The emotional rollercoaster of Asperger's

Note: since the DSM-5, Asperger’s syndrome has been included within autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I keep the term in this article because it’s the one many people still use.

As I said in My partner has Asperger’s syndrome, today we’re continuing with Asperger’s syndrome (AS) in adults. This time I wanted to talk about the negative emotional reactions of people with AS to situations they see as conflictual. I’d like to explain what characterises these reactions and what usually causes them.

Many people with AS find the feeling of losing control much harder to cope with than others do. If, for any neurotypical (NT) person, the feeling of not being in control of a situation or of their own life is usually quite stressful, imagine what it’s like for someone who lives in a world whose rules seem to have been made for everyone except them. Rules they don’t understand but have to follow without having the skills to do so. It’s as if you were two metres tall and lived in a world where nobody is taller than one metre fifty. Everyone stares at you and can’t understand why you are the way you are. And you can’t get into places, or do a thousand other things, because everything is built for people of a different height from yours. You can stoop to get into some places (just as people with AS learn certain behaviours by imitation to get by better), but you can’t cut your legs off! You can’t, and never will be able to, be shorter than you are! That’s the idea. A world tailor-made for others, but not for me.

As a result, many of them live with baseline stress levels that are considerably higher than the rest of the population’s. That’s why people with AS often need very precise, and sometimes rather excessive, routines and order: it’s a way of feeling in control of the world they’ve been born into. They achieve a sense of inner order and control through those routines and habits. Hence their very strong reactions when they’re forced to interrupt or change those routines.

It doesn’t happen in every case, but many men with AS (as I said before, I’ll refer to men because that was the case in the couples I told you about and because it’s diagnosed more often in men, although it often goes unnoticed in women) tend to react explosively when they feel attacked or feel they’re not in control of the situation. This can happen frequently due, among other things, to their hypersensitivity to criticism (real or not) and their communication difficulties. And by communication I mean both expressing what they think or feel and interpreting what the other person does or says. It’s a fairly explosive mix that often leads to unwanted reactions, especially if you live with them, as a partner does. When they do happen, these reactions of anger or rage are usually characterised by the following:

• They seem to “come out of nowhere”, that is, they’re hard to understand and illogical from the NT person’s point of view.
• In quite a few cases there is verbal aggression.
• They vanish as quickly as they appear. Within seconds or minutes the person calms down and, for him, it’s as if nothing had happened, and he acts accordingly, but for his partner it’s usually devastating.

When these situations keep happening, they can lead the NT partner to end up doubting herself and her own mental health. Naturally, her self-confidence and self-esteem decline, and this can even lead to serious depressive states (remember Cassandra affective deprivation disorder). If the NT person doesn’t know her partner has AS, she may come to think she’s losing her mind.

At other times, the man with AS doesn’t react with anger or explosively but quite the opposite: through silence, withdrawal and putting up walls. This is simply another way of expressing anger, of defending himself from a perceived attack by punishing the other person, only this time through walls of silence and emotional distance (even more than usual). We all know this can be very painful too, sometimes even more so than an outburst of anger, which at least gives us the chance to know what the other person thinks and feels.

Managing emotions is usually extremely hard for a person with AS when dealing with the outside world. These reactions of anger or withdrawal are not a whim. That doesn’t mean we should always excuse them, or that they can’t improve them, because they can. That’s why diagnosis is so important, and the earlier, the better. Generally speaking, when a person with AS knows what they have, when they can put a name to it, the result tends to be positive. They no longer think the problem is them, but rather that it’s something they have. The difference is very important and can be a great relief for both partners. Therapy will work a great deal on communication, establishing patterns of interaction adapted to the characteristics of AS in order to reduce the number of conflicts caused by communication that was unwittingly inappropriate because nobody knew what was really going on. And of course, for this to work, it’s also essential that the diagnosis is accepted.