[My own experiences] Excessive crying etc.

Post Reply New Topic

Background info: I’m in my twenties. Every Aspie is unique. My experiences can’t possibly reflect other Aspies’ experiences. I’m posting this here because I have read elsewhere on the Internet that some parents whose children are on the spectrum have no clue why their children struggle with so many emotional issues. Well, I have no clue either. I can merely try my best here to give a monologue on my own emotional issues. Maybe your child faces similar issues, but I hope not.

Note 1: I can’t confide in my family. My parents are usually moody. One moment they might be smiling, the next moment they might be scowling. Even now, I still can’t pinpoint what issues will trigger their anger. Besides, I feel that they don’t always take me seriously enough. When I was in elementary school, I told them repeatedly not to force me to copy their answers to my homework questions. They always gave me the same answer, “Oh, you don’t know what’s best for yourself. I know what’s best for you.” I cried in school because of this. A teacher, who found out why I was crying, wrote a note to my parents asking them not to interfere in my studies. They stopped doing my homework on my behalf after receiving this note.

Note 2: I can’t confide in friends. I have zero friends.

Note 3: I can’t confide in counselors because of too many bad experiences. One counselor even lost her patience with me, calling me “the most difficult case ever”.

Main issue: I have been crying excessively as compared to people around me from preschool to high school. (I cried the most in preschool and cried the least in high school.) I have finally come up with a list of reasons why I cried so much in the past. The first reason is the TOP REASON.

1. I might cry when people mock/criticize/rebuke/get upset with my carelessness/forgetfulness/poor articulation/poor comprehension/poor motor skills/poor visual-spatial skills. Most of the time, any equivalent of “You are making my life difficult!” is enough to make me cry, especially if the speaker adds that I have been spiting him or her on purpose. These weaknesses have already been making me feel bad about myself because I can’t fully live up to my potential. I feel even worse about myself when people get upset with me because of these weaknesses.

2. I might cry when I watch shows or read books or listen to songs that sadden me.

3. I usually express myself better through writing than speaking. When I was much younger, my vocabulary then wasn’t rich enough for me to express all my thoughts and feelings adequately. Back then, I sometimes cried out of frustration because I was too tongue-tied to explain myself, but I realized that as long as I had pen and paper, I usually had few if any problems explaining myself through writing.

4. I vaguely remembered some people telling me that if I had always spoken my mind, then I wouldn’t have cried so frequently. Communication is usually the best way to solve any issue. Now that I think of it, I realize that my reluctance to communicate with people has caused me to bottle up my frustrations within myself. I tend to cry as soon as such frustrations reach boiling point. Even now, I don’t really understand why I would rather keep quiet until I cry than communicate with people. Let me digress… I’m the eldest child. My parents made quite a lot of mistakes when parenting me, but luckily they didn’t repeat most of these mistakes on my siblings. My dad confessed to me more than once that he had been trying out ways and means to cultivate me into the ideal Asian girl since my birth. In his opinion, the ideal Asian girl is quiet and obedient. She won’t question authority figures. Maybe this is why I keep my mouth shut in most situations?

5. I might cry if I have already done the same thing countless times, yet I still show zero sign of improvement. (E.g. Physical fitness tests, especially if sprinting is involved.)

Question: Dear readers, when you are in any of the abovementioned situation, how do you manage to get rid of any urge to cry? Um, I don’t really know how to phrase this… I assume that some of you might not even have any urge to cry in such situations. How do you manage to maintain this mindset of “Oh, there’s no need to cry.”?

Question: When you scold some other person, do you expect the other person to cry? I’m asking this because I have always been curious about teachers scolding students. Do they expect students to cry when scolded?

I try my best not to reveal too many details here just in case I expose my identity, but anyway, I interact with preschoolers during volunteering. So far, I had interacted with the newest batch of preschoolers only twice, so I’m not supposed to jump to conclusions. There is this boy who reminds me of my younger self in a really bad way. Even though 99% of the time I prefer people to leave me alone if they see me crying, I would like to confess here that as a young child, I sometimes cried to seek attention. (As a young child, I felt very very insecure because my parents quarreled over all sorts of issues quite regularly and sometimes these quarrels turned violent, but whenever my parents were on good terms, they were on really good terms, hence I could never predict how their relationship would progress. I could never predict how they would treat me either. For example, as a young kid, my dad sometimes told me it’s alright to fail spelling tests but sometimes whipped me with a belt for failing spelling tests. My mum always praised me for enjoying watching news on the TV, but once when I was watching TV news as usual, she suddenly screamed something like this at me, “WHAT’S THE POINT OF WATCHING NEWS WHEN YOU ARE TOO YOUNG TO UNDERSTAND NEWS?” When I cried to seek attention, I was actually looking for soothing words to assure me that there’s still some pleasantness left in this world.) When this boy cried, some of the volunteers would rush over to soothe him while other volunteers (like me) ignored him because I was afraid of pampering him. He started smiling as soon as he was soothed, but after a while, he would start crying again, causing the entire cycle to repeat itself. I was rather surprised that when my second session with the preschoolers ended, he said goodbye to me loudly and cheerfully before handing me a biscuit. I overheard the other volunteers gossiping that this boy’s younger sister behaved in the exactly the same way as him. (Crying, smiling when soothed, then crying again.) Oh, on an unrelated note, I noticed that this boy hardly blinked. I noticed that even though he remained quiet throughout the two sessions unlike other preschoolers who contributed their opinions as so on, when he wasn’t crying, he was staring into the eyes of every volunteer, one by one.

Questions: If he cries again, is it better for me to soothe him or to ignore him? Is there sufficient evidence that his frequent bouts of crying might just be an attention-seeking ploy? Maybe he is troubled by sensory overload, but is too young to express what “sensory overload” is?

Side issue 1: I sometimes wonder whether my troubles with social interaction are mainly caused by autism or bad childhood experiences. My own parents aren’t very good with social interaction either. My dad (introverted) is so unpopular in his workplace that it’s indeed a miracle that his boss promoted him years ago instead of sacking him. His boss, who appraised him fairly recently, wrote something to the effect that my dad is good at applying textbook theories to various problems but not street-smart enough. My dad still keeps in contact with his schoolmates-friends though. My mum (extroverted) makes friends with other women easily, but she loses friends just as easily. She notices that her friendships tend to end prematurely because her friends always turn her down whenever she invites them to go out with her. She has no clue why. I don’t have any clue either.

Side issue 2: I’m frequently haunted by bad memories. I notice that whenever I tell myself to forget one bad memory, more bad memories will flood my mind until I feel as though I’m buried under all these bad memories. For instance, I cried today because I suddenly remembered that in middle school, to cut a long story short, my class was split up and assigned to different classes for one particular lesson because my class’ own teacher was on leave. I learnt after the incident that the teacher involved was well-respected for being strict but excellent. When I arrived in her class around 5 minutes late, she loudly rebuked me for “irresponsibility” and made me stand at the back of her class, though she later allowed me to return to my seat. She assigned us all a role-play task. I suspected that she made my partner (her own student) and I perform the role-play task last because she wanted to “save the worst for last” because she asked the best pair to perform for the whole class first followed by the next best pair… Throughout the role-play, one boy in the front row kept giggling at my articulation. I cried soon after returning to my seat. (The teacher said that every pair disappointed her except the first pair that performed.) The teacher made the boy apologize to me. When I continued crying, the teacher told the boy to apologize to me in Chinese, saying “She’s a foreigner from China, apologize to her in Chinese.” (I’m Chinese, but not from China. Besides, I’m definitely not a foreigner.) She then said something like, “I’m sorry that my Chinese isn’t good enough for me to tell you this in Chinese. In life we all laugh at one another. You know the boy who laughed at you just now? He always asks all sorts of bizarre questions in class, so we all laugh and call him Monsieur What, he just laughs along with us.” I witnessed this Monsieur What boy told my partner (for the role-play task) angrily afterwards that I shouldn’t have cried because he thought “laughing at people’s articulation” is an unintentional offence that doesn’t warrant any apology. I told my mind to “shut up” but this incident just played itself out in my mind like a movie clip until I broke down and cried because I kept wondering whether I had overreacted towards that Monsieur What boy’s giggling back then.

Question: Your own experiences please… How do you successfully get rid of bad memories as soon as they pop up in your mind?

I'm sorry for sounding so angsty, thank you and have a nice day.

To address your questions about crying, it's certainly not unheard of for an aspie to get upset and cry more easily than most kids their age. I struggled with this when I was a young kid. To answer your question as to how to avoid crying, I would suggest that when you enter a social situation in which there's a good chance that you might end up crying, remind yourself that it's not worth it. Although it may be difficult to keep this in mind when you get overwhelmed, it was for me. I think part of the reason that I was able to get over my crying problem was that as I got older, I just came to realize that some of the things that used to upset me were far too trivial to be worth getting upset over. I know that when I would get upset, and feel like I was about to cry, sometimes it was helpful for me to withdraw myself from the situation if possible until I'd calmed down and was able to look approach the issue rationally.

I would never scold someone with the intent of making them cry, and I don't think that most people with a healthy approach to interacting with people would deliberately try to make someone cry unless they themselves had completely lost their temper.

I don't know if you should try to soothe this preschool child who likes to cry. It seems like you like to be left alone when you're upset, which isn't uncommon among aspies, but for a lot of NTs it's helpful to be comforted when upset. This kid seems to have appreciated being comforted when upset in the past, so there's a good chance that he doesn't simply wish to be left alone when he is upset. I don't know, a lot of kids still cry quite a bit when they're in preschool.

As for how to get rid of intrusive bad memories, is it possible that you could have some sort of anxiety disorder? I'm afraid I don't have a lot of advice regarding this issue.

I hope this helped to answer some of your questions.

Thank you very much for giving us your perspective, I think it is always helpful to hear how things hashed out for an adult with AS.

Sometimes parents struggle with cultural expectations, too - and often parents with autistic tendencies (like rigidly held ideas) have autistic children. Many Aspie adults who post here seem to be struggling with these truths. As an adult who may or may not be on the spectrum, it took me a significant amount of time to be able to separate what was my parents' unreasonable expectations, what was actually my disability, and what I could change to make things better.

It is interesting that you bring up emotions, there is a discussion of emotional regulation here: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt226859.html I know that I was very like you as a child (not only would I cry, but I would lose speech when I did, so there was no possibility of communicating what was going on.) My son, OTOH, responded to everything as though he was angry - I know for him it was about learning not only what different emotions were and how to appropriately express each one, but also about expressing degrees of emotion. It may well be that you crying all the time has something to do with this.

OTOH, I can see where you are in a very frustrating situation. You seem to need someone to talk things out with, and you don't have resources to do so - that in itself would be enough to cause sadness and crying. I will say this: as an adult, I've had some horrifyingly bad experiences with counselors. I have learned from them, and have been able to choose therapists who could actually help and didn't make things worse. Don't give up - but also, listen to yourself. Find a counselor who feels right (one that knows how to work with someone on the spectrum.)

The bad memories are something both my son and I struggle with: we both edge over a bit into OCD. I think it is a side effect of having a superior and highly detailed memory. We handle these sorts of situations by treating them like OCD: they are a "brain glitch," something that happens that is out of our control, and we try to ignore them and move on. Another possibility: it would also make sense that obsessing over bad memories could be a part of depression, and it sounds to me like you are struggling with a very severe depression. Again, professional help is a good answer - you just have to keep looking until you find someone who suits you.

Again, thank you for your help in understanding our children.

Your parents seem to have autistic tendencies and appear moody as well as also seem to be very inconsistent. Aspies don't seem to do well with inconsistencies and weirdly applied emoting, so I do not blame you for being confused. They also seem to have been pretty mean from what you have said.

Question 1: I do a terrible job of not crying. I managed to cry publicly at least once a year while in school. It was embarrassing, but I could not help it. So, I am not a good source for advice on this. I try to help my son, with his disproportionate emoting. He cries a lot at school, but I at home I can often get him through several days without crying, although he usually does shriek at least once a day about something.

Question 2: I do not want my son to cry when I scold him. I just want him to try to remember to avoid doing certain things, like touching the glass jars at the supermarket, so they do not break and maybe hurt him. Some at school expect him to look contrite and sad when scolded (His teacher knows better, the others not so much) but he is not going to know how to pretend to look like an emotion he does not have. They are not trying to get him to cry, though. They are hoping scolding and punishing will act as a deterrent. It doesn't because he has difficulty doing what they expect him to do because of impulse control and other issues.


Question 3: I help my son when he cries. I do not worry about whether or not it is attention seeking. If attention is what he needs I give it to him. When he cries, at this point, I can figure out why, even when he does not tell me, because of my seven years of experience with him. He needs help calming down, but I try to give him the tools he needs so he can soothe himself. So I will tell him when something is not as big deal as it seems to be and try to help him see that for himself.



Side Issue 1: From this description, your dad sounds like he has autistic tendencies, particularly his lack of social skills and "street smarts."
Side Issue 2: My son is like thi,s as am I. Bad circumstances seem to open the floodgates for related/bad memories. I think autism promotes this kind of recall, but I don't know of any specific research to support this.

Question 4: Getting rid of bad memories is tough. I try to tell myself that these other things are not relevant and try to distract myself. It has gotten better as I have aged, but maybe because my memory is not as good, or the pain of the past events has lessened due to time. This is probably a thing that cognitive therapy could help with, though I have not used it. I therefore cannot attest to whether it would work or not.