How the heck do I help this guy?

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So I`m mentoring this guy online with some kind of ASD: he is from Australia and I met him on Youtube...he connected with me from the channel of the main person I mentor. It is very obvious that he has an ASD from simply interacting with him online. He has a lot of specific interests that he gets really "stuck" on and will talk about these with anyone regardless of the context.

When he comments on a video that has to do with the topic, they are okay, but he will talk about his interests or allude to them in videos made by other people with AS: particularly women. These interests include but are not limited to: languages, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, driving, and random facts like "lots of Askenazi Jews have red hair". They have nothing to do with the videos and he even pushes the people to explore his interests when it is very obvious that they aren't interested in them.

He will also ask questions or give comments on their videos quite a lot. A few of these lady bloggers, understandably, have gotten frustrated at his behavior. The girl I mentor and another well known AS vlogger have asked him to stop in various ways, but he wouldn't and they had to block him. He will also allude to youtube female bloggers quite a lot in our communications, despite me explaining very clearly why that sort of thing is creepy.

A few days ago, he asked on a video to do with writing a language how to spell my name and the girl I mentor's name: I said why it was creepy and asked him to remove it. He did: but still gave some ridiculous reasons why he thought the comment was justified along the lines of "there are many people with your names in the world"...Uhhh, then why the heck did you pick ours? He is also super hyper-logical and even I will try to give reason after reason why his social decisions make more sense...as he put it, there are flaws in my logic. This makes me feel really frustrated and invalidated. I am an introvert and will only save my breath and social energy only to write to people who I know appreciate my help...but I dont know if he wants it or not.

He also writes to me constantly, nearly every day, and even when I don't respond to something. He does not understand emotional tone at all and will not recognize when someone is angry or frustrated...hence everyone blocking him. I don't know if he wants my help or wants to change himself and so tonight I asked him these things. I don't know if he understands that he's scaring people away, and all I want to do is help him.

Out of the goodness of my heart, I want to help this guy, but it is just so frustrating when he writes me after I've explained something very clearly a number of times and he'll say something that shows that he very clearly doesn't get it.

I need some help in dealing with this guy. I am at my wits end. I always end up dealing with people like this who are so freaking hard to get through to. All I want to do is help them.

Any/all advice is appreciated.

Have you ever pushed a one ton stone up a hill? No? How about balance a flag pole on your head for a month? No? Ever walked to California from Rhode Island and back with the same pair of shoes? No? You should try it sometime. It'll be easier than trying to bring your friend around to normal.

Here's another question: What happens when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?

I don't want to make him normal by any means. I just want to make it so that other people aren't as annoyed by his behaviors.

You can still have AS and know how not to creep people out.

Only he can help himself sadly. He has to knowledge he has a problem and if he doesn't think he is doing anything wrong, it's impossible to help him and you are not his therapist.

Do you know for a fact that this person has an ASD or could they maybe be a seriously dedicated troll? Regardless, we all have to learn manners. Tell him his behavior is unacceptable and then block him. There's no reason to continue explaining if he is intent on using manipulative "logic" to badger and abuse you. Logic in quotes because I doubt he can find any actual logical reason for being such a chode.

Him finding faults in your logic means that he's not understanding your socially sourced logic. I can see where he's coming from in terms of how he thinks about everything. Since he has a certain mental framework that is very different from yours, in order for you to be abe to teach him something, it would have to fit into his logical framework somehow. And in order for you to know how his logic works, you would have to know him really, really well, something that is very difficult to do over the Internet and would require lots of hours in direct contact. Otherwise, he just won't absorb anything. I know that, coming from a rigid mindset perspective. He actually messaged me recently and told me that your messages have been making him very nervous. Perhaps it's enough and you should stop and just let him be.

He's obviously into collecting women with AS on Youtube and trying to assimilate them into his other interests. I think that the best solution to all this trouble would be for him to continue doing what he does, but in private, without trying to elicit direct conversation from the women. He could write short stories about them being incorporated into his world. He could also collect stuff on his channel about them, as long as he makes the channel restricted. Since his fixation just happens to be women instead of objects, this interest comes into the social realm; if he channels the interest in a way that makes it non-social, there really isn't anything wrong about anything that he's doing. Writing is a good outlet but he could also find other creative non-social outlets, such as art, to fulfill a similar goal.

Thanks for your responses everyone. I think I'm going to block him since he doesn't want to see beyond his own logic. I think he'll still be obsessed with me beyond that though, but whatever. I`ll try not to think about it. His behavior just annoys and unnerves me though to the point where I feel I have to correct it. But if he said his emails were making me nervous: why did he keep replying to them?

I am so annoyed with the tendency for a minority of guys that I have met on the spectrum to become obsessed with me. I know where it comes from, because I have fixations myself, but the difference is that I am so self-concious about them that I have to hide them from everyone. They do not see their behavior as different, don't see how annoyed and frustrated people get with them, and don`t want to help themselves. It is hard behavior to deal with.

All I want to do is help these people...and when I cant help people, I feel like a failure. I get annoyed to the point where I feel like going crazy and want to break things. `Maybe I should leave stuff like this up to the professionals who actually know how to do so, and be more vigilant to anyone who just contacts me out of nowhere instead of trying to help everyone.

Maybe he feels like he has to.

I'm thinking that perhaps the reason why so many guys are obsessed with you is because you seem completely NT, and yet you claim that you are autistic. I think this is alluring to some people because they may have always dreamt to be friends with people who seem very well adjusted. Saying that you are autistic gives them a hope that they can finally connect with an outgoing, friendly, seemingly extroverted individual, because "autistic" implies a common ground. What these people have trouble understanding, I think, is that this good adjustment and sociability comes with a price of social awareness that is inaccessible to many autistics. What these people need is to find that these is more to a person than just a label, that the common ground established by a label is elusive/not always existent. By means of this understanding, the next step would be to choose people to associate with based on shared characteristics as manifested by their actions, not by their words or by labels they put on themselves. The shared label may or may not lead to a more compatible person, but it does not guarantee a particular set of traits nor compatibility.

Also, there needs to occur within the individual a rejection of what is most socially desirable. Part of the attraction to the more NT-like characteristics is caused by what the society tells us is most attractive. Rejecting this standard may well be the most difficult thing to do, as this is the kind of thing that tends to easily seep into your unconscious no matter how much you try to control it. The stigma surrounding differences makes this instinct even harder to resist. It happens to all, really, no matter whether you're AS or NT. Group belonging is the best fix for this, but it's difficult to give that to a person.

Did you tell him you don't want him to talk to you/respond to your messages anymore?

Last edited by MathGirl on 24 Dec 2012, 11:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I suspect that your friend sounds too friendly online, hence people perceive him as creepy because excessive friendliness=creepiness. Me, I have a tendency to seem friendlier online than in real life. When I email some bloggers to show them how much I appreciate their blog posts, these bloggers get freaked out instead because they misinterpret my emails as a stranger's creepy attempts to befriend them. I just don't know how to tone my friendliness down.

I did. I told him that we just communicated far too differently for us to get on any sort of equal ground. He hasn't responded or messaged me since, which has resulted in less stress for me. Also, I checked his youtube and it seems like he has moved onto other things: so maybe in a way I got through to him.

Your explanation re: people being obsessed with me makes quite a lot of sense. It may be the reason that I have a few "superfans" on the spectrum who aren't necessarily guys or attracted to me but highly admire who I am and what I do...it may be because they see someone who is very NT-like. However, pushing myself to be NT-like comes at a price. Recently, in my presentations and in my general ASD related work, I try to let people know that, regardless of outward appearances, my life is not perfect, and I am often plagued with low-self esteem/self-confidence and high levels of anxiety. It's very difficult, personally, for me to reject socially desirable qualities as I am highly agreeable and just want to be liked by as many people as possible. There is a highly motivating personal reward from this, which is the opportunity to potentially gain quality friends and connections, and I gain a lot of personal satisfaction when I make these.

I would refuse to mentor the man and stop dealing with him immediately.
His behavior towards you and the other girl sounds like that of a stalker.
The net can be a dangerous place. There's a lot of info out there. It's possible he's not an Aspie at all, he could
just be faking it for your attention. He could be a pervert.
Please be careful out there. if he writes you everyday he is obsessed with you.
Internet harassment is a crime. Can you block him to be safe?

Obvious, but does he know? Has he been evaluated? A psychologist would have to talk to him in person to know one way or the other. ASDs can look like other disorders, and other disorders can look like ASDs. I am assuming he told you somewhere along the line that he had a diagnosis?

If he's got an ASD, it's probably not obvious to him that they're not interested. This is something we do because when we have a special interest, we are absolutely fascinated. It brings us joy, satisfaction, intellectual stimulation. We can understand, abstractly, that other people are not as interested, but it's somewhere along the lines of an obsessed football fan understanding only intellectually that other people don't care about football, but not really being able to see what it's like not to care who won the last game. We have a way of connecting everything new to the topics that are fascinating to us; I think it's the way we understand things. For me. those topics are science in general, psychology and medicine in particular, and cats (both behavior and biology). I will often use analogies involving cats when I try to explain something.

He probably doesn't perceive it as creepy; he probably just likes knowing girls. Most guys do. His interest is not likely to be stronger than the average person's, but since he doesn't know all those subtle social signals, he can come off as "creepy". He probably can't analyze why these girls "understandably" think he is creepy. What exactly did they consider to be creepy about his commenting? YouTube invites comments. Were they off-topic? Too personal? Too many of them? If he were to be given some rules about YouTube comments, he might avoid annoying people. Namely: One comment per video. Talk about the video only. Don't give out your personal information or ask about anyone else's. Don't compliment people's personality or looks, or try to flirt.

Yeah, there are flaws in your logic. This is because you are talking about people, and people do not always act logically. That matters to him because he uses logic to understand the world and may still be operating on the assumption that other people also use primarily logic. It takes a while to figure out that people don't act logically, that emotion figures into it and so do all the things that are in their mind at the time, and all the things that are in their past, and the temperature, and what they had to eat this morning... Thankfully, one can predict, to some extent, how people will behave. Most people will walk over a bridge rather than jumping off of it. Most people will associate their names with themselves, even though those names also denote many other people. People are not predictable fully, though. Our brains are chaotic systems and that means the tiniest change can cause a huge difference in what we do. The best approach is to learn which things are generally true, and then to know how to recognize exceptions and deal with unexpected things.

Talking to people when they don't respond--again, can you put that social protocol into a formula? You can't just say, "Don't keep writing to people so often"; he'd need to know how often it's okay to write to someone, how to get that person to tell him whether they want him to write.

The goodness of your heart, huh? Look... I know you want to help him, but he's his own person. You're not going to magically change him into a neurotypical person; this isn't a Lifetime movie. He's always going to be socially clumsy, though he'll slowly learn how to compensate; the best way to approach the problem is not to try to mimic other people, but to find ways that work for him. If he can find a way to get other people to explain to him in words what they are feeling, then that'll help. Words are easier to pin down than all those vague social expectations.

I know this thread is more than a year old but:

No, I said her email were making me nervous.



That was not the content of any the OP sent to me, but something similar was written in the last one.

I know this thread is more than a year old, but:

You're that guy, aren't you!

I found that the original poster to be a little softy-softy in her mentoring. For example, she seems to think it's okay to talking on and on about one's own special interests is okay if only interacting with people who do share them. This is worrying as it may encourage people she mentors to avoid people who don't share them and interact more with people who do, even when they, for example, have no evidence to back up odd things they say about their own interests. Often, someone with a special interest in an area will act like an expert in the area, whether they are or not, and may even talk down at others who share it, even doing so to people who work in the field.