Contrary to the view of certain charities and many ignorant ‘celebrities’, there is no epidemic of autism. There are many things that upset me about the focus on children with autism, but the main thing is that it wipes the rest of us, hundreds of thousands of us, out of the picture.
(No, I’m not using a quote from Autism Speaks, because then I’d be obliged to provide a link, and that would make me physically sick.)
(I rather like the name Autism would speak if narcissistic personality disorder would just shut the fuck up for a while – if anyone remembers where that came from, please let me know.)
So where are all these auties? How did they get through childhood so painlessly?
When I was about ten I found a pile of Reader’s Digests in the cottage we rented for our summer holiday. And in one of them was a story called For the Love of Ann. I was fascinated by this story, and only now can I grasp that it was because I understood Ann, her fears, her reactions. And I knew Ann’s father was going about things the right way, because he decided to hit her whenever she did something ‘wrong’. And this was what my parents did.
It is one of the unspoken secrets of autism that beating your child will, in many cases, control many of the autistic behaviours. Before everyone starts screeching, I am not in any way advocating it. But it is undeniably true. As long as a child has the capacity to link the pain to the behaviour, fear will set some controls. There is a place in the US where austistic teens and adults wear belts that deliver electric shocks whenever they do something ‘wrong’. For most of them this succeeds in stopping the ‘wrong’ behaviours. The cost to the individual being tortured does not seem to be part of the equation.
If you’re in your middle thirties or above, then you came from the generations where smacking* was a perfectly acceptable way to control your child. And we were smacked. Oh boy, were we smacked. My most vivid memories of this were crying and telling whichever of my parents had just hit me that I didn’t understand what I did wrong. This simply earned me more punishment for being ‘cheeky’. I hated being hit, but I hated more the way my parents turned ugly. I couldn’t trust them. I had no idea when they would be angry with me. And so I spent my childhood trying to keep a lid on my fear of them.
In this situation a child can end up with a strange version of Stockholm syndrome – you have to like your parents, and believe they care, because if you don’t, the alternative is far worse. But the mental gymnastics involved are an enormous strain.
I confined my autistic behaviours to my bedroom. When I felt a meltdown coming on I would run there and bang my head against the wall, crying. I would sit in the bottom of my wardrobe. I would sit on my bed and rock.
I knew these behaviours were bad, and not for public view. Strangely, I have no memory of being directly punished for them, but I know my anxiety over my parent’s reactions, my fear of them, goes a long way back, certainly to the age of three, and likely earlier. In our house, anger was bad, or at least my anger was. If I got angry or upset I had by definition, lost the right to a valid point of view. That this wasn’t the case for my parents was another form of cognitive dissonance that I shut away in a box marked Dangerous – not to be thought about.
So yes, I learned self-control. I learned not to do ‘weird’ things. I learned that the weird things I couldn’t control were only to be revealed in private.
And that worked, for those things. I was, superficially, a nice, well-behaved NT.
Except I still couldn’t do normal things, like make friends with normal people. I could sustain it for a while, but eventually it would all fall apart for reasons I never understood. I got overstimulated easily, and needed to retreat for long periods. I was hyper-anxious, though I knew to hide it from everyone. My career stalled again, and again, and again, for reasons I couldn’t grasp. I kept moving on, spending no more than a couple of years in any one place, because that was how long it took until the weirdness became uncontrollable.
So at the end of this ramble, I’m not sure what my conclusions are, or at least, the ones I have are contradictory.
- Hitting anyone is bad.
- Hitting (and yelling) can control autistic behaviours in some children.
- Being forced to constant self-control is exhausting and distressing for an autistic child, who has no one to turn to.
- Controlling autistic behaviours can allow an autist to fit into society, hold down a job, live independently.
- The cost of that control is borne entirely by the autistic person, and it can destroy much of who they are.
I do think one other conclusion is that it’s much easier to control an autistic girl this way. There is huge cultural pressure on girls and women to conform, and autistic behaviours are much less acceptable in a girl. This is why I’m still not convinced about the 4:1 ratio. I think there are many, many more of us out here, but we’ve become spectacularly good at hiding.
* You’ll note that when a child is hit, we call it smacking. When a woman is hit, we call it slapping. But when a man is hit, that’s hitting, or punching, or beating him up. Because what happens to men is serious, and must be taken seriously. /feminist snark.
Sorry to bother, I think it would be best for people that fight stigma in the group they belong to avoid stigmatizing other groups, like people who have narcissistic personality disorder (or mental illness, other disabilities, etc), since like many others I’m autistic and have a personality disorder too (many personality disorders can come from abuse, so it’s also victim-blaming sometimes), if there is one thing worse than the autism stigma is the personality disorder stigma, if we don’t buy into the autism as evil, we shouldn’t accept personality disorders/mental illness as evil too, a person can be bad or wrong without having any condition, I don’t think people in Autism Speaks have any disability, if they do it have nothing to do with the fact they suck.
Maybe I think this because I think neurodiversity is for all diversities and not just Autism.
Sorry about the rant. Hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I like reading your blog.
I like your post, I also tried to hide my autistic behaviours, I mostly failed and got problems because of it, that’s why I don’t think passing is good and I don’t like therapies to make us “normal”.
I also think there are many misdiagnosed autistic females in the world, other diagnosis are given more easily, I spend years with a diagnosis of depression, PTSD and social phobia, nobody considered Autism and I acted autistic as a child, but in my case it could be because I live in another country, less information maybe.
My comment got too long, sorry.
Yup, I take your point about narcissistic personality disorder. It makes a pithy quote, but I see how it is offensive. I’m sorry.
I hope you don’t mind if I leave it up; it is easy to edit but I’d rather leave up demonstrations of where I got it wrong and got called on it than try to hide it.
It is also sparking ideas in my writerly brain of an argument between a sociopath, a narcissist, a psychopath and an autie where they all demonstrate their failures to understand each other’s point of view because of their neurology. Or a Jesus and Mo style comic strip where the four of them flatshare…
Hmmm………
I vividly remember being taught about passing at the end of my grandfather’s hand when I was four and a half, and how everything changed after that.
Thank you for this.
It’s an ugly, well kept secret, and it’s so easy to keep the people holding the secret quiet. Just yell at us, and wonder why we disappear.
This is basically what my childhood was like. I don’t know if they ever smacked me for stimming – my stims tended to be dismissed as nervous habits and fidgets – but I got smacked a lot for being “stubborn” or “pestering.” I’d be objecting to a change in routine, or complaining that my tights itched too much, or clinging, or otherwise complaining about something, and all of a sudden my mother would start hitting and screaming. It happened a lot when they were trying to get me to stop doing something I was interested in because it was time to do something else, or they just thought that I had been doing that for long enough.
I was terrified of my parents, and still am. By a certain point I basically stopped even letting my parents see me engaging in an interest: books that I reread over and over were kept hidden, music was only played when I was alone, whole stories got written entirely in my head without putting a single word on paper. I was scared they would use it against me, like by threatening to take my things away if I was bad. I’m not sure if my parents could even name any of the special interests I’ve had since around third grade.
Yes. I feared my parents, and hid from them anything that I felt would be unacceptable.They did care about me and I am sure they would have helped me any way they could were I able to ask for help. But I could not. And we were spanked, sometimes it felt very unfair and it never felt justified.
And it is true that this constant self-control is exhausting. And it sort of alienates me from myself.
Thanks for writing this.
My parents tried to abuse the autism out of me too. It’s more common than parents wish to admit…both the ‘good’ parents and the ones who are doing the same thing.
Thank you for standing up and saying “this crappy thing happens, and it happens to people you know”. It’s hard. It needs saying by the people who have the emotional bandwidth to say it.