pekkla wrote:
For the past year, I seem to be annoying my teen son, diagnosed with AS, every time I open my mouth. When he is playing WoW, which is most of the time this summer, I cannot ask him anything without getting either "shut the F*&% up" or "I hate you B&%$&@" or the more neutral "you are so annoying." When i tell him that he does not need to yell at me, he almost always says the same thing--"but you were yelling at me." When I ask him to explain, as I am not raising my voice, he says that my asking him questions about stuff he doesn't want to talk about IS yelling at him.
WTF? Is this a teenage attitude thing or is it AS? Is it something other aspies understand or can relate to? Or is he depressed? Sometimes his moods change abruptly. Sometimes he has rages where he dents the wall with his fist. He has a lot to be depressed about. He is very overweight, has no friends other than the friends on WoW, and he pretty much hates school, which is starting again in 3 weeks.
Any advice at all--I need it. I'm walking on eggshells all them time now with him. Even when I am talking to his sister in another room and he can hear us, he frequently tells us to "shut the %$&# up." I am a self-diagnosed AS and try to put myself in his shoes, but feel like I cannot say or do anything around him now. I love him and want to do the right thing. He is 14.
I can empathise with this because I'm still dealing with anger problems (though I'm doing better). They developed just around the same time as when I developed an anxiety disorder (which was roughly after I started puberty). Whenever something was stressing me out, I would either bottle it up until I had a panic attack or I would throw a huge tantrum. I now think that I was doing the latter to avoid the former. In fact, I usually get angry when I'm feeling sad or scared or confused....pretty much every negative emotion. Not sure why. Perhaps he feels like you are trying to force him out of a hobby that (perhaps to him) is the only source of escapism. Also, maybe I'm being presumptuous, but perhaps he finds it difficult to talk about his feelings? Perhaps he finds it difficult to describe them and much like most aspies, he probably find it difficult to "see the bigger picture". Of course, special interests are also quite addictive. I would know - sometimes they're great, but sometimes you can get so involved in them that you even feel withdrawal symptoms when you're away from it (or is that just me?).
Of course, I don't know your child, I suggest that you keep note of these behaviours if they are really concerning you (and talk about it to a specialist. I might suggest that you could bring it up with him, but he might see it as a form of confrontation and may think that you are invading his privacy and not respecting him (which it probably is). I hope you find a way to help him out and I'm sorry if my advice is useless.
22 Oct 2010, 2:58 pm
