Hurtful comments - help please

Perhaps if I try to take that a bit further it would help.

Part of what your son is experiencing is a shortfall in the amount of conversational/social information he picks up. There are several theories about this relating to both eye contact and "bandwidth" - the amount of information he can take in at a time.

Ordinarily children will pick up on speech intonation as well as what is said, and will be able to register the difference between a scowl or a smile. They will be conditioned to social norms by the reactions of people around them as to how they should behave.

On the spectrum you lose a lot of the speech inflexion, facial expressions and gestures. In part at least it will be difficult to look for this information. Your son will be hanging on the exact spoken words. It will be a bit like texting without smilies (emoticons). Particularly if he is frequently reprimanded for not conforming he will hear mostly critical and unkind words.

For him therefore other people seem harsh even cruel. So his reactions are likely to be driven by his own sense of pain and isolation. Also he won't be learning any distinctions between harshness and kindness on the basis of which to govern his responses.

Autism is often compared to being a foreign visitor with language difficulties, struggling to make out what other people around him are saying. Another analogy is that ciommunication seems to be through a fog. Except this is permanent - you never really learn the new language, the fog never clears. 

What you need to remember is that what you say is what he hears. It is not ameliorated effectively by your frame of mind or facial expression. So you may need to add in words the information you would otherwise have conveyed by looks, facial expressions and gestures.

All he perceives is a harsh unfeeling world that doesn't understand him. Its not about being self-centred. It is a very real difficulty in understanding and making communication.

Perhaps if I try to take that a bit further it would help.

Part of what your son is experiencing is a shortfall in the amount of conversational/social information he picks up. There are several theories about this relating to both eye contact and "bandwidth" - the amount of information he can take in at a time.

Ordinarily children will pick up on speech intonation as well as what is said, and will be able to register the difference between a scowl or a smile. They will be conditioned to social norms by the reactions of people around them as to how they should behave.

On the spectrum you lose a lot of the speech inflexion, facial expressions and gestures. In part at least it will be difficult to look for this information. Your son will be hanging on the exact spoken words. It will be a bit like texting without smilies (emoticons). Particularly if he is frequently reprimanded for not conforming he will hear mostly critical and unkind words.

For him therefore other people seem harsh even cruel. So his reactions are likely to be driven by his own sense of pain and isolation. Also he won't be learning any distinctions between harshness and kindness on the basis of which to govern his responses.

Autism is often compared to being a foreign visitor with language difficulties, struggling to make out what other people around him are saying. Another analogy is that ciommunication seems to be through a fog. Except this is permanent - you never really learn the new language, the fog never clears. 

What you need to remember is that what you say is what he hears. It is not ameliorated effectively by your frame of mind or facial expression. So you may need to add in words the information you would otherwise have conveyed by looks, facial expressions and gestures.

All he perceives is a harsh unfeeling world that doesn't understand him. Its not about being self-centred. It is a very real difficulty in understanding and making communication.