Bad temper/outbursts

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It works like this for me: At NO time am I allowed to make an ass of myself, At NO time am I allowed to blow up and cause a scene. At NO time am I allowed to show my anger. Because once a crack in my steely exterior begins to show, it's already too late. A little crack turns into a full-on meltdown.

I can't be just a little mad at someone. I can't act on my anger because I might not be able to stop.

I have lived with both sides of this post. My father was stoic and almost never lost his temper and my mother was, well, sometimes the other way. I took after my father, but have observed what happens when Mom gets angry. Anger is your body's response to a perceived threat - it doesn't matter if it a "real" threat or not, it matters that your brain experiences it as a threat. One helpful thing that you might try to do is some self-talk (I'm safe, I'll be OK) and anticipate that certain situations will send you into an anger brain-storm. On the occasions when I do feel intense anger coming on, I try to let people know that I'm having a difficult time processing and then get away from the situation as fast as I can.

Z

i used to get random bursts of anger, i still do, but ive learned how to pick up on it as it starts and therefore avoid acting apon it.

Tybald,

I have exactly the same problem.

As you say, the best way to stop it happening is to avoid trigger situations, especially when you are feeling stressed.

My triggers include:

1) Being thwarted e.g. my train being cancelled so I have to miss something I was planning to do, or being told I cannot do something for no apparently logical reason whatsoever.

2) Shops closing, events starting, or trains/buses leaving even ONE SECOND early.

3) People ringing my (very loud) doorbell over & over when it is obvious that I cannot possibly have failed to hear it the first time.

4) Being forced to conform to stupid social conventions that I don't want anything to do with.

5) People who hang up the phone or walk away in the middle of an argument.

6) Being made to back down after I have already made a stand (this is usually by my father!)

The only other thing that has ever helped with me is to have a friend with me (preferably one who I would be embarrassed to lose it in front of) to defuse the situation by distracting me or intervening.

Last edited by shopaholic on 25 Mar 2008, 8:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've learned to just go with it before it gets held in and gets worse.

Yeah these things (not no.5 so much) really bug me too, especially the being thwarted bit. I think that's why I don't like things not working properly. Things should be so simple and straightforward, but it the unneccessary complications that get me every time.

I also agree that having people around who you don't want to lose it in front of helps (probably why I have never had a meltdown at work) but I find holding it in just makes for a bigger meltdown later on when these people aren't around. I'm fairly 'new' to AS so I'm still working on improving my understanding of the condition and myself. Maybe this is something I'm just going to have to make allowances for...

While I can crap on for hours about topics I like, I can't stand having to repeat myself or re-tell a story. I am the original "if I told you once, I've told you one time" person. My parents love to do this: I'll tell one something, and instead of relaying what I've said, Mom or Dad will say, "Let me put your mother (or father) on the phone," which means I now get to tell the story again. My mother, who's riddled with anxiety and loaded up on Xanax will, of course, forget what I've told her, and ask about it again later. She also is incapable of mastering a single phone in their home. Her favorite thng to do? Call me on speaker phone while either running the Dust Buster or doing the dishes. Then she has the audacity to wonder why halfway through the call I flip out (once we didn't speak for a week because I thought she'd accidentally hung up on me--a nearly every other day event--and I said, "G-d-it, that stupid c-word hung up on me again". Except...she hadn't. She'd only hit the "mute" button).

I also go ape-poo-poo in traffic. What makes it even worse is my spouse is in law enforcement and I'm pretty well versed in the rules of the road. There is nothing that makes me more furious than when someone does something obnoxious and illegal, and then gives me the stink eye, as if I were in the wrong.

My father-in-law makes me nuts. He tries to get me to do the same stuff I don't want to do over and over, time and time again, and my spouse defends him. He's old (FYI: He's not that old). He's stuck in his ways. He's this. He's that. Finally, I have to yell, "What about me?! I'm on the spectrum, buddy!"

Bad customer service. Me, with all my hang-ups, was able to get it together back in the day and be polite (though I never got the eye contact thing down, I'm pretty good at mimicking what I see, that's how I've gotten through life), efficient, and even kiss a little heinie. Now everywhere I go people are rude, disorganized, and careless (the exception being Starbucks, where I think they must be hitting the latte all day long).

Political correctness. Valentine's Day is now Friendship Day? What, are they worried some kindergarten will misread another kindergarten's Buzz Lightyear Valentine and feel the classroom has become a hostile environment?

Oh yeah - Forgot no 7: The Nanny State Health & Safety crap (e.g you have to have your mobile phone switched on all the time when you are working out of the office, you have to tell us if you'r' going to be back later than you said.....)

I mean how many times do I have to say "I DON'T KNOW what time I'll be back, so I don't want to say a time" or "The stuff I do outside work is much more risky that anything I do at work, e.g. when I have to return to the deserted station car park in the dark every night".

In fact that was the cause of the last time I did lose it at work in a meeting (when the Service head was present, no less!)

Just experienced a classic example of the sort of thing that annoys me. I questioned my pay today as I only got roughly half of what I was expecting this month to be told that since the right bit of paper hadn't been filled in, I wasn't entitled to be paid at a higher rate, despite it being authorized and signed off by the relevant people. The thing that really p*ssed me off is that I had already queried this twice and been told there would be no problem. Now each department responsible is blaming the other one while I have to put up with another month of struggling to make ends meet and they sit around doing nothing about it. These are the people who literally every time I go into the office about something are making some personal phone call about their kids or their next door neighbour's new haircut etc.

Why? Why in a supposedly educated society can people not make the most basic systems work? Why do people not know the relevant procedures and who is responsible for what? Why are people allowed to get away with this sort of incompetence? If they are so limited why are they emplyed in the first place? I think taking the simple step of docking their pay every time they make a mistake or display this kind of stupidity would soon solve a lot of problems in the British workforce. Also a 3 mistakes and you're fired policy might help people buck their ideas up considerably! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.......! !! !! !! !! !! !!

That's outrageous!

In fact you have legitimate grounds to file a formal grievance, since the people who "authorised" it should have known what forms to use.

Ask them to give you an advance to cover the outstanding amount at once!
(And yes, of course they can do that. Don't let them wriggle out of it.)

have u tried imagining the person that makes u angry as what u think of them?
what i mean is if u think someone is a a$%ehole imagining them with a a@$e for a head. i read an article in a teen mag that had that as a suggestion of how to keep your cool.

I am a very inpatient person. I have low tolerence skills. I need help here. Mostly my lash-outs are caused by anxiety. And if I am in public (where it's strictly forbidden to lash out because of all the embarrassment I'll suffer afterwards), I bottle it up, which makes me glare or huff and puff at people. I'm just scared because I don't want this getting worse. Because I think it is. Each day goes by, and I find I'm growing more and more irritated by people when I'm out. They stare at me for no reason, and the next person who stares at me like that I feel like saying to them, ''why don't you take a picture?! !!'' or ''I come in peace!'' (This is sarcasm).
I just cannot go around fighting anger all the time, because it's going to lead up to a heart attack. I need some counselling to help keep this anger under control and to not show that I'm angry to other people. I can only help to avoid this through counselling - but, alas, I can't get counselling. It's been a year now since they got in touch with me, and since then I've had to go backwards and forwards to the doctors over 3 times to get allocated for counselling, but the doctors still aren't doing anything. So I'm going to go back again to see if I get any luck. I think they just think I'm not severe enough to need counselling. But I do. Finding it difficult to keep anger and frustraton under control is one of the worst conditions to have related to AS, and usually counselling can help a great deal.
Drugs aren't the answer. If they give me side affects - which will be diarrhoea - that will be defeating the object.

Well, the way I see it, I think Aspies who can't control anger can be due to what situations they face in life. Example, my friend who has Autistic (but not severely) has parents with really good jobs, a Dad who has given him lots of encouragement and confidence when he was growing up, and he's very bright, and enjoys being with others with major disabilities without cringing (NO OFFENSE). So he doesn't really have much anger or anxiety in him about many things.

But someone like me, who has more of a difficult life, has more anger to contend with, and so will have more difficulies in controlling anger. My Dad keeps loosing his jobs, and we're in a big recession at the moment aswell, and I'm I've been looking for a job for 2 years and still haven't found one, and I find all the job hunting such a big pressure on me because I don't know what to look for really and it's getting me anxious, and my nan has Alzheimer's and is a pain now so my mum and her sisters have got to be with her all the time now, and I have lost a lot of friends in the last 3 years and I feel more lonely and isolated and unconfident, and I'm not very clever either with things, and I don't seem to fit in with other people with disabilities, but I don't fit in with many NTs either, and there are more family problems what are stressing us all out. So this is why I can't ever relax and have a lot of anger built up in me. Also I have a low self-esteem, and every corner I turn there's something else gone wrong. . . is there any escape? Can anyone blame me for being an angry, irritable person? And this AS thing I've got doesn't help matters. Ohh! Why was I brought into this cruel world?

I used to have no fuse. At all. I'd go from green to red in a blink of an eye, it was exhausting. I had to consciously work on this and train myself. For me, I figured out that when the situation is hot I am not going to be able to contain my own self. I needed to learn to pay attention to what things set me off and then already know in my head how I could handle them. (if that makes sense?)
Kind of like preparing for battle, perhaps.

I found self-talk to be the most effective. I would talk to myself in my head, or outloud, or write in a journal whatever it was that set me off. I did this so that I could actually learn to recognize situations. I needed to hear them and visualize them. My problem was that I wasn't recognizing what was setting me off. And then I would, in a calm state, think about how I should handle situations that set me off. I'd think about what is healthy for me and what is healthy for everyone else around me. Basically, I had to learn to not react immediately, which is hard to do but it is do-able.

From that I discovered certain strategies that help me.
I have four steps I do during the day.

1. My morning must be calm and quiet and I must follow routine. I do meditation and yoga and I don't drink stimulants. I also make sure that I leave with plenty of time to get to my destination. (Being on time is exceedingly important to me anyway)

2. Self-talk. All day long I do self-talk. I say things like, "I'm not in a hurry", "These people around me are people too, and they have things to do and they have their own thoughts, and they have their own schedules and lives." "People make noise, and normal noise is okay". "It is illogical to get mad in this traffic when I won't be here all day anyway." "This is stressful. I am not going to die. I will get through this." "Traffic is bad because that's how it is when there is a lot of people on the road." "That person is a creative driver, hopefully they will stay safe and not kill everyone on the road." "When I get home I can isolate and relax."

I also name outloud the things that I am experiencing and hearing, like: "I hear water running, the television is on, there is a dog barking, I am breathing, I am okay..." just so I can get myself in touch with the here and now and not become overwhelmed. If I can name things and if I can state outloud what is going on, or make a conscious decision to pay attention, then it's as if I have control over the situation and am allowing myself to be okay. I hope that makes some shred of sense. I do this to steer my perspective, instead of having my environment steer it for me.

I also continue to pay attention to my breathing throughout the day. That's important for me.

3. My evening must be calm and quiet and I must follow routine. It's a mirror of my morning, for the most part, but I'll allow for some extra environmental noise.

Someone made a suggestion about music for driving - that's an excellent idea and I do this too. If I'm in a stressful spot I will switch my music to a slow instrumental with no vocalist and then visualize my brain and my personal energy mimicking the meter of the music.

As far as dealing with other people go - well, the environmental self-talk thing I haven't found to be very effective for dealing with people. At least, for me anyway. Basically I just have to mentally force my mouth shut and picture myself locked up in a padded cell. I still have no idea how to deal with people.
Usually I just don't say anything at all, especially if the person addressing me is rude. It'd be a waste of energy to engage with them anyway. If I have to converse with them, then I'll either be vague, or to the point, and then excuse myself and then relish the relief I will feel to no longer have to be in their bothersome presence.

Goodluck.