RE: Yes Helen

[Guest guest]

Ah Helen,

I concur with everything you say

here. Absolutely everything!

Oops, sorry that’s what you’ve

just said. No, seriously, this is all perfectly correct. Of

course the behaviour is not confined to NT people. Many AS folk, - and I

have to include myself in it of course, are perfectly capable of carrying on

with drawn out rages. Though come to think of it, though I might in my

third marriage have gone through a large number of ‘Melt-downs’,

and certainly screamed with anguish and self-defensive panic, I’ve

personally never had the ability or the repertoire to keep going for extended

times. I’ve always been just too conscious of the fact that once I’ve

said a thing, especially in an emotional upset, I was not able to repeat and

rephrase on and on. My outbursts were almost inevitably very sharp

and relatively shortish. So long as my wife ceased her verbiage, I

could shut up and keep quiet. However if she started again, then I would

just build up to another explosion. I guess it was this fact that

she so often could not bring herself to make any sort of tactical withdrawal,

which I was so often trying to achieve, that was something I just could not

comprehend, and further hurt so very much. As it happened, my melt-downs

almost invariably took the form of panic screams for the ‘abuse’ to

STOP. I’ve never ever been one to use literally abusive

language or vicious attacks. But I’d be abused and condemned in

return purely for the fact that I did scream in my self-defense.

In fact I could never comprehend

just how my partner managed to get hours and in fact, at times, days of

carrying on out of a particular gripe or upset. Perhaps it is one

reason why I so seldom actually won any advantage or battle for myself in

relationship confrontations, - because I couldn’t consistently carry it

on long enough and convincingly enough. In any case, I usually realized

that I just had to stop fairly quickly with my side of the argument, because

the whole exercise was just destroying me too hard and too quickly. As

well, it was just making her stand more deeply entrenched. As it was it

would often take me some one to two days to get over the upset, with chronic

trembling through the body and fear in my mind. I’d lie down in

private, breathe deeply and try to recentre myself. I must say here, that

the comforting presence of my beloved pussycats at those times was a huge help

to my well-being.

And in the process of that time, I’d

be attempting to make use of psychological and spiritual exercises to bring

myself back to normal, as well as dosing myself with tranquilisers (of a herbal

kind, I must add… I always keep Valerian on hand.) I

was always just so conscientiously aware that there were responsibilities and

daily demands that could not be neglected due to upsets. The

fact that my NT wife on the other hand would just allow herself to go on and on

almost without pause and without any self reminder that she was destroying

herself as well as myself and the demands of everyday life, just left me

bewildered. She never appeared to attempt any

resolution of such events. It was inevitably all my fault, and just

because she never indulged in my Aspie type screaming when under such duress,

she was the goodie in the circumstance. It didn’t matter in

her eyes, that she was delivering a one-sided monologue with tears and anguish

and heavy condemnation without any consideration of my side of the

story. I just felt over-whelmed with her blanket battering, and in

my sheer confusion just listened in a shattered state sometimes for an hour or

more until I just burst with the panic stress of it. She then of

course was the one ‘in the right’ because she was the one who hadn’t

screamed or yelled. I’d remind anyone to re-read what I wrote

before about listening to the NT partner.

I was on occasions, advised to move away,

- to ignore her when things were at their worst; but as I explained in my last

note here, I felt helplessly compelled to keep watching and listening, because

to ignore her was potentially grave danger. As well, in my excessive and

rigid Aspie politeness, it even seemed rude not to pay attention. I

wish that at times, I could literally have been more ‘rude’ and

impolite. Heaven help us when we have Aspie obsessions, however

apparently beneficial.

Sorry to do some ‘venting’ of

my own, but I went through so many stressful and destructive years of this,

that it still causes me profound grief in my memory. It has only

been with a long-time separation and my wife learning to develop her own more

independent activities (not to mention finding herself a gentleman friend) that

perhaps some 95% or more of the old troubles have faded away.

My own commentary that Helen approved of,

was of course, offered purely to explain just what might go on in the mind and

experience of the Aspie; and thus might help to explain to

bewildered NTs just why their AS partner behaves in such outrageously peculiar

ways, that simply don’t match the common ‘folk’ understanding

of inter-relating.

Ron.

Subject:

NTs going on and on.

At 04:18 AM 4/25/2008, Ron wrote:

I guess like many Aspies, I associate emotion that goes on and on, with

danger. This person does not contain his or her emotions and they could

conceiveably just go anywhere and cause any sort of trouble. Uncontained

emotional talk just isnt intellectually safe; and if on top of it all, one

has the tendency never to truly trust any other person, then panic can ensue.

HI Ron,

I concur with EVERYTHING you say here. Absolutely everything!

For balance, however, I have also experienced ASers raging for hours and hours

as a powerless child and that was pretty grim. Though less common than

the short fused and short lived Aspie shut down, I know other families that

have endured this behavior - typically with AS children and teens - but also

sometimes AS adults. The AS person may have become trapped in a maelstrom of

grief, and woe betide anyone who is close to them, because they lash out a

" safe " people. Family members have said that after experiencing this

a few hundred times, they themselves now go into PTSD when they see signs

of another flare-up. As a child I I got a front row seat as I watched my loved

one go from an elevated mood to an agitated and " rumbling "

state for a few hours before they exploded. This may have been indicative of

bipolar disorder too. Hard to know now. Whatever. It certainly exacerbated my

anxiety disorder.

..