Aspies For Freedom

Yes I have experienced it, in the school, with some family member's, and the thing that better works for me is just trying to keep calm, i use a stim, like a tic, by example moving my toes or fingers very quickly to drain some energy, and then when you were alone you can cry and take out all the negative feelings, is very hard but later you will learn to control better that, now i can have more control on these situations and almost nobody note if i'm sad or angry

The Puppet
  by me

as cold boiling filled me i knew
it must go away for a while so
i willed it into a little box
closed tightly and put on a shelf
behind my eyes

then i watched me do the things that
must be done and say the things that
must be said and as a puppet
holding the little box closed
carefully take myself away

later alone in a quiet place
all alone in a safe and quiet place
the puppet was allowed to peek
into the box and died

I didn't begin to learn this until I was 55. Slow learner? stubborn? or deep fear of letting go of control?

It was the latter, I believe. I began to learn to let go of control in therapy. For two years I had been controlling what I spoke about, rehearsing it for a week before the sessions while telling myself i was being honest. When I finally saw that I was being utterly dishonest and controlling I was, for the first time in my life, deeply humiliated. Going back into that session the following week, humiliated, a failure, having betrayed the relationship, was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had been sooo hung up on keeping control. And what I had done was sooo wrong, within the rules of that relationship.

What I learned was, it's possible to be totally wrong - completely humiliated by failure at the deepest level, flattened with shame - and get up and live again, and keep the relationship going; it's not the end, and although the shame of failing feels like death, it's not. Rather, it can be a rebirth. A great discovery. A few months later i found myself aware that I was never again going to hold - or want to hold - all the loose ends of my life, in a neat tidy bundle. There were going to be ragged ends, mess, unfinished things, mistakes, things misunderstood and impossible to correct. It's a new world. (It helped to learn to swim at the same time - taking your feet off the bottom of the pool a great way to learn to let go of control!)

So: on one hand, slow Aspie learning? and on the other hand, hope - you can cross the deepest depths of learning even at 55!

best wishes
I hope your learning sets in sooner than mine! Wishing you a happily messy life
/michael