As with all posts, materiel changes have been made to protect confidentiality.
Jim is a pretty typical high school junior. He's quite smart, particularly in science and math and is quite socially awkward, not in small part due to his longstanding diagnosis of Asperger's (now categorized as "high functioning autism" (HFA) but let's not get too stuck on labels here.)
Though Jim's never dated, he has a couple of geeky friends who are boys with whom he gets together to play video games and discuss their books replete with complex development of other worldly characters. Fantasy and science fiction have an almost Biblical status for Jim and his friends, to the point that they sometimes forego their school work while engaging in reading or playing video games consistent with their passions.
So Jim was caught off guard recently when one of the girls in school inserted herself into the mix of Jim and his friends. She continued what adolescents have been doing with one another since the dawn of, well, since the dawn of adolescent life; she began to "split" Jim and his friends for no clear reason. (I theorize that the girl may have been exhibiting her own brand of flirting with either Jim or his friends, but didn't have the sophistication to do it kindly.)
She began by engaging Jim in a discussion about his close friend. Jim, naively fell into the trap of saying something negative about his closest friend that the girl immediately brought to his friend's attention. Thus the split; Jim and his good friend were now fighting, the girl is able to create a connection with the friend. A play that's as readable as a sacrifice bunt moving the runner to second base, and often as effective.
What Jim's struggling with his that he was the sacrifice, or to put it in group dynamic terms: he was "triangulated out" of the group. By aligning with Jim's friend against Jim, the girl was able to create a close(r) relationship to his friend and create animosity from the friend to Jim. The friend believes that Jim betrayed him, all this at the hands of the girl. It's pretty easy to understand, unless you're Jim.
Jim's thinking is fairly concrete, not unusual for someone with HFA. Jim is forlorn, he misses his friend, and just doesn't understand what happened. These are emotions with which he's unfamiliar. They were tight, and now they are not. He was misunderstood, why can't his friend understand? Why is his friend taking so long to get over the fact that they were played against one another (the girl, apparently in this case, has moved on.)
This kind of social difficulty is quite common for kids on the spectrum. He's stuck on the betrayal he feels from the girl's distortion of his words. He's sad at the potential for having lost a friend. He doesn't know what to do. And I don't have a simple solution.
Tony Attwood explained the experience of this population well in one of his early books on Asperger's when he said (I believe in the name of one of his clients) that being here on earth feels like being a Martian who's arrived on a strange planet with strange rules. That is, the rules here are unknown, mysterious, random, and the learning curve to adapt to this civilization is long and complex. This is the dilemma Jim's going through. He's pained by not understanding the emotional gamesmanship that are the complexity of adolescents, and feels victimized. We discussed the "rules" of hurtful communication like this - indeed they are hard to understand, but Jim's smart, I think he'll do OK. Like the rest of us, he needs time to heal.
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