Are short tempers typical for aspies?

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How bad does it get when you do actually get angry, dragonsanddemons? (My wife is very hard to anger too, it might happen once in 5 years or so, but God help the fool who manages to do that )

I wonder how atypical it actually is, I don't have a short temper either. I imagine many people on the spectrum get frustrated and overwhelmed easier. I wonder how it would be if they lived in a less stressful environment than the "normal" world usually is for us.

Not very, I'm so shy that I usually just seethe quietly, then let my anger out in a journal or in a post in an appropriate thread on here. I don't have huge explosions of anger or anything. (Though no one can stop me from intervening if an animal is being mistreated, I will gladly put myself in harm's way to help just about any animal.)

Although if I have a meltdown, I will sometimes thrash around on the floor and hurl any small object I touch. But that's not quite the same thing.

Last edited by dragonsanddemons on 19 Feb 2020, 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don’t have much of a temper either: I did when I was younger, but life situation changed for the better.

I’m so placid most of the time my wife occasional says she “thinks the world would be a much better place if Aspergers ram it”
I just smile sweetly and think
“No, you’d find that as difficult as I find things now”

I understand, you can get angry and not let it show or out, I do that too. I'm always afraid of hurting others (not necessarily physically). It's very important to me not to lash out.

I remember somebody here telling their therapist: "having mild autism means you experience it mildly, not me". It resonated very strongly with me.

^Yes! Superficial external symptoms versus inner lived experience.

I think it was skycat, bless her. I quote that every time someone says about my son: but he is so mild! Little do they know...

Thank you for that, I will remember it. My autistic HFA friends don't feel "mild" in any way.

Is there any explanation why many aspies have short tempers? All my aspie friends do at varying degrees. This usually happens when they are oblivious of an emotional or socially acceptable context and are battling to ascertain a factual accuracy that has higher priority for them. Or because I clutter the conversation with my convoluted thinking.

Last edited by Teach51 on 19 Feb 2020, 4:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It seems like some of us don't, at least not naturally. I would guess that frustration (from constantly being misunderstood and misjudged), exhaustion from constantly masking, compensating and making accommodations for others, feeling overwhelmed sensory-wise, mentally and emotionally as well as alexithymia (for those who have) or at least lack of emotional awareness and intelligence play a huge part.

When I was short-tempered it was because I was struggling so much I woke up every day feeling like I’d already had all I could take.
But I wasn’t even aware that I was struggling at the time.

Yes. Sometimes I feel it is related to frustration with me navigating the conversation all over the place. Then they look like a chameleon on a tartan rug trying to figure out what colour to be.

I don't necessarily mind "convoluted" thinking as long as I get to understand what someone is actually meaning, but accuracy and precision are incredibly important to me. If you don't have the natural ability to "decode" what people really mean/feel, it takes a huge amount of effort to rationally go through all the vagueness and hints trying to figure it out.

Yes I am beginning to figure that out. My ADD renders me much more descriptive than factual and I tend to jump from topic to topic by association rather than evolution.

I am laughing now because I am depicting my aspie friends' perplexed expression while I am telling him about some experience I have had. I mean laughing affectionately of course because he cannot fathom how I got from A to B.

I tend to have quick explosive outbursts -- a mix of annoyance and startlement -- when my concentration is abruptly broken. But I usually get over them within a few seconds.

Other than that I don't think I'm especially hot-tempered.

I suspect that I've managed to avoid some of the co-occurring emotional problems that many autistic people have, in part due to the following general life strategy of mine:

Throughout my adult life I've sought out situations where general personal quirkiness was relatively tolerated, and I've avoided situations requiring a high degree of arbitrary social conformity. Thus I have avoided the more intense kinds of masking that many autistic people routinely do.

I'd probably be a lot more irritable, and a total nervous wreck, if I were to wear myself out trying to blend in all the time.