Self-awareness an self-reflection

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Hello,

My six-year old son is having massive problems with this. He gets upset very easily, gets angry a LOT, yet when I try and talk about it with him, he will simply say 'I'm not angry', 'I'm never angry', or 'I rarely get angry'. I tried to name it differently, because I thought it might be a semantic thing. I tried to explain him that it's OK to be angry, but not OK to shout and kick. I tried the feelings and needs card, with very little succes. His friends at school are withdrawing from him, are fed up with his anger attacks. Sadly, I understand. I desperately want to help him with his, but I just don't see how I, or anyone else can if he doesn't even realize he gets angry. I understand there's a neurological explanation for this (low activity of the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex).
I tried the mirror approach once, it was extremely emotional, because he saw himself crying and it seemed very painful to him to see himself in a state like this.
I even told him 'honey, we have a problem. You get angry a lot, and I don't know how to help you if you don't see this'. I guess that wasn't a bright idea, but I'm out of ideas. So is his teacher.
We're on the waiting list for official diagnostics, hopefully we will get help in the next few months. Meanwhile, any ideas, thought, tips, are massively appreciated.

We have the opposite problem, in that my son perseverates on being angry, now that he kind of understands what that means. Also it is now his default go to emotion descriptor, so even if he is sad or disappointed he says he is angry. I think anger is more comfortable to him than the other negative emotions right now, yey! (not)

Identifying emotions can be hard.

I would try talking to him when he is not angry, in addition to trying to label it while it is happening. (Although, if it angers him when you tell him he is angry, you might want to temporarily back off from that, for the time being.)

Anyway, when he is not angry or stressed, I would explain what anger is calmly, and give him some generic examples, first of circumstances where people might be angry. Make sure it does not reflect actual events of any kind relating to him or your family, so that he can keep emotional distance from it, and not launch into denial. Once you have done this a few times, with him being OK with it, try to give examples of anger from characters he is familiar with in comic books, TV or video games that he likes. You might have to go slow before you get into more concrete, real life examples. As his comfort level increases, you can give more personal examples, and hopefully, in not too long he will be able to talk about these things after they happen, with greater understanding.

I say these things because when my son was 3 or so, he used to actually cry and get upset anytime I tried to explain any emotion, even happy ones. The very notion of emotions scared him. If your son is like that, even in a more moderate form, then it may require a gentle approach.

Maybe he has alexithymia? It's a difficulty identifying your own emotions, common in AS.

Another possibility is maybe he really isn't angry, but is feeling a different emotion and it comes out as anger. I often seem angry when I'm actually scared and hurt, for example.

He needs to learn to name his feelings for himself. I think he may be resisting it because you are telling him how he is feeling. A program like How Does Your Engine Run or a 5-point scale might be good for him. Perhaps he is ashamed about being angry? Even though you are telling him that it is OK to be angry just not to hit and kick, he may not really understand or believe that. DS reacts very strongly to anything that makes him feel ashamed or embarrassed. Using one of the methods I suggested above may make it more objective and it ca help the child find his own words for how he feels instead of having someone else tell him how he feels. An interesting thing for us when we did a 5-pt scale with DS, he would put the pointer on 3, which on our scale was "Nervous", more often than anything else. In this way we saw how much of his challenging behavior was a result of anxiety. It was an eye-opener .

I'm a big believer in naming emotions when my children are very young, but it is definitely harder for some kids on the spectrum. Have you tried to ask him how he is feeling or, if you think it is anger, after he has calmed down, how he was feeling? I agree that he might be feeling something different; anger is actually a secondary feeling resulting from some cognitive processing when someone feels threatened, hurt, scared etc. I remember assuming my son was angry at kids who were mean to him; it turned out that he was sad but didn't blame the other kids. That taught me to say "I would feel angry if..." etc. I also had lots of success watching TV with my DD who is on the spectrum; I could pause a show and say, "I wonder how so-and-so is feeling," or "He looks sad; what do you think has made him sad?" The trick is to never say that the child's perception is wrong; use it to try to understand how he perceives things, and offer options by saying, "or it might be... " or acknowledge that it can be hard to guess what someone's feeling by saying, "I don't really get why she is crying."

Thanks for your feedback.
I will try to name my own emotions more, stop labelling his, see if that will get him less upset, try to motivate him to name his own emotions, using some kind of scale might be handy. I'm thinking some kind of thing with 'levels' since he likes games so much.

But I think we'll have to start naming other people's emotions, since he simply does not seem to reckonignze his own. I don't know if he has alexithymia, I remember him saying 'I'm angry' a couple of years ago, but that was maybe once or twice. He has said 'I'm happy with my new toy' a couple of times. So maybe he is indeed ashamed about it, shame is an emotions I see a lot in him. I can't understand why he would think he has to be ashamed of it, though. Maybe I'm giving it too much gravitas.

I've noticed that my son feels ashamed or embarrassed about things that *I* would never think of as embarrassing but I have learned to accept that he has his reasons for feeling this way so I try to get to the cause or simply make a note to avoid whatever the shame producing situation is for him. It takes a long time for kids to learn to label their emotions if it does not come naturally for them, so I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about other possible disorders. My son is 7 now and we have been working hard for 2 years on this issue. He is much more able to identify how he is feeling up to a certain point and he still has a tough time choosing a strategy for dealing with big emotions, i.e. he can say that he is angry, frustrated, nervous, etc. but cannot come up with a possible solution independently. I figure that will come as he matures. I think naming other peoples' emotions and talking about how they deal with them is a good place to start. For us that helps a lot with the shame factor. If we talk about how another child lost his temper and threw sand on his classmate on the playground, that isn't directed toward him so he is able to talk about what the child did, how it was perceived by others and what other choices the child should have made. My hope is that eventually we will be able to make these discussions more directly about him and he can reflect on his own actions and the choices that he has. I think it will come.

It is alexithymia.
Even now, I can be crying and people will ask me "Why are you upset / crying?" and my response will be "I'm not upset / crying." - and it will still take me hours or days later until I realise why I was.
Quite frankly, it sounds like he's having emotional overloads. When we get too emotionally overwhelmed, it can lead to an overload - the problem is that with alexithymia this can happen much more easily or frequently because we are usually completely oblivious to our own emotional states.

You trying to tell him how he feels won't work because he won't be able to feel his own feelings or even be aware of them until hours or days later. Even teaching him to recognise others emotions won't really solve this issue, because he won't even be able to tell when he starts getting worked up. It's taken me years to make the connection that I cannot breathe or speak properly means I need to go to the bathroom and take a break before I completely overload. This has nothing to do with anger management, and everything do to with autistic overloads. If you try to treat it as an anger management issue it will only get worse because he will become even more frustrated that nobody understands.

One of my son's first therapies was a role-playing game called Secret Agent Society http://www.sst-institute.net/ (it was run by a local hospital as part of a group - be aware that, while it's great it is EXTREMELY expensive and you can probably do something similar without the expense)

One whole "level" of the game involved identifying feelings based entirely on physiological responses. There was some kind of "claw" game, where the kids were supposed to "grab" phrases and put them in "containers" labeled with the correct emotion. DS labeled every single phrase as either angry or happy - at which point the therapist noted that it explained an awful lot of his behavior (he was acting out whenever he felt anything that wasn't happiness, so fear, sadness, anxiety all came out angry.)

What I really liked was the next level of the game discussed heart rate, breathing rate, muscle tension, and a bunch of other factors and classified different responses with different emotions. DS can categorize things with the best of them, and he really learned a lot from this exercise - keep in mind he was 10 at the time, so he was able to do things a younger child might not.

There's a somewhat touchy-feely movement called EQ (Emotional Intelligence.) While I don't always agree with everything they suggest, sometimes they do have resources to help kids learn alternate ways of identifying their emotions. You might try a quick google of that with your son's age - then you can start helping him appropriately label his own feelings. Here's something a quick google brought up: http://ecap.crc.illinois.edu/pubs/katzsym/shuster.html

When my son was younger, I used colours - zones - to identify what were appropriate and what were not. Have you heard of the Alert Program - How does your engine run? It might be a good start to building that awareness. I never used the program in full depth but used red and green a lot.

http://www.alertprogram.com/

That is where we are, though he is calmer now that it is summer.

This thread has reminded me I need to work on this!

http://www.do2learn.com/organizationtoo ... ivity1.htm

I am going to customize an emotion wheel based on the emotions my son thinks he understands, and a couple I think he needs to, that are in reach. There is a standard one on that page, but it is way too sophisticated if you have a child that really is delayed and/or young.