When your child is in defense mode and/or depressed, and they are taking it out on their sibling and making what appear to be unreasonable demands, how do you address it with the child with ASD? Both in the moment and afterwards? What works to set a boundary? A simple "I see you're having a hard time. When you are feeling irritated and bothered by your sister or the clutter in the house, what can I do to help? What can you do to take care of yourself? When you scream at me, I feel sad. Jets find a better way for you to handle when you have big feelings." This is not cutting it for him. It would work with my daughter, but not with him. I know it's pretty deep and he will need lots of understanding and contributing to build the relationship, and then to find the motivation to change. For now I am concerned about the boundary, especially for my daughter's sake. She does know that he is having a hard time and feels feelings more deeply and gets stuck and that we are trying to help. I am trying to get her into therapy. She has expressed that she is worried she will not have a relationship with her brother. She has told her teacher how hard things are at home. Despite that, she is doing relatively well. Would talking to my son at this point about her feelings help him find some motivation? He goes in and out of defense mode depending on the day. School days are worse. Days when she is extra cute and bubbly are worse. When she has friends over, etc. Working on the sibling relationship, too. We end up separating them a lot, not forcibly, just to get space and do separate activities they each like. We try to intentionally plan time when we do something away from home where we all decompress. I feel like he can't handle much pressure to make the sibling relationship better but that he needs to be pushed against some kind of hard line as to what behavior is not good for anyone. A little dose of reality as to the impact of our behavior on other people. I think yelling at us when he is stressed would be the one behavior I would hold a boundary to. But in the moment, he thinks it's justified because we make the clutter or we do something that seems like a scapegoat to blame for why he's feeling rotten. It's like a red herring, if that makes sense. But I do afterwards talk to him about how the clutter bothers him. Sometimes we make a bit of progress dealing with things at face value. But a lot of times it's either unworkable, like selling his sister's stuff, or it doesn't address what's really going on underneath. If I could get his buy in, I would have him do a course on anxiety or DBT and learn how we don't have to follow our emotions.

Posted by sophieno at 2024-02-14 14:10:32 UTC