Understanding Correlation In Sadness

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I've been wondering about this for awhile, and would love some input.

When my son gets sad about something, it inevitably leads to him crying about my grandfather who died 2 years ago or his pet rat that died when he was 5.

I used to think that he was being manipulative... Either using those things to divert the current situation or in some odd was just continuing the current state of interaction by bringing up another incident of sadness.

I know that Aspie's aren't considered manipulative, so I've been searching for another reason... He only, ONLY brings up these things when something else has caused him to be sad.

Is it possible that he's just correlating the current experience to the last time or the most painful time he experienced sadness? Even when drawing that similarity just draws that pain closer to the surface? I wonder that... But then I recognize that every time he does this, the initial issue gets left behind and not dealt with because now we're dealing with the loss of Papa... or Peter (the rat)..

I'm not sure what to think of it.

Any ideas or advice??

My daughter does this too.

It seems to me that upset and sadness are being associated with the last BIG occurance of those feelings.

I know I cannot let go of highly emotional events - even from very young childhood. They are still as fresh and sharp as the day they happened and they can be triggered by something completely unrelated. As an adult I am better able to cope with and wrestle those upheavals into some sort of rational submission. I suspect the same happens to my daughter and that she just hasn't yet mastered how to quell that sudden upwelling of old emotion.

I mean - she's 8 and she can still cry over her goldfish that died when she was 3 - all from a small crying fit from brushing her hair. And I mean small... maybe 2 or 3 tears. When it happens she seems a bit confused and just can't control it.

I don't know if it is common in AS or not but I've just been trying to teach her the things I do control it. I'd love to hear anyone elses input on this one.

That...actually happens to me. When something makes me a little sad, I usually start remembering HUGE things that made me sad in the past. It's confusing. Especially when it makes me feel worse than I felt initially.

I've seen several different, but related, things in my son. First of all, he tends to hang on to negative things and perseverate on them - anything that reminds him of something upsetting brings it back as though it just happened. His memory is incredible: a bad event is just as clear when it pops into his memory as it was while it was happening.

Another thing that we're starting to work on with some success: my son has extreme difficulty connecting an event with a feeling, particularly with sadness. He tends to need an explanation for every feeling, so if he feels sad and the reason doesn't make sense to him, he'll come up with a memory that he can connect that feeling to. If I happen to know why he is sad, I handle this by saying "When xxxxx happens, a lot of kids feel sad. Some feel really sad. Do you think maybe that's what you're feeling?"

Next possibility is emotional regulation: until recently (therapy helped a LOT) DS had an on-off switch when it came to emotion: ecstatic or despairing, explosive or immobilized. If he didn't really feel up to one of those standards, he would crank himself up to that point using whatever worked, I think so the intensity of the feeling made sense to him. The therapy was all about fine-tuning the language for feelings to help him understand that there were many degrees between solemn and despair.

My son does this exact thing, except for him it's the death of his grandmother or losing his dog. It is absolutely NOT manipulation, it is deeply painful and genuine for him. My son, and most aspies I know of, are much more sensitive in ALL ways - not just in terms of physical senses but emotional ones as well. When they experience grief, they feel it full-on, they don't compartmentalize or cope strategically the way most NTs do. I personally think their way if much more human and healthy than our more socially acceptable ways.

I wonder if it's an associative kind of thing where you cried when one sad thing happened and then every time you cry after that your mind accesses those previous sad events and then you are experiencing all of those events over again?

This is precisely what I've been wondering....




I did honestly wonder if it was at first... but I've been learning.. and trying as much as I can to apply what I've been learning. So even though I really didn't think it was manipulation any longer, while trying to understand what's going on with him.. it was still a vague underlying doubt.

Thank you guys for your insight...
Now, how do I deal with it? Sometimes, the initial thing needs to be dealt with... discussed, but then he starts crying about Papa. Compared to the other thing, Papa dying is something that deserves tears while the other thing, might not warrant tears (of course it upset him, and he deserves to be able to get upset over it...) But he was upset and crying, and that led to crying about Papa which leads to talking about Papa... which leads to both of us crying, then laughing as I tell him stories about Papa. So when the crying is over, I'm afraid to revisit the initial topic, because I'm afraid of restarting the cycle... but the initial topic really needs to be discussed. (I'm sorry, I feel like I'm talking in circles and only randomly getting close to my point..)

Hopefully you get what I mean... so How do I deal with this? I get that he needs to cry for Papa. But I can't skirt issues to avoid upsetting him and triggering that sadness.

I don't avoid tough subjects or skirt around issues to avoid this, but sometimes I can tell that my son is having a particularly hard day (or hour) and that it may not be the right time for me to push him over that line where he can no longer cope with his feeling of sadness. So sometimes I have to be strategic in when/how I decide to deal with certain issues.

If he has already gone to that sad place about his grandmother dying, I do much as you've described - validate his feelings of missing her etc, but I then remind him how much she loved him and how she would not want him to only think about and remember her when he is sad - she would want him to be happy too. Once he's over that, I play it by ear to see if he's able to handle a short discussion about the initial problem. Sometimes he's not, and that's ok - not every single thing has to be resolved. It's ok to let some things go too.

When I'm there I try and put the distance back into it... if that makes sense. With my daughter, I validate her feelings but remind her that it was a long time ago. I haven't yet found a way to stop it from happening. My personal control method is all about brute force of will. Lots of redirection - putting my mind somewhere else usually into whatever my special interest is. Many times the tv helps with this. Listening to other people speak without the expectation of reciprocation is a 'fully engaged' activity. I suppose this is the 'zombification' doctors hate so much. I'd honestly be lost without it.

With my daughter, sometimes a nice tight hug and some rocking helps her thorough it quickly - a few minutes. Sometimes redirecting to her DS or the tv. It's more prevalent first thing in the morning and last thing before falling asleep - basically when her brain has nothing else to do yet.

Her father is more the 'just get over it' type. That just isn't going to happen.

I'm no expert - but I think this is the issue. What may not be a tearful situation to you may warrant tears for him, ...and then, if he has internalized rules about "boys don't cry" (as my son did, despite our best efforts to prevent it) he has to find something "worth" crying about about because he needs to have a reason.

I think you misunderstand me. I never TELL him he shouldn't cry over it.. Tears are a natural outlet. I usually don't even mention the tears themselves.. I talk about what's wrong, why are you sad, how can we make you feel better, or change the situation..... As I said, but I'll reword, he's upset and crying is his response and he has the right to be upset... I've never invalidated his feelings. All I meant is that one is very obviously deserving of tears, one not so much.

If he gets upset because.... he broke something of mine... I understand his frustration.. I understand that he feels bad.. but in the whole big scheme of things.. it's an object- I don't care so much (not that I don't care if all my things get broken)... especially when I see how much it upsets him. So we talk about it, and he's upset and that leads to Papa. Hmmmm a broken vase... Papa died... It's not hard for me to judge which is a more emotionally serious situation. But, as a parent, at some point I need to point out that we don't do X in the house because things get broken and we like to have things.

No, I didn't misunderstand; I didn't mean that you said that - but the message for boys not to cry is an extremely powerful and pervasive one; even if you never said it, your son may be assuming that it's true. We were very, very careful never to send that message to my son (even to point out whenever my husband cried and to validate that) but there it is - to the point that he would prefer to be violent (despite the consequences) than cry.

I have an idea about breaking things: I've been clumsy my whole life (probably due to undiagnosed AS.) Breaking something is yet another validation that I can't control my body and cause destruction no matter how good my intentions are or how careful I am. I often cry when that happens (even as an adult) even if the thing I broke is inconsequential - because the ramifications of not being able to control my body are huge and scary.

Not to say that you shouldn't talk calmly about the vase in exactly the way that you did, but you may not get a "typical" reaction because it's difficult to tease out all the other concurrent stuff from "don't play Don Quixote in the house" (or whatever it was that caused the vase to break.) Now add in whatever assumptions he may be making about boys who cry...or that AS crystal-clear memory...

(I am hoping this post doesn't come across as judgemental - please understand it is not intended as such, rather the opposite...)

I do this too. When people do things, it can remind me about my ex's or anything in the past. That's why I get such negative thoughts about certain things because of my ex's. I don't know if this is what everyone meant in this thread but I can relate. I do it too and from my experience, people can get upset when you compare them to someone who was a jerk. Telling me to accept who you are when it's over something I can't stand will really put me into a meltdown and screaming match and then me talking about my ex and sobbing because that is what he did to me and he was a jerk and he pulled the "I thought you accept me for who I was" so since then I take that very literal now when people say it. And there are other things too.

oh my goodness, I do the same thing!
I still get sad about my childhood cat that died. I had her for 17 years from the time I was 8. She died 12 years ago and I still get upset about it when something else triggers the memories.

But speaking of my son. He had a playdate over last weekend, he is a boy who my son has gone to school with for the last two years in K and now in grade 1 both of them in the same class. My son talks about him often and my son played at his house first then the boy came to our house. When the boy and my son were upstairs my son all of a sudden came down asking me where his cat was. He was frantic and clearly upset to the point of tears. I was very confussed and just didn't even think that something else could have been bothering him. He would not go and play with his friend until we found his cat.

It's a strange feeling, isn't it? I hate that. Not being able to just "get over" things and that be the end of it. In response to what you son did, I used to get like that all the time. And it was never solely about the thing that I was looking for.

I do this too. I rarely cry but when I do cry it opens the floodgates to everything that has ever been wrong. A loss of one type connects to other losses. I have a sort of slide show for things in my mind and when something triggers one of the slides in a set, the rest of the set kicks in. If my slide set isn't "activated" by anything, I have a hard time bringing it up at all.

Last edited by ominous on 23 Apr 2011, 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.