This is not the first time I experience paralysis by analysis during an Autism-related celebratory day. Maybe that’s common among those of us diagnosed late in life, at the North of middle age. I don’t know: I’ve never compared experiences with other autistic people diagnosed after their 50s.
Among women, the age groups between 40 and 60 are where you find the highest frequency of traumatic memory integration. It’s when these memories emerge, gain meaning, or explode. For example, that’s when Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder) female patients most frequently develop a crisis, becoming aware of one or more of their alters. DID is much more prevalent than we previously knew, around 2-3% of the population, and it is produced by adverse childhood experiences (ACE).
Atypical, deviant and different individuals are frequently submitted to systematic forms of oppressive violence, more or less subtle forms of torture, as well as physical and emotional abuse (including sexual abuse). As long as their behavioral differences and deviations are manifested since early childhood, these people will grow up without ever knowing what it is to not suffer acts of violence and invalidating speech.
The chances of an adult in emancipating themselves from the echo effect of traumatic memories are reduced when the violent acts were systematically committed since their early childhood. People under these circumstances may never acquire the instruments that are needed to elaborate their past experience. They don’t recall a moment of rupture, when the violence was introduced in their lives: it was always there and it’s the only reality they know.
The sudden awareness of these past events that left “orphaned memories” floating across our consciousness is brutal. Brutal and risky: the person is confronting a monstrous reality, a reality fenced against access or elaboration in part because they may be impossible. Once exposed, the fragments and marks of the monstrous past might devour us. They may sequester us forever from social interaction, either by suicide or by an irreversible internal fragmentation.
I understand autism as a sub-category of “Mad” - she or he whose mind experiences reality in “another” form. “Other” relative to what? We don’t know. We don’t know that because our shared representations of “normal” and “typical” are also normative and strongly protected by the status quo. This way, in order to pass as normal, and therefore socially acceptable, one must avoid by all means a psychiatric diagnosis.
Every different child quickly learns that being identified as atypical, deviant or different carries a punishment sentence. Those of us who can learn pretty fast to camouflage. We learn how to spit out the response to a situation that will get the least attention. That’s the safest behavior to avoid punishment, and although it usually makes no sense to us, we try to imitate it. We practice camouflage to hide.
Autistic people don’t have the neurological equipment to generate deceptive behavior. That means we can’t lie or spot a lie. There are programs, courses and very questionable therapies for autistic people that teach enrolled “students” to say the socially accepted lies, and to play the social games. The results are poor. We understand, and sometimes we may be able to identify that there is a game being played. The smartest and most determined of us create algorithms to predict and interpret the behavior of the relevant neurotypical individuals affecting our quality of life. Among them, the most harmful are the “blue mothers”
I went through all this, and I had several psychiatric and neurological diagnosis until recently. Then, different professionals - psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists - independently diagnosed me as autistic. Most of them used the term “Asperger”, no longer used, but that’s what they had in their menu of options then: too many converging signs in a particularly smart individual. Therefore, an Aspie.
It doesn’t matter: my diagnosis was liberating. It was not liberating because I agree with mainstream psychiatry’s nosology (and I don’t), or because there is one biomarker or one set of traits that characterize autism. There aren’t. What is available to us now is a large collection of behavioral and biologic variables distributed along spectra (plural!) or gradients. These variables have complex associations, we are still crawling in gathering evidence and elaborating concepts to explain them, and, at this point, they cannot be modeled.
Let’s think about a chart with three dimensions where each axis represents the variation range for a variable. Each individual will occupy a unique place in this three-dimensional diagnostic chart. Some of these deformed bubbles will be more “typically” autistic than others according to some parameters. Each of these variables will also be represented in the neurotypical population because they are distributed along spectra.
3D scatter chart from Chart Director
If we assume n axes (n variables, with n = or > 4) we can no longer graphically represent or imagine a chart for the mathematical model. A model like this is closer to describing the intersecting spectra that define autism. It’s no surprise, then, that the DSM-V is so useless.
I grew up with a neurotypical mother. She is also different, but in the opposite direction: she is the antithesis of the typical autistic representation. She is a master manipulator, an impeccable mind-reader and a perfect liar. She spent my whole life reinforcing a self-representation that made my existence incompatible with being alive. As a living child, I couldn’t be fixed. If I was dead, then things would be okay. She would have an opportunity to play one of her favorite games: being a victim. “Look at how my daughter makes me suffer”. I was a broken toy, my behavior, my thoughts and my body deeply disappointed her. Her frequent repetition of the story about how she made the hard choice of not aborting me suggested that I wasn’t supposed to be alive anyway.
She tried really hard to have me fixed. She took me to dozens of physicians and psychologists, many of whom were pedophiles (of both sexes), and they poked me, squeezed me, inserted their fingers into my orifices (before age 7), touched my genitals, held me against my will, fondled me, and turned me into a person with an obsession about dying. Her screaming to force me to relax and sleep (I had insomnia from such an early age that I can’t remember not having it; I was also heat intolerant and excessively sensitive to odors), or because she had lost an argument with me didn’t help either.
Today, during this Autistic Pride Day, the first Autistic Pride Day in which I have to manage those memories that are no longer orphaned, I ask myself if it wouldn’t have been better if they never made sense, never integrated back into my self-narrative, and remained floating without eliciting a reaction from me. I wonder if that day, in January, when my mother’s expression of urgency, fear and manipulation during a video call triggered the process by which those memories started to furiously connect with one another, shouldn’t have been deleted, or never existed. After all, she’s 94 years old and soon she will no longer exist. Wouldn’t it have been better if I succeeded, as I tried so hard, to clean my repertoire of family memories and select only the good ones?
Maybe yes, maybe no. On the one hand, it would certainly have allowed me to love my parents with much less ambiguity. On the other hand, maybe I would never have freed myself from the suicidality that has been with me forever: the first attempt I remember was at 6 years old, at a swimming pool.
It’s too soon to know the answers. What I do know is that the diagnosis was a pre-requisite for my orphan memories to gain life, to gain meaning and to start changing my inner landscape. It was a pre-requisite for me to “see something” in my mother’s look, her darting eyes and manipulation.
When all this happened, right after the hate and suffering that the now meaningful memories caused, a sense of peace flooded my mind. I finally understood the stupid and absurd choices I made in my professional and personal life. Not all my choices were ruinous but they were enough - in number and impact - to destroy career routes that I deeply valued.
Am I free from my suicidal fate? I don’t know. Death is just sitting there, in his corner of my mind, like a very old friend who has all the time in the world and a reassuring expression. When I need him, he will be there. However, that day in January, I finally felt that I don’t need to fix the original sin of my existence by undoing it.
I think that is what I’m proud of. I’m no longer a broken toy that needs fixing or throwing away.