TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of childhood trauma and autism. I’ve been asked about this subject many times, and usually, I have resisted talking about it, in large part because I don’t feel like I have the clearest answers or I don’t have answers that apply across the board. So what allowed me to come here and feel comfortable enough to at least try to make a video on this subject is realizing that what I have to say now, some of these thoughts that I have, don’t necessarily apply to everyone and probably don’t apply to everyone who ends up getting labeled on the autism spectrum. But I feel pretty confident that it does apply to some people. So I guess that’s where I’d like to start by saying that getting labeled or getting diagnosed with autism or being put on the autism spectrum isn’t a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Lots of things can lead people to end up on the autism spectrum.
Now, when I talk about childhood trauma, that’s a very touchy subject in the history of autism. I know in the 70s, 80s, even before that, a lot of people said, “Oh, it was the refrigerator mother,” this cold, withholding mother that caused the child to become autistic. And that was a very popular idea, maybe even going back before that. But then at a certain point, that idea fell out of favor. That idea became very unpopular, very politically incorrect. And now it seems like the point of view in the general psychology field, neurology field, is that autism is a biologically caused condition. It’s a neurological condition. It has nothing to do with parenting. In fact, don’t even try to connect it with parenting in any way, which in some cases is what I’d like to talk about here.
Well, one thing that I have seen in general in the psychology field, it’s become much more strong, actually, in the 20-something years that I’ve been involved with the psychology field. Having been a psychotherapist for 10 years now, having been out of the field for 10 years, actually out of the psychotherapy field, but still very intimately involved with the psychology field in lots of different ways. Well, the trend that I’ve seen is to label all sorts of mental problems as biological, genetic, neurological even, and autism perhaps most strongly, such that so many people, people who I know even, who have been labeled as autistic in one form or another, call themselves part of the neurodiversity movement. Neuro being related to the brain, like it is a brain problem. And a lot of times, I don’t see evidence for that, really good strong scientific evidence.
However, I will say I have met quite a few people who are labeled with autism, people sometimes in programs that I’ve visited, because I’ve visited quite a few autism treatment programs where some of the folks that I meet sure seem like they have problems that are biologically based. Like, I don’t know if childhood trauma in any way could cause this, yet I’ve seen some people that I think are exceptions. And the main way that I feel confident that there can be a connection between childhood trauma and someone ending up being labeled or diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum is knowing families with an autistic child, a child who gets labeled with autism, knowing this child since they were a baby, watching them grow, watching the family dynamics, watching their relationship with their parents.
Now, what percentage of people who end up getting labeled with autism fall into this category? I’m not sure. Is it a lot? Is it a little? I’m not sure. And that’s probably part of why I haven’t felt so confident to talk about this in any sort of scientific manner, because it’s really not scientific what I’m talking about in terms of quantitative science where I have numbers. But in terms of my observations, I think there can be a scientific aspect to the way I’ve taken my observations, watching families.
So to get down to it, what I’ve seen is some of the children who I have known, children whose families I have known well, observed their inner dynamics. Some of what I’ve seen is what they have experienced in their family in relation to their parents. The dynamics of their parents toward each other, toward them, could certainly lead some of these kids to become autistic, as it were. What I mean is I have seen families where the children, when they were babies, seemed just fine, seemed like perfectly normal interactive children, and there was nothing biological about what caused them to change. It wasn’t like a vaccine or some toxins in the environment, anything so obvious that I saw. But what I did see that was so obvious was very strange, intrusive, disruptive relationships they had with their parents, sometimes with one parent, sometimes with both parents.
Things that I saw were traumatizing to the child, things that I thought were horrible emotionally to the child. Being screamed at by a parent, being radically rejected by a parent, having a parent who very intrusively came into their world, manipulated them, didn’t let them be. Having another parent maybe who didn’t defend them at all in some very strong ways, maybe having both parents intrude into their world very intensely, growing up in an environment where their parents fought super intensely, and the child didn’t know what to do, was emotionally overwhelmed by this and withdrew. I’m talking about children who are maybe even less than one year old, some of the children that I’ve seen in this situation, two years old, three years old.
And in some way, the child, from what I observed, withdrew, pulled away, pulled into himself or herself, became maybe a little odd, became socially awkward, wasn’t so easily able to make eye contact with other people, didn’t interact as normally as other children. And the reason that I feel confident saying in some of these anecdotal cases that childhood trauma did affect their behavior is it just made perfect sense to me. I thought if I was a little child in that situation, in that family system, I might well withdraw in the exact same way. I might feel very socially awkward and uncomfortable in the same way. I might not be able to make eye contact with people and interact in a normal, regular, comfortable way if I were in that situation.
And yet what I’ve seen is in those families, the parents completely denied this. They said, “Oh no, no, no, that’s not what’s going on at all in my child. That’s not why they’re behaving this way.” They bring them to the experts, and the experts said, “Oh, your child seems to be having some autistic-like characteristics. I think they might be on the spectrum in some ways.” Sometimes they ended up getting diagnosed as being on the spectrum, getting labeled with a neurological or a biological condition. They completely absolved the parents of any responsibility. In fact, what these experts said and what the parents later said, or maybe what I was going to say is the parents later parroted, is that the parents were actually the greatest thing in the child’s life. The parents were long-suffering. The parents, in a way, were victims of this child’s aberrant behavior, victims of this child’s biological or neurological condition. This wasn’t a psychological condition according to the psychology field, even though this child’s neurological condition, biological condition of autism was diagnosed by their behavioral characteristics.
I didn’t see any of these children getting brain scans. They weren’t studying this child’s brain. They were just observing his behavior and listening to what the parents said about the child’s behavior. And then I take a step back and I think about something that is a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon in our society, American society, often European society, societies all over the world, that parents get a pass. Parents can do all sorts of horrible things to the children, objectively horrible things that very negatively affect the child on an emotional level, such that they’re actually literally traumatic, traumatizing for the child, and no one acknowledges this outside of the family system. Even within the family system, the world protects the parents. The world lets the parents off the hook. In fact, the world so often does what they’re doing in this situation: they actually blame the child. This child is the problem. This child has a problem. This child is causing problems for the parents. And in a strange way, sometimes it’s kind of true. It can be incredibly stressful for a parent to have a child that has a lot of problems, that doesn’t fit in, that doesn’t interact normally, that doesn’t behave normally all the time, that does repetitive, strange, unusual, withdrawn, antisocial behaviors even.
It can be very stressful. It can make a parent very uncomfortable. And so yes, it can cause a lot of pain for the parents. But often, society, in all sorts of different ways, doesn’t look and even open the door to the question that actually the basic cause for this problem could have started with the parents.
And often what I see is that so many people in society, most people in society, most therapists from what I’ve seen, most psychiatrists from what I’ve seen, are not deeply in touch with their own emotional experience of childhood. They haven’t resolved their own childhood traumas. Often they don’t even know that they had childhood traumas at all. Often if they feel they have problems at all, they view them in a sort of biological light, with a diagnosis, maybe a biological diagnosis, something that needs medication to resolve it. That seems to be the way of the modern world.
Or sometimes people know some of their childhood traumas, but a lot of them they have no clue about. They don’t have a clue about what actually happened to them. I’ve seen this so often in the mental health field and in society at large, that people really are out of touch with what children go through, what they themselves as children went through. And so they apply this to other children. A lot of times it’s just reflexive on the part of society, reflexive on the part of the mental health field. When they see a problem in a child, they instantly, before they know anything about the situation, absolve the parents.
Sometimes it’s not even about absolving the parents. Sometimes it’s totally diverting away from the possibility of even asking questions that might consider the possibility that the parents could be behind this. Now does that mean that parents are inherently behind every problem that gets labeled as autism? I would go so far as to say no, probably not. But then again, what I’ve seen in the mental health field, the people who are defining what is autism, so many autism experts, is they’re not even asking these questions at all. This is like, don’t touch this with a 10-foot pole. They often say things like, “Oh, that’s what we used to believe 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago in the psychology field, and we’ve proven that that is not true.” Well, often when I’ve read about it, the proof isn’t that strong.
So I guess how I’d like to conclude this video is, if somebody came to me—and people have come to me—and someone asked me, “Daniel, is it possible that what I went through as a child in relationship to my parents had some effect on me that ended up contributing to me ending up getting labeled on the autism spectrum?” I would say yes, it is possible. And it’s something worth exploring. It may actually not be true, but it might be true. And in some cases, I’ve seen pretty good evidence that it probably quite strongly is true.