Published on 12, July, 2020
My 18yr old son was diagnosed with high functioning autism when he was 11yrs old. He is now asking us to find him a cure for his autism and gets cross when he tells his friends how he feels and finds them unable to understand why he hates being autistic. Today he asked us to get him a second opinion as he is refusing to acknowledge that he is autistic now. He is currently having counselling for a separate issue that he has been on a waiting list for for a while and he has been calmer since starting counselling. His meltdowns have also lessened but this denial seems to have replaced that. I am just wondering if anyone has been through a similar issue, either themselves or with a child? If so any advice with how to handle this?
Thanks
Is your son engaging with any friend groups or online communities that might be cause for concern? A lot of groups for gaming, forums etc online are very hostile to autistic individuals from my personal experience. It might be that people have been saying unkind or untrue things that have had an impact on the way he feels about himself.
Hi Shadow,
We are really careful with his online presence and he only communicates with the same group he has been communicating with for years and whom he is comfortable with.
He does however, spend way too much time looking at the way some people in the USA treat people with autism and they are never stories with happy outcomes or any positivity. He then uses this information to tell us that this is how all autistic people are seen and if he tries to go about his life the same sorts of things will happen to him too.
We have, of course, tried to tell him all the positive things that we have read about also to give some balance so that he can see that there are positives as well as negatives but he chooses to only see the negativity at the moment.
We are not blind to the fact that living with autism is not an easy thing for anyone to deal with and there are aspects of the day that can be unbearable but we are desperately trying to help him to understand that there may be ways of coping with things to make stuff a little easier to bear.
We are by no means experts and we are muddling through it all together. We just want him to be happy and healthy and it's been a tough year for everyone with a global pandemic thrown in the mix. Anything suggestions that anyone has to help him cope would be gratefully received.