Families with Autism: There IS a Light at the End of the Tunnel.

Hi! Since a lot of us who have autism or love someone with autism have been struggling with the increased isolation due to the pandemic, I thought I should share my own experiences and struggles. I hope it inspires you and gives you hope.

So far as I know my birth name is “Harry Hirsh" and I was born in Detroit in November 1993. My “family” and I moved to Muncie, Indiana when I was very young, then again to Columbus, Ohio when I was ten years old.

My "father" is a neuro-opthamologist. My "mother" is a psychiatrist.

There’s a reason I put them in quotation marks: I don’t consider them my real family. Nearly everything that has ever gone wrong in my life was a result of the abuse I faced at their hands.

My "father" was constantly controlling and throwing temper tantrums at me, as well as often trapping me in a room with him while he shouted at me for hours.

He also sometimes got slightly violent. Slapping me, spanking me, hitting me over the head, grabbing my shoulders and forcibly steering me to where he wanted me to be standing, grabbing my headphone cord and pulling it around my neck to restrict my breathing for a second or two…

It was never enough to leave lasting physical injuries, but the danger of that was always hanging over my head.

My "mother" was manipulative and wouldn't allow me the chance to make mistakes and learn from them.

My "father" berated and bullied me for not performing a task to his exact, poorly communicated standards, to the point where I was afraid to do my chores or even leave “my” bedroom most of the time.

The word “my" is in quotation marks because I had no privacy or safety there. My “parents” often burst into “my” bedroom without knocking whenever they wanted to lecture me or force me to do something for them, even in the middle of the night when I was asleep.

Then the chores that I was still too terrified and exhausted to leave my bedroom for, my "mother" would then have the chance to take over and do for me so I wouldn’t have the chance to try them myself.

My “parents” had a sort of routine going on. She was the good cop and he was the bad cop.

Both of them constantly interrupted me and tried to finish my thoughts for me all the time, so I could never be heard unless I talked really fast (but when I interrupted them back I got in trouble).

And they would never consider anything I said unless I explained it in absolutely perfect pedantic detail.

They never modeled decent critical thinking or interpersonal skills for me. Quite the opposite—they constantly modeled for me exactly what NOT to do. They forced me to walk on eggshells around them both all the time and got angry or annoyed when I asked questions.

And somehow they still wondered: "What’s wrong with our son? Why isn’t he normal like other children?"

When I was five years old they had me go to a doctor who diagnosed me with ADHD. Then when I was ten years old they had me go to another doctor who diagnosed me with high functioning autism (Asperger's).

As a result I found myself systematically dehumanized by nearly everyone in the society I live in. Whenever I said something or did something it wasn't seen as a result of valid feelings and perspectives which evolved from my experiences. Instead it was seen as the symptom of an illness and summarily dismissed. And that "illness" was my very personality! My "disordered" personality.

In other words, my "parents" had shifted the blame for my lack of critical thinking and interpersonal skills from their abusive behavior to my "inherent neurobiological and genetic structure" (in other words they blamed me because I AM my inherent neurobiological and genetic structure, since the body and spirit are two sides of the same coin).

And they had successfully persuaded the rest of society to systematically agree with them about that and treat me accordingly. Instead of saying that I had poor critical thinking and interpersonal skills, they said I was psychotic and autistic.

Nobody noticed how my odd behavior and unique perspective was the result of being a "one-person culture". It didn’t occur to anyone that my lack of interpersonal skills had prevented me from understanding and absorbing the perspectives of people around me or their cultures, nor how that might affect my own personal perspective and cultural practices.

For most of my life I was brought up by the books I read, the games I played and the anime shows I watched online. Not by my “parents”.

In 2013 my "mother" secured continued legal guardianship over me and used that to blackmail me into attending Ohio State University against my will. She had state-funded babysitters constantly harassing and micromanaging me nearly the entire time I was there, so it was a struggle to find the time or breathing room to think straight and explore.

I'm now 28 years old. I just survived 22 years of nonstop extreme brain poisoning since I was five years old. Lots and lots of dangerous psychoactive substances in large doses were forced into my young body against my natural will for most of my life.

Then last year:

• I nearly starved on a long walk through the city which I went on because my body was breaking down from decades of chronic isolation and captivity
• I got kidnapped by police and held captive in two very abusive mental hospitals (the second of which purposefully destroyed my gut microbiome and nearly killed me)
• And then I had to go through a near-total immune system reboot which strongly resembled infancy in order to survive and recover from everything that had been done to me.

Yet despite all this ridiculous abuse that society put on me for most of my life, my personal growth and skill development got faster and faster the more time passed. I learned and grew more in the last three years than my entire life before that combined. I learned and grew more in the last ten years than my entire life before that combined. My life trajectory has followed this exponential trend on average ever since I was ten years old at the earliest and that trend still continues.

My teachers and "parents" were always very shocked by how quickly and dramatically I would transform.

Back in 2015 I had started learning critical thinking skills after reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" (HPMOR) by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky has written extensively about how to apply findings in cognitive science, logic and philosophy to improve one’s critical thinking skills.

Much of his ideas and his approach are very biased and flawed. His series of essays advising people on how to overcome their biases and improve their thinking are filled with many wordy, exhausting rules and procedures. These rules and procedures are intended to be memorized by his readers and help them exert self-control to avoid the temptation to believe things they know aren't true.

Of course, it would be better for them to use some common sense empathy on themselves to have internal dialogues about what feelings or desires tempted them to beliefs they know aren't true (since that would allow them to address the temptation at its roots without boxing in their hearts and minds with exhausting rules).

Nevetheless, those exhausting rules combined with the bit of critical thinking skills I’d finally absorbed (after listening to very analytical people my whole life) turned out to be surprisingly useful. I was able to use them to help solve a criminal case which had stumped all the private investigators.

Thanks to my anonymous efforts, the last private investigator to work on that case got unstumped and was able to figure out the rest. The client's son was innocent. He had been framed by a small county government in order to cover up their drug crimes. The FBI got involved and the real criminals got in a lot of trouble.

Then three years ago, not long before I graduated from Ohio State, I met someone who finally gave me the chance to learn real interpersonal skills.

Up until that point no one had ever made a real effort to teach them to me because they believed I was inherently incapable of ever learning them. Instead, people had given me a bunch of exhausting and complicated "rules of social interaction" to memorize.

Following those rules had allowed me to imitate normal social interaction without really understanding the hearts and minds of others. The moment anyone had gone off script I had never known how to react.

And when people were giving me these rules to memorize they said they were "teaching me social skills".

This time was different. In the last three years I have gone from being visibly socially and mentally impaired to being someone who actually enjoys creative intellectual problem-solving and cross-cultural diplomacy.

And I actually seem to be pretty decent at it too.

Decades of chronic isolation has given me an outsider's perspective on the world, so I can think outside the box better than most people.

I've also finally started connecting with people for real. I now enjoy deeper and more genuine relationships than I ever have before.

I can actually see intuitively that different cultures are essentially different collective/average personalities of large groups of people. And that means each of them has a valid and true perspective which evolved from their experiences over the course of their life, just like an individual personality does.

They all have different strengths and weaknesses, and their perspectives are all puzzle pieces of the enormous, complicated and multidimensional reality we live in.

So I joined a church one of my good friends had introduced me to and now I'm a Christian. Or at least I'm a Christian when the more spiritually inclined parts of my personality are in the "driver's seat". When my more analytical/logical parts are in the "driver's seat" I tend to be more secular.

At some point last year I learned to split my personality and recombine it at will basically whenever I want. And I can split and recombine in different ways for different kinds of situations. Both my more analytical/logical parts/selves and my more spiritual parts/selves are real and genuine, and the more I learn and grow the more I see how their (my) perspectives are compatible with each other.

God and Jesus have saved me and they've been helping me learn to be more charitable to others and forgive everyone for how they treated me over the years, as well as to stop letting myself be deceived and controlled by my trauma and fear.

I now live by myself in my apartment in Clintonville in Columbus, Ohio. Most of my basic living expenses are paid for by a payee company using my SSI. Neither of my "parents" are my legal guardian anymore. Instead my legal guardian is the Franklin County Board of Guardianship Services.

Despite my misgivings about having a literal government agency as my legal guardian, they actually treat me kindly and professionally. It just took me a long time to recover from enough of my trauma to see that.

I'm no longer on any of the psychiatric brain poisons. Last month my guardian easily agreed to never make me go back on them. They said they would never force me to take medication without my consent.

And they’re helping me look for a job without taking my giant inaccurate medical history and long list of psychiatric stigma-labels into account, nor pretending that my English/professional writing degree doesn’t exist (like so many nonprofit and corporate employers seemed to have been doing in the past couple years or so as far as I could tell).

And since my legal guardian only has guardianship of the person and not of the estate, that means they aren’t using control of my income as a means to control me. Otherwise they wouldn’t be helping me get a job, since they can’t control my work income without guardianship of the estate.

My whole world has opened up. I finally have the chance to do over my childhood without being interrupted and forced to start over again by trauma and brain damage.

I finally can gain the life experiences that were systematically denied to me my whole life.

I’m finally safe and free. My life has finally begun for real.

So for those of you who are still struggling with autism or love someone who is, know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Additional Notes: Autism is not a personality disorder. It’s a learning disability. Specifically one that impacts a person’s interpersonal skills including communication and listening skills. And if one lacks the skills to communicate or listen to other people, then that can impair their ability to learn anything from other people at all.

And learning disabilities are not illnesses. They are not a medical doctor's area of expertise, despite what the establishment medical system claims.

Learning disabilities are a teacher’s area of expertise, not a doctor’s. If someone is really bad at baseball, making them ingest lots of dangerous psychoactive substances doesn’t improve their baseball skills. Nor does making them memorize a book about how to play baseball well.

And if you tell them, their parents and all their teachers that practice won’t make them better at baseball, because their “inherent neurobiological and genetic structure" prevents it, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why would they keep trying to get better at baseball after you used your “expert” authority to discourage them like that? Why would anyone try to teach them baseball competently after you used your “expert" authority to convince them it was forever physically impossible to do so?

The same is true for all kinds of skills, including interpersonal skills.

The more impaired a student’s skills are for a particular type of activity, the more time, practice and competent instruction they need to catch up to the level of their average same-age peers.

If the necessary amount of time, practice and competent instruction occurs then the student will catch up.

Whether you admit it or not, even if you aren’t an educational psychologist, sheer empathy and common sense should tell you that this is a Law of Educational Psychology.

There is no arbitrary skill-level cut-off where this law no longer holds true. Even if some people take many decades to bloom, they still bloom eventually so long as you don’t discourage or bully them into giving up too soon.

There is no such thing as a never-bloomer who is still alive and conscious. There are late-bloomers. Some bloom much later than others. Just because they aren’t blooming as fast as you think they should doesn’t justify taking away their opportunities to learn.

Unfortunately our world’s education systems, their curriculum and the credentialing process which determines who is allowed to teach in them are mostly controlled by big government agencies who don’t understand education.

As a result we live in a world where far too many teachers don’t know how to teach very well.

If our world’s education systems were remotely competent (or ethical) then we’d have real interpersonal skills taught to autistic children by tutors with backgrounds in fields like: journalism, advertising and sales, fundraising, public relations, foreign affairs, comparative cultural studies, social media and entertainment.

You know, the ones who actually specialize in fields of expertise which require good interpersonal skills.

But unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. The world we live in has autistic children being taught “social skills” by those whose only background is in fields like: medicine, psychology, occupational therapy, speech pathology and social work.

We can do better than this.