Autism and Anger Management (why do we sometimes explode? or implode?) | Patrons Choice

Published 2022-01-20
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Do you sometimes explode over seemingly small things? Why do little things sometimes make us so mad? Anger management is essential to avoid negatively affecting our mental health and relationship with other people.

In this video, I share why anger management is important, what are the possible reasons why we explode over small things, and how can we manage and let go of the anger when we are or just about to explode.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 - Introduction
00:58 - Why is anger management important?
04:02 - What is it that fills up my bucket?
04:44 - What are the things that help me empty my bucket?
05:37 - Why do we explode over seemingly very little things?
09:24 - Personal experience of feeling that intense immediate anger
11:12 - What it feels like to implode (instead of exploding) and its effects
13:30 - Personal strategy in managing anger
15:43 - How does a "bucket" of anger and frustration can affect you and the people around you
17:31 - Three areas to help us manage anger

CHANNEL LINKS:
Patreon: www.patreon.com/aspergersfromtheinside
Facebook: www.facebook.com/aspergersfromtheinside
Twitter: twitter.com/AspieFromInside
Written Blog: aspergersfromtheinside.com/
More Videos: youtube.com/c/aspergersfromtheinside
Email: [email protected]
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// WELCOME TO ASPERGERS FROM THE INSIDE!!

My name is Paul and I discovered I have Aspergers at age 30.
If you're new you can check out a playlist of some of my most popular videos here: youtube.com/c/aspergersfromtheinside/playlists

Yes, I know, I don't look autistic. That's exactly why I started this blog, because if I didn't show you, you would never know.

As the name suggests, this channel is devoted to giving you insight into the world of Aspergers.
This blog started off being just my story, but I've learned SO MUCH about my own condition
from meeting others on the Autism Spectrum that now I make sure to feature their stories as well.

I've come a long way in my own personal journey.
Now I'm sharing what I've found so you don't have to learn it the hard way too.

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// WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS BLOG

You can expect me to get to the point with concise useful information.
I focus on what is most important and don't shy away from difficult topics.

The best way to learn about Autism is to see it in real life ( i.e. via the stories of many, many people on the spectrum).

In this channel I endeavour to show you what Autism and Aspergers look like in real people and to also give you some insight as to what's happening on the inside.
I upload a new video every weekend with some bonus content thrown in mid-week too.
There's always new stuff coming through so be sure to check back and see what you've missed. (Is this where I'm supposed to tell you to hit that subscribe button?)

Topics Include:
- What is Aspergers/Autism?
- Aspie Tips, coping strategies, and advice on common issues
- Learning Emotional Intelligence (this is my special interest!)
- Autism in real life: stories from special guests

Everything I do is and endeavour to go deeper and take you 'behind the scenes' to understand what may, at first glance, seem 'odd'.
oh, and I love busting stereotypes and turning preconceptions upsidedown :)

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// ABOUT ME

I discovered I have aspergers at the age of thirty.
It has been my life's mission to understand these funny creatures we call humans.
My special interest is a combination of emotional intelligence, psychology, neuroscience, thinking styles, behaviour, and motivation. (I.e. what makes people tick)
My background is in engineering and I see the world in systems to be analysed.
My passion is for taking the incredibly complex, deciphering the pattern, and explaining it very simply.
My philosophy is that blogging is an adventure best shared.

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// EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TRAINING

I also run autism friendly online emotional intelligence training. So if you like my direct, systematic style, and would like to improve your own emotional intelligence skills, check it out here:
emotionsexplained.com.au/

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// CONTACT

Blogging is an adventure best shared which means I'd love to hear from you!
Feel free to leave me a comment or send me and email at any time and I'll do my best to respond promptly.
Email: [email protected]

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this channel!
I look forward to hearing from you!

Peace,

~Paul

All Comments (21)
  • My mother always tried to paint the picture that I’m “explosive” and have anger issues when she would always say the cruelest things to me when she is angry and taunt me with it. For example she would say “If I knew I was going to have an autistic kid, I would have never had you , fckng cretin” and then she would always go on and taunt me “ bonkers autist 🤪, bonkers autist” Iwhilst aggressively punching her own forehead. She would go on and on and on , I’d still hear if I’d go to another room. I’d scream at her to stop to please stop but she never did , it caused me immense anxiety and panic attacks and later on I did start cursing back at her. After doing that I was just painted as a difficult brat and my mother as a saint.
  • @DeniseCummins
    Not feeling heard is a hot button issue for Asperger's individuals, and I think this is why: Aspies process more information at a faster pace than most neurotypicals. That means that the Aspie is usually several steps ahead of the neurotypical when discussing a problem or issue. As a result, what the Aspie is saying makes no sense to the beurotypicall. They're "not there" yet. Sometimes just letting what you've said percolate in the background will cause the neurotypical to stop mid-sentence later on and say, "Wait-were you saying <blah blah>? Now I see what you meant."
  • @pedroff_1
    A big issue I have is that when I try expressing what's troubling me, if I feel like the person is dismissing me, ot just fills up my bucket all ober, and makes me lash out at them.
    While I do feel I "explode" in those cases, I also feel super drained and really bad for having done so, so it still results in me getting hurt, just with hurting others as a freebie
  • @pondurosa3792
    I finally feel like I found someone who understands EXACTLY what I go through on a daily basis. I thought I was going insane. Awareness is the first step. Thank you so much
  • With me, the question is-- "Why do SO MANY things bother me SO MUCH?". I still don't know if I have autism, I went through life being treated for depression and anxiety. When I was a kid I would try to express the things that were bothering me, only to be told that I "was being ridiculous". Like, everybody else can put up with these things, you need to learn to just live with it. Learning in my old age that autistic people can have meltdowns due to sensory input really resonated with me. Now a lot of the episodes in my life that I put down to Bipolar Disorder, I wonder if it was just overwhelming sensory triggering that I didn't know how to control. I have retreated to my house and my cats (thanks, Covid), and now the only thing that gets me is if the house has a maintenance crisis, or the cat puked AGAIN.
  • @karlab95
    I use to explode more as a child and teen, but grew into pretty much an imploding kind of person. I really like the metaphor of the grenade you used, because it feels just like that: you do what you can to spare other's feelings and then that resentment just builds up.

    Overall a really good video. 100/10
  • One of my biggest flaws is that I don’t empty my bucket regularly. Unrealistic parental expectations and always ‘being put down’ contributed to my anger bucket exploding.
  • @annehislop2449
    Being invited to the pub to a workmate's leaving do (about 12 people) and me thinking they are being friendly. I get there, they're all sitting around the table, drinks ordered, then they all disappear into other areas of the pub. I'm left sitting on my own, in a busy pub on a Friday night 8 months pregnant with a glass of orange juice in front of me. I left the pub in silent tears whispering to my unborn child "It's okay, Mummy made a mistake" blaming myself for somehow getting it wrong. Later, I realised I wasn't supposed to go, I was only invited so they wouldn't look mean by excluding me, Still hurts.
  • @Sheka88
    6:10 "(..) it's not always easy to notice our own stress (...), especially if we're living with a significant amount of background anxiety."
    This line seems so obvious when you say it, yet i'd not realised. Thank you for pointing this out.
  • @rwithers3
    I'm the same way (anger on the inside) maybe that's why so many of us autistics have stomach ailments....
  • What do you do when you try to slowly empty your bucket bit by bit, and the other person doesn't let you do that by interrupting you and saying that you need to get over it? They're slowly pushing you closer to imploding. And you know that by "getting over it", or what it actually is, sweeping it under the rug, you're eventually going to explode, but the other person just won't let you slowly empty your bucket, so what are you supposed to do?
  • @statickaeder29
    Imploding is how I end up crying at work, and people don't understand, "oh, you don't have to cry" and "we all feel like this" when "yes I do" and "no, you really don't" are the real answers. I try to warn people when I'm reaching a limit, often about talking about "chaos, this is all chaos" in the work place - I work in the back room of a retail establishment, with my BA in Music Theory & Composition and Russian Language, and my words are becoming more and more limited. And crying is more open and aware of my surroundings than shutting down, withdrawing, and practically disassociating.
  • @jonmars9559
    Good questions. As I struggle to come to terms with both ASD and CPTSD, emotional regulations is extremely difficult to manage. It causes great difficulties in establishing and maintaining relationships. The tension and rage that builds up inside me I try to mask or suppress but internalizing anger wreaks havoc internally. Expressing rage outwardly doesn't serve well either. displays of anger rarely aids in making friends.
  • @peterwynn2169
    One thing that annoys me is when I say to my folks, "Please don't do my chores for me, unless I'm unwell and I can't," but they do them. For example, I have a strategy with the council bins whereby I put a fresh liner in every week and I put four clothes pegs in to hold the liner in place. I put the bins out but one week, my father brought them in and he put the clothes pegs that were on the outside table back in the peg basket! So, I had get them out!
    My most recent meltdown was on December 13. My brother came over with my niece and nephew and I had to go and see my kidney specialist. I had 70 minutes to have my breakfast, take my pills, have a shower and brush my teeth. My brother decides to go and get my parents something for lunch, and my niece flops down on the floor crying out for him. Then, my nephew decides to scream that he wants my sister-in-law, then, my family KNOWS that I HATE FLIES, but they left the door open for the little dog, and I had to also unpack the dishwasher, but a fly came in while I was trying to and while I was trying to put my yoghurt back in the fridge, my father asked me to get some toys for my nephew! I was annoyed! I went and saw my kidney specialist and was a few minutes late because somebody parked in a clearway and I had to wait for traffic that was turning as I was in a lane with a red arrow and then, someone drove along at 30kms/h in a 50kms/h zone!
  • @appouhal
    I have been recently diagnosed as autistic but I was previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder because I have severe inappropriate outbursts of anger when I get upset.

    I really hate how irrational I become when I get angry.

    I become like a total sociopath whose only ambition is completely & utterly destroy the target of my rage in every way imaginable.

    I’ve stalked, harassed, menaced, doxxed, outed, exposed, threatened, and cyberbullied dozens of middle-aged men, most of whom I‘ve never actually met in person, for things ranging from them promising to contact me and them blocking me afterward to them making appts to meet with me at a hotel and them flaking out without telling me.

    I find that I can’t stand being:

    1) ignored

    2) ghosted

    3) led on

    4) rejected

    5) turned down

    People who do these things to me cause me to go from being a meek mild-mannered math teacher to a sociopathic cyberstalker straight out of a Lifetime thriller.
  • This has really been the story of my life. I'm 69 years of age and i still have trouble sensing when im ready to explode until it's too late. It doesn't happen as often but it still does.
  • @musicteacher5757
    I was blessed with an abusive mother.
    To survive I had to control my anger.
    But my controls are too powerful and too broad - I don't express anger when I should and get bullied.
    When I'm very angry I shut down* because most of my "spoons" are used up on bottling up my anger.

    *Shutting down is mostly isolation to avoid more triggers.
  • @Crouteceleste
    I live with my sister and we are both autistic. We have a lot of issues when we try to talk to each other about grievances. It often ends in shouting matches with sometimes objects being destroyed or tears of rage because we apparently push each other's buttons until we both explode. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that there are remnants of the siblings "hierarchy" between older/younger sisters. Also a big part of this I think comes from lingering hurts and insecurities from being raised with abuse in our family.

    I found out that if there is no lingering injustice (like a task she pushed back weeks or months like a pile of trash bags she didn't evacuate or dirty dishes she didn't do, which causes me severe anxiety and is the most common topic of our fights), I can usually calm down if she stops interacting with me and goes away. Simply saying "I can't deal with what you're saying right now, please stop overwhelming/triggering me now because I will surely explode" is not a solution for us.
    It was very hard to make her understand that that was NOT an excuse for me to "win" the fight or avoiding it, just to avoid burning myself so hot I start to destroy things instead of hurting her.

    The issue is, she is very lazy (though I know most of it is because of anxiety and executive function disorder, like me). I do try to remind her as little as possible that I need her to do the task, because it gives her more anxiety and makes her even less likely to do the task. Which, in turn, both angers me that I still have to remind her to do her chores (we're both around 30), and stresses me out A LOT until she finally does the task. It's a vicious circle :/
  • @MaciekRabizo
    Unfairness and pointless lies fill my bucket instantly 😁
  • @trinnyj1451
    This resonates so strongly with me that I'm crying ......... thank you for explaining these complex concepts so beautifully.