Autism and Abuse

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Have any members here had some of their autistic traits 'beat out of them' (physically or emotionally) as a child?

How has it affected your life as an adult?

Do you self punish when these traits rear their head?

How do you cope with the anxiety when these traits present themselves?

To be fair I will answer the questions myself.

My mother would threaten to kill herself if I didn't behave. She would literally chase me around the house with a knife at her wrist or throat. My father would physically beat me for being 'argumentative' and for throwing fits. My stepmother would verbally abuse me when I chewed on my hair, spun, or climbed the tree in our yard where I would stay all day or night.

It has affected my adult life tremendously. If I get into a fight with my significant other, I find myself feeling despair and loss no matter how stupid the fight. I constantly fret our fights will end in death.

If I catch myself gazing or swaying or rocking I'm bombarded with internal name calling and self loathing. When I argue with my boyfriend (although I never back down) I flinch away from him when he gets angry which is very hurtful to him.

Please let me know your experiences.

1. For me, the traits that rear its head is probably due to depression and being somewhat off when out at a social event. When younger, other people would just avoid me or ridicule me for being different than them. When I voice out my frustrations, people seemed to be amused by it. Teachers and my parents usually forced a time out for me and I was sometimes forced into isolation. Some friends weren't often my friends for a while after things happened, and some didn't stay friends with me.

2. I have had a hard time with the adult life coping with the connections with others. If I sense that I will say something that will be frowned upon, I don't say it or I avoid certain people altogether. Some people might actually take these actions personally.

3. Do I ever. I have a hard time finding someone to listen to me. When I do find someone to listen to me, I usually stop communicating with them because I feel like I am burdening them with all my little problems. Come to think of it, some people walked away from me when I was a teenager because of this desperation to connect and sometimes when I voice out frustrations.

4. Unfortunately, I time out for a little while to rest. Then I get back out and see what I can do with my social life again.

yes,back in the day severe autism and LD were assumed to be caused by brain damage by paed neuros of mine [of which there was no damage on scans] for every difficulty,trait and behavior was badly beaten by dad,by sister, school teachers and attempted to be by bullies at junior school in the late eighties onwards.

was also thrown against tables and walls at school in a rough attempt to restrain which made become more violent with them,if it wasnt multilink was throwing at them it was the chairs or tables that was sat on.

woud be dragged to head teachers office,caned,wait with him whilst getting a bollocking about which ever mother f/cker bully had injured this time.dad woud come storming in and woud be dragged out by the wrist tightly whilst the other one was a tight fist punching everywjere he coud get,back home it was a lot worse.

sister was unable to cope and woud bully to get her own back for the challenging behaviors of mine,she did things like smash plates and say it was emma,because was completely non verbal and sister was never doubted,woud then be twatted with what ever heavy item he coud lay his hands on be it a heavy hard back book,a belt or a slipper.
forgot to say this was every day was being dragged home into a beating.
never recognised him as dad,he was basicaly removed from the registry in brain and was never scanned again.
have only began recognising him as dad in the past several years,he has been really trying though.
sister also started to understand when she left home at sixteen and went into pyschology.

thats only small details of it but yes am badly damaged from it,the lack of attachment from him and mum as she wasnt able to cope and became a violent alcoholic, caused a mental disorder from which am still strongly affected by; severe reactive attachment disorder,only got diagnosed with it in the past several years when a lot of this had reared its ugly head.


the best way is to face bad memories head on,dont hide them away otherwise the mind will obsess over it and obsess over it until the mind shoves it deeply away then it blows up with a force,see a pyschologist,mine was a LD pyschologist part of the LD team in social services,he helped to lay some memories to rest and learn to communicate through art.
stop hiding start fighting,make sure to have some good back up support on the way!

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And,
Yes.

Life for me was a plague filled misery before I finally developed a super method for coping and revising my issues.

If you care you can find it here. StabilizingAutism/unsolicited-advice
You can find what it can do here. What PAR can do
And
If you're really, really interested you can get a free session here. StabilizingAutism/free-first-session

Life sucks hard, we've all got to do what we can to help ourselves and each other.

You actually brought up an important issue - autism and abuse. In some of my past posts I've wondered about the connection of the two.

For instance, if a child doesn't make eye contact, can you beat him so often that he learns to do it?
Conversely, can you beat a child so much that he fears making eye contact would get him beat again?

I was beaten a lot and I also ask myself if my autistic traits have been beaten out of me

For instance, I dared not stim in front of my father lest I should taste his belt.
I dared not look my father in the face lest I should taste his belt.
I dared not speak within earshot of my father lest I should taste his belt.

I've also learned to minimize referring to myself in the 3rd person because people have told me to my face that it's annoying. Still, it slips out every so often.

Last edited by redrobin62 on 19 Jul 2013, 8:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have read that in cases of abuse, the abuse will either:

A) Cause the child to comply with what is required
or
B) exasperate the reason for abuse in the child. For example, if beaten for rocking, because the rocking is a way to cope with stress, the added abuse will cause the child to rock even more.

The question is, will that child rock more yet only in private, or will the child rock when confronted with potential abuse regardless of an audience.

And what roll would autism play in that distinction?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

I stopped speaking up at all because of this. Sometimes it still feels like a revelation that I'm expected to speak my mind, and even be rewarded for it. It's still hard for me to speak up sometimes, because there's such a sense of catastrophe with it. I feel like I can only knuckle down, grin, and bear everything--even if it's not the best option. I was raised to be seen, but not heard.

I don't make eye contact and my mother's ex-husband liked to beat me for not making eye contact, which somehow "proved" I was lying. But accusing me of lying was his game to find excuses to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong.

Wow! I'm shocked at the things you guys had to go through in your childhood

It's not easy trying to be Jesus Christ with an autistic child, I certainly get frustrated and raise my voice when my daughter is being non-compliant.

As a parent it's very very tricky to work out the boundaries when teaching a child to stop doing "bad" behaviour starts to border on coercion and is counter-productive.

I spent the first 15 years of my life on the edge of abuse. Call it disproportionate pressure. My alterity was always under fire. And, in the early 70's, just being excused from school to a shrink's appointment was generally traumatic. Nothing physical, but a slow drone of critical focus certainly gave me a lifetime sense that the rest of the world was implicitly antagonistic. Of course, my 2 years in the military, where the abuse got down to the nitty gritty, corroborated my earlier suspicions. No doubt stress acerbates AS maladaptives. I never sit w/ my back to the door.

Holy mother...
I am so sorry that you all have had to suffer through so many horrible things.
*offers hugs to everyone who may want or need one*
May you all find healing and peace in your lives; regardless of how you behaved as a child, none of you deserved that sort of anger and pain.

I can relate to this. I was certainly not abused as a child, but my father would occasionally use a sharper tone of voice and not-so-kind words when I fell short of his standards. I also remember being "spanked" a few times in elementary school; incidentally, my behavior did not really get too much less "distributive" until seventh or eight grade.



In many cases, especially when autism or other neurological variances are involved, the behavior may be beyond the child's control; for example, me being yelled at to "quit crying so much," regardless whether the voice came from my parents, siblings, or teachers, did nothing to make me any less emotionally sensitive, thus meaning that the crying continued, regardless. It is not that it never occurred to me that having such strong emotional reactions was unpleasant to others or that it would have negative consequences; this was very clearly illustrated from the beginning. Thus, I now tend to shy away from others when I am feeling strong emotions.

Whether the child will privatize the behavior or not will depend on the child's ability to get away from the situation; some children "shutdown" when they are at the point that they feel compelled to rock and thus may not be capable of walking away to a private room.

A question, since it's happened in this thread and it's something that puts me way off balance when it's happened in the past because I never expect it:

Why is it that sometimes in discussions like this, when offering up factual historical information about one's life, do some people respond on an emotional level with the hugs and reassurances?

This is not meant as a criticism, and I am not a stranger to emotional support - but it sometimes seems to me that other people are bothered more by such things than I am (such things did bother me and continue to do so, and they shouldn't happen, but I mean on an emotional level),

Are you suggesting that some people's memories of abuse may be embellished or exaggerated? Elizabeth Loftus is an authority on child abuse in North America and she also suggests that over time people are more likely to insert false memories into their recall of events.

This unfortunately is a problem for victims who attempt to make accusations against perpetrators many years after the event. Here in Australia we have perpetrators of sexual violence not being charged because the victims are unable to recount details of the attacks in sufficient detail and the judge is not convinced because there were no other witnesses.

I can see what you mean, why should others be bothered more, and of course you have and are entitled to your own feelings and reactions.

At the same time, I hope I'm not alone in being bothered by situations where NTs fail to respond to AS distress, seemingly unable to recognize because it looks a little different.

So I guess to me, the offer of emotional support is so much better than the alternative of failing to recognize someone's suffering because it just doesn't quite seem real, because it looks that little bit different. And hopefully both NTs and Aspies on Wrongplanet are recognizing one another's humanity and erring on the side of caring when it isn't needed rather than not caring when it is.

What...I don't even. How did you... I don't know how to respond to this. What are you talking about? How did you get there from my post?

That's not what I meant, I'm sorry for being unclear.

What I mean is, if I say "X happened to me" as a point of information for a discussion, and the discussion has to stop so people can say "I'm so sorry that happened to you." Why does that happen?



No, I find it frustrating too. My PCP used my lack of emotional display or reaction to pain as evidence that I was not distressed or experiencing pain when I was. But what I wanted from her was a practical solution.



I am not trying to say it's not needed. I mean, for all I know it may be needed. I just want to understand why it happens - and I think your explanation is reasonable.