Help with a friend

[rileym022]

I have a 21 year old friend that has Aspergers/Autism. He had kind of a bad childhood and his grandma ended up taking him in when he was 8 and then he became a Christian. His grandma is my mentor so that is how I know him and he lives just a few blocks from me.

I was lucky that I got in through his grandma because most of his other friends got beaten up by him before they became friends. I once saw him flip a kid over a wall because he touched his psp. He quit beating people up because he became an adult and knows he could get in serious trouble for it. but he can still be really mean and he is so full of hate.

We now both attend the same college and I get so frustrated with him. The way he hates is unreal. And he blames it on his Aspergers. He says he doesn't have any feeling because he has Aspergers. I have told him many times hate is a feeling and I have also told him God tells us to love and that hate is not good, expecially the hate he has. Today he was talking about eating babies souls. He likes to call things the devil, like babies. One time he called me selfish for spending time with family and for working at a camp this summer with "needy" kids.

He feels like a lot of people just need to die and he also wished he would die because he hates the world and people. He wants the rapture to come now so he can leave this place. Last week he posted on facebook that he wanted to commit suicide but he knows it is not an option because it is a sin and he would go to Hell.

He complains non stop. All quad I listened to him say how much he hates a teacher because we had assigned seats in that class and you got counted absent if you fell asleep in class. He felt like since he is paying for it things should be his way so he just hated the teacher and blamed him for the bad grades. The most common phrase I hear from him is "I hate my life".

His grandma once told him if he lives like this he can't be a Christian. He got so mad. But I sometimes wonder. The Bible says if you don't have love, you are doing everything for nothing. And he doesn't have love. I try to tell him these things and I try to give him advise and turn his negatives into positives or give him ways he can fix a situation or view it from a different direction but he is too lazy and won't hear any of it. I don't know what to do anymore. It has gotten to the point where I can barely stand to be around him. He knows a sin of his is pride but he doesnt want to change. He even told me once he thinks God has called him to stay where he is at and that is his ministry. That sometimes you have to stay in the fire to help people get out of the fire. But how can you help someone get to a place you have never been?

His grandma thinks getting on his medicine again will help but I kind of doubt it. How can I reach him? Or is he fine where he is at? Is it really the aspergers that gives him all the hate? If so, I'm pretty sure God can change that right?

 

[chapmic]

Its hard but stay positive keep battling his negativy with positivity because you are the light. The light always shine over darkness, "kill him with kindness" because you may never the day he may want to change. Usually anger stems from sadness, so he may be sad about his life or something he is not telling you. Either way I believe with gentleness and perseverance you can get through to him. Stay counting your and hi blessings. Remember their is victory in Christ and he is with you always! I will be praying for both of you!

 

[grandvizier1006]

Hi there!

I’m a Christian with Asperger’s, and I think I can help. I used to have this same bitterness, and I know exactly where it comes from: your friend has a love deficit. He can’t give love unless he RECEIVES love first—God’s love, of course.

I want to say thank you and congratulations for putting up with this person and his anger. Looking back, I wonder just how so many people were able to put with me. THAT was a miracle, and it was one that took a very long time for me to appreciate. If you can get him to change, I promise you your reward will be great. There are so many benefits to having a person with Asperger’s as a friend.

For people with AS—some of us call ourselves “Aspies”, so I’ll use that term here—social interaction rules just don’t come naturally, as you know. This, as you can expect, leads to messing up social situations all the time. And this, in turn, leads to social isolation. We get very lonely and bitter.

We feel like everyone in the world is against us, and we just hate how people are able to go on with their happy lives and not notice our own suffering. And for a long time we Aspies couldn’t get a diagnosis, so we had no idea what to do. We knew we were suffering, but we couldn’t tell people; we thought they’d just ignore us or say that we should “just straighten out”.


Our brains are wired to feel negative emotions very strongly, and that’s why the slightest things will set us off sometimes. It does get controlled with age, but at a much slower rate than regular people. I can remember my parents constantly telling me that I was “actin’ like a two year old!” It got so annoying hearing that over and over, but it was true.

But the anger comes from social rejection. Your friend, as you can obviously tell, had difficulty fitting in and as a result came to think that the world was against him, and that it was harsh place full of mean people. That’s how I used to think. I described my life as “a living Hell” all the time.

Not every person with Asperger’s is angry like your friend is; if this was true then the DSM would list “being angry” as an Asperger’s trait. It’s not that we’re all angry; we just have difficulty controlling our emotions, and since the world doesn’t make sense to us, a lot of things in the world just seem “wrong”. And we can’t just sit there KNOWING that somewhere, someone is doing something wrong, especially if it’s being done to us.
His failed social interaction left him alone and isolated, and he chose to react to this by being angry and hating the world. It was a choice he made to become angry, even though it might have been a subconscious choice. I know because not every person with Asperger’s is angry like that; not even I could be perpetually angry. Some of us respond to our social isolation (it tends to be inevitable) in other ways. Some of us come to actually embrace it! But not everyone can do that.

I felt worthless, alone, worried about my future, and misunderstood. I technically believed in God, but my words and actions and the cynicism with which I viewed the world indicated otherwise. It wasn’t all bad, but a lot of the time I spent dwelling on negative thoughts could have been spent on making friends and just being a nice person.

My problem was that I was taking on the world alone. I thought that it was just me vs. everyone else, the misunderstanding people that didn’t realize that I had Asperger’s and would say what I wanted to, when I wanted to, and I didn’t care for their social stuff. I didn’t want to be overdosed on happiness like them, and I didn’t want to care for anyone else. “Why should I care for others”, I thought, “When no one has cared for me?”

The truth was that people DID care for me. Plenty of people recognized my natural intelligence and love of learning and my ideas, and they appreciated my sense of humor (even though I was basically humiliating myself sometimes). But I couldn’t see them the way they saw me, and I certainly couldn’t see myself the way they saw me.

Him calling you selfish for working at a camp and hating things like babies sounds a lot like the way I used to be. I also had that whole “I wish everybody could die except me, because they deserve it! People all hate each other, there’s nothing wrong with me doing it!”

That kind of thinking comes from a human-centered worldview, the kind I had. Your friend can claim he’s a Christian all he wants, but he obviously isn’t one.
The way I got out of this can’t exactly be repeated by every other individual with AS (although I sure wish it could!) but this situation your friend is in is VERY similar to what I went through as a teen (but I got out of it at a younger age while evidently he’s still in it, although it was through no fault of my own). I can’t leave an Aspie brother behind to face battles he (or she) can’t win alone, the way I tried to.

Here’s what you need to do:
• Start a Bible study with him. It has to be one-on-one. Answer every typical skeptic’s question about the Bible that he’ll come up with, and show him that Christianity is indeed substantial and logical. Show him that it makes sense. Get other Christians to help you with this if you need to. I, for one, know a couple of things in the Bible that I can “filter” through the autistic mind on your behalf, so if you need suggestions I can give some.

• Let him trust you and find nothing to hate about you. You might think this is tough on your part, but even if you have some “flaw” he can “see through” (that he thinks you have), if you’re as kind to him as you can be then he’ll look past that flaw, knowing that you’re a very valuable friend to have. Even when I was mean and bitter I made it a point to value my friends, even though I don’t think I ever really communicated this to them well.

• Let him know that you are genuine, with no ill intentions. Explain your motivations to him, tell him how you see him. We autistic people aren’t good at seeing things outside of our perspective, but it’s not that we can’t do it at all; it’s just that we don’t really know WHEN to do it. Let him give you his point of view, how he sees the world, and you open up to him in return. Because we can’t pick up on other people’s social cues and non-verbal communication, we gain a lot from people’s words because that’s all we can “read”. Because no one would just straight up open to me, I felt like people were one-dimensional—like I was in a world of fictional characters and I was the only “real” person aside from my brother who also had AS. Tell him verbally how you feel and how you think. Don’t assume that he can just figure it out, because he honestly can’t unless he knows where to begin. If you’re his friend, then hopefully opening up to him shouldn’t be too hard. Be vague if you have to, and don’t feel like you have to surrender your personal problems. Just say enough to let him know that you’re a human being, just like him. Only ONE non-Asperger’s person has really done that with me, and as a result, she’s a great friend even though we live far away from each other and we just email each other.

• Be honest with him and his sin. Explain to him how his anger and hatred is destructive, and let him know that he doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to mention Jesus, but you do need to explain to him about his fallen nature. Something to make him realize that he needs help, not the rest of the world. But make sure you emphasize that it’s not his condition that’s wrong with him; it’s how he’s handling it.

• Get him back on that medicine.

• Give him the chance to cry out to God. It took me a long time to realize that the problem was not with the world; it was with myself. Obviously, your friend won’t get it if you just straight up say that to him, but it’s the truth. Humanity and the world is fallen, and we can either sit around and mope about it or we can find the good in the world and work to undo the damage of the evil and misery. That’s what I’d love to help you do with your friend. Once he cries out to God and realizes that even though he is an angry, bitter person with so much hatred in his heart, God loves him—all he had to do was accept that he was the sinner.

But let me tell you just how it works, what happens when a person with Asperger’s comes to Christ. It’s a wonderful, cathartic experience that I really can’t talk about without my eyes getting watery. I like to call it the “perfect hug”.

As you probably know already, autistic people don’t like being touched, and some of us don’t like the feel of certain clothes or textures. We’re just very sensitive about that, although for me personally it’s not too bad. But with hugs, we can be very sensitive. Even now I have relatives that want to hug me for some reason and I sort of go limp if I’m on the receiving end.

A “perfect hug” isn’t a literal hug; it’s a hug that conveys all of the affection and love without the unwanted stimulation. It’s the kind of hug that says, “I know that the world is a harsh and scary place, but I love you, even though you’re different. I want to protect you and make you feel better.”

That kind of “hug” can only come from God’s love.

I can’t remember the exact chapter and verse, but somewhere in 1 Corinthians Paul talks about how if he could do all sorts of cool things but not love, then he’d be worthless. And in 1 John somewhere (again, I suck at chapter and verse references on the spot, sorry): “We love because he first loved us.” That is very true with people with Asperger’s. It’s not that we can’t literally love someone, but let me tell you, before I felt God’s love—before he told me that I was loved and valued despite all of my social problems and attitude and mannerisms—I began to feel love for others. I WANTED to love other people so much more, to “make up” for how selfish I used to be.

Because we autistic people have difficulty perceiving the world outside of our own lenses, we sometimes end up being a bit selfish without meaning to. It isn’t until after we make some mistake and act like a jerk and get punished for our actions that we realize how bad we’ve been.

There are ways to make him manage his anger and make him less upset and reactionary that don’t involve the Bible, but the most effective way to help him is to let him know that Christ died for people like him.

Jesus was bullied, He was blunt with people who were doing things wrong, He never lied, He hated hypocrisy, He had to live in a world that operated differently from how His perfect, sinless brain worked, He had people misunderstand Him, He felt lonely sometimes, He was tempted to act superior to everyone else (some of us people with Asperger’s feel like we’re always right or we’re smarter than everyone else), but He didn’t do it. Jesus didn’t have Asperger’s, obviously, but His struggles were similar enough. During Jesus’ lifetime, He went through every struggle imaginable, every struggle that human beings can have, either directly or indirectly—and He did it all so that we wouldn’t have to. And yet we still do because often we don’t recognize that there’s a way out.

He might already technically know the story, but it obviously hasn’t hit home yet. When a person becomes a genuine Christian like I did, there’s a big difference. They won’t be perfect, but they’ll change.

I think then your friend will realize that he needs to change his ways, and he will need your help. You’ll have to teach him all the social rules and how to see the world and everything in it with joy instead of bitterness. Sometimes I have trouble with this, but I know that Christ inside me. I can’t give up on life because I know that I am becoming more social for God’s sake, not my own survival. I’m not trying to “cure” myself of my Asperger’s, because I don’t need curing, but I do want to improve myself and show people that I have value, just like all human beings do.

I’ll be sure to pray for you and your friend. Feel free to ask me anything if you don’t understand something or need more information. God bless, and don’t give up on your friend! God can free him from his misery!

 

[rileym022]

Thank you so much for sharing! That is a very beautiful story of your change. Also thanks for the tips and more information on Aspergers.
The thing with this guy is that he grew up in church. We have done Bible studies together. We even co-taught a lesson on thankfulness in youth group last year. He knowz the Bible and he takes pride in that. He also knows he struggles with pride but he likes that. He likes feeling powerful. He takes credit for impacting the lives of many of the kids from our youth group.
He loves Revelation and proving why evolution is not true. To him, his views are the only views and if you don't agree with him, you obviously misinterpreted the Bible.
Also, the reason he loves Revelation is because he just wants Jesus to come back so he can get out of this "Hell on earth" basically. And he wants to watch the world suffer.
He is back on his medicine but I see no change.
Thanks again for the help and for the prayers. I am also praying for him and hoping he can see the loving side if God is better than the violent side

 

[grandvizier1006]

Glad he's back on his medicine, but if he still has anger issues, enjoys reading Revelation for its destruction, is very dogmatic about his theological leanings, and is extremely proud of his supposed knowledge, then I fear that he's still trapped in sin

I was never the sadistic sort, and just for clarification that's not an Asperger's thing so much as it is a manifestation of how he has chosen to react to his social rejection. Man's ways of dealing with problems are never beneficial, it seems

You're going to have to get him to value human life, probably by setting yourself up as a human being. Tell him how his sadism is seen by you. The thing about us Aspies is that even though we can imagine how other people see us, the thought of stepping into another person's shoes doesn't cross our minds. Some scientists believe that we CAN'T do it at all, but I disagree. We just sort of don't know to do it instinctually and have to sort of be taught. It's never too late for him to learn how to do this stuff. For me, coming to Christ really helped with that, I think. You can't really MAKE him start valuing people until he begins to realize how they see him. That's why a lot of us Aspies might get upset sometimes about something--it never occurs to us that other people will look at us weird.

Once you get him to understand that there are other people in the world besides him--who have their own problems and may also be suffering in silence for other reasons, and have feelings and emotions and are not simply happy robots--then he may come to realize that other points of view exist. Hopefully he'll get less dogmatic about his opinions, then.

As for pride, I suppose that's not always a bad thing. But I've always been very cautious of it. I've never liked pride of any sort, whether it's pride for who you are or what you do. If you're proud of who you are, my logical thought process says, then you are being proud of things you had ought to be ashamed of. If you are proud of your abilities, well, God gave you those abilities, and He can take them away if you forget Him.

But too little pride is bad for self-esteem, and I sometimes have issues with that despite my talents. You need to get your friend to realize that God is the source of all goodness and all talent and whatever it is that he is proud of himself for supposedly having.

Another thing that you might want to do is contextualize any part of the Bible in which God is wrathful (that he seems to enjoy, as you've mentioned). Explain that God can get angry, and that (especially in the OT) He did not tolerate sin. But also be sure to mention that the whole purpose of Jesus was to put an end to this system, to show humanity what it deserved in the Old Testament versus what it would get in the New (Jesus).

And even in the Old Testament--in every book of prophecy, pretty much--there is some instance of God's love being demonstrated. Make him realize that God is not some sadist, He's a loving God who must sometimes exercise discipline, whether subtly or explicitly.

Also, people with Asperger's tend to think very literally. Be sure to explain any Biblical metaphor, analogy, parable, etc. that you come across. Even if he thinks he already knows the symbolism, be sure to explain it in detail. I personally have less of an issue with figurative language than other people with Asperger's, but there were times when I didn't understand things in the Bible and had no one to turn to for an explanation.

As bad as it may seem, please don't give up on this young man. He just needs to realize that he has been loved all of his life, and it is time for him to let go of his hatred and turn to God--for real. You can't directly state this, though; you have to lead him to it on his own. Unfortunately, you can't change much about him; he has to do a lot of it himself. All you can do is give him a push forward just a bit.