Hi, your story sounds so familiar. Very similar to mine. My son is 9 and we have just been told that he is on the spectrum, very close to a full diagnosis of aspergers, but not quite. The consultant did say however that we would probabaly find ourselves referring to it as aspergers so that other people could try and understand where we were coming from.
Most recently We have had months and months of tears, shouting, hurting siblings and extreme anger. It all came to a head a couple of weeks ago when he tried to jump off the top of the banister. It was during the weekend and we felt very alone and not at all sure what to do.
We have regular days of 'hating' himself, everything being 'too much' 'wanting to die'. He often says he would be 'better off dead.'
School do not really agree with what we are saying. Academicaly he is very bright, in top set for everything and they say he is very willing to please and always says he is happy if they ask. Again, i think he says this because he knows that is what they want him to say and he wants to do the right thing. They have however begun to put things in place after a lot of pressure from myself and them seeing that things have to change for the sake of ouf family. We have two other(younger) children as well. He now stays in the library at break and lunch times as we felt the class time was enough of a social situation for him to deal with and a lot of the anger was due to anxiety of friends 'liking' and 'not liking'. having people to play with and not etc. I wonder if this might benefit your son? He has also be given the responsibility of getting to school 10 minutes early, collecting the register and helping do jobs in the classroom before the start of the day. This has given him a real sense of purpose in the morning and along with a very strict morning schedule our life has gone from world war three every morning to a little more chaos than other homes but feeling like we are moving forward with tiny positive steps for him! do you think this could help your son?
Thye negative remarks he makes about himself we try and ignore as much as possible as i feel he was feeding off our shock and upset. we acknowledge that its ok to be feeling like that and discuss ways to try and improve it but if we feel like it is being obsessed about then i try and walk away.
Another good things that is working is that my son has a 'thinking' book in school and he writes , mostly negative things, concerns etc in the book and his class teacher can read it and discuss it later with him. It is obviuously for good things as well but we don't get many of those!
I wonder if you need to go into school and ask them to support you even if they don't want to belive or accept there is anything there with you son. They have nothing to lose and you have a lot to gain.
We have also been offered medication and i think after a lot of thought and research we are going to try it. I think we have decided that our family needs to try and function at a more positive level and if this is going to help our son get to it then it will help us all. We only want the best for him and when we ask him he is so desperate for change and some help and i wonder if the increased level of behaviour is the same for your son?
My son did the lighting for the school play as he didn't want to be infront of everybody but could be in complete control of the lights with no interference. could yours do the lights or sounds?
Sorry for the long message. It has been great for me to do this as for so long we have been dealing with it all by ourselves. Would love to chat more if youthink it might help.
xx
