i would just like to lie down and die :(

[thriftychic]

ds2 (13) being assessed for asd. dont know what to think( have posted on here loads already)
main problem is his behaviour so go between being convinced hes asd to convinced hes a hideous pure evil teenager.
whatever it is dp has the same as they are almost identical at times .

yesterday ds2 was being particularly hideous , having a massive flip out . i didnt handle it as well as usual (which isnt that well anyway really) in the midst of my smashed up house , skidding around on washing up liquid which ds had squirted EVERYWHERE he then spat right in my face. i lost all clear thinking ability, i yelled that we would ring the police and dp launched him in the car and took him to the station.

as they left i realised it was the wrong thing to do but couldnt call dp as he had left his phone.

hoped the police would just give ds2 a telling off and put the frighteners on a bit but they actually seemed to point the finger at dp. ds2 told the copper we kept him locked in nad wouldnt let him go out with friends . we dont let ds2 go out as he wants to hang around a park with a group of lads ive never met and he lies to us , doesnt do what we ask etc etc. while they were at the station another copper came to the house , said he was worried about dp being so stressed , said they would inform school and social services . someone is supposed to be ringing me to see what i want to do (i think) he said spitting is assault and ds2 can be arrested.

dear god it was all so wrong. everything is now so much worse. ds2 wants to kill himself , actually telling me to have him arrested .
dp is non sensical as always and when i said i actually thought he might have just drove around and not actually gone he went ballistic and said 'but you told me to go'
i cannot cope with dp anymore than ds2 they are both from another planet.

everything is just so hideously wrong with my life at the moment . somehow i no longer have any friends that i feel i can talk to. no one understands and the people i hoped would, have turned out to be a massive let down and offer no support at all. my ,mother being one of them.
i am also angry at myself . i am also a massive let down.

You are not a let down at all!

So followed your instructions that's all and when stressed requests can sound very definite :)

Use this visit to your advantage. You have a chance to tell these people about the assessment and that things are on turmoil. Perhaps they may have ideas that can support you. Ask for a copy of the incident report to add to your log of issues for the proffs doing the assessment.

I know it's scary and hard but it really won't do your ds any harm to learn that this is where he could end up if his behaviour gets worse xx

hugs to you x

DH followed your instructions not SO lol

Oh thrifty you sound so stressed and at rock bottom. Our son has asd but is only at primary school but he can be so difficult. I dont always cope well with him now but you know what i'm not mary poppins i'm a normal stressed mother of an asd child and life is hard. Dont beat yourself up, i'm sure many of us would have reacted the same. As coff said use this as an opportunity to push through the asd assessment and also see what support you can get from other agencies. Is there a multiagency assessment or CAF? I'm sceptical about the actual purpose of these but it would highlight what support you could all get. I have a good friend whose teenage daughter had the most horrific teenage years and was diagnosed with aspergers aged 13. It nearly drove her family apart. Teenage years are difficult enough without asd. Hugs to you, turn this around and look at how you can use this situation to ask for help and move the assessment process along.

Just want to give you support.

Ds2 is only 10 but when he starts screaming everyone gets caught up in it, Dh included. It is so difficult to know where the child's problems and family stuff start and end.

However, I would say, think about the triggers. If you have a calm moment, is there something you can identify that is setting ds off in particular which you can approach from a different angle. Is there something you are askign him to do, or something he wants to do, that you don't want him to, that you tackle as you would for a child with ASD. ie: very low response, no escalation of demands, habit forming, lots of warning for change, not reacting to his anger, not shouting etc. That has helped us a lot. Also we try to think in advance about what might trigger off a bad reaction from our son (crowds, stress, being late, homework, loud noises, change) and organise things so that they are less likely to set him off.

We have been using Family Therapy to help, organised by council. She isn't so great, but it has given us the chance to sit down together and really sort out some of our emotions, and how we react to each other. We come up with a lot of the solutions rather than the therapist, so that is worth remembering, you do have some answers. It is also perfectly possibly for one person with ASD traits to find another with ASD traits extremely stressful, although it sounds counter intuitive; they are both hanging onto a fixed view of the situation, both hate shouting and screaming from the other, this in my opinion makes things much worse to start with.

But in the end, the way your Dh responds to the world may be a strength, in that he can identify with how your ds is feeling. Does he remember being a teenager, how did he feel when he was that age? Try and get him to get beyond how he thinks ds should behave, and work out why ds is behaving the way he does.

Also recommend recognising feelings in the ASD person, not to extreme degree but just acknowledging they feel bad about something, rather than dismissing their strong emotions as unreasonable. Sometimes that is very soothing!!! Read How To Talk so Children Listen it works with ASD children too.

Sorry haven't been much help with technical side, just wanted to say I know how horrendous it is when everyone is sounding off. You just feel like the family from hell.

I?m typing this rushed so please forgive, but want to say that if you've held a relationship together with both of them in the same house all this time, you are stronger and have more skills than you know.

Very few with ASD sons and partners get as far as you have still together, and what?s happening now is the sort of crisis that forces that issue. Follow Coffee?s and zzzz's posts, both absolutely correct and you need to take this and use it to push through for help. Take charge again, I know you feel drained and unable, but you need to show the world that yes you?re close to breaking, but capable of holding things together too.

Contact NAS and tell them what?s happening, they have a lot of experience of this sort of crisis point through one woman holding together an undiagnosed ASD family.

Sorry have to run, (own disasters testing my abilities to cope with own ASD family) but please know what?s happened last night is far from unusual and you?re not the first and won?t be the last. Sometimes it takes something like this to make everyone realise what we do on a daily basis just to get to the end of each day. x

Hope you are ok thrifty:-(
There is some great advice on here already.
I just wanted to say be kind to yourself.

All good advice. You can phone social services to set up a meeting even before they contact you. You can also get some advice from your local childrens and young peoples localities team - google it. SS may even be able to recommend a CAF even if you haven't got one via school. It could co-ordinate the support that you need. Don't give up or waste time thinking you could have handled it differently. We're all human and it sounds like you're doing a great job so far. You can do it.

To my mind, the police usually seem generally a much clearer-thinking and helpful bunch than the caring carrots. And their take on the situations actually seems fair enough: ds is in danger of breaking the law, and things are edging towards domestic violence, whilst dp can't handle this and his stress is reaching worrying levels.

Maybe it's the personality type they recruit? Or maybe I've just been watching too many episodes of The Bridge...

hi,
thankyou for all the helpful replies .
what triggers ds2 is not getting his own way. he is quite manipulative and controlling. telling him no can trigger him . not having things how he wants also . e.g recently he was supposed to be going to karate class , putting on a new karate suit. but , we realised it had a rip in it and would have to be sent back so , because he had to put his old one on again instead of the new one as he had been exited to do , he was in turmoil . he didnt want to wear the old one and he couldnt wear the new one. so , major disaster in ds2 mind , didnt go to the class at all in the end.
its things like that that set him off.
he starts by being really loud and obnoxious and when i tell him for that he just gets worse and worse .
sometimes , there isnt much telling him or arguing just massive explosion!

That kind of thing would really upset Dd3 as well thrifty.

Anything that upsets her rules or routines can make her very upset.

Like zzzzz says I have learned to see it as upsetting and anxious for her rather than making her angry. I usually dont try to communicate with her until she has calmed down. Sometimes she will let me give her a hug but usually she just needs to be left alone.

I have just bought the Understanding PDA book, not because I think Dd3 has the wrong dx but because she can be so demand avoidant and she isnt a teen yet so I want to try some different strategies with her. I have only read a couple of chapters but so far it looks interesting.

All I have to do now is get DP on board[hhmm]

I think your Karate story is a classic explanation of a trigger. You have to imagine if someone is very very anxious about something, and someone else was telling them stop worrying because it is ridiculous to worry, or telling them off for causing trouble/making a scene. In fact in those cases most of us would deal with anxiety in another person, differently, soothing, defusing, blotting it up. But instead, what it is easy to do with an ASD outburst is to feel that they are so unreasonable that they have to be stopped. Which often makes situation worse. As you said, he ended up not going to Karate. Maybe the answer was that that solution should have been available to him from beginning.
zzz is talking a lot of sense.

We've got into a bad habit with ds2 of saying to him "Why are you screaming? Stop Screaming!" when in fact what we should say, is "Can you tell us the problem quietly?"

But I didn't mean you had to sort all this out yourself; this is just of the tips I learnt from the ASD support group I was sent on, when Ds2 was diagnosed. At the time I felt...so what...I knew that...go away I don't want to think about all these negative things...but lots of stuff half remembered is now very helpful in the way I approach ds and situations. Also what my expectations can be of him.

For example ASD group said teach "Zero Tolerance of Violence", even if you knew violent behavour was due to anxiety. But they taught that you respond in a particular way appropriate to ASD children. So you apply a zero tolerance of violence, without thinking, my child is the worst child in the world and he must PAY, more this is a problem, and we must try and solve it without escalation.

thanks , makes sense
i am sure i will handle things better when i have a clearer answer . the problem is that when he is behaving so horribly i just dont know whether there is an underlying problem i.e asd or he really is just a spoilt horrible angry teen.
so far , 2 different psychs , 1 said he just needs anger management, not asd behind these behavior problems and the other thinks most likely is asd.
of course whichever it is , the behaviour is unacceptable and would have to be dealt with but how i feel about it would be different and i would be more accepting of it if it was asd. when i think otherwise then i end up blaming myself , blaming dp etc

I suspect a lot of anger management problems are ASD related.

Well, maybe not all. But there again, family therapy is v good for any stuff.

It is not about saying...I can't do anything about his behaviour if he has ASD...more...

these are the specific difficulties he faces...anxiety, fixed view of problems, low tolerance of stress, and how can I tackle them?

Also, it is a relief to realise that you haven't brought him badly; more you didn't recognise some of the difficulties he faced coping with daily life.

We do judge parents on the way their children turn out. It is a fact. If you see someone screaming at their child, and that child is hitting people in the playground you tend to see a casual link in the way they have raised that child.
But I can assure you I have met absolutely lovely kind thoughtful non-confrontational parents who still have children with autistic traits, who get into rages, who can't "cope" with everyday situations, who get stressed by social situations, who lash out. No doubt if their parents handle the situation badly they would be WORSE, but their parents aren't responsible for their ASD occuring in the first place.