Male "autism" and abusive behaviour

It’s a really hard conversation to have here, or anywhere else. I keep reading and re reading my posts, trying to see which bit is going to get me jumped on and slapped down. However…

@SpiderPlantBoogie I think there’s a significant marker between the unintentional damage from some ND behaviours and the damaging behaviours we judge more harshly.
I get cross that it feels as if all the accommodating and learning is on me, and all the allowances are given to him. However, with my increased knowledge and understanding I can make my life significantly better. Yes, I’m handling him. Yes he ought to do more about understanding his own condition. But he isn’t deliberately behaving in ways that make my life difficult and he doesn’t change the behaviour when I’ve found a solution that works.

The goal or purpose of his behaviour has nothing to do with me. In fact, that’s the issue! I’m irrelevant. He does his thing. I find ways to stop his thing making my life miserable. He takes no joy in winning or getting his own way.

It isn’t easy to put in words, but the feel is totally different from the feel of more malicious people.

The vast majority of these men are not raised religiously, and do not work. I would say 8 out of 10 are on benefits.

Even worse is when this dynamic occurs in very religious families. Instead of being taught how to regulate or verbalise feelings, which is already difficult for ND kids, they are fobbed off with some standard line about God's will, go pray for something or some other bible quote that has zero connection to their actual emotional problems.

A dysregulated but successful ND father, a weak pandering mother and a whole bunch of undiagnosed ND kids growing up in a strict, often religious family is a recipe for disaster. Yet they always appear perfect from the outside so nobody believes them!

That’s a huge grey area though. There will be degrees of suffering. And their suffering doesn’t entitle them to abuse others.

And finally my response to intense discomfort and suffering is to behave in abusive and controlling ways that do not consider the wellbeing of the people around me.

What is ‘ND’ though? I’m sorry to say I’m not entirely ‘there’ yet in being convinced there are ‘different brain types’ which divide neatly into ND and NT.

It's less "I like things to be a certain way" and more "If things aren't a certain way, it causes me intense discomfort and suffering".

Yes I never said that absolves them of consequences. They should absolutely be held responsible for behaviour that impacts others and very often, these families fall apart anyway. However it's strange how nobody ever mentions the connection between ND and abusive or lazy male behaviour when it's so blatantly obvious. The autism police on MN always get their knickers in a twist whenever someone hints that people with ASD do not belong in a perpetual state of victimhood but can very well be assholes and abusers as well.

I would say that a version of this is pretty much the experience I grew up with including the mother with a decent dose of narcissistic traits alongside him who was very focussed on image, on manipulation and had quite the propensity to using nastiness to control her children.

They are people so they had good qualities too but any form of minor stress on them or behaviour that they perceived to negatively impact on their image they both used nastiness to regulate themselves.

The dynamics in the family were truly awful.

But nobody is entitled to have their needs met at the expense of others. This rush to frantically understand and appease male behaviour would never happen in reverse. I feel very strongly that this is just the age old abusive male behaviour dressed up as pathology as if to say they can’t help it.

They can help it. They don’t act like this at work, or toward their friends. It’s always the poor girlfriend or wife that takes the brunt. As usual.

This is a really important discussion.

I’ve worked in the criminal justice system for many years now, and to be blunt there is a massive overlap between these types of behaviours and men diagnosed with autism and ADHD. So much so, that I would say more are than not. And it is used as mitigation - ‘I struggle with appropriate behaviours and relationships because I’m autistic’.

Interestingly such behaviours from autistic women are very low which confirms my suspicions that this is just male behaviour rather than autistic behaviour, but the diagnosis is being used as a handy mitigator.

Ultimately we can’t reach a place where highly abusive men are citing autism as some kind of justification or excuse for what they’ve done, but we are heading in that direction. It’s convenient there is no equivalent diagnosis for women who want to explain away their crimes.

I will die on the hill that a huge number of undiagnosed autistic men turn into abusive narcissists as a way of getting their needs met. This usually applies to conventionally attractive men from "normal" families who simply refuse to believe that there is something wrong with them. They learned how to mask aggressively early in life so nobody associates them with typically autistic behaviours like painting model trains, memorising 1000 Pokemon names etc. But inside, they are still neurodivergent so they self-medicate with alcohol, stim by being on their phone all the time, use their career as an excuse for disordered or repetitive eating habits, and they utilise aggression, weaponised incompetence or coercive control to ensure all their needs are met by their partners.

If they feel sensory overwhelm or executive function freeze, they will go non-verbal which also acts like emotional abuse for their partners to figure out how to fix it. Their partners and children can often sense which situations trigger them most so they will end up bending over backwards to accommodate the man's needs to avoid being punished by his bad mood or silent treatment.

This is compounded by the fact that very successful ASD or ADHD men tend to attract narcissists because they love the proximity to money or fame. They're easily manipulated into becoming close friends with grandiose or malignant narcissists and all the toxic male behaviours end up becoming normalised over the years.

The only difference would be that ASD men don't tend to exhibit abusive behaviours if all their needs are being met and they are genuinely happy. However this state is very difficult to achieve in a busy adult life so they will constantly be triggered by mess, stress, children, chaos etc. True narcissists will continuing abusing their family regardless of circumstance because they enjoy it.

"3) I also don't want to cause testerical shouting, and trust the intelligence and nuance of the women here"

Lol. Good luck with that!

'The issue is that, as with all people, it’s very hard to distinguish between what is autism and what is the additional result of nurture/ lack of nurture/ culture around the individual when growing up. This could include online culture too.'

I disagree. There is so much overlap between symptoms - BPD and ND and trauma, if you look for them. All can be correct - as in there are behaviours ticking certain criteria. There is a tendency though , once autism or ADHD are diagnosed, to explain ALL behaviour through ND, dismissing other explanations.

The issue is that, as with all people, it’s very hard to distinguish between what is autism and what is the additional result of nurture/ lack of nurture/ culture around the individual when growing up. This could include online culture too.

Many autistic children really struggle to differentiate between what is real and what is fantasy. Many also rely heavily on echolalia and delayed echolalia when learning key things.

There is also an overlap with schizophrenia; 10% adults who are were diagnosed with autism as children go onto develop schizophrenia.

An autistic child exposed to poor examples of domestic interactions/ actual DV, overly violent and misogynistic online / screen content etc could really struggle / be abusive when they’re an adult. At the same time it does not absolve them of responsibility. Obviously all of this is extremely individual. And these things can certainly affect anyone. Personality types overlap every diagnosis.

There’s actually a large number of differential diagnosis to autism. It’s very important to get the correct diagnosis as some can do extremely well with a lot of therapy (eg BDP, PTSD, trauma.) but this is also very challenging as there are no biomarkers for any of them - just a subjective list.

My son was diagnosed as mildly autistic in the later years of primary school. His Reception teacher spotted it pretty much from day one, as did many of our friends, but diagnosis by paediatrician came a few years later.

I cried when they confirmed it. Because he will never, ever "grow out of it" - it is him. And while he is hilarious, imaginative, clever and can be kind and affectionate, he struggles with communication, boundaries, social behaviour and is endlessly in trouble.

Our parental strategy is to teach him that once reasonable adjustments for him are made, it's up to him to learn the rules and get on with it. Violence is unacceptable and leads to punishment. A lot of his poor behaviour goes in phases so sometimes we are teaching no whilst just riding it out and hoping it ends.

To go back to the OP, I read any media accounts of autistic people and try to learn from them. I have seen 2 accounts where autistic people hurt innocent children (AR and the Tate Gallery incident) but more where autistic people were the victim.

I worry that, as my son is already bigger than me, we have the potential for DV but we just keep reinforcing that Violence is wrong.

When I was an undergrad 30 years ago, there was a notorious professor who hassled female students. He was investigated and said “I’m autistic” and so got no punishment. The female students just learned to avoid him.

more generally, most autistic people can learn social behaviours, it just takes more time and explicit examples. (I’m excluding profound autism here). So autism should not be used to excuse abusive behaviour.

@DuskOPorter i agree, this “He struggles with cognitive empathy because if it isn’t how he thinks and feels then he dismisses any feeling anyone else has out of hand.” is hard to live with.

It requires significant self confidence to repeatedly remind someone that their opinion is not ‘the only correct one’, despite their intelligence.

I have had to repeatedly remind DH not make and act on major family impacting decisions without running them past me. And that when I ask for more information or discuss the matter with him, it isn’t a criticism but a reasonable and permissible attempt to understand our life.
I suggested he work out a family budget (massive change in circumstances ). He did. He didn’t however think to share it with me. He’s quite surprised I’d like to know what it is!

Yes, this whole 'unmet need' thing as a driver is problematic in schools where the need for basic education and sufficient books is also 'unmet' due to lack of funding and difficulty retaining staff (who at the TA end can earn as much with far less personal risk in a supermarket).

The fact is that schools are not funded or staffed to meet many children's needs - if indeed they can ever be met -, and yet the children are kept at the same school despite the risk to themselves and others. This is not good for any of the children involved. Boundaries are good for children, all children. If children really can't cope with boundaries they shouldn't be in a normal school because boundaries and rules are the only way these places can work. Loosening and bending safety boundaries because of a diagnosis seems to me to be the opposite of 'kind' in the long term. And the absolute hard-line boundary should be that you do not harm others.

Where children are violent, they are affecting the need of other children to feel and be safe (let alone get an education and some of these children will have ASD too), and yet, so much seems to be excused. My daughter's been evacuated from her classroom at least 4 times in the past few weeks. At what point is the child causing the evacuations given education that meets his needs and at what point does my child get an education where she doesn't need to be evacuated. The teachers and TAs are doing their best in a very difficult situation.

There's some concerning commentary on this thread Teacher speaks about lack of classroom support and abuse in schools | Mumsnet (not specifically about autism but about how many violent behaviours are excused in schools and put down to 'unmet needs' with seemingly no consideration of the needs of other children and teachers to be safe). It's unclear here whether the teacher has no support due to lack of funding or because no-one's willing to do a job where they will be kicked, hit, chairs thrown at them for minimum wage.

What if the 'unmet need' a boy feels he has is girls to hit or harm? Surely that's a perceived need that really does have to stay unmet? I also think it's not very kind to children to give them the expectation that every 'need' will be met. Because that's not life, unfortunately.

The lack of empathy is a stereotype which does not apply to every autistic person at all.

I have 3 very empathetic people with autism in my household, not just cognitive empathy plenty of affective empathy there too. On the other hand my father does not have a dribble of empathy. He struggles with cognitive empathy because if it isn’t how he thinks and feels then he dismisses any feeling anyone else has out of hand.

It is very hard to hear when this empathy difference with ASD is discussed where people assume empathy in autism is a universal given when you have been brought up with the cold, controlling and completely lacking in any empathy version. While I absolutely get that tonnes of autistic people are very empathetic there are plenty who are not. Mirror neurons are often a difference in autism.

It is the spectrum of the condition where traits are spiky on both ends of spectrum but you are not allowed to discuss the traits that harm others because it is seen as offensive.

'It's also the case these days that some of the people being expected to 'be kind' and accommodate may be autistic themselves.'

That's what I see too at work. The main problem is that loud, problem, externalised behaviours tend to overshadow internal presentations.
Problem behaviours tend to be prioritized for support.

Instead of setting boundaries (focus on changing behaviour as well as others being understanding), as it would be the case with other behavioural issues, the uniform advice for ND accomodation is to be kinder to meet the person's needs. It is expecting the problems will stop once all needs are met, regardless if there is any evidence to support this claim.

Sorry for typos. Havibg to access on mobile and struggle to type!

It was interestibg watching Love On The Spectrum how much more confident the men were xompared to the women. I think a lot of the entitled behaviour is because men get diagbosed earlier because they arent forced to comply socially like girls are. Boys will be boys, he hurt you because he likes you and all of those excuses and tropes play a part in the low bar we set for boys to comply socially. Women not being diagnosed until later ages means they have usually met a certain level of socialisation and have hidden things that make them obviously autistic because they have been conditioned to be less (less enthusiastic, calmer, quieter etc).