Hello, my name is Linda and I am 36, I am here for some help on what is hopefully not too uncomfortable an issue - puberty. And some unusual aspects coming from it. I do apologize for the... odd... nature of this first inquiry. I don't know if anyone has any insight on anything similar but figured I would try.
I am the mother of a fourteen year old boy with relatively high-functioning autism spectrum disorder who has recently, following puberty, developed an unhealthily prevalent and pronounced sexual interest in feet - men's feet, usually, and only feet, almost exclusively. It's become concerning - not because of its nature, I find that, well, very unusual but harmless - but because it seems to have become an obsession, and one which causes him trouble as he is unable to realize other people do not exist simply so he can enjoy their feet. I am interested in advice on how to best go about dealing with it before it becomes even more problematic.
It has been going on for the past six months or so, but not to the extreme extent it has recently taken on. Our son has been sexually mature for more than a year, but for some time, he appeared to fail to recognize any aspect of the human body as a sexual stimuli as a typical human adolescent male would do. He is not entirely aloof, as some children with ASD are, but he is also not especially social. His issues have always lied most with understanding social boundaries than anything. He is intelligent, a gifted reader, insatiably curious, and generally able to handle his own emotions well. However, socially, he is rather a mess. He struggles with conversation or communicating his needs, never makes eye contact, the usual.
But back on the subject at hand - by this age, we were aware he was.. producing, as happens past puberty, though either through nocturnal emissions or intentional releases we weren't aware, as from a younger age, he'd been instructed, with apparent success, that while this sort of thing was normal and okay, it could be done only in the privacy of one's one room. However, ever since this feet thing developed - it appeared really quite suddenly - while he won't actively engage sexually in a public space, merely seeing feet - especially bare feet or in sandals - sends him into almost a daze, where he becomes dead to the world and can see, nor think about, nothing else, except touching them. He does not snap from it unless forcibly removed from the situation or if the stimulation is removed from his own sight, and even afterwards he may talk about it for the rest of the day - it's the only thing he seems to be able to talk about! He has asked his father, who's feet he is excited by as much as most any male's - to bring his feet into his room so he can see them when he does his private business, which is obviously a request always refused - which then can sometimes upset him so much as to make him cry. He is sexually aroused by seeing feet, and once when this obsession began asked a male friend of his father's, wearing sandals, to come into his room to see something which was only a ruse so that he could start to masturbate to them (he only knows he can do this only in his room - he can't grasp that it should only be done when he is alone in it). When he is kept from acting out his desires, he becomes angry. It has been the only issue to ever get him to question "why". Why couldn't he do what he wanted. He wasn't able to understand any variation of answer, that it makes other people uncomfortable. All he could understand was that he was constantly stimulated and always being kept from relieving himself as biology intended except when alone and with then, when he had nothing to excite him. I believe this issue is making him spiteful to me and his father, for preventing him doing what he wants, and withdrawn as a whole.
For whatever reason he has no interest in women's feet, nor children's - thank goodness. He doesn't seem to identify at all as homosexual, either - he knows well what the word means. He seems simply to enjoy feet and that's it, and finds something preferable about those of males vs. females.
His obsession can sometimes take up pretty much all he thinks of for days at a time. He seems to struggle to relieve his sexual tension with no stimulus in his room and it's obvious his obsession is strongest when he's hormonally built-up than right after he's taken care of his needs. Since this developed, he's lost much of his previously prevalent positive interests, such as reading and gardening. And things once enjoyable have become impossible to do with him - he can no longer visit the beach, for obvious reasons, and even shopping centers in the summer season are minefields of guys in sandals...
How can I possibly try and distract him from this, or take it down to a manageable level again, when it seems all he can think of anymore?
07 Jul 2015, 9:39 pm
