I'm not sure how he feels in their company. He considers them friends, but then he gets into conflict with them and doesn't know how to cope. For example, one friend (coincidentally this is the friend he talked to last night) was visiting him at his apartment a year and a half ago. They were drinking. The friend started teasingly poking my son in the stomach and telling him he was fat. (My son isn't fat, but the friend is.) This upset my son and he asked his friend to stop. The friend escalated, and they ended up in a physical fight in which the friend's tooth was chipped.

Or another story: he allowed his neighbor to drive his car while he rode in the passenger seat. He asked the neighbor to pull over but she refused. She continued to drive for two or three more hours while my son asked her repeatedly to pull over. She finally pulled over. My son grabbed the keys and left the car telling her he wasn't coming back until she was gone.

I would like to advise him on how to handle these situations, but I honestly cannot imagine myself confronted with one of these problems. People I know don't poke me or misappropriate my property. Yet these things happen to my son all the time. His friends cross boundaries, and my son gets overwhelmed emotionally. He either gets into punch ups in which people are injured and property damaged, or else he gives in in order to avoid the fight.

The only advice I can think to give is: Don't have friends who violate your boundaries or hijack your car.

No one's ever done anything like that to me, and if they did they wouldn't be given the opportunity to do it a second time. And I certainly wouldn't call them 'friend.'