Nothing but a lazy, conniving liar......I am lost...

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ASDMommyASDKid
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12 Jun 2013, 2:57 pm

I am going to throw this out to you but maybe softer parenting might be an interesting thing to try, if you haven't. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I get better behavior when I lighten up a bit, sometimes. If nothing else, maybe it would throw him off his game, and you would see something new that you could work with.

<ducks></ducks>



Last edited by ASDMommyASDKid on 12 Jun 2013, 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Wibbly
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12 Jun 2013, 3:04 pm

DW_a_mom wrote:
Wibbly wrote:
Thank you. I might. At this point - I just want him to be someone else's problem. And that book would cost money. I know it could possibly help - but I also know exactly "why" he is lying......

control.....he's an Aspie that is sociopathic in his desire to control everything and to have everyone else be wrong just so he can feel good. But there is the dichotomy for him that he "knows" it doesn't work - he always gets caught - but he doesn;t care in the end.

He's somehow sure it will work one day and that the whole world will apologise for being so mean.

I have no more unconditional love left for him. I guess that's my Aspie black/white.......but I have worked SO hard for ten years.....and nothing but his overall health has changed - when he can be bothered taking all the allergy and asthma meds......

I just don't want to be a parent anymore. I didn't in the first place - then he was such a joy as a toddler - so quiet, so compliant (with a few exceptions), so loving.....so able to concentrate, so eager to learn and help.....then he turned 7. And we have been living in a circle of thinking we're ok, making progress......then nightmarish realisations that he doesn;t give a flying bat poop.....

And I see his future - lonely, broken relationships.....grabbing, cheating, lying......and I die more inside.....yet I thought I coudln;t anymore.....

I will try considering your book suggestion......I have so much with the other son being dyslexic and genuine ADHD....


Have you considered that Aspies tend to reach out for control because they are confused and overwhelmed? The more confused and overwhelmed, the more they need to conform the world to their wishes. That is the pattern I've seen over and over on this board and with my son.

So it is time to step back and ask one simple question: what are you missing? He needs something that no one is giving him.

And that is going to be extremely difficult because you have your own issues that may well block your ability to get into his head enough to figure it all out. That is OK; we are who we are and we can't beat ourselves up over that.

But it could make a world of difference for your son if, instead of blaming him for that divide which will never be crossed, you acknowledged to him that part of it comes from you. Because, in his eyes. his entire family is probably a divide he can't figure out how to cross.

What happens if you see his reactions as self-defense instead of pathological?

There is no blame in most of these situations, just a mismatch that hurts everyone. Your hurt is palpable in your post, and his is palpable in his actions.

Anyway. Just a thought. Sometimes if we change perspective, our answers become more visible.


Well...so far....no one knew any of us were Aspie because we are so high functioning (go figure) - it's my "black and whiteness" on lies that I have to be careful with....very self aware....aware we can add and evaluate each time....but no, we aren;t perfect. So far the counselling he has had has shown it is about control - but I did think of asking him why - to see if he can articulate it (he is very high functioning and articulate), as I did wonder last night if he was avoiding because of being overwhelmed with the "grown upness" of it all - but the lying historically is not because of feeling overwhelmed - it;s because he wants something...a false comfort (we got that sorted)....but the lying as a means to whatever end....the lady at the Centre seems to think there's something deeper that only time and someone who specialises in this type of behaviour "may" be able to fix.



Wibbly
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12 Jun 2013, 3:11 pm

ASDMommyASDKid wrote:
I am going to through this out to you but maybe softer parenting might be an interesting thing to try, if you haven't. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I get better behavior when I lighten up a bit, sometimes. If nothing else, maybe it would throw him off his game, and you would see something new that you could work with.

<ducks></ducks>



=) Done it. lol. I do sit and actually am with him now, asking him the "why's" - figuring it out together...offering hope that he can change - it helps sometimes....but other times.....bloody mindedness cannot be beaten.

I appreciate everyone trying to help. =)



Wibbly
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12 Jun 2013, 3:15 pm

Esther wrote:
I am curious what happened to the woman from the clinic's son. How did he turn out? Did she tell you? Did it give you hope if she did?

Good luck!



me too! thanks.



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12 Jun 2013, 4:05 pm

Good luck to you! (I can't keep that from sounding sarcastic as I write, but I don't mean it in a sarcastic way.)

I'm with DW; there must be some kind of explanation you haven't yet uncovered, and that might include TOM or sociopathy or something else. Sometimes the only tool we have is lots and lots of detective work.

I wasn't suggesting you were a "soft" parent, just that sometimes parents haven't connected the work they do to maintain a home with the expectations that they have for their child's behavior. I'm glad you've already learned this lesson and am sorry it didn't work out.

In terms of detective work, I've found an old-fashioned FBA is helpful when I'm flummoxed by DS's behavior - basically, it's a charting system where you work out all the variables involved and see if there are any patterns. Here's an example: http://mfba.net/forms.html



Adamantium
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12 Jun 2013, 5:08 pm

Wibbly wrote:
I put so much effort into our son. GOOD counselling, special diet, research, love, teaching strong morals (that everyone else thinks he has cos he charms them)....

Who is this "everyone else" who he charms and who think he has these positive characteristics? How many people? Who else shares your negative view of your son?

Quote:
But he is just like his nasty, lying, egocentric grandfather and great, great grandfather.

That's interesting. Do you think this is a genetic trait? Whose father are you describing, yours or your husband's? Does your husband agree with these assessments?

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hey are jealous of those who do well.....like his brother, who puts his whole heart into everything.


This sounds like a kind of parental comparative that I am very uncomfortable with. Maybe it would be better to deal with each of them without any reference to the other. Are there other people than his brother who he is jealous of because of their success?

I don't feel I have a good sense of what is happening in this situation.



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12 Jun 2013, 6:29 pm

I'm sorry - I'm not going into all that with you - not to be rude or becasue I am offended - but becasue finally, this morning, I took it all to my doctor - she took me seriously and has pulled out the big guns to get us the right help. She stated (as I have before to him) that he could end up in prison - yet he has huge potential not to and has been moving away from this because of the counselling help we have got so far - but she is getting us some very specified help with a top specialist in this field of paediatric spychiatry/psychology (forget which)........

And by everyone - I mean everyone one we meet......because the part of him that is genuinely beautiful captures the heart.

And my doctor is quite comfortable with everything i have said. So is the woman in Wellies whose son was "teh same" from what she says - SO - we are finally standing at a precipice that has a path of hope, instead of a cliff to fall off of.

Thanks everyone. Will be too busy to pop back for this topic. I appreciate it all so much and know people are trying to help and add ideas.

Bless you all.



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12 Jun 2013, 6:34 pm

When you stop back in - we're all pulling for you, hoping for the best, and are glad to see that you've found support.



ouinon
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21 Jun 2013, 2:55 am

Adamantium wrote:
Wibbly wrote:
I put so much effort into our son. GOOD counselling, special diet, research, love, teaching strong morals (that everyone else thinks he has cos he charms them)....

Who is this "everyone else" who he charms and who think he has these positive characteristics? How many people? Who else shares your negative view of your son?

Quote:
But he is just like his nasty, lying, egocentric grandfather and great, great grandfather.

That's interesting. Do you think this is a genetic trait? Whose father are you describing, yours or your husband's? Does your husband agree with these assessments?

Quote:
hey are jealous of those who do well.....like his brother, who puts his whole heart into everything.


This sounds like a kind of parental comparative that I am very uncomfortable with. Maybe it would be better to deal with each of them without any reference to the other. Are there other people than his brother who he is jealous of because of their success?

I don't feel I have a good sense of what is happening in this situation.

I think this is v interesting.

I know that Wibbly said, ( right after Adamantium's post ) that they'll be too busy to read or reply to any more posts on here, but I just wanted to look at these questions, because I think my parents had a v similar opinion of me in my late teens, to the extent that the day I turned 18 my Dad said that he washed his hands of me from that moment, he was no longer legally responsible for me.

I lied, ( not all the time, but regularly almost routinely about some things ) usually to get things I wanted, ( which I knew I would not be allowed otherwise ) or out of fear of my ( aspie ) Dad's terrifying glowing-coal-eyes when angry. I knew that I wasn't supposed to lie, that my parents didn't like it, but it didn't seem any different to me to an awful lot of fictions that adults and authority figures produced on a constant basis. And I didn't understand that it "hurt" anyone at all, in fact it wasn't until I had an out of body experience when I was almost 29 years old that I really really understood/grasped that other people were not some kind of avatar, that other people actually felt pain, just like me. It was an absolutely extraordinary breakthrough; I discovered compassion.

My parents always approved of my sister though, she of total goodness, thoughtfulness, highly conscientious worriedness, etc and despite being 18 months younger than me so abnormally responsible and sensible and capable of longterm thinking, and sustained effort, and of finishing things, and and and ... that people meeting us for the first time always assumed that she was the older sister. I love my sister, ( always have even when I loathed/resented/despised her for, variously, her squareness, naff clothes, goody-two-shoes ness, etc, even when I bullied her, teased her, tried and failed to involve her in naughty things I was doing etc ) but she was a terrible contrast to me. My parents were almost never cross with her, and never ever "despairing of" her, etc ...

I do not know what might have enabled me to discover compassion earlier, perhaps excluding all food opioids from my diet ( gluten/all cereal-grain food-storage proteins, and dairy, as well as the powerful anaesthetic/painkiller sugar, which the medieval Arab world used for bribes it was such a sought after drug ... that yummy numbness/nirvana of mmmm ) ... if this boy is, like me, one of the large subset/36% of people on the spectrum with an unusually permeable intestinal membrane which allows the passage of such consciousness-altering molecules undigested/not broken down ...

The biggest drawback in "discovering/truly understanding compassion"/other's genuine pain was/is that I could no longer behave so dashingly/adventurously/recklessly/spontaneously in life, I have had to plot/calculate a much more complicated path through life/between/around people's needs and sensitivities; it slows me down, takes up a lot more energy and brain-power. It is tiring and time-consuming. Life was so much faster, brighter, flashing scintillating exciting like a film/story before ... . I was able to "fly" then, whereas now, being aware of other's pain, ( since age 29 ) has made me plodding, prudent, slower, careful, conscientious ... in fact the first thing that my best and longest-lasting friend of all time said to me when I saw her after the breakthrough ( and going on an exclusion diet etc ) was "You look like your sister"! :lol

Pre-the out-of-body-experience ( triggered by absolutely awful headache and attempts to push through it and being sick and so on ) at the end of several years of increasingly extreme alcohol consumption, and pizza and cheeseburger and sugary/chocolate etc eating, and constant very late nights, and a v bad gastro in Turkey and strong over the counter antibiotics bought there, I think life felt like a computer-game to me, a story-world all to myself, in which I was automatically/obviously the hero/ine and everyone else was NPC/non-player-character. I remember one morning after the breakthrough, walking somewhere, I suddenly "noticed" that the world, the sky the hedge alongside me, the wall the roses, etc were *outside* me, were not some virtual thing in my head/inside "me", that I was/am **inside** the world. ( It was what the out-of-body experience had "shown" me; me/my body physically *in* "the world" ). That was the big difference which enabled/accompanied the "compassion".

My parents had difficulty imagining or believing that other people could like/appreciate me, ( so did I, ... so I v much loved some German relatives who liked me a lot too, and a couple of friends, then later a "gang", as well as some teachers at school, etc ). Probably because in non-intimate, non-living-together situations I could behave well fairly easily. It's not so much that I "charmed" them, but that I wasn't under the same sort of pressures with people outside my home; I could behave "well"/socially successfully/charmingly for certain periods of time ... it exhausted me, I would get burn out if had to do it for v long, and did so increasingly in my twenties ... but the reason my parents saw so much of the lies and resentment and complaining may be because I saw/experienced them like game-administrators of some sort, not really part of the game, in a different "dimension" of some sort, with whom the game's-roleplay was not appropriate or something, or not even possible, home being somewhere that do maintenance and repair?

PS. My parents' recurrent refrain about my "qualities" was "lazy, greedy, ( not surprisingly with my food-opioid and sugar addictions; I was constantly on the look out for more of my drugs ), selfish" and "inconsiderate".

PPS. I resonated with Wibbly saying that some psychiatrist/therapist said perhaps her son is actually extremely autistic, just v skilled at doing all the daily stuff ( has "savant"ishly learned all the socially required rituals and customs ) so that the lacunes seem far worse ... I think that is me too, quite astonishingly autistic/disabled in some way by high levels of exposure by my developing brain to food opioids in infancy plus very obvious family/genetic predisposition to all this ... that I am shockingly disabled, but almost invisibly so that behaviour is given few or no allowances.
.



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21 Jun 2013, 4:14 am

I don't think enough attention is paid to this aspect/experience of the 36%/subset of people on the spectrum, that of feeling as if the world is inside one's head, and that other people are "mere" avatars ... no less fascinating or important for being so, just not "real" in the same way as oneself. And that for some "savant" or particularly bright/intelligent people on the spectrum the behaviour of others is like the problems and challenges on a quest in a computer game, to be deciphered and overcome/navigated, and that one's reactions/general interactions will seem very socially skillful because have applied a lot of impressive brainpower to "winning" at the "game", but will lack the underlying elements of "caring"/empathising ... and that our sometimes/often appallingly thoughtless, uncaring etc behaviour is the result of this "game-playing" perspective on things. ( Real intimacy is almost impossible while in that state, the closest that are likely to get is a faux-intimacy with someone who happily plays a certain role in a certain sort of "intimacy drama/scenario". Real intimacy is impossible because don't perceive other people as being as "real" as oneself and/or are always performing to some extent anyway ).

I don't know whether the incapacity for sustained regular effort towards longterm goals, total repeated failure of long-term thinking, blindness to consequences, intolerance for delayed reward, etc ( so called "executive functioning" skills ) are related to this perspective/experience of the world being inside one's head, or simply another by-product of a brain flooded with ( food ) opioids from infancy onwards ( the effects on serotonin and dopamine pathways etc which are involved in long-term thinking etc etc ) ... but it certainly ends up looking like the "laziness" my parents repeatedly accused me of, and Wibbly says of her son. :( However much I *try* and *try* to pursue activities longterm, to bring large/longterm projects to a close/completion it seems to be forever out of my reach, and it is desperately frustrating, cause for despair, ( like trying to walk with no legs ) and definitely feels like a good reason to only "bother" with the "immediate", the "instant", the easily/quickly achieved, because know that will never finish anything else.

If my aspie ( and coeliac ) Dad and near-to-spectrum mother ( with autistic and physically disabled sister, who died "young", and many other aspies/auties in her family tree ) are anything to go by I suspect that Wibbly's son may have been given v little proof that other people really feel pain. My parents were apparently always in control, always discreet, never complained, never showed any signs of distress, ( except worry, about missing buses or similar sort of practical problems ), almost always calm, and "reasonable", never argued/lost their temper with each other or us, ( even when angry their anger was extremely controlled, in my Dad's case literally "limited" to his eyes ), were always perfectly "civilised". Where was the pain? In some ways they could almost have been robots, for all the depth of feeling I ever saw them express. And when I bullied/teased my sister, ( mostly when aged 4-5 and again at 10-11 ) her quiet misery/crying ( still v alien/strange and infinitely fascinating as a result ) was "muffled", slow to happen, and became increasingly suppressed to mere disapproval/disdain as she reached puberty.
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