I frequently present at trainings, webinars, and conferences on various topics related to autism. In one conference, I talked to mental health providers about autistic differences.
The subject matter felt very basic to me, but it’s easy for me to lose sight of how much of a paradigm shift autistic-positive messaging is for people who only know of autism as a series of deficits.
Author’s note: some minor details changed for the sake of anonymity.
Towards the end of the presentation, there were breakout rooms. What this means is that all the people in a virtual conference were randomly sorted into small groups. This is intended to be a space of reflection to talk about how the material impacted them or how they can use the material in the future.
As a speaker, I was tasked with hopping around to different breakout rooms to answer any questions people had. It was like being teleported randomly into the middle of different conversations.
I want to write about conversations that happened in two of those rooms.
Breakout Room 1
In the first room, a woman said that she watched me interacting with my friend who was co-presenting and realized that autistic people have these very fluid, seamless friendships and deep connections full of humor and nuance. It caused her to challenge herself about how she had historically used the word “awkward” to characterize autistic people. Then she asked me what I thought about what she said.
I told her that now that I know I’m autistic and am in the position I’m in (as a high-profile advocate), I’m often in meetings wherein the majority of us are autistic and there are one or two non-autistic people.
In those spaces, the non-autistic people are awkward, they say the wrong things, they don’t get our jokes, and they try hard to relate but can’t. They’re also absolutely cognitively exhausted trying to process the social and communication differences whereas we feel energized at the end.
Just observing autistics being charismatic (differently), comfortable (differently), funny (differently), and intuitive (differently) shifted how she understood us in a major way.
Non-autistics rarely get to see us in conditions optimized for us.
Breakout Room 2
In the second room, I was “teleported” in while a woman was speaking. She was emotional and trying not to cry.
She was non-autistic but had been raised by autistic parents and had autistic siblings (though undiagnosed at the time). She was somewhere between seething and despondent that I had not talked about how it is so hard for neurotypical people to be in a majority-autistic family.
At first, it reminded me of those old experiments where white high school students fell apart when they experienced racism, even just for a few minutes when they knew it was just for a temporary experiment. That’s not to say that racism and ableism are the same, because they are not, but that it is profound when someone in a privileged position experiences what it’s like to to lose their majority position for just a few minutes.
For people who live with oppression every day, they have to learn to accept that kind of behavior from others without showing their emotions for the sake of their safety.
But the difference was, this woman wasn’t in a fake experiment. This was her family who surrounded her during her most formative years.
I validated for her that, yes, it is absolutely hard to be in the neurominority, regardless of neurotype. It is a death of a thousand papercuts (with occasional bullet wounds) where all your relational instincts fail you, and you feel so forever out of sync.
She was in the neurominority in her most important developmental setting— at home with her family.
She had spent a lot of time in her adult life reading books about “Asperger’s” (this was over ten years ago when that was a common diagnosis), and those books had validated her by reassuring her that her parents were broken and at fault by default. She internalized the message that her family couldn’t relate to her or meet her needs because they were inherently missing pieces of their humanity.
I could tell she was angry at me, and she even said she felt like it was hard to say those things in front of a “person with autism.” Her anger was visceral, too. Her whole body shook with it.
I’ve been where she was and recognized that pain and those emotions. Sort of.
Thinking of us autistics as inherently broken had made it easier for her to process those feelings of being the “other” in her family.
I had mentioned in my presentation how autistic kids, because they didn’t tend to perceive people in relation to social hierarchies, can prefer being treated like equals with adults, and that autistic parents and adults tend to really value kids’ autonomy.
“To non-autistic kids,” she told me, “that feels like neglect.”
That’s fair. She was acknowledging that children have different needs, and those needs are related to their neurology.
The Harms of Misinformation
The books and articles she had read had convinced her that her parents just had no empathy or capacity for understanding anyone’s needs. Seeing my friend and me co-presenting, laughing, interacting fluently, and seeing other professionals valuing our insights made her angry.
People weren’t supposed to see us as fully human equals who had different— not broken or incomplete— heuristics (internal rules) that would impact how they relate to others.
She had trouble gathering and verbalizing her thoughts, and her eyes watered. Essentially, she was experiencing what we autistics would call situational mutism— or the type of communication barrier that is anxiety-driven and a result of years of having communication not be fully understood or accurately interpreted.
She wiped away tears and said that as a child, she was looking for more attention, overt nurturing, rules, structure, and discipline. That level of autonomy and personal space is what an autistic person might crave, but it felt like neglect to her.
It was very sad. She had real trauma, like almost all autistics who didn’t have an autistic parent.
My Childhood Was a Mirror Image of Hers, the Same but in Reverse
I had non-autistic parents. Or, at least, my much more dominant parent was non-autistic. The jury is still out on if my dad is autistic. He definitely has traits, but I’m not sure. But my mom is definitely not autistic.
Three of my 4 grandparents were definitely autistic. I was very close to my maternal grandparents growing up. They only lived a few houses away, and everything in my soul was drawn to them like a cosmic magnet during every waking hour.
I thought about how I felt like my grandfather was the kindest, warmest man ever, but most people (even if they loved him) found him terrifying, pedantic, and far too blunt. My nickname was “little buddy” and his was “aye buddy” because that was his greeting to everyone regardless of relationship, gender, or social status. (Autistic people can struggle with matching names to faces.)
I was his constant sidekick.
We literally communicated with noises, and when I went away to college, he would write me letters or send me cards wherein he just spelled noises— mostly R’s in varrying sizes.
“Aye buddy! RrrRRrrRrrRRRrrrr. Love you always. RrrrRrrRrRRrrrr.”
-A card from my grandfather
I was desperate to learn anything he had to teach me, and he used everything he did with me as a teaching opportunity. I learned all kinds of things about circuitry, horticulture, raising chickens, song birds, water purification, gardening, auto mechanics— all the things.
But I always knew that other people just didn’t, or couldn’t, bond in the same ways with him. Most people loved him, but they found him intimidating and terrifying— too honest, too direct, too confrontational, too explosive. They didn’t see him as the “let’s grab lunch” type of relationship.
But making him angry, dysregulating him and setting him off on a shouting and swearing reel, was my favorite pastime. I would laugh so hard, and he would ham it up and be extra because I thought it was so funny. I sometimes worried I would literally die because he made me laugh so hard that I couldn’t catch my breath.
The economy collapsed decades ago in coal country, so villages of yardsale and flea markets popped up in the abandoned parking lots and on the foundations of burned down buildings. I would ask him to stop at the flea markets, then pull a stunt— like the time I asked for two dollars and a cardboard box.
His sense of adventure was stronger than his sense of self-preservation. So he gave me the money and asked around for a box until he found one.
We went home with a live adult duck.
Another time, I hatched a rooster in an incubator, and he disassembled my grandmother’s dining room— much to her chagrin— so I could raise that rooster in the house for a while. Its name was Union Carbide.
I never once felt even remotely unsafe around him.
My relationship at home was not so smooth…
Everything is much better when everyone involved has great tools and information. My parents didn’t have that luxury in the 80s in the rural backwoods coal mining camp where I grew up, and the harder they tried, the more friction there was.
All their efforts failed, so they just kept trying harder. My dad worked the “hoot owl” (evening) shift in the mines six days a week and is very passive, so my mom had her hands full with three autistic kids.
Plus, I was the only girl out of my whole family— even of all my cousins. I was also the most stereotypically masculine, and that was problematic in that place and time. I had no “Southern grace.” I was fire and gasoline, a powder keg of dynamite.
Everything, from the clothes I wore, to the food I ate and when and how I ate it, to holidays, to posture, to social gatherings, to sports, to gender expression, to the way religion was practiced, to my gait, to homework, to how I interacted with friends became increasingly more and more about control and management as I did everything differently from how I was “supposed to.”
I just kept being not-normal. I was full of demand avoidance, and they wanted me to submit to authority.
I had to write a Bible verse over and over and over, thousands of times, as a punishment in school:
Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.
-Hebrews 13:17, King James Version
My mom was wired to value social hierarchy, so “normal” was the gold standard. I resisted, she doubled up on control. I resisted harder, she controlled with increasing strictness. By my final year of high school, this struggle had become so extreme that she was my school’s principal, taught 5 of my 7 classes, coached my volleyball team, and chaperoned every trip I ever took.
Reconciling the Past with a Future-Minded Paradigm
I moved out right after graduating high school. It was not until after an autism diagnosis in my mid-30s that we started to understand each other and build a healthier relationship. We had no framework to understand that we were just very different.
She never wanted to be that mom. I never wanted to be that kid.
I think what happened to her happens to a lot of parents of autistic kids. She wanted better for me than what she thought the world was going to give me, so she needed me to be able to comply.
And I understand better now what she was doing and why, but it took me a couple decades to get to this place.
She was trying to break me in so that I would fall into place because I was not compatible with broader society. She was trying to protect me and literally built a whole world around me with herself as the authority to do just that.
What we have in common as parents is that we are both willing to rearrange the entire hostile world for our kids— we just had different ideas of how to sort the pieces. She tried to protect me with the same energy that I use to protect my child. But her instincts made her think the best way to do that was to make me fit.
It was never going to happen, so I found every rebellion I could sink my fangs into to prove it.
Meanwhile, my grandparents thought I was the sweetest, easiest, most agreeable child in the world. I never once told them no or had any conflict with them. Never once wanted to. They didn’t even see normal or have it as a value.
Now, as an autistic parent to an autistic child, my relationship with my child is just like my relationship with my grandfather. I can’t connect like that with most kids, and it would be so hard painful not to be able to— but at least there’s better information available now to help with that.
It makes me feel so sad for my mom. She was doing what she thought was best and what her instincts told her to do. She was trying to make sure I knew how to belong and be a fit— and that’s the lowest priority on my list of needs.
My mom’s parenting instincts may have been exactly what that woman in the second breakout room needed… maybe that woman would have loved tagging along to baby showers, wearing dresses, playing with dolls, Girl Scouts, busy schedules, ballet lessons, vacations, little league sports, play dates, Sunday School, piano lessons…
Maybe they would have had very few conflicts. Maybe they would have felt like the great mother and the great child we wanted to be for each other.
Prejudice Holds Dominant Identities in Place
The way most autistic people have to live every day, in every setting— at home, at school, at work– makes them a minority with instincts different from most people’s.
The difference is there are not tons of books out there telling autistic people that everyone who ever misunderstood them—intentionally or unintentionally— was just too broken to even be able to care.
No one reassures autistic people that they are burdened for having to live with non-autistics. No one tells us that those who caused us harm and even trauma were the broken ones and we were normal and whole and deserved better.
We do not ever get the benefit of the doubt that we are the default way to be human. We are never the “gold standard.”
We are demonized as not being able to feel emotions or empathy, as not caring about people around us, and sometimes as being sadistic.
Can you imagine if this woman had looked for support and answers, and all she found were tons of books and articles and groups set up to help autistics cope with and grieve having a non-autistic child?
Can you imagine if she only had access to information that claimed she was broken and awkward and had no empathy or social grace? That made her feel like what needs she had were a result of her brain being defective?
Can you imagine if the whole structure of society agreed that she was the problem and her parents were victims? That she needed to be cured or enrolled in a 40-hour-a-week intervention therapy so she could learn to overcome her “challenging” and “attention seeking” behavior?
She didn’t deserve to see herself as broken, and neither do I.
Society is broken. It’s standardized, colonized, and pathologized.
In that system, there’s no hope of healing.
Processing Trauma
For that woman, framing her parents as broken was an illusion that wouldn’t ever give her the insight she needed to understand her childhood. Eventually, if it wasn’t from me and my co-presenter, someone would have shattered the illusion that was holding her identity in place.
I mentioned that autistic people— like any people— could be abusive, and was about to explain that if she had experienced abuse, it was inexcusable regardless of the neurotype of her parents.
She interrupted me at that point and said she knew her parents were great people who loved her and were doing their best. That’s when she really broke down. It seemed like that was the most bitter part for her.
She had witnessed her parents effortlessly interacting with each other, her siblings, and their similarly-different friends— but no matter how hard she’d tried, she never could connect the same way.
I know what that’s like.
She couldn’t think of her parents as abusive, so she was validated when all that pain of missed connections was explained in the books she’d read and the research she’d done as them having deficits.
Those books describe autistic people as “mind blind” (that’s the actual terminology) and not being able to perspective-take or relate to others. She had learned (falsely) that autistics couldn’t form deep connections and were happy with surface-level interactions.
I was taking that illusion from her, and I imagine it was like losing a religion suddenly.
The truth is that no one was broken. They all needed better information. If they were good parents, they would have done everything they could to relate to and get to know their child.
But if we have that hierarchy in place, a perpetual unhealthy codependency is automatic where one person sees themselves as the savior who has to fix or carry the burden and the other has to be reliant on the “default” as being the authority on everything— even what it means to be human.
So much pain can be avoided for everyone if we chronicle our differences and help each other to have translation guides. Just like learning a new language as an adult, it won’t ever be as effortless as it is for native speakers— but it goes a long way to bridge communication gaps.
I like to think— hope— that both of our parents would have been able to understand and accommodate us better had they had better resources.
Where I felt under constant duress for being too controlled and too pressured, she felt under duress with the lack of social structure and no chain of command. I felt suffocated, and she felt neglected. I had too many rules and too much oversight, she longed for more of those things. I hated the pressure to “know my place,” but she felt disconnected and as if she didn’t have any place to belong. I wanted to author an identity separate from others, she wanted to belong to an identity.
Of course, all children, regardless of neurotype, have different needs. I am not the same as every autistic, and she is not the same as every non-autistic.
We have both grieved what could have been had we all had an understanding of who we were, what we needed, and how to bridge those perceptive differences. But she now has to grieve again and unpack all the lies she was told and learn to see her family as different, not broken.
I was not offended by her anger towards me, her clipped words through gritted teeth, her discomfort, or her scowl. She had been socialized to see me as having no idea what I was talking about because, to her, I couldn’t. She had propped her emotional equanimity up on the notion that I was too “mind blind” to understand nuance.
I suspect she always knew, down deep, that wasn’t true.
Those lies never really benefited her, either.
The misinformation she had did not help her to heal. She had biases to overcome, and both of us were victims of the misinformation about autism.
NeuroClastic Is a Love Letter
When you’re in the autistic community, you quickly learn that most autistic people don’t have the best relationships with their non-autistic parents.
The comments on this Instagram post from Asiatu Lawoyin are telling:
We want to help non-autistic parents and their kids to avoid this kind of pain caused by having different ways of being.
They will never read articles Autistics write. They’ll be annoyed we’re infiltrating the autism narrative.
This whole site is a love letter to both autistic people and those who provide services to, parent, employ, or support autistic people.
We want to help people avoid the totally unnecessary pain most of us have experienced.
That means non-autistics will have to abandon the “experts” and pop psychologists at the top of the academic and social food chains peddling the “broken neurotypical” narrative of autism and will need to listen to us.
Parents reach out or leave comments sometimes. It is too late for them. They are learning only after their children are no longer alive. “I wish I had found this site years ago” is the tragic refrain.
We want to see healing happen.
Those illusions and prejudices will not hold relationships and identities together forever. There’s hope, and we can help each other get to better tomorrows.
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116 Responses
The article is well written and it highlights a topic that has been escaping the radar for my entire life basically. It is funny how it’s from an autistic angle- but not surprising, I find autistic ppl being highly inspiring -( look at Greta Thunberg. )
We need the change, and I think the change is already here. And we need each other, this world won’t last built on old structures masculine energies where one is trying to dominate the other, (age of Pisces) instead we bring in the feminine – future is female as ppl say. (Age of Aquarius is upon us if anyone is into astrology)
Society needs to be more inclusive and I feel really sad when I read about the oppression of autistic people. It breaks my heart to read that we can’t do better than that as human kind, and I am also a bit sad that the author although showing great compassion and handling the traumatised womans anger with great patience, (and it must be super hard when you’re sensitive to this- so even greater effort!) at the same time in words expresses anger towards neurotypicals, (we are all individuals!) Which is totally understandable where you’re coming from, I hear your pain. But I believe that for us to be inclusive, loving and caring human beings to all living things on this planet we need to start by not blaming each other no matter what or who we are – We all suffer, We are all in this together, one planet.
I’ve only but recently discovered my deepest root to my pain, my dad’s undiagnosed autism. How does this affect me?
How can you ever fully love yourself if you never understood parts of yourself and where you’re coming from? How can you love others and expect this world to heal if you can’t be compassionate towards yourself?
Understanding your own pain and healing it – will heal this world. I think this is great that we all finally speak up and share our pains with each other, even if we’re so seemingly different we all can gather around and understand pain, it’s universal. So is love.
Most of my childhood I had trauma from my needs not being met by my dad – but I somehow pushed this deep down into the subconscious and tried to move on with life.
Until I fell in love with this guy who I wasn’t aware was exactly like my dad (undiagnosed and on the spectrum) Psychology holds that we all choose our partners based on similarities with our dads (if we are hunting for them men) (or mums -when searching that woman of ours) and there I was suddenly matched up with someone on the spectrum – not knowing anything about spectrums- but feeling real deep connection, something like love on soul mind spirit level. Me NT he ASD.
At start I felt so alive, it felt so healing. Like I truly could be myself and he is the first person to see the real me. Losing sense of self, we both got slightly anxious, this love of ours couldn’t last, it just released my long held up trauma from my childhood neglects. There It was brought up to broad day light and the way he neglected me (autistic behaviour it’s just much needed space- avoidant attachment)
I was struck with pain for months – until I slowly figured out and my entire life unfolded.
I was a child to one autistic parent and one NT and some crazy family dynamics that brought loads of shame – we weren’t exactly “normal”. Dominant mother constantly nagging on my father as he was a child too. Really weird to see this relationship pattern as a kid and no wonders why I avoided all relationships.
I feel thankful for the universe putting me on this path of realisation who I am, even though my entire life has been pain and isolation – no one understanding my pain. Until TODAY. when I read more of you out there that have had this too. We are not alone! <3
I am still trying to heal this trauma, at least now I understand why – I’m hoping it can get easier to find a way to communicate love to people on the spectrum and to find understanding. It is painful to not know how to connect with my dad or this guy that I really still love, it makes me sad. I always worry and want to know if they are ok, but they don’t communicate emotions the way I do. Maybe I just need to trust they are fine and stop worry? They need space but I also need to start putting my own needs first (b more autistic) – I need reassurance, not more neglect.
I think there’s quite a few of us out there needing healing ❤️🩹
Good luck everyone – we all can heal
Gigi
My childhood was hell. My mother constantly criticised me, had meltdowns that sometimes resulted in her screaming at me and then ignoring me for days, or even in throwing me on the floor and kicking me (she responded to my mentioning this with “that only happened a few times”). She wanted me to follow recipes to the letter, though my variations yielded better results even by her estimation. Any deviation from any script or any explicitly-stated rules was absolutely unacceptable. She cared and understood more about what strangers on the news thought and felt than about my thoughts and feelings. She turned her back on me when she made me cry. When I was bullied she said the boys were interested in me. She said that all my teachers and my friends’ parents were inconsiderate or stupid. In high school a decade later, when I told her I’d been raped, she said I shouldn’t go to parties.
I’m 50, and have just realised that my mother is on the spectrum.
Unlike the woman in the breakout room above, this has come with a flood of relief and understanding. My (still-undiagnosed) autistic mother was raised in a boarding school in the fifties. She’s now turned 80, and I don’t think she would welcome this insight that I’ve gained with the help of my psychiatrist. I do welcome it though. Sometimes, yes, she was simply abusive. But the rest of the time she was just autistic. This means not verbally abusive, not cold and uncaring, not a cluster B horror show of a human being. It doesn’t undo the trauma of my childhood, but it recontextualises it and will help going forward.
Thank you!!! I was also raised by two parents with untreated Autism and the trauma and lack of emotional connection with a parent, and invalidation led to me developing a host of mental disorders including Borderline Personality Disorder. Which by the way is wayyyyy more stigmatized than Autism!!
Autistic people get away with their crap and say their disorder is beautiful when it’s not. They abuse people without treatment and it’s not ok for that to be ignored.
And I exist in a world that isn’t made for me as well due to my BPD, and I don’t act like everyone else has to change for me because I actually have empathy. Thank god!
Autism is genetic (though some researchers claim that prenatal variables may have an impact.) You are most likely also on the spectrum. This does not necessarily preclude you from having BPD, but one is very often misdiagnosed for the other as some traumatized autistics share several characteristics with people who suffer from BPD.
And by the way…. I really really feel a lot of pain and resentment when I only hear that people with borderline are horrible….. when it’s a trauma disorder, and in my case it was caused by the lack of validation and empathy because my parents are autistic.
It hurts me.
So I appreciate your comment and you speaking up it helps me.
Wait I misread your post because I wasn’t paying attention.
Excuse me…. A cluster B horror show of a human being?
My abusive Autistic parents called me horrible things and that I was horrible since I was a very little girl.
That is extremely ignorant and unacceptable of you to say.
And it’s not true. I go to therapy and care about other people. My parents think nothing is wrong with them. And they’ve been cruel since I was little. Not ok dude.
Totally get you, oftentimes it is the lack of insight or refusal to acknowledge by the ASD parent that is most damaging and hurtful, because this is the ultimate invalidation
You make up blatant and malicious lies about us and then expect us to call you an ally. You probably deserved every bit of abuse and neglect you got.
Thank you for sharing this Susan. I found the article distressing because of the failure to address the reality of physical and emotional abuse that child experience. I was physically abused by my mother, told she wished she had aborted me, drowned me at birth and was insanely jealous of the bond my father and I had. She also has a relationship with a creep who used to make sexual comments about me. Thank god I was a young adult who was not living with her, because I have no doubt in my mind he would have sexually abused me. My mother continues a relationship with him to this day. I have never been a priority to her. She was raised in a household where she never was held responsible for her actions.
As a survivor of childhood abuse there is NEVER an excuse for this.
Hi I had a similar experience to the woman you are describing here. I would like you to know that this article did not help me at all, but confirmed that I made the right decision in going no contact with a group of people who genuinely don’t care that they hurt other people’s feelings.
I had an aunt who was a shrink who pushed this bs my whole life. It destroyed my relationship with my parents. It destroyed my father’s relationship with his sibliblings. It destroyed my alistic life. It destroyed my brothers autistic life.
I can get why you feel alienated and don’t think that’s fair at all, but no an alistic kid having autistic parents is in no way the same set of trauma as visa versa. To be frank this is an example of autism altering your perception of reality. While people without autism can make the same mistake, this is what black and white reasoning looks like.
I get the autism positive movement, but telling my mom no she doesn’t have communication or maturity issues that are negatively effecting her children’s mental and physical health, that’s just people being unfair about her autism was hell. Allistic people do this too, but they don’t have an abuse positivity movement that makes any of their socially damaging behaviors acceptable.
You didn’t help this woman. You made yourself feel better at her expense. Why dont you feel and about that? You are gleeful about ammo for your intellectual special interest. You did not emotionally connect with this woman. This is not a fair or supportive reaction to someone’s trauma and you as an adult should have known how to deal with this. You didn’t.
If you have this situation in the future do not dunk on traumatized people in public. The kind thing to do would have been to speak privately with this person. Please recognize that getting in an intellectual debate with a traumatized person about their trauma is straight up abuse and bullying.
Sorry but whoever wrote this should not have children.
Have you considered the possibility that you are also autistic? ASD is very heterogeneous, meaning 50 different autistics will present in 50 different ways. Lack of empathy is not one of those characteristics. People with ASD can have low empathy, high empathy, or anything in between. They can even have other personality disorders in addition to autism, like BPD, NPD, or Antisocial Disorder. CPTSD is the most common comorbidity with untreated, undiagnosed ASD. Just being autistic, whether you know it or not, is inherently traumatic exclusively because of the society we all live in.
I agree Luke with every fibre of my being and had the same experience. I’ve been no-contact for about 25 years and I still don’t feel like there’s enough distance there.
You probably deserved any abuse that came your way.
Your comment should be reported. How DARE you blame someone for their abuse’.
Luke’s comment is exactly how I felt reading this. Actually I had to stop reading because of how condescending you were towards the non autistic woman.
The comments are better that the actual post lol
Isn’t it interesting how one person can read the article as condescending, while another person can read it as empathetic?
Frankly, I don’t care what label a psych has stamped on you, or if they’ve not duly affixed a label at all. If you cannot be kind and nurturing to children instead of abusive and neglectful, you should not have children. And if you can’t stand your child but the child gets along perfectly well with other family members (your sister, brother, parents, or whatever) the moral thing to do would be to see if you could get said other family member/s to take custody of the child. Every child deserves a loving home, and if you don’t even LIKE the child, they’re not going to get one with you.
The problem is that my Autistic parents saw nothing wrong with their parenting.
They aren’t capable of empathy
The same with my mother. I was ‘the problem ‘.
I was finally diagnosed with PTSD at the age of 50.
100% Donna!!! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT
Actually…. I have only read GOOD things about Autism on the internet.
I developed Borderline Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder, OCD, Bipolar Disorder, and even Body Dysmorphia from the blunt comments from my mother which were cruel.
Honestly the only reason I know they aren’t psychopaths or have Narcissistic Personality Disorder is that they just do not even understand how other people work.
They hurt my relationships growing up because they were strange and they shat on everything I enjoyed that they could not understand. And I enjoyed normal things!
I had a full blown manic episode and when I told them I was hurt that they never even texted to see if I was alive, my mother said how was she even supposed to know? And she KNEW. she gaslights.
Then she told me that her friend was in the hospital. And told me that I don’t care how her and dad feel either.
I told her that first of all her and dad aren’t sick right now. And second of all, they have each other so I know they are not alone should something happen.
And I live all alone! And I was manic! I could have been dead and they like don’t care.
Now, Borderline is villainized on the internet and Autism is like we are supposed to be nice to you all.
Treated Autistics can be lovely people! But when Autism is untreated it is just as toxic to the children of the autistic person as untreated BPD and other illnesses.
The reason people say that Autism is beautiful and not a disability is because in the past they viewed Autism as like downes syndrome and other low IQ disabilities.
Guess what? As someone with BPD I know exactly how it feels to exist in a world where I am different.
The difference is that I don’t defend the behaviors of untreated BPD. And I work hard to behave in ways that are acceptable to other peoples feelings.
You act like no one is allowed to feel terrible when you say whatever you want and scream at people or speak in a harsh tone or lack the ability to feel and show empathy.
If you had that capability you wouldn’t have dismissed the woman raised by Autism when she is not.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am struggling to understand my mother and how she raised me, it’s been a life long struggle and it wasn’t until I was able to see her as autistic that I started making sense of her and our relationship. But I too made the mistake of acting like this meant she was broken and all issues that happened between us were caused by her deficit. Even if this were to be true, it doesn’t help us move forward.
Being raised without the structure you speak of left me with a myriad of mental health problems but like the woman you were speaking to, I also feel my parents really did everything they could to raise me the best. It was just very lacking for a neurotypical child, I needed more. I grew up really resentful of my mother for this misunderstanding, because no matter how well I explained or demonstrated the issue to my mother, she refuses to see it through my eyes, through my context and story. She had an approach she thought she had to push through to make me turn out the way I was supposed to turn out, but I was very much against it.
It took reading your article here to see how my feelings and frustration is what autistic people might deal with every day. Truly eye opening. I’m sorry the other commenters didn’t see what you were showing them, it’s actually kind of ironic, they really demonstrated the lack of support and empathy that autistic people have given to them. Seems pretty hypocritical to say autistic people have no empathy when I see so little here from the non-autistic community.
Sorry I should clarify the last paragraph, I meant the lack of support and empathy that autistic people have been given by non-autistic people. This article is asking for empathy, to see how our struggles are the same rather than so different and yet, once again people show that they’re incapable of doing that. So many comments simply say that your message is good but I don’t like not being the centre of attention. That’s all I was speaking to with that comment.
Sorry if it reads the opposite way.
You’ve come this far and I think that’s great, keep chasing your dreams and one day you’ll reach the top and then you’ll see how great you’ve become .
I don’t know who has autism myself, as her singe mother, or her, as my only child. I know we both exhibit signs of surfing the spectrum, me carrying the empathy burden for both of us. Now at 32, my daughter
cut me out of her life years ago, and recently told me her ADHD, may in fact be autistim . No allowances are afforded to me who may also be autistic, as is now genetically suggested. I did my very best as a parent, gave her a childhood I would have wanted, but in hindsight I overparented and deserve the wrath I’ve been dealt. I now grieve, my only child, who lives. A parents who loses a child to physical death grieves immensely, those who grieve a child who chooses to be dead, suffers the same. Be kind. Just be kind to others. Your parents may suffer a similar disorder without the benefit of a modern diagnosis wondering where they went so wrong.
Thank you for this post. I think it’s great that you are educating people about autism and challenging the stereotypes and stigma. I was especially moved by the story of the woman who was raised by autistic parents and siblings. It made me realize how much we take for granted our neurotypical privilege and how we need to be more respectful and inclusive of neurodiverse people.
I’m neurotypical & was raised by an autistic father. It was a special kind of hell which nobody but myself will probably ever understand.
I see you Layne, just want you to know that. I too am a NT adult raised by an autistic father. I don’t know what your experiences were like growing up, but I bet I would understand them exactly if we ever were to share stories. I SEE you, you are NOT alone (even if it feels that way).
I was raised by autistic single parent. My autistic mum and my autistic sister were always in synch. I was the odd one out.
I remember when I was 7 yo I went to my neighbour to ask if I was adopted , as in my little brain that could be the only reason why I was not loved.
My mum and sis would be sweat and kind to me sometimes which would fill me with hope things are gonna be ok from now…but always they were overwhelmed by me and my joy and end up beeing snappy hurting my feelings badly. I would cry for hours …but they would not comfort me. I would be the one at fault, always. This cycle was in a loop till I moved out at 18. I always had hope as they could be so supportive and amazing at times. But things would be the same, no change.
When I started living on my own my heath improved, I felt so much better!
But sadly all my romantic partners were autistic. I had to relive the trauma again and again utill realised what was going on.
It was autism.
I feel ok now. Healing
Often in relationships we are choosing partners that represent our parents in an attempt to “fix” the past, but instead we just repeat the trauma. It can be a very hard pattern to break as it’s all happening at an unconscious level, you are literally attracted to these partners and it feels natural. There is a lot of info out there on this and it can be changed.
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“Can you imagine if this woman had looked for support and answers, and all she found were tons of books and articles and groups set up to help autistics cope with and grieve having a non-autistic child?
Can you imagine if she only had access to information that claimed she was broken and awkward and had no empathy or social grace? That made her feel like what needs she had were a result of her brain being defective?
Can you imagine if the whole structure of society agreed that she was the problem and her parents were victims? That she needed to be cured or enrolled in a 40-hour-a-week intervention therapy so she could learn to overcome her “challenging” and “attention seeking” behavior?”
YES. This is exactly what that woman was struggling with. You don’t seem to see it. She doesn’t have to imagine. This is the universe she lives in. There are no resources for her experience. Children of parents with ASD feel crazy, and there’s usually nothing available to explain why. They feel like attention-seeking jerks. They punish themselves.
An autistic child raised by non-autistic parents may struggle with social expectations and communication norms that are more aligned with neurotypical ways of interacting.
This was an amazing read, for many reasons. It was well written and a refreshing side to this narrative. I needed to find this today, as I am releasing a sense of lack and cutting cords of trauma that have held me back for so long. I’m welcoming in abundance and who I really am, and paring away at the false self inner voice of my non-diagnosed autistic parents that plague me in a way that is exactly like the effects of narcissistic abuse. I can see how you could develop a lot of identity confusion living with a mismatch of this sort, either way. You doubt yourself, you shame yourself, and feel like a square peg in a round hole. What you feel and what you’re experiencing from others are two different things. If you’re like me, you feel like you’re too much, your needs are too great, you’re a victim or you’re ashamed/broken and will always be alone. You may always wonder when the other shoe is going to drop and you’ll lose everything, a catastrophic pattern that was learned early on by parenting you experienced. You have to reparent yourself, because the human brain ( many autistics excluded apparently) requires attachment from at least one parent in order to develop a strong sense of identity. If you didn’t receive that, there will be many hard years ahead of you. This deserves a lot of compassion. We all deserve compassion and understanding.
If the AUTHOR or any autistics on this string would like to comment, how exactly would it look to you to have been raised by Autistic parents in a way that would support your neurodiverse relations? I see my daughter struggle to have any friends, make plans, maintain friendships, connect with people. What kind of parallel play do you suppose the neurotypical parents should facilitate for their autistic children in today’s society? How do you think your parents should have handled it when you flew off the handle in public, didn’t get out of bed or brush your teeth, refused to eat or do homework and didn’t participate in anything, fighting them at every turn? When you screamed in their face day and night, picked your bleeding scabs and couldn’t remember to do almost anything unless someone was standing next to you. Seriously. Tell me what you really wanted in a parent? Someone that ignored you? Someone who let you miss school and fended for yourself, eating nothing but chicken nuggets and candy all day affecting your gut brain connection and contributing to further deficits (and YES they are deficits. That is in no way ablist.)? Someone that let you hurt yourself or others? Someone who let you play video games all through the night so your developing brain struggled to advance?
OR, like my parents, someone that ignored when you were struggling, when you were sad, never cared much about you and flew off the handle like a giant man- baby, threating you with violence and control? Someone who put their needs above yours due to an extremely low emotional maturity? Someone who would leave you on the side of the road if they didn’t like what you were talking about and just needed you to disappear? Someone who didn’t pay any attention to you, get to know you on a deep level and called you “buddy” or “kid”? Someone who never apologized, appeared to care or change or nurture you in any way? Someone that would have lunch with grownup you, never to have seen your business space or known anything about you or cared to know, and ignored everything you had to say, only to interrupt and go on a monologue about all the cool people and special interests they’d rather be talking about? Someone who your whole life would take any hardship at school, life or with a friend, etc. and explain to you what you should have done better or differently, instead of backing you up, seeing you, hugging you and offering guidance and love? Someone who literally doesn’t have time to speak to you even though they have literally nothing going on in their retired life and is too bothered by doing anything for you that doesn’t serve them in some way?
You can write about how intellectually superior you are until you’re blue in the face, but that just makes you part of the problem. We all can see the hurt that you have that’s causing you to put up these walls and define your value. Be part of the solution. Come up with the actual solutions for people to support kids that have different brains if you really want to make a difference.
I see you all in these comments. I SEE YOU. You are not invisible. There is a side to every story.
Thank you Robin. I see you too. Your experience growing up sounds a lot like mine.
This is such an interesting topic! When a non-autistic child is raised by autistic parents, they often experience a unique dynamic that can shape their worldview in profound ways.
Yes, you’re right, the worldview of non-autistic children of autistic parents is shaped in profound ways, none of them good. It’s an unhealthy dynamic that leaves the child feeling incredibly alone, unseen, questioning their reality, and . As an adult non-autistic daughter of an autistic father and an emotionally-neglectful NT mother, I can attest to this. I am 44 years old and, although I have managed to achieve a modicum of success in life, I am in many ways “behind” in life when compared to peers that were raised with healthy parenting.
My parents never provided (still don’t) any emotional support or validation – quite the opposite, and I was gaslit as though I was the one who was “wrong” whenever I questioned any of my father’s bizarre or inappropriate behaviors.
As a result of my parents never seeing the “real me” – that is to say, a person with normal emotional responses – I never learned such basics skills like emotional regulation, how to healthily express “negative”emotions (I wasn’t allowed to express anger, while my father’s daily outbursts were the norm and completely acceptable), and I never received any guidance or feedback (unless it was to criticize anything that was not in my father’s view the “right” way of doing things – because autistics are incapable of understanding that there can be more than one “right” way). My personal tastes were actively criticized by my father and passively criticized by my mother (and there was nothing wrong with them- I was a pretty “normal” kid, if a bit bookish!), neither of whom bothered to get to know what their daughter actually likes/dislikes/is good at/needs more help with – imagine being raised by people who don’t actually know you as a person.
Not receiving any guidance or feedback from my parents, I spent the first half of my life drifting from job to job, never sure what career field to get into, ending up in unhealthy and abusive relationships (men that mimicked my father’s temper and emotional disregulation), and struggling with depression for most of my life.
Only now that I finally understand the dynamic I grew up with and recognizing the thing I had so much trouble naming as a kid – that my dad is “different”- because he’s un-diagnosed on the spectrum – have I begun to heal by re-parenting mySELF, getting to know and like who I am as a person (yes, it sounds weird for a person to say that they’re only getting to know themselves in their 40’s, but that is the truth when you are raised by parents who don’t really “see” you; took me awhile to realize and admit that), and learning the invaluable skills of how to regulate and express my emotions in a healthy way. I am switching careers (again), but this time finally into one that “fits” me, now that I know who the real “me” is (and what she’s good at, and what she finds fulfilling – stuff that’s taken this long to figure out in the absence of parents who “saw” their child”). Hello, switching careers again and again leaves you behind your peers who found their calling and were able to build their career up much earlier in life – hence why I made the assertion that in many ways I am “behind” in life compared to peers coming from healthy parents.
Non-autistic children of autistic parents get double-gaslit: by the autistic parent who is incapable of understanding and seeing their child, and then by society at large, when they seek help and instead are met with a barrage of pro-autistic parent crap, that further seeks to criticize the person for daring to claim that an autistic person would be any less capable than an NT parent.
Sorry, NO- autistic people do NOT make good parents to non-autistic children, and if they have kids, the other parent better be able to step-up in serious ways (my mother was/did not), or they NEED (for the good of their child) to have strong supports in the form of family therapists and parental training.
This is a problem in our society that is only growing, especially as it seems that the occurence of autism is on the rise. It’s time for people – both autistic and non-autistic – to recognize this limitation and address it.
This enrages me. I am the only NT person in my nuclear family. Both my parents are in their 80s and not dx. The unintentional emotional neglect of my family ruined my life. The pain I live with daily is often unbearable. I know my parents tried their best. I know it was a different time. But this is and was hell. I will never feel normal. Never fully love myself. I’ve been in therapy, take meds, meditate daily. I’m TRYING. But man did you center her pain on you.
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Very helpful advice in this particular article!
An interesting discussion is worth comment.
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