Journeys with Autism

Spoiler and trigger warning: In this post, I talk about having survived childhood abuse.

For the most part, having survived abuse is not a topic that occupies my mind very much anymore. I still have post-traumatic stress issues that I will probably deal with for the rest of my life, but they don’t inhibit my ability to navigate. I work with them or I work around them, depending on the day, and being able to do so has become a source of power and self-confidence.

In this post, though, I’ll talk about the abuse. I’ll talk about it because the abuse itself once threatened my ability to have any sense of self at all, and because struggling with its legacy has been the key to having a secure sense of who I am.

I was emotionally abused throughout my childhood. I was also physically abused from the time I was 4 until I was 19, and sexually abused from the time I was 11 until I was 19. The abuse stopped after I fled the scene, moving three thousand miles away to California. I no longer have any relationship with anyone in my original family, as my blood relations are either in denial or simply don’t care.

I want to say outright that I don’t have any kind of hierarchy in my mind about which form of abuse is “worse,” because for me, the only important dividing line is the one that separates being safe from being unsafe. For a long while, ranking one kind of abuse as worse than another became an exercise in minimizing and controlling my pain, and it was a great relief to stop.

I finally gave myself permission to stop over twenty years ago, after sitting in a support group with a woman who was actively recovering memories of the most hideous abuse imaginable. Each of us got a session in which to tell our stories, and when this woman told hers, everyone else in the group responded with a variation of, “I feel like I don’t even have the right to be sitting here with you. My abuse wasn’t nearly as awful as yours.” Her mindful, compassionate, and altogether accurate answer was, “There is no such thing as better or worse when it comes to abuse. Once someone forces us to cross that line, we’re all in this together.”

One aspect of her struggle that we all shared was the visceral sense that the abuser had somehow taken up residence in our minds, our hearts, and even in the cells of our bodies. Particularly regarding the sexual abuse, I felt that I would never be able to rid myself of the way it pervaded my awareness of my own being. For a long time, I felt as though the abuse were circulating through my body and that with every beat of my heart, it was making me feel dirty and broken. How could I possibly heal? How could I possibly keep up with the messages of self-hatred that were spreading inside me? How could I tackle them quickly enough to defuse their power? Having been born with a very healthy sense of outrage, I was very, very angry that the ugly messages seemed to have become an inextricable part of me, and I rebelled against them even when I felt utterly done in by them.

As it turned out, rebelling against them helped me see that the idea that I had been dirtied and broken was an illusion—that it was a feeling, not a reality. I came to this understanding through teachings from my own culture about the purity of the human soul. I know that not every culture has these teachings, and I know that there are many paths to healing. This one just happens to be mine.

Judaism teaches that we are each born with a pure soul, that we each die with a pure soul, and that nothing that comes between our first breath and our last breath can change that. At the core of this concept is the belief that when we are created, a spark of the Divine enters us and becomes the soul. Because the Divine can never be broken or made incomplete, the soul within us shares that indestructibility and wholeness. And so, whatever is done to our bodies, our souls are perfectly resilient and incorruptible.

As I meditated on these things, I came to feel that much of the evil that was done to me consisted of making me forget that I am perfectly fine. I have struggles, yes, but I am not the same as what has happened to me, what has been done to me, and what has terrified me. At the core of my being, through all the pain and confusion that clouds my path, I am separate from the storm, and I am perfectly whole. In these teachings, I found my connection to the Divine, not as a self-other relationship, but as a deepening sense of immanence, awareness, and shared existence. I am no longer religious, as I once was; I seem to have little need for most religious ritual or study anymore. My husband says that I’ve internalized it all, and I think he’s right.

For many years, I thought I’d never again have to struggle against that sense of being compromised, broken, and wrong. Then, I got the Asperger’s diagnosis. After the initial rush of “Yay! That explains everything!” came the second wave of becoming profoundly aware of the language of impairment, disorder, deficit, and disease that permeates most conversations about autism.

That’s when I started to really believe in karma. I don’t mean the idea of karma that says you get punished for something you did in a past life. I mean the idea of karma that says that each person comes into this life to struggle with and learn about a core issue, and that we keep getting the same lessons over and over in order to strengthen our understanding. For me, as for a lot of people, the question I’ve had to grapple with all my life is “How do I maintain my power when everything around me keeps telling me that something is wrong with me?” If you’re autistic and want to live a happy life, I think that this question is key.

In my next post, I’ll talk more about how I’ve grappled with it.

© 2010 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg