Thanks for the kind thoughts and suggestions.

I’ve found that I use my writing here to help recognise and deal with my thoughts and feelings these days. It’s taken a while to fully open up here, but now that I’ve managed to do this, I’ve found the process to be very liberating.

Maybe something like the blocks would help too – particularly when I’m having a bad moment of executive dysfunction that expresses itself in me not feeling able to make a decision about something.

This is interesting.

The text you quote does describe me rather well.

I’ve not come across the block system mentioned before, but I recently saw a similar, but simpler scheme in action on a TV program.

In that example, a young autistic woman (she had AS) had a set of ‘Emotion Cards’ that showed a pictorial representation of an emotion with the name of the emotion attached. She used the cards to convey how she was feeling.

As someone who finds it difficult (ok, more often than not practically impossible) to verbally discuss emotions, I can see how this system could be very useful.

I would however find it extremely difficult to bypass the stigma attached with using such a system, regardless of how useful it might be. I can suddenly comprehend why people who start to lose their hearing in later life chose not to wear hearing aids – there is a feeling of failure and also one of “I’m not disabled” involved.

I take your point about my wife learning things from me that will help with the raising of our children. I’d not considered that!

Thanks for your best wishes,

James

p.s. I reformatted your comment to make it easier to read, without altering the content. I hope you don’t mind.

I learned about it in a book called “Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Adults with Aspergers,” by Valerie Gaus. I’m extracting this excerpt from her book to see if it makes any sense to you.

“The obstacles or factors reducing interpersonal effectiveness can be lack of skill, worry thoughts, emotions, indecision or environmental constraints. People with Aspergers suffer from a combination of lack of skill and indecision. They lack the prerequisite skill of recognizing their own internal mental states, recognizing that their distress can be a signal for a need to initiate change in the environment, differentiating emotions from needs, and translating them into words. Adults with Aspergers have a higher rate of alexithymia (a deficit in the fund or accessibility of words to describe subjective states).

I wonder if these findings are related to my clinical observations of the difficulty they have with learning assertiveness skills. As a prerequisite to assertiveness training, many adults with Aspergers need to learn to connect their internal states with words. An invaluable tool for teaching this skill can be found in Talk Blocks for Work (Innovative Interactions, 2000). Capitalizing on the strong visual skills that many of these patients have, the Talk Blocks serve as a visual multiple choice cue set to help the Asperger adult recognize and differentiate his or her needs in stressful situations.

The Talk Blocks are a set of six blocks, each with a picture and phrase on each of the six sides. Three blocks are red, to symbolize feelings, three blocks are blue, to symbolize needs. First, the person is asked to look at each of the red blocks to find a word to best describes their feelings (they can pick more than one). Then the person is given the blue blocks to help them figure out what needs to be done to resolve these feelings.

The person learns various things from practicing this exercise repeatedly with different real-life scenarios. One is the ability to make connections between subjective states and words. Another is the idea that a feeling can actually prompt one to change something in the environment in order to relieve distress.

It is my opinion that this multimodal presentation optimizes whatever learning style the person may have. There is the obvious verbal presentation of the words, but it is associated with nonverbal visual cues (picture symbols and color coding), along with tactile involvement because the person must hold and rotate each block in his or her hand while processing the choices.

Not all the feeling words are “pure” emotions. However, the purpose of the task is not to teach emotional proficiency but rather to begin building a connection between subjective states, whether they be emotions or beliefs, and words, and the fact that those states can prompt a need for change.

Not all the solutions on the “I need” blocks involve other people. The goal is to get the person to realize that he or she can initiate an adaptation when in distress.”

James, I don’t know if the talking blocks would work for you, but her book had some really good information. Whenever you feel bad about how your Aspergers affects your wife, remember that she’s learning from you the information she will need to be a good mother to her sons. You’ve heard the expression about opportunity being disguised as hard work. Well your Aspergers may be a blessing disguised as a burden.

Good luck and God bless you!

I do take your point about sometimes seeing the ordinary complications of life that everyone has as mistakenly being something AS related.

I still feel there is a subtle point in the posting that makes the situation different from how a normal person would handle this, and it’s really to do with my reaction.

I’ve gotten very stressed and anxious about the situation, and that’s a direct consequence of the AS and how I’ve learnt to react to it over the years.
My anxiety and my AS in general means that I suddenly can’t see the wood for the trees and don’t know whether my behaviour is reasonable or not. I withdraw and don’t know what to do. I can’t explain verbally to my wife what the problem is – all classic AS problems.

Most normal people would simply argue their case, and get back an argument as good as they give, until both sides found some common ground and calmed down.

I’ve tried this approach when feeling brave in the past and have come completely unstuck. I took the shouted arguments against me very personally, and ended up a gibbering heap on the carpet, unable to deal with the reaction.

Part of my wife’s frustration is that she knows she can’t have arguments like this with me that will clear the air for her. It must be very frustrating for her.

So yes – the situations above are all part of every day life for families. My reaction to them isn’t though, and hence my wife’s reaction isn’t either, causing her further frustration, and making it difficult to resolve things.

I think generally being different sometimes makes us feel like we always are, even when that isn’t the case at all.

There is always something else that needs to be done. That doesn’t mean configuring resiliency into a server isn’t something that needs to be done as well.

Maybe just try to chalk it up to real-life, if bog-standard pressures and not worry too much?