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My 10 year old son just offered me more healing than 15 years of therapy.
I was talking with him about healing and generational cycles of trauma, and this is what he said:
“Mama, it's like dominoes, you know? They just keep hitting eachother until one gets slightly out of line. The rest stay standing cause of one small move.
You moved out of line, Mama.”
You guys, there's hope for this world.
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Thank you for an honest and raw piece on autism. As the mother of a 32 year old on the spectrum who can’t keep a job and stopped trying before the pandemic, I appreciate it. I am so tired of the autism is cute crowd and specials like Love on the Spectrum who make it appear as though this is a lovable and easily manageable problem for most people. My heart goes out to you and your family.
My autistic son, another Jonathan, is 28, and I agree completely about the autism is cute image. 10 years ago, the DSM eliminated Aspergers Syndrome as a diagnosis and folded it into Autism Spectrum Disorder. This gave the public a distorted image of what autism actually looks like for the overwhelming majority of families. And it created the identity politics neurodiversity movement. Because people with Aspergers can speak for themselves and people with more profound autism cannot, this spread…
agreed. i keep having people ask me if my 8 year old son is a genius, whether i've seen any extraordinary tendencies emerge. Is he the next Elon......I'm honestly just excited that he used a fork correctly today. Little things really
I have a 22 yo who still struggles with utensils, he has poor fine
motor skills. But boy oh boy, can he ever hit a golf ball.
I have a 32 year-old son living with me. When he was tiny, I called him, "Sunny Jim." Absolutely no fear of anyone, no night terrors, always so very happy and well-behaved, loved by everybody instantly. He seemed quite precocious and dearly loved any machinery; I still have a video of him digging a giant hole with my backhoe on my farm, three years old and alone on the machine - so small that he had to stand behind the levers to operate them, rather than sitting on the seat.
Once he reached scho…
Could it be that these people like your son are simply not designed for a post modern society? Hunters, gatherers, high intuitive ones, broken things fixers, bakers, community mood creators / maintainers..?
I can’t help thinking about all these important human roles that got abandoned in a post industrial society.
Could this be an answer..?
No offense meant, but no.
Any ideas what, then?
None taken.
In pre-modern societies, children who were deemed incapable of contributing to the tribe and/or a burden on resources were left for dead. Now we force parents to care for them but provide them with inadequate resources & institutional support. Both are brutal, but I think the former practice was more humane than what we have now.
I can relate to that. But that sounds like a relatively small group. And I m thinking more about all the severe cases that you described vs people who are relatively functional and could do with simple, down to earth jobs and an overall support that comes naturally with a tighter community.. it’s the latter, described as “high functioning” by the modern language, whom I m wondering about.
Whether they could lead a normal life in a more traditional society, with simple jobs and tighter community?
I grew up on the other side of the pond in a waaaaayyy more traditional community. And I know of someone who is in her 40s now and she has seriously deteriorated way into her 20s, after she gave birth. Now, her daughter, who is 18 now has deteriorated much earlier, in her teens. Her daughter came into a drastically different society, born in the early 2000. Her mom was born in 1970s and she was able to keep it together for much longer..
And because my 1970s happened in the USSR, those were some very different 1970s, than what you know in the US.
Ours were much earthier and basic and tribe like environment. All of us, Soviet kids of the 1970s still picked berries and mushrooms in the woods and canned them with our parents in our kitchens so that we could make it through the winter with the variety of foods. Not to mention tons of other survival skills that we all thought of as a daily routine. So, how come I now know of only a one or two severely disabled cases back in the old country and nothing about the so called “high functioning on the spectrum..?”
I do not think these “high functioners” are fake. No. I think they are the high risk group who suffered because of all the post-industrial changes.