Oh greenlotus, you have my kid again! DS is now about to turn 15, anxiety at least as high as ever, inattentive ADHD is way off the charts, and that flavour of ASD-ishness still challenges.
I have been battling "I don't know" for as long as I can remember, but it seems like somehow it's ramped up even more with this first year of high school. He can't make the simplest, lowest-stake choice, ever (as opposed to just most of the time, which I guess was the old normal?). What to eat. Does he want to see a friend this weekend. Do you want to go for a bike ride. I don't know.
spaghetti has some really good insights. DS has definitely always been terrified of responsibility, and I need to give more thought to how that contributes to this problem. And certainly, as I have written about here many times, avoidance is his modus operandi for anything hard. And yes, he is the blame-shift king.
That said, though, what I can clearly see is that these decisions leave him absolutely paralyzed with anxiety. Stupid, ridiculous decisions with no meaningful consequences of any kind, and he's just paralyzed with anxiety.
What I have been trying to figure out forever is why?
My best guess so far is it comes out of the weird mixture of anxiety, PG, ADHD and his extreme rigidity (one of his biggest ASD-like traits). Those create a perfect synergistic spiralling soup of catastrophisizing, seeing way too many options, indecision, and tunnel vision.
He can both see way too many pathways - and of course how each of them could go wrong - and yet somehow also be utterly stuck in one track and not be able to see how he could ever possibly leave a pathway should it not be working for him. And he is so absolutist that should his choice turn out to be less than optimal, he sees that as both a complete disaster, and also something that can't be changed mid-track, or recovered from afterwards.
Basically, extreme fear that he'll choose wrong, with a wildly out-of-whack sense of the consequences of doing so. Which is pretty much the definition of anxiety.
Interestingly, DS does much better with higher-stakes decisions. While he can do his usual avoidance of committing for longer than is ideal - and I think here spaghetti's interpretation applies a lot more - there's a lot less of it, and it's easier to get a real answer out of him. Weirdly, I think he can better grasp the real consequences when they are serious and meaningful and have a lot of impact on him (what school do you want to go to? Do you want to take this course in the summer?).
Though I suppose this is consistent with what I've observed since he was a toddler - hard stuff is easy for him, for the easy stuff tends to be really, really hard.
Must get back to herding them out the door. Will give more thought.
