Did a bad school experience make you more reclusive?

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It did for a time. I was picked on and verbally bullied in Grades 8 and 9. I spent my weekends at home away from my peers between Grades 9 and 12. The year that I started college was the year that I started to open up.

My whole school experience was a "bad experience."

It made me somewhat reclusive at times when I was a teen/early adult. Not so much these days.

For me, yes definitely. School forced me to become socially reclusive in order to survive. It wasn't simply the students either, the teachers were the largest part of the problem (to be bullied and humiliated by someone in a position of absolute social power, and then have them get your parents on side "not trying hard enough..." is the kind of thing you don't forget).

(Primary school was a very small place, small enough for a given year to have a single "in" clique). Believe it or not, I was relatively normal before that time, but by 7th grade, I was a complete recluse - no problem talking to adults, but little interaction with my peers beyond what was necessary (not that I faced much bullying by that stage, simply so lacked trust, and knew so few people that it wasn't worth making the effort). I have slowly regained my social normality since.

It may have been good for him to leave, if those aggressive acts were signs of frustration (to have on the one hand an inability to communicate ones needs but also view vulnerability as weakness is an experience few children or adults for that matter handle well). It can be worthwhile talking about these incidents even long after cool-down, to understand what lead to the outburst (what he was feeling / hiding with aggression is more important than the absolute facts of the situation). He will need to learn how to deal with these (and frustration tolerance in particular) in a healthy way.




I would be worried about this too, it sounds like an excuse to stay within their comfort zone, but avoidance of situations leads to an association of them with fear and stress. Sometimes we really need guidance to step outside of our own thought and behavior patterns.



School is amongst the most intensive social situations we will face in our whole lives (Aspie or NT), yet we are thrown into it at a time when we have the greatest gaps in development from our peers and are mentally least able to deal with it. Add to that, competitive pressures socially, academically and through formal sporting programs (not to mention competitive parenting ), it's almost certain that children will become overwhelmed (intense dislike of school is certainly not unique to children on the spectrum).

Teachers can be as*holes sometimes, I remember in first grade where according to my teacher I somehow lost my report card and she kept on treathening me that she will fail me because of it. I was always inside my head during classes and texts and lectures looks and sounds like jjiberish but when given a test paper I can usually get high grades. Almost drove me crazy because she kept on pressuring me for my report card almost everyday then my grades started to suffer.When the school year was about to end she miraculously found my report card. Since then it has always been a theme in my life. Something's " disappears" I get blamed then I go crazy.

When I was in primary school I used to go to the school library to get away from the bullies.
Once I went to the Special School I was a lot better as I felt like I fitted in.

So sorry to hear that. I guess I was lucky with regards to bullying because I've never been bullied in school that much and even when I got bullied it was never that bad its just kids being kids. I even had a classmate that is obviously autistic but he was never bullied or maybe that's just how I remembered it.

Many bad experiences in school and outside school made me more reclusive

I think they're quite right, I too see the world as being too noisy, smelly and overpopulated, among other things. Though I'm not sure the fix would be sustainable in the long term, and if not, it might be a hard fall if they've got used to such a good lifestyle and haven't had to develop the coping strategies necessary for surviving out there.

For some odd reason school and college never made me reclusive, though I remember a lot of it being pretty horrible. But I had a couple of bad relationships and some bad experiences with other people, during my middle age, and I adopted a strong bunker mentality after that. I think my faith in human nature went south for a while, and I never completely recovered that, perhaps because to some extent my judgement was correct. Little by little I seem to be finding a middle road between hiding away in my fortress of solitude and subjecting myself to undue stress and risk. If I've stayed in for weeks, social stuff become harder to cope with. I might not use a telephone for a long time, and then when I do, it's stressful, yet there have been times when I've been using it regularly, and it's been easy.

I had so many embarrassing moments in school that I kept a low profile for the rest of the years of school in the hopes that they wouldn't remember me afterwards. It backfired... the less attention I wanted, the more I got.

I don't think the word antisocial is the best term to be used in describing your kids condition. I think asocial would be more appropriate. I mean antisocials are people who are up to no good, while asocials are just people who have trouble with social interactions but are more neutral than evil... unlike antisocials.