You gave good examples, LadyM. (husband let me sleep in this morning; plus he's up the other end of the house talking to difficult child 3, who also slept in - we often post close together).
As I interpret it, you just gave some examples of how things have been with you and your difficult child. It is very brave of you to do this, also very honest. Good for you. And yes, we do understand how hearing some of those responses from him kicks you into the "I can't tolerate this disrespect" mode.
You recognise this now when you're calm - that is really good. That tells me you will be able to make the changes.
What happens every time you snap back to old habits - it undermines your progress with him for a bit. How much and for how long is dependent on how smart he is intellectually and socially. As they get older and more socially capable (and despite the autism, they CAN learn social skills, they just need to be taught to socialise the way you would teach history, for example) you find progress seems to escalate in some areas. However, something else that can also happen, is they get to a certain age and feel more confident in themselves, and make a conscious decision to ALLOW some of their autistic traits to have free rein. Our daughter has done this (easy child 2/difficult child 2) now she's an adult living away from home, she has found ways in which she can 'get along' and still enjoy some of the freedom in herself that she values. This means that to some people she will seem odd perhaps, but in an intriguing way. Few people would see this as Asperger's but those who know it will recognise it ore than when she was a little younger. She used to hide it a lot more, now she doesn't. it's a "like me as I am" attitude. She wears tightly laced corsets and clothing styled from the Victorian era, mostly. She buys fairly standard off the shelf clothing but will modify it. Or she finds specialty costume shops. But because she has amazing style, she merely looks like a fashion design student. As for her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) - those who visit her apartment will see it. But her husband has his own obsessions which dovetail neatly with hers. The pair of them make it work for themselves.
We (husband & I) don't worry about this in her, because she has learned just how much id acceptable and how much is going a bit too far. She keeps a lot of her individuality under wraps in the workplace, for example. She has learned a great deal in the last six months especially, on how to get along in the workplace even with work colleagues who seem unreasonable. Some hard lessons but she now has learned from it. She's 23 and still learning, now at a very complex level. I think her 'snapping back' to show more autistic traits, is part of her way of learning to cope. She can't hold it all in, so she has chosen what traits she can get away with, so she has more control over the rest.
But that is Asperger's. High-Functioning Autism (HFA) is different, tougher to deal with, harder work for you and definitely harder work for the person with autism. Also note - some people (including health professionals) will equate Asperger's with high-functioning autism. This is tricky because the goal posts are still moving. You need to have your own strong ideas on exactly where the boundaries are and where your child fits in, or the confusion can really mess with your head.
I just talked with husband - he came to tell me he'd posted and to discuss it with me. He hadn't realised that the examples you were giving were coming from you saying, "I realise I handled it the wrong way in these examples." So please read his responses in that light.
Which brings me to another point you may not have considered - where else in the family, do these traits appear?
We've often said, autism doesn't run in our family, it gallops. We were told years ago that where you have a kid on the spectrum in the family, you are much more likely to find traits at least, in another member of the family. In our family we have difficult child 3 with High-Functioning Autism (HFA); difficult child 1 with Asperger's; easy child 2/difficult child 2 diagnosed as having some Asperger's traits but not enough for a diagnosis (that doctor will not accept the presence of traits we see that he does not). easy child 2/difficult child 2 herself believes she has mild Asperger's. When we do the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) test with her on
www.childbrain.com, she comes out as mild Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). She's gone through that questionnaire thoroughly, analysed the questions including the suggestions on exactly how to answer them accurately.
husband & I can look at one another, we look at our parents and other family members and we can see traits there also. Now the way Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) is being diagnosed is constantly changing. But you will also begin to see this, as you learn to understand your son - we have become very good at recognising autism and Asperger's wherever we go. We can see Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) traits in husband. In his father (who was a lovely, gentle man with a brilliance for creating something out of nothing, for adapting junk into workable ingenuity). In his mother maybe? In a couple of his cousins. I look at me and my family - I'm sure I have traits, I remember some things from my childhood where I know I behaved in ways that other people around me couldn't understand. I have a cousin who was a musical genius but a social misfit. He learned how to blend in, but in his later years he was a handful for his carer and his colleagues. He was a household name in classical music in the 50s & 60s but in his later years his career evaporated because of his increasingly bad behaviour - nobody had of course raised him in any kind of diagnosis, he was instead allowed to be eccentric because of his talent. Highly intelligent, extremely cloistered - he was a lot like the bloke in "Shine" but without the later obvious oddness in mannerisms. And so it goes.
If you look at yourself and your husband, as well as other kids, try to see if you can find something similar. It is no stigma if you do find it - we are all, each of us, a bundle of different things. Autism is seen as a lifelong disability. But that doesn't mean it has to be a handicap. And even a handicap doesn't mean you can't still win the race.
One hallmark of high-functioning autism and Asperger's is often a strong talent or high ability area. An Aussie researcher, Trevor Clarke, did a lot of work about 10-13 years ago (I'm remembering, we tried to get involved with difficult child 3 but just missed out because the books closed before we were able to let him know what we had) in using the high skill capabilities of the kid with autism, to help them learn how to adapt.
What you need to teach your son isn't how to switch off the autistic behaviours, because you never can. What you are needing to do, is teach him how to adapt. When difficult child 3 was 8 we were finally able to explain to him what autism was, and that he had autism. He simply had not had the capability to understand, earlier. By 8 years old he was beginning to realise he was different, and to resent it. He was increasingly angry with himself and everyone else, for not fitting the rules that he had in his head, of how things should be (because of course, it always has to be fair, doesn't it? IN their heads. What you have told us of your interactions with your son, tells me he has the same rules in his head - he is very much focussed on balancing what you do and say, with what he does and says).
So we told difficult child 3 about autism. We followed "Sixth Sense" lesson plan (it was used by the Aussie autism association, called Aspect) and also added a description from difficult child 3's own understanding of computers. we said that if we compare a printed document with its twin, we won't be able to work out, just by looking at the printout, which was written up on a Mac and which was written up on a easy child. But the operating instructions to each different computer type has to be very different. The detailed computer language that is the interface between the person typing, and the binary code in the computer, is very different in a Mac than a easy child.
And some people have Mac brains, others have easy child brains. It's just a matter of finding the correct programming language, in order to get the same output from either.
After learning and understanding this, some months later we were talking to difficult child 3 and he said out of the blue, "You know - I'm getting very good at pretending to be normal."
I think that says a great deal on what it is like inside their heads. They always feel like outsiders and know they are different. They also desperately want to belong, but have to really work at it. Sometimes it just seems too hard; other times they manage better. We have seen with our older kids, that they get better and better at it, and at other skills. Seeing our eldest gives us hope for our youngest. He makes good progress but we're too close and don't see the gradual changes. Other people do, and tell us.
Last year's school end, difficult child 3 got a major school award, a citizenship award. it was for always trying to do better, always trying to work with his teachers, for working with other students and helping them (on school study days - he's a correspondence student as are the other students). We were blown away by it. But it showed us independently how other people now value our lad.
And the exchanges you describe - oh boy, do we know them!
I'm hoping that you will find the way through for yourself and your son, and begin to see the same changes too.
You're off to a flying start.
See if you can get the book from the library, or have a look at the sticky on "Early Childhood" on the book, it might give you some advance ideas.
Marg
