I’ve researched as much as I can and I’m not really finding what I’m looking for. Before I give up and assume it doesn’t exist, I thought I’d reach out here… Does anyone have experience or just able to point me in the right direction of compassion instruction? My 18 yr old has (as yet) been unable to get a formal diagnosis. All of the providers we’ve worked with agree something is going on but he doesn’t check enough boxes for them to feel comfortable giving a formal diagnosis. So, we’ve just been working with all things autism/aspie related with much success. The one place where keep hitting a wall is compassion. I wouldn’t describe him as compassionate, but I have seen him show compassion to others. But when it comes to his own family, we get none. Any help we offer is what we are supposed to have done, so why would he express appreciation? If someone is sick and therefore can’t do their chores, he will either claim sickness himself to also get out of chores or go on a tirade about why he has to do another person’s job. Anytime there has been added stress on my husband or me and so we had fewer resources to deal with minor issues (like telling him we can’t take him somewhere he just thought about going because we’v had an appt planned for a week or more) there is no sense of understanding that our lives are in chaos and we need him to just wait while we try to gain stability. I found an old notebook where I had written some anecdotes to share with the psychologist we were seeing at the time. Things like making noise and blaming it on his brother, so that his brother would get in trouble. Waking his sister up from a nap because he wanted to play and he wasn’t allowed to do that until she was awake. 12 years later, and I feel like we are still dealing with these kinds of issues. He went through DBT, which did help some, but we are still dealing with a lot of these issues. Essentially, if what another person needs, or asks for works out for his benefit as well, he’s on board with it. But if it is going to cause him the least inconvenience, he will refuse and spend hours fighting it, when it would have taken all of 20 seconds to show the other person that he cared about them just a tiny bit.

Posted by morganhargett at 2023-12-28 19:29:47 UTC