HELP! My brother (has Asperger's) won't talk to my parents!

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Hi there, I'm new. I am 21 and my younger brother is 18, he has Asperger's Syndrome. For the sake of privacy, I'll use fake names. I'm not sure if this is the right topic to post in but since this relates to parenting I thought I should put it here. If it's wrong, feel free to move it.

At the moment there has been a row between my brother, I'll call him Paul, and my parents. It's caused a horrible tension over the house and none of us know what to do to fix it. Please, if you know something that can help, please say.

Paul has always been untidy. He has a tendency to leave food packets/drink cups lying around, he won't always bring plates down from his room and usually spends a lot of time alone on his computer. He's never had many real friends and has always had problems with bullying. About 18 months ago he met a girl online, I'll call her Lizzy. They met in person, she's about a year younger than he is I think. They've become inseparable, they are like soulmates but they're still strictly FRIENDS (Paul doesn't do 'relationships', I believe due to his Asperger's, and I don't think Lizzy is into boyfriends). Since Paul has discovered this amazing intimacy he's pretty much shut everyone else out of his life, and she's become a priority. For example - I recently lent him some DVDs that will help with a project, since I've lent him those he hasn't watched them because he's been busy talking to her everyday. She comes to ours much more than he goes to their's, usually due to the excuse that at hers there's a newborn baby and it would be inconvenient for him to be there. She comes from an area near Birmingham, we're in Norfolk. When she's here, he pretty much shuts himself away in his room with her, playing videogames and watching TV all day and all night only leaving the room to get dinner and to go to Tesco for snacks. They don't really go out much and they don't accept any invitations to fun activities because they don't want to compromise a second of their time together lounging around. He doesn't do much work/chores, just occasionally takes the dog out for a walk.

Over the summer of this year they spent nearly 6 weeks together, she was here for a while then he went back to hers with her and then they both came back here. During that time Paul's room became more and more of a pigsty, and Lizzy doesn't really do much to encourage him. My stepdad went into his room (bearing in mind that my stepdad had recently spent nearly £3000 getting him a fitted bedroom with loads of storage space, that took a lot of time and effort, and also that he had recently spent about £200 fixing his computer because it was filled with dust) to give him some cables for his computer that he needed. My brother and Lizzy were at the cinema. My stepdad saw how disgusting it was and became very angry. It was a slap to the face after all that time, money and effort spent on him. We'd been begging Paul to clean his room for weeks and there was no progress. My stepdad has bipolar disorder and can get depressed really badly. My mum and I tried to clean it a bit and clean the rest of the house to make my stepdad happy while he cooled off. My stepdad said that if Lizzy is distracting him, then she needed to go home. It only cut two days off her planned visit anyway and in retrospect, if she hadn't gone then, she would've been in the middle of petrol bombs as two days later was the beginning of the Birmingham riots. She went the next morning. Paul was angry for a few days but calmed down eventually.

This all kicked off again a month ago. Lizzy had said to him online that because she was sent home she didn't feel welcome at ours anymore, and she was particularly frightened of my stepdad after hearing that he was angry - even though he didn't even SPEAK to them about the incident, let alone get angry at them and yell at them. In fact, they didn't even see him that night - and she's frightened of angry people (her father was murdered, so apparently because of that she's phobic of angry people - surely she should see a psychiatrist?? She will at some point encounter someone angry in her life, an angry boss or something, is she just going to avoid everyone all her life?). Which is rather unfair to my stepdad and my family, considering we go out of our way to please her when she's here - she only eats particular foods, for example. Paul seems to side with her, saying he can understand why she won't risk coming back.

He's very defensive of her (even to ridiculous ends - once I was in his bad books for ages for jokingly calling them babyish for watching Alvin and the Chipmunk DVD marathons all day). He won't talk to my stepdad at all, blaming him entirely because his punishment affected Lizzy as well as himself. Paul insists that it shouldn't have affected Lizzy. It should only have affected himself. But she was the distraction. Even if all his computers and gaming consoles were taken away, she was still the distraction. She wasn't helping him or encouraging him to do it, so what were my parents meant to do? Lock her up til he cleaned his room? He keeps insisting that she was 'collateral damage' in that punishment, and now won't talk to my stepdad and sometimes won't talk to my mum (if it seems that she's siding with my stepdad). He blames my stepdad and says that he doesn't trust him, and that because of him he'll have to wait til he moves out to see Lizzy again (as he can't go to hers). He can't see that mum and I are 'collateral damage' in his feud against my stepdad, and we are because we're all suffering for this tension and constant rowing, he just says that it's my stepdad's fault and he's not to blame. He won't talk to my stepdad again until he apologises and makes it up to them both. My stepdad, quite rightly, doesn't feel like he needs to apologise. He made a parental decision, they had seen each other for far too long and it was impacting on his family life. We love him having a friend, but she's completely taken over his life.

We have no idea what to do. We're all getting really upset. I'm the only one Paul doesn't have a problem with atm cos I wasn't directly involved in that decision that night, but when I try to talk to him about it he gets angry, saying I'm taking sides with them and ignoring his point of view. I'm not, I just don't think he's in the right.

What can I do??

He is a teenager. Teens can be a big pain in the ass, especially when it comes to the other sex. He may not be in a romantic relationship, but it is an intimate relationship nonetheless. When kids are that age, they think they know EVERYTHING. They are becoming independent people from their family, which typically means pulling away and talking less. It is difficult in this situation since it seems like there is more tension due to aspergers and bipolar issues not quite getting along.

What it comes down to it that you can't make him do anything. He is going to be headstrong. Your parents obviously need to keep boundaries and rules in their house, and he should be following them. They will need to figure it out.

The best thing you can do is be a good listener, and try to make suggestions that don't seem forced. If you try to push, he will stop talking to you as well. Just my opinion. I've had 3 younger siblings go through this kind of phase....teens are a pain!

How do you feel his diagnosis affects this situation?

I can't help but feel that this was a question I was born to answer what with my being a seventeen year old male aspie and all. It's very true that change can be hard for someone with AS. I can certainly see how all those massive changes might have left him feeling a little sore. It's also true that we Aspies are notoriously stubborn. We're not trying to be cruel or unfriendly. We simply have trouble accepting that another person's viewpoint might be correct if we're certain that ours is the correct. This can often lead to issues when it comes to interaction with others. Fights break out and then we Aspies refuse to back down. I'm constantly getting into fights at home over silly things because I refuse to back down. If you can find a counselor to talk about these issues with, it might help with mediation between your brother and your father.

This is just my guess, but for what it's worth, I think there are a number of issues. But you're not going to like a lot of what I say. I hope you read it carefully anyway. You obviously don't understand your brother, but I do, at least somewhat, because I live in his world. And until you understand him, you can't do a thing about this.

1: You certainly don't understand Aspergers at all if you think that "showing him numerous times" will necessarily teach him to do something. I've been shown things numerous times, been absolutely desperate to get it right, and yet until the missing piece clicks into place, I simply cannot. So there is a background of misunderstanding; your family may try to treat him decently, but when it comes to actual understanding, I think you've fallen far short.

2: Cleaning his room is almost certainly an issue of executive function problems. I have things I desperately want to do myself - including clean up my desk and my computer files - and yet I can never seem to manage to do it. I'll beat myself up over it, yet I can't do it. Only someone who has problems with executive function could understand what I mean; I used to think I was just a lazy idiot - then, when I figured out what made me so different, and read about the executive function problems, things clicked into place that I'd never understood about myself. So again, I don't think you really understand that, reasonable as the rule may seem to you, asking him to keep his room clean might be like asking you to walk two hundred miles in ten days. You could probably do it - but unless you're already a big hiker or runner (and, if you are, pick another similar example), I'll bet you'd only actually manage it if threatened with catastrophe.

3: His grandmother, who he was close to, died. He went to college. And his dog died. All in one year. I'd say he's doing absolutely wonderful to hold together as well as he has. Any one of those things could throw most of us off balance for a long time. And any single one of those would more than explain an increased problem cleaning up his room. In a sense, I think he's right on at least one thing. Lizzy may look to you like the cause of the problem, but she's really not - she's just what he happened to choose to distract himself from a life suddenly made unbearable. Those three things are the problem. Now, I don't know your brother. He may be better able to cope than I am - but one death of one person close to me affected me negatively for close to twenty years. Every time I lose a cat, I'm gutted for a couple of years. At least. And going on to college is a challenge you cannot imagine for him; think of, say, trying to learn quantum physics, Russian, Chinese, and how to play a musical instrument - all in one semester. As overwhelmed as your mind would be - that's how overwhelmed his is, just by all the changes going to college entails.

4: Although you don't say so outright, it sounds as if Lizzy has Aspergers, too. She only eats certain foods - which is not unreasonable at all if she does, as the wrong foods will make me physically choke - and she's willing to spend that much time with a guy like your brother, and she's easily scared. If she doesn't have AS, she has some set of "things" similar enough that they can understand each other. NTs, or "normal" humans, do not understand us. The first living creature in my life that I recognised as a fellow being, who could at least somewhat understand me, was a cat. Very few humans have ever understood me even superficially. Meeting someone enough like you that they do understand you when so very few people do is a powerful draw. Especially in view of my third point. And now that Lizzy has been scared - it doesn't matter whether anyone tried to, it happened, I doubt any of you understand her at all, either - he's terrified that you'll all do something to drive her even further away. In his world, she may be the only human being who has ever understood him, connected with him.

Now, in spite of all I've said, he probably is being at least a bit of a jerk. If you'd had all that happen to you - from his perspective - you might be inclined to, too. And he's young, so there are a lot of things he hasn't learned yet. And growing up was a lot tougher for me than it seems to be for most people, precisely because I wasn't good at doing things for myself, so I wasn't getting all those good things they enjoy. I just had more expected of me, at a time when I was struggling to cope with massive change. So, while I don't doubt he's being a bit of a jerk, I do doubt he can help it. Especially since your stepfather did misunderstand the situation - Lizzy was not the problem, only Paul's solution to his very real problems - and did cause a catastrophic change in his life. When you talk of all that is done for him, you talk mostly of money - in his shoes, there is literally no amount of money on the planet which would make up for that damage. Not billions, not trillions. So I don't think it is one sided here. I don't think any of you see his side of it at all. What is easy for you is not easy for him. Example? When I was six, I could read 'grownup' magazines - and understand what I read, and remember it. But I couldn't figure out how to tie my shoes. All the "you're so smart, so you ought to be able to do this" comments didn't help, but even if he's never been told anything of the sort, the reality still is, I learned on my own to do one thing few kids can do at that age, but struggled to figure out how to do another almost every other kid can do. And that struggle was real.

He has trouble cleaning up because of poor executive function, and the more pressure is put on him, the worse it will get. That expensive "fitted" bedroom (I'm assuming the term means built-in storage space) may have even made that worse. I say that because I know that faced with such a setup, I'd then struggle to try to figure out where to put everything, how to organise it. Going off to college would make it much worse, because things like that always fall by the wayside when change rocks the foundations of your mind. And it does rock the foundations of our minds, when the change is that huge. The death of someone close to him would make it worse, because he's struggling with that and using up all his mental energy on that. The death of a pet would make it worse, for the same reason. All those things together, I'd say he's doing very well not to let a lot more things go to pieces.

Lizzy was his way of coping with some of this. She was probably also an amazing discovery for him; someone who actually understood him. (And, by the way, working with clients who have AS doesn't mean you understand them. Most of the "experts" don't understand us, because they look at what they see on the outside, and ignore what actually goes on in our heads. Just "working with" us, in a situation where you effectively call all the shots, is barely enough to let someone think they understand what they in fact don't at all.) In a family full of people who do not understand him at all, suddenly, he found someone who did. Now, they've been driven apart. No matter how reasonable that sounds to you, Lizzy's reaction makes sense to me (another reason I suspect she has AS), and no matter how unintentional the result was, it may be the worst thing to happen to him so far in his life.

Very insightful Wanderer. I hope OP has a better understanding of what his brother's experience has been.

I've tried to point out at least a few more things, although I won't pretend to have a guaranteed solution. I wasn't suggesting you were trying to be mean, by the way. I wouldn't bother trying to help if that was my impression. But I can't help seeing a lot of it more from your brother's perspective - and hoping that might be useful, somehow.

Thank you for your honesty. It's true that we don't understand him well at all, and that we can't understand why Lizzy has reacted that way when all that happened was that they both heard that my stepdad was angry (they never saw him that night, and they never saw him angry or heard him yelling, he was perfectly pleasant to them). He was just trying to make a parental decision and I would understand if it was being applied to me. It's just difficult for us to understand why he can't understand it being applied to him.

It wasn't just the money with the fitted room (yes that does mean more storage space), it was the immense amount of effort and time put into the project. He was offered a larger room when we moved, but naturally (avoiding change) he chose the room most similar to his old one (slightly smaller than his old room though) and arranged it in as close a way as possible to his original room. We had to move home because we couldn't afford to live at our old one anymore, and although we knew it was hard for Paul we were wary of trying to be accommodating. He had too much stuff for the new room though and he needed more storage - he loves to collect figurines, like Dr Who and others, he needed more shelf space for those. He wouldn't have been able to have his stuff if he didn't have the storage.

We may not have been understanding this properly, but we were all affected by everything too. I'm still not fully over everything that happened. I just know it was that much harder for him. And my stepdad actually sat him down last week for a congratulatory talk to say how proud he is that he hasn't gotten in with bad crowds, how he's coped so well and everything. But Paul's not really accepted that compliment.

Perhaps Lizzy does have AS? I don't know. It just feels a bit ungrateful to the rest of us that we work really hard to make her feel welcome and she then decides that she doesn't want to come back because she's terrified of the risk that my stepdad 'might' get angry again, and Paul was basically comparing him to Lizzy's dad's killer in his argument somehow. Now when I was growing up, my real dad was a violent con-man who beat my mother on a regular basis. I remember everything cos I was old enough. Luckily Paul was too young. I can't help but feel offended that she considers my stepdad "aggressive" (her words) when I witnessed REAL aggressiveness as a child, and she has no idea what that looks like.

I know I'm not directly involved in this whole feud but I am still part of this household and I'm sort of on the sidelines just listening to everyone vent at me. But what can we do to fix this? It's difficult with my stepdad having bipolar disorder too. It's splitting my family apart!

We're not trying to be mean, we just want him to be happy. We really, really do. If she'd just come back he'd be happy again. We are just so clueless, we obviously need to learn more. Thanks for your message

I think I can offer some advice on this matter.

Butt out of his life. He's 18, he's not going to change, and he should be able to spend as much time with a girl as he wants, and keep his room how he wants, provided he is not leaving food up there to rot.

If you all have so much of an issue with him, and you can't let it go and live and let live, then you should tell him he needs to get his own place or go live with Lizzy.

I've only read the first post. Anything else is too much reading for now.

I would say no wonder he's feeling frustrated. You've permanently scared off his only friend. And he's too afraid to go over to hers himself.

I think your dad should acknowledge the unpredictable consequence of his behaviour. I also think your brother or whatever should apologise, though he seems to have the mental age of a small child and probably won't apologise.

Unfortunately there was no correct way to proceed, though if 'Lizzy' ever decides to come back it should obviously be in smaller doses.

I would try to encourage him to see her, whether it's at her house or someplace inbetween. One option to mend things with Lizzy is perhaps to write a letter explaining the situation? You may be able to talk to Paul about the correct way to approach her about it slightly mending things, though my sense is that he'll respond stubbornly with something like "it's no use, it won't work, why bother, f**k you dad". Or some such.

It's a difficult situation. You should work towards a compromise.

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Cut Lizzy some slack. She obviously has some problems. I'm sure she's not being intentionally rude.