficult to write about. In those friendships which i do manage to maintain, i very often feel like they are unbalanced in a way that always leaves me feeling particularly guilty and self-hating; the direction of support within the friendship, which ideally should be an equal flow both ways, seems to become unilateral. What seems to happen is that either i talk to a particular friend about the worries and problems in my life, with the expectation that they will likewise talk about their worries and problems to me, but for some reason that reciprocity doesn't happen, and they simply don't tell me about theirs, leaving that aspect of the friendship as a one-way thing when that was never my intention, or, in the more insidious form of it, every conversation i have with a given friend seems to end up developing into a one-way advice-seeking session, in which my problems become the whole focus of the conversation and theirs do not even get mentioned - again, without me ever having intended that that happen. (I've even - more than once - had cases where the purpose of a meeting or a conversation was for me to try to be somehow useful or helpful with some difficult situation going on in a friend's life, and i brought up something from my life as a potentially-helpful parallel, and that ended up turning the conversation into one about my problems...)
It's hard for me to describe exactly how this role-switch happens, or even for me to verbally describe the "roles" themselves (except by analogies to "professional" relationships like counsellor/client, which is a train of thought i'm not particularly keen to follow), but it is always apparent to me, and always deeply frustrating, when it happens - but, once it has started happening, i seem bizarrely powerless to reverse or stop it without ending the whole conversation (and probably in doing so strengthening the impression that i am "the one with the problem").
The way this leaves me feeling is as if i am somehow an inherently "parasitic" person - one who is doomed to "take" but never "give" in every relationship - despite my strongest desire being to "give", to be "useful", to provide something of genuine value to a person who i am in a valued relationship with. This reminds me of what i have heard people - often those with vaguely spiritualist or "New Age" leanings - describe as "psychic (or "energy") vampirism" - and makes me wonder if many of the people so described - often in extremely damning terms, such as in this article (warning: don't read if you are allergic to woo) - are actually intentionally "draining energy" from others at all, but rather suffering from a clash-of-neurotypes communication problem. (I believe i've heard of people - possibly in the Goth subculture - actually self-identifying as "psychic vampires" - but couldn't find any first-person accounts from such people, although i'd be interested to.)
I'm left stumped as to why this happens - possibly due to non-verbal cues (that i'm in all probability not even aware of) being misinterpreted by the other person? or to some aspect of my verbal "style" (word choice, sentence structure, etc)? I think one part of a reason for it may be issues related to "empathy", as i wrote about here, but am not sure if that's particularly helpful in trying to lessen or avoid it. I think another reason for it might be that my need for social interaction in general seems to be a lot higher than many people's (including both autistic and neurotypical people) - to extend the vampire metaphor, it reminds me a bit of the recent film Daybreakers, which features vampires who remain fairly "human" as long as they get a steady supply of blood, but if deprived of it rapidly mutate into monstrous-looking, feral beings apparently lacking in human sentience, which resonates with me because of just how strongly i feel like i am falling away from humanity if deprived of contact and conversation with other people.
(There are also things i want to say here, that feel vaguely related to this post, about how a basic ethos of helping/serving others can very easily get twisted into something deeply unhelpful, and the probable influence of Christianity on that in my case, but i think i'll save that for another post.)
So... i'm kind of wondering if any other autistic people might experience this phenomenon, particularly in friendships with non-autistic (not necessarily neurotypical) people - and, if you do, if you have found any effective ways to deal with it. My active hope remains for fully equal and reciprocal friendships, and i have some which it would be reasonable for me to believe are such, but i think the nagging paranoia is always likely to remain that in all my friendships, i "take" and don't "give". Tentatively, i think that this sort of difficulty is less likely to develop in autistic/autistic friendships than in autistic/non-autistic ones - but then, i have sometimes encountered situations with other autistics where it feels like there is a double dose of communication barriers rather than a neutralising of such barriers...
Even more tentatively, i wonder if discussion among autistic people about how to deal with these sort of issues might eventually lead towards developing an entirely new "autistic model of friendship", which might function very differently from what most neurotypical people see as a functional relationship between friends. Posts like this one, and the kind of autistic communities that are slowly developing out of events like Autreat and Autscape, give me hope that such a radical remodelling is possible, but i'm still a long way from knowing what exactly it would look like. Possibly even the concepts of equality and reciprocity in friendships that seem so important to me might actually come from a neurotypical-centric set of values that does not take into account neurodiverse ways of relating to others.... i don't know. It's difficult for me to even speculate that far. Anyway, if anyone is reading this who has been frustrated by the non-reciprocity of my friendship, then i want you to know that this is very much unintentional, and any suggestions for how to make our friendship(s) more reciprocal would be very positively received.
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22 comments:
A lot of this is ringing true for me --- I've historically been the friend who tried harder to start, strengthen, or maintain the friendship. I'd call/write people I hadn't talked to in a while, just to talk to them and renew the friendship, I'd drop in on people if I lived near them, and (earlier, like in high school) would be the one making more overtures to hang out outside of school. I also got a lot of rejection/non-response, too --- again, particularly in high school. Later, things have tended to even out; friends would contact me about as often as I contacted them, and, less happily, I'd reach out less often due to communication/energy problems.
I've also experienced the asymmetry in Friend with Problem/Supportive Friend relationships, though I have been more often in the Supportive role. (I am the One With Problem in my romantic relationship, though). I don't think these are quite as one-way as what you've experienced, though, since I've never felt taken advantage of, or anything. And in most of these friendships, the roles could be reversed sometimes. My friends have helped me, and I've helped them. Sometimes I have felt like I've needed *more* support, but I don't attribute that to inattentive friends so much as to the severity of the problems I was having. (Hello, severe depression and overload-induced agoraphobia!)
As to whether non-autistic people are able to avoid one-sided relationships, I've got little to go on but I kind of doubt it. (Though, with the non-autistic people in my acquaintance who have had relationships like this, they're usually on the side of the Supportive Friend/Lover who ends up getting bled dry by the Excessively Needy and/or Manipulative Person With Problems.)
I think some "energy vampire" situations are a clash of neurotypes. (I haven't read the article because I hate woo. But I am familiar with the concept.) Others are clashes of physical type and a way of treating someone's access needs as an energy drain because as an ablebodied person you are not used to having to work at relating to someone.
But sometimes it's something real. I don't mean real in the woo sense. I mean it describes a real and profoundly destructive kind of relationship. The reason I know it's real is because I have known a couple people who fit the bill but it's clearly not an access or neurotype issue because they are less physically disabled than me if at all, and are also autistic. I have only known a tiny number of such people but the horribleness involved makes them all too memorable.
The most obvious aspect is that the moment they come into any form of interaction with me, or even a room with me, I become exhausted. Sometimes too exhausted to even move. Sometimes so exhausted that after an hour with them I have to sleep for days, and not just because all social interaction is tiring to me. Once after ending such a friendship I instantly had more energy than I had had in the entire time I had known them. It's like the constant threat of potentially having to interact with them was a drain on me. In one case someone warned me in the middle of such a relationship that the person was an "energy leech", that person being their other primary... target or something, it's hard to say friend.
It's very hard to say what single trait created this sort of person or relationship. I know it was always someone who had that effect on either everyone who knew them, or at least anyone who entered a certain kind of relationship with them. And it was definitely not anything at all about neurotype because the effects did not differ between targets, regardless of the neurotype of targets. (Sometimes there were targets, sometimes it was a nonspecific effect on everyone around them regardless of neurology or physical type.)
One aspect of it was a profound selfishness. Everything they did had an explanation that came back to their emotional "needs". This meant that they could have endangered your life and the response you'd get when you informed them would be "but I was so upset I couldn't help it". If they did something good for you it wasn't because they wanted you to feel good, it was because they wanted something back. The autistic ones would even come out and say that sometimes. Nonautistic ones were less honest but still obviously doing the same thing. No act of kindness was done without a price tag. The idea of no strings attached was foreign to them.
Cont'd
They tended to be incredibly manipulative. Yes even the autistic ones. They would do or say things in a way calculated to get you to do whatever they wanted. Even if they had to contradict themselves to do so. Like (I am making up this example, but it's a close parallel to something real) claiming to be in pain in order to demand a backrub, but the instant they knew you wouldn't do it regardless of their pain level, if you told them an alternate way to help the pain they would go "oh I'm better now" even if the time elapsed was five seconds.
And while there was an element of me always being the one helping with their problems, it went beyond just the facts of that. It was that they would go and create more problems so they would have more problems for me to solve. And they resisted actual resolution of them for the same reason.
In one case the person would tell me about all these people who were "bullying" them. And I was sympathetic until I found out from multiple other people that the people were actually being bullied by this person, or the person would go around picking fights and then come back and act like a victim when they talked to me about it. The same person was desperate for a (nonromantic) relationship in which they could be the child and have an adult take care of them like a child forever. They also tried to get another person I knew to quit her job and take care of them forever, when that person was too severely disabled to ever do such a thing for them. (But they were also one of those people who could never accept anyone being more severely disabled than they were and we found out they were taking traits from every disabled person they met and acting them out in everyone's presence except the one they borrowed from. Presumably to be more helpless than they were.)
Unless you are doing lots of things in those veins, your relationships sound like they are way less imbalances than ones that get called vampiric. They do have that imbalance to them but there is a lot more to a vampiric relationship than what you've described (and while they may say they want reciprocity, they really don't, and I'm assuming you do). It does sound like the people you are friends with may be giving you subtle hints that as an autistic person you are not picking up on. And it may be worth just refusing to talk about your problems at least a certain percentage of the time. I don't know. But you sound way way less awful than the people I've met that most people would call energy vampires.
Oh and I forgot to mention that it is unrealistic to expect friendships to be 50/50 all the time. Many friendships are unequal in one direction or another and that's okay as long as everyone in the relationship is genuinely okay with it (by genuine I mean without being forced by therapist types to believe all relationships ought to be 50/50 and without being forced by the other friend to accept a friendship they wouldn't otherwise accept). Some relationships are 50/50, most are either steadily imbalanced or switch between different levels of imbalance. Therapists have played a role in creating the 50/50 belief, because they get more work for themselves if they convince someone "Your problems are too great for a friend, so you should see a therapist" or "Your friend's problems are too great for you, you should dump them and tell them to get a therapist.". I would not have survived my early 20s without leaning on people more than they could lean on me, and seeing a professional was out of the question for PTSD reasons. That means my friends were even helping with suicide prevention at times. I can be more reciprocal now only because of the help they gave me back then.
Oh god, Shiva, I know what you mean. It's really frustrating for me as well, and I don't even have the desire to socialize much.
My mum once said it's because I'm a pain in the ass. (In the kindest possible way of course)
It's a neurotypical privilege thing IMO. Non-autistic people can just not bother because they have to make a bit of an effort to communicate with me, whereas I'm expected to make that effort all the time.
Lindsay - you reminded me of one thing that i forgot to put in in my rush to finish this post - the fact that this (especially the later part of it) has a horribly self-fulfilling aspect to it. In my worrying that i am being a drain or parasite on people, i get all self-loathing and apologetic about it, which in turn actually makes me even more of a drain on those people through my apologising causing them to seek to "reassure" me, and it can be an incredibly hard-to-break cycle.
Amanda (re first 2 comments) - with the people who you've known who were "energy vampires" (and now that you've posted here, i think i actually remember you writing about them at some point on your blog), do you think that they were intentionally acting like that? Or were they themselves unaware of how they were affecting others?
I've known a few people who i have found extremely difficult to interact with and not quite been able to work out why, but about whom for some unkown reason i felt like their presence was somehow an unwanted imposition even when they were talking about things i also wanted to talk about. (Oddly, one person who i felt like that about for a while actually ended up becoming one of my closest friends, after hir going public about certain things allowed me to change certain specific perceptions about hir.) I don't think that's quite what you're talking about, and i definitely didn't think those people were being intentionally "draining", but i think it might have had something to do with nonverbal things that i am very poor at consciously percieving, but still somehow percieve and am "bothered" by on a subconscious level, and i wonder if that is something like the same effect that i have on many people.
Amanda (re 3rd comment) - i thoroughly agree with your assertion that "Many friendships are unequal in one direction or another and that's okay as long as everyone in the relationship is genuinely okay with it", and i think what you say about "therapy culture" being responsible for the assumption that all friendships "should" be perfectly reciprocal is very illuminating as well, so thanks for that.
(I should also say here that your writing on "therapy culture" had a huge beneficial impact on me, by validating things that i had been thinking and feeling for a very, very long time (since childhood even), but thought were too "beyond the pale" to ever voice openly - seeing someone as respected as you in the online autistic community saying it openly was a huge thing for me, and i now point everyone i know in the direction of your posts on the topic whenever it comes up (which it does a lot in certain types of "green"/ecological activist, as well as feminist, circles).)
That sentence ("Many friendships...") also makes me see an illuminating parallel with the pathologising by some radical feminists of consensual BDSM relationships, which seems to come from a privileging of ideals of equality and reciprocity over those of consensuality and liberty. I'll have to think (and perhaps write) more about that...
Kowalski - that point about privilege and who has to make how much effort how often is definitely a very valid one. (I often find it quite hard to think of personal/relationshippy issues like this one as being about privilege or other "political" concepts, despite my oft-stated mantra of "the personal is political"... probably because i have so much internalised oppression in the form of "I, being the unusual, "awkward" one and in the minority, am the problem".)
It strikes me that it would also stand equally well if it so happened that autistic people became the majority, and hence "neurotypical", and non-autistic people were the "odd" ones, which raises interesting issues about majorities and minorities in general... another topic that i'll have to think/write more about...
I'm not actually sure if my overall "desire to socialise" is greater or lesser than the average NT's (although it does appear to be greater than that of a lot of autistics). My problem is often that my desire to socialise exceeds my capacity...
Another thing is that i'm fairly sure that i value pretty much all my friendships with other people a lot more than they value their friendship with me. Whether that's because of scarcity increasing the sense of value, or perhaps because of the general emotional/empathetic overload thing that i talked about in the old post i linked, i'm not sure, but then, it seems like i "over-value" everything that's important to me (or "take it too seriously") compared to most NTs...
Yeah, I never bought into the idea that I'm supposed to be the problem because I'm a minority.
It may have something to do with being female (a mojority in numbers) living in a patriarchy/kyriarchy.
Kowalski - interesting point... i wonder if that might explain why seemingly more female-assigned autistics write/do activism from a radical social model viewpoint than male-assigned ones (of course, with some obvious exceptions)?
That's an interesting phenomenon, isn't it? I wrote about it here as well, that if you experience other forms of oppression, you can more easily see a pattern at work.
Oh my goodness this post. (I found my way here through the Carnival). I find so much to relate to in this post. I always seem to be the one to initiate conversations with friends (not call, because I dislike phones. But e-mail, message, &c). And when friends don't respond to something I've written to them, I...well, I kind of freak out a little. I'm going through that right now, actually--it's been about two weeks since I heard from a guy I know, so my mind keeps looping around these horrible ideas. He's shunning me! He hates me! He'll never speak to me again!
I've also--as have several of the other commenters--noticed the asymmetrical power dynamic within my friendships. I tend to be...I don't know, kind of needy? Which isn't *necessarily* wrong, but then I feel guilty about making so many of my conversations All About Me and end up in this weird Shame Spiral thing (which, as you said in comments, can easily become a particularly nasty sort of cycle).
Also, I am going to be reading 4:48 Psychosis for a class this year. Now I'm really excited!
Anyway, thank you for writing this post. You've given me a lot to think about! And reassured me that I'm not the only one working through some of these issues, which is always a comfort.
The people I knew seemed to be aware of a lot of it, because they were doing a lot of things that require intentional planning, such as telling different sets of lies to each person in their lives, and other complex acts of manipulation, most of it with the purpose of... I don't know the word exactly. They seemed almost addicted to and outright basking in a superficially pleasant feeling they got out of it, and willing to do nearly anything to ensure a constant supply of it. One person I knew was actually open about the matter, being the first person I heard the term energy vampire from. The others were not open but seemed to be aware of what they were doing, maybe not in words, but enough to take specific actions to try and hide their intentions from others.
You still continue to give me absolutely none of that impression. (And with the people I have known it has come through in writing, due to some kind of pattern I was sensing.) I think you have fallen into (I mean, fallen into a situation where you have seen the term used this way) an unfortunate use of the term to refer to situations that have nothing to do with what I just described. And that have only become described that say because of things like ableism.
And yeah the situation you are in may well be that people fond you annoying but don't want to say so directly (and there could be a bunch of ableism in that too). I have been in a lot of situations like that and even "if you don't like me just tell me" didn't work, ugh.
On a side note, Raven Kaldera has a book called, I think, "The Ethical Psychic Vampire", that's about how to use that dynamic in ways that are positive for all people involved. I don't know if it's what you are interested in, and I haven't read it, but I've enjoyed some of his other writings so figured I'd toss it out there.
I tend to associate that sort of relationship, on both sides, with attachment issues. I know I'm happy to step into the caretaker role because it's one of the few ways I can feel closely-connected to someone without being vulnerable.
This means I've encountered both people with whom I've had fulfilling caretaking relationships with and those with whom I've had manipulative, unfulfilling caretaking relationships. The latter were almost always characterized by three things: dependence, a disrespect of boundaries and the chronic nature of the relationship. If I was *not* available, I faced negative consequences, emotional blackmailing or additional clingy behavior. They also never considered nor respected that I might potentially have something else to do, or that I might have a bad day. Finally, this was not the product of a crisis situation, but rather a chronic, repetitive situation, where they were unwilling to work on their attachment issues.
I've successfully "used" other people to get over some of my own attachment issues, and have successfully supported friends who needed someone they could unconditionally come to while they learned the coping skills to provide themselves with that support. Do I prefer my current non-enmeshed relationships? Sort of. I miss the depth of a friendship born of need and attachment, but my life is also less stressful and tiring now. Also, when non-enmeshed relationships go really well I can have an intense, close connection without loosing myself or being responsible for someone else's happiness.
There are pluses and minuses, but I think the most important thing for me is that every person *own* what they are contributing to and getting out of a relationship, and working always towards greater personal insight.
I am neuro typical, very much so, and had exactly the same problem throughout my twenties. It was only past the age of 28 that my friendships began to solidify. It's got a lot to do with people on the make, insecure, and looking out for themselves. People like that tend to drop by the wayside over time. I suspect this happens regardless of where one is on the spectrum! Hopefully as time goes on the genuine people will stay and the freeloaders will melt away. I find online friendships have lasted too, and this could also be a solution for you, especially if some of them were close enough to meet IRL.
I wish you best of luck and many happy friendships in the future!
As a kid with undiagnosed ADD, I found it happening constantly, and it continued into my teens. I'm not sure when or how the situation pretty much stopped occurring, although it was in early college.
It left me a very confused and sensitive child, I think, constantly trying to appraise everything I said and did for potential hurt and embarrassment. I worked _hard_ to make it less work to be my friend, but I often failed and it cost me a lot of pain and constant soul-searching to lower the cost to others. This post brought back a lot of uneasy memories for me, but thank you for writing it.
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I have had these feelings so so so so so many times.
Especially the vampire friendships. They make me feel so wrong.
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Interesting post. I've more often ended up on the other end of things, feeling bad about having trouble keeping in touch or initiating things. Then I'll put off calling or e-mailing, since it's been so long and I'm afraid they're pissed off or just assume I don't care at all. Your pattern sounds kind of like the flip side of that, but also based on some assumption that people will not want to be around you (especially in the stated worries about the reciprocity and boundaries).
Like Amanda, I've had dealings with/lived with people I can't help but classify as emotional or energy vampires (no woo needed), and you have never struck me as having much in common with them. You actually care about other people, and are concerned about reciprocity and fairness in general. The narcissistic, vampiric people I have known do none of those things, and their ability to put up a pretense of doing so varies rather a lot.
What Amanda describes sounds painfully familiar. I have also seemed to attract other vampiric types as "friends" or "partners", for a variety of reasons. (Including feeling like I had to put up with that kind of behavior.) I agree that you do not seem to fit the description.
There's a rather good description of how these folks can be described as vampiric here. That site specifically talks about narcissistic mothers (in fact, I kept getting the eerie feeling that the author knew my grandmother, as familiar as it all sounded), but take out some of the power dynamics and it describes narcissistic behavior, period.
Another you might find interesting there is one rather long (but good) description of dealing with a narcissist. And pretty much by definition, if you worry about the effects you are having on other people, you are *not* one. Needing extra validation and attention (maybe in response to, erm, having lived with a narcissist), while being painfully aware of the fact, is not the same thing at all.
TBC
(cont.)
For the last link, I forgot to add that it also talks specifically about narcissistic mothers, but applies just as well to other narcissists. It's harder to deal with if there is the extra layer of power over you (and really easy access), but difficult enough in a friendship or romantic relationship.
I would be more put off by the terms used to describe narcissists--and more likely to extend doubt, assuming it might be a misunderstanding much like with autistics--if experience had not told me that they are painfully accurate. :( I'd be more likely to see things in terms of some kind of neurotype conflict, but that would require a non-constructed sense of self. Ouch. That may well happen in response to serious abuse (spot on in the two cases closest to me); even with compassion, the results can still be very difficult to live with.
From what you describe, I'd suspect a combination of neurotype conflict (as you suggest)--with misunderstandings and misinterpretations of some communication--and some emotional needs that just haven't been getting met. (*Very* different from constantly looking for narcissistic supply.) How to get them met without feeling like a burden is the difficult part! Can't offer much there, since that kind of thing is so individual.
From an earlier comment of yours:
In my worrying that i am being a drain or parasite on people, i get all self-loathing and apologetic about it, which in turn actually makes me even more of a drain on those people through my apologising causing them to seek to "reassure" me, and it can be an incredibly hard-to-break cycle.
Oh my, yes. I fall into this one far too easily, and have really made other people upset with it when they might not have been all that irritated to begin with. (Though I can feel like an unreasonable drain if I say I want or need anything whatsoever, given the training that way. Not the best overlay for some neediness!) Even with lots of work, it's a pretty persistent pattern. Ingvar just tells me to stop apologizing, and I've mostly stopped taking that as a sign that I'm a huge PITA he can barely stand to be around. *wry smile*
Amanda also made an excellent point, about expectations of 50/50 reciprocity. Things aren't that neat, dealing with real people, and the balance does vary across time depending on people's needs. Wish I had some reasonable suggestions for stopping beating yourself up over it. ;)
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