My husband, who has ASD, and I keep hitting on the same problem. Our children sometimes get overwhelmed, angry and/or frustrated, and say unkind words to us in anger. Even sometimes when not overly angry, they try out hurtful things, like, "your shirt is ugly." My strategy, based on advice from a therapist, is to ignore words when spoken in anger or when used to try to hurt me. If I am feeling like I might get angry back, I take a moment to ground myself, or I move away for a moment. I two not to "feed" their anger by reacting and giving power to their words. I am pretty good at this so to an onlooker it may look like I am "weak" or passive. If it was a moment of anger and the kid calms down and moves on, I offer to process with them what they could do differently next time. If they were words being used intentionally to try to hurt me, I often make a point of following up afterwards to say that I did not like those words and I chose to ignore them, or something similar. In other words, I am using an intentional practice and I would like to be able to continue to use this so that I myself don't get into a cycle of yelling, blaming, or lashing out at each other. I am trying to cut out my part in that cycle and model regulation. I do see it's slowly having an impact, but my son with ASD does still struggle a lot with self-regulation, and our NT daughter seems to copy this, but not regularly. My husband, for years, and despite my having explained my strategy to him, often gets extremely upset when the kids yell at me or him or when they call me names. He knows I am ignoring, but he will jump in and start to fix the situation that the child is upset about (say the Internet is really slow and the kid is yelling bloody murder in frustration, he will get mad and start to try to fix it but lashing out along the way). Or else he will look at me and say, "why do you let them treat you like this? You let them abuse you." My huge frustration is that my husband does not want to work with a therapist on these issues in some capacity. We have in the past, but he does not get on board when the therapist recommends strategically ignoring, and choosing to give attention to the positive behaviors when the child is calming down. He wants the therapist to help our child directly fix himself and his behavior. My husband does not see his own behavior as a problem. I am hoping that anyone who has read this far might recognize this struggle and have some insight. I understand my husband is getting triggered by what he thinks is passivity, and he wants to actively get solutions (sometimes by what he thinks is assertively telling the kids why and how what they are doing is wrong.) my husband also likes to follow directions and appreciates someone giving clear guidelines, not having to guess at how to do something. So I can see that he may think telling the kids what to do instead of letting them figure things out might be part of this. I guess I need to let him do things his way, but I really get frustrated by what seems like interference with me strategically ignoring. And he seems to have certain blindspots that he is not willing to explore. Also, I know I make it worse whenever I get frustrated with his approach, and if I try to tell him why I feel like my way is better.

Posted by sophieno at 2024-07-11 15:33:56 UTC