A very bizarre special interest?

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Hi, all -

I am Amanda and I am new to this forum. I posted for parents already, now I want some advice on what some aspie dx'ers now about a very bizarre special interest. My ds is 16 years. I believe my husband has mild aspergers. I wonder if I have an even milder form. My ds was originally with a dx of schizoaffective personality disorder or something. Current psych says that was mis'dxed. This schizoaffective thing didn't seem to fit my ds anyway.

About two years back, I'd say when my ds was 14 years, he took on a special interest that is all-consuming, as I have read all aspie interests are, and extremely weird.

My ds has an obsession with taping his entire life. He secretly tapes all the sounds on an audio tape and all the sounds of others around him. He eventually converts these tapes to audio files on his laptop computer so he can reuse old tapes. He has hundreds of audio cassettes bought very cheap at hometown auctions. He has hundreds of CDs with the stuff hidden away in a place he says is secret and not around our house. He listens to many at night I know, and he likes to hear himself talk. He has been known to tell people they have lied because he has apparently studied certain conversation pieces. This has become something of a problem already.

At first I didn't make too much of a big deal. Until I found out he secretly does this everywhere. He does it in school, at the store, at psych sessions, everywhere, from the time he gets up till the time he goes to bed. I believe it is probably illegal.

I'd like to know what I possibly could do to make him quell this obsession. He hides the small cassette recorder around the house and even tapes conversations between I and my husband while he goes in his room. He began to overhear things this way and started accusing us of being hypocrites.

Social stories I have tried. Just being ordersome I have tried. He says he's not doing it but I keep finding out that he is.

He is very good with audio and video manipulation, though. Maybe it might be his choice of career.

I don't find this very weird, just inconvenient. When my son accuses me of being a hypocrite or inconsistent, I just agree with him. I admit to him that it is difficult to be 100% consistent in our lives and that I fail at that. I point out to him specific instances where he, too has failed. (that really freaked him out!) We don't have too much to hide in our house so I wouldn't be too disturbed if my son taped everything but taping the rest of the world could present a problem. Try explaining to him that it's considered inappropriate and possibly illegal. Try giving him suggestions on cool sounds and environments that he could record. There have to be intriguing places to record sounds that he hasn't thought of yet.

I'm sort of that way a little with my camcorder. I carry my little sony super 8 handycam with me everywhere I go. but unlike your son, others around me are aware that I'm videotaping, and I don't do it quite so obsessively. One could go through my tape library and review my entire life for the past 10 years or so. I've got mostly footage of interesting places I've been, and interesting things I've seen, along with some other significant events in my life. For instance, I've got footage of when I moved into my house when I bought it.

One of the things I enjoy doing is assembling my video footage on an editor on the computer, and either narrating along with it, or mixing music into the footage. The results are quite nice, and I've had many complements from others on how good my home videos are. Like Bland mentioned, you might want to take your son to locations that have interesting and intriguing sounds to record. You could interest him in editing the sounds, and maybe mixing a narrative into the recordings to explain what's being heard, and why it's significant.

The flip side of this however is if he is recording everything around him because he doesn't trust anyone. I can sort of see why in a way your son may do this if it's the reason. One thing that I have learned is that I cannot take anyone's verbal word at all. People will say one thing, and then turn right around and deny that they said it. Having recorded proof sort of settles this. Other's shouldn't be so disturbed about it if they weren't trying to pull something off on others. Peolple also say many things they may not mean. Recording what he hears for review later may be an attempt to understand verbal communication better.

That's something that I've thought of doing, though to a lesser extent. I was thinking of recording the sounds around me for a day, then maybe condensing them to an hour or half an hour to see what it sounds like.

I used to do the same thing your son did but not nearly to that extent and at a much younger age. After seeing a movie where a character had a couple of micro cassette recorders, I became very fascinated with them and talked my parents into getting me one. I would record all sorts of things with it and I'd experiment with manipulating the buttons in different ways to make the recorded sounds speed up, slow down, or go in reverse. I never really recorded anyone secretly except my sister a few times. She was usually quick to rat me out to my parents so I tried to get dirt on her and get her into trouble. I did that for only a brief period of time before I got bored of it. The recorder didn't last too long because of the way I manipulated the buttons.

Later on, I had a dual cassette deck stereo and would take samples from different songs and edit them together. It was very primitive compared to what I can do today but it helped inspire me to be creative.

Like you mentioned about your son possibly getting a career in audio/video, that's exactly what happened with me. I work for a large tv network/movie studio doing technical work in post production. The best thing you could do for your son would probably be to redirect his obsession into a more constructive and productive one. Try and find out where his main interest is within audio and/or video and then encourage him to do whatever it is he's interested in. You never know, he might become a great location sound man in the film industry or maybe a talented mixer for a music company, or any one of several possibilities.

I think this is pretty much the reason. Like a lot of aspies, he probably has been mistreated a lot in his life, so now that he's old enough to do something about it (albeit irrational), he's fighting back by recording everything. I don't know what his exact mindset is; it could be anything. But most likely, he wants to have evidence (from the recordings) to turn the person in to the authorities if he/she insults him or says something incriminating. The latter can be especially useful (in your son's mind) if the said person hurt him in the past.

If you want to stop his obsession, you may want to ask him, "What are you planning to do with the recordings?" and/or "Will anyone other than you ever hear them?" If he doesn't give you answers, leave it at that. Warning him about the illegality of secret recording is a good idea, though. If he absolutely wants to continue recording, tell him to warn people that they're being recorded; for a cover-up he can use something like "I'm doing an audio documentary for school."