boyfriend acting strange, what’s going on in his mind?
My boyfriend has always been a anxious and sensitive person, (not as in emotional and cries a lot, he hates being emotional in front of me. Just sensitive toward his surroundings) but over the past few months something has changed and I genuinely don’t know what’s going on or how to help him.
For context: he has a “good” life objectively. He goes to university, gets very good grades, has a really fun and impressive job that benefits his future career, works out regularly, eats well without being obsessive about it, etc. So externally he seems balanced and functional.
But emotionally and mentally he’s become extremely fragile lately. Even very slight criticism, or sometimes completely neutral comments, can make him spiral because he interprets them very personally. In those moments he sometimes starts stuttering badly and struggles to form sentences at all. I’ve seen him become so overwhelmed that tears were running down his face, even tho he hates when i see him cry.
The thing that worries me most is that hes muttering to himself out loud very intensely, almost like he’s talking to another person in the room. Sometimes he says things like “three times… I just have to say it three times and then…” and other times he angrily says things like “stop” or “get your shit together!” He becomes visibly distressed while doing it. he also doesn’t get where the “three” thing is coming from and why he feels the need to say it.
He told me that he feels like there’s a version of himself that used to feel normal, happy and connected to life, and now there’s this “broken” version that he can’t get out of. But he says it does NOT feel like separate personalities or entities both feel like “him.”
I’m autistic and have ADHD myself, and we both strongly suspect he may also be autistic and has maybe been masking heavily his whole life. To me it almost feels like some kind of extreme burnout, shutdown, anxiety spiral, or loss of ability to cope emotionally, but I really don’t know.
Another confusing thing: sometimes when he stutters and I tell him I genuinely can’t understand him, he’ll insist that he DID say the sentence clearly and that I “must have understood.” But later, when I asked him calmly about it, he admitted that he also noticed himself stuttering and knew he wasn’t speaking clearly.
I don’t know if this sounds like autistic burnout, severe anxiety, OCD, dissociation, chronic stress, or something else entirely. I’m mainly asking because I want to understand what could possibly be happening and how I can support him without making things worse.