thoughts about Jack and aspie behavior

While reading Room, I remembered something I had read in an article written by a mother of a young boy with Asperger's Syndrome (a quick rundown for those unfamiliar with the syndrome:  Asperger's is part of the autism spectrum.  It's generally more mild than fully blown autism, but it affects social interaction, nonverbal communication, and several other things.)  In the article, she described how her son was getting ready for a car ride when he asked for her help in securing the "backwards seven."  She had no idea what he was talking about, until she realized that he was talking about his seat belt, which would look like a backwards seven to him when he looked down on it.  Jack's terms for things that he's just now discovering made me think of this.
There are other things that Jack does that make remind me of aspie behaviors, like his difficulty speaking to people other than his mother when he first leaves the room.  While I doubt Jack really is on the autism spectrum, it's interesting to compare his behavior to the behavior of neurodiverse people.  It really brings into context how damaging being trapped in Room was to his development.

ma and psychological abuse

Despite our perception of Ma being filtered through Jack's naive worldview, it's not hard to see that Ma suffers constantly. She lives with constant physical pain, she has to deal with the ever-present fear of Old Nick, and she is also trying to raise a child (which is stressful by itself) in a tiny room. It's implied that Old Nick comes to their room frequently and rapes her, and she has injuries that she received from him both recently and in the past. He abuses her physically. He also abuses her psychologically. The most commonly used diagnostic tool (the Conflict tactics scale) divides psychological abuse up into about 20 different tactics, which fall into three basic categories. 

1. Verbal aggression (e.g., saying something that upsets or annoys someone else);

2. Dominant behaviors (e.g., preventing someone from contacting their family);

3. Jealous behaviors (e.g., accusing a partner of maintaining other parallel relations)

It's obvious that Old Nick does things that fall into the first two of those three categories (most notably is him confining them in Room, which falls into the second category.) If you read their conversations, Old Nick frequently pushes the blame for things onto Ma. For example, he complains that the wear on the cork board is Ma and Jack's faults, saying that he only expected to have one person in the room. The wear on the cork board is entirely Old Nick's fault, because he was the one who put Ma (and eventually Jack) in the room in the first place.