Trauma Treatment for Parents of Autistic Children and Trauma Treatment for Kids with Autism
Autism is often represented as puzzle pieces that might be conceptualized as sub-personalities that need to be integrated through trauma-informed therapies.- Biological Trauma
- Biological trauma might be caused by a major illness or through exposure to multiple pathogens as a result of an over-ambitious vaccine schedule.
- Toxicological Trauma
- Toxicological trauma might include exposure to mercury through vaccines as well as through other situations.
- Organophosphates and bromide might also overwhelm the body’s ability to release toxins. Bromide and organophosphate exposure is closely related to the opioid hypothesis of autism (see below) and the idea that gluten (wheat) and casein (milk) cause gut problems in kids with ASD. Click here to learn more about autism and organophosphates and bromide.
- Emotional Trauma
- Birth trauma is just one type of trauma that might afflict a child with autism. Most children are traumatized during the birthing process, in fact, but some children are able to literally “shake it off” / release the trauma over the course of time. Other children, many children, are not able to shake it off and release the trauma.
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Trauma, by definition, can be any situation in which a child (or an adult) feels overwhelmed with fear, anger, or sadness and experiences a sense of utter helplessness. Situations that evoke a traumatic reaction are not always regarded by others, by onlookers, as being “traumatic”. What causes a given situation to be experienced by the body as traumatic is the sense of being helpless. A child who is able to help itself by running away or fighting back, yelling, or taking an action against a threat probably won’t feel traumatized by it but rather, empowered. Trauma is a physical, body-oriented experience and a reaction to some situation in the environment. But, as a body-oriented experience that essentially derives from the autonomic nervous system – which might be regarded as a second “brain” that lives in the body as opposed to the skull – trauma involves the sense that we can’t act to overcome whatever it is that threatens us.The autonomic nervous system is, at once, both primitive and wise. It is the wild part of our nature that was created to ensure our survival in a world that presents ambiguous situations to us – situations that may or may not be threatening depending on our attention and awareness, our past experiences and how we interpret the meaning of what surrounds us. When we are traumatized, the autonomic nervous system takes a snapshot of a moment – or rather, a short video clip of the situation – and it gets stored in the body without a narrative that could allow us to describe the traumatic film reel in words. It is the lack of a personal narrative of what happened that causes us to experience trauma as something that disconnects us from other human beings – as a situation that is alienating – because we literally have no words to describe the horror of what happened to us.
Our human bodies are animal in nature and like the animals, we were built to be able to “shake off” what traumatized us. There is only one video that currently exists showing how animals “shake off” trauma. Click here to watch this video of a polar bear releasing trauma.
Our human bodies were meant to be able to shake off fear, sadness, and anger so as to move on with our lives and be healthy, but often, the human mind does not allow the body to go through the necessary movements to overcome trauma. Other people may try to prevent us from “shaking off” trauma and then, the trauma gets stuck in the autonomic nervous system like a dance or a set of movements that the body needs to perform in order to release the trauma.
The movements or “dance” of trauma could look like “flapping”, screaming, self-injury, or any number of odd behaviors in children. Trauma, after all, once it becomes lodged in the autonomic nervous system, functions as a separate sub-personality with its own concept of the world and its own ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong. We “embody” our trauma such that a part of our energy force (some call it a “soul part” or a “sub-personality”), like a piece of a larger puzzle, becomes dedicated to acting out trauma in an effort to one day release it. The traumatized “soul part” or “sub-personality” tries again and again whenever triggered to tell its story but it has no words because this part is mostly isolated to the right brain. The only way for this puzzle piece to “speak” is for it to “embody” the body and make the body feel what it felt like emotionally to experience the trauma. But, to experience the emotional content of a traumatic moment replayed in the present tense, where the body feels the feelings associated with something horrible, makes people feel crazy if they don’t know what’s going on. They are not crazy, of course, but the feeling of crazy happens when a creeping sense of desperation followed by sheer terror overtakes a person who is surrounded by peace and love wherein there is nothing wrong and nothing traumatic happening. The dissonance of feeling these horrible, terrifying emotions while being in a safe place at a time when there is nothing wrong, causes people to behave very strangely if the person experiencing these feelings does not realize what is happening. The present tense, as we know it, is an emotional construct. We build reality out of our emotions and when the emotion of terror overwhelms the body, even a peaceful reality becomes terrifying. Yet, our bodies were designed to release these emotions by feeling them and so, the goal is to stop resisting and allow the feelings to emerge and dance them out of us. This sounds easy, but it’s hard to do without the sacred medicines which guide us to the root of the problem and then through the movement, sounds, and the experience of the emotions that we need to have in order to release the trauma.
In children, especially babies and very young children, craniosacral therapy can be a useful tool to release trauma gently and very slowly. Older children can be given peyote or even psilocybin in microdoses as they have been for generations in the tribal communities where these plants are in use. Ayahuasca can also be administered to children in microdoses, but in order to use sacred medicines in children, you have to know the medicines yourself as an adult. The sacred medicines are not drugs and they don’t work the way that pharmaceuticals work in the body. These are medicines that allow us to experience a sense of connection to other human beings and to time and space (the environment and nature) through the autonomic nervous system. They are medicines of nature that are there to help us understand the “technology” of the human body and how to use this “high-tech human suit” to heal ourselves as well as to heal other people. Indeed, the sacred medicines in tribal societies have mostly been used by shaman to heal the other members of the tribe. Our bodies, in fact, are designed with these capabilities, but the highly developed societies of the world have lost touch with these distinctively human and very powerful “technologies” of the human body.
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To be sure, shaman differed in their level of skill at using and “knowing” the sacred plant and animal medicines to which they had access, but the truly gifted shamans of the ancient world ensured that the human race survived since time immemorial without Big Pharma or the FDA. How did they do it? How did they know that this plant or that plant would kill them or that it would work as medicine at a particular dosage? In the western world, we explain these miracles by telling ourselves that people tested the plants and learned about which would kill and which wouldn’t by whether or not people died after consuming it. That’s a very scientific way of thinking about the world, but science is not the only way to know about reality. As westerners in the developed world, this is the best we can do, though – to explain how a human being can “know” something, we assume that there was some kind of scientific process latently at work. We have become people who can’t “know” anything without seeing it in real life or reading it in a book.Yet, the human body comes into the world upon birth with wisdom built into it. For example, the body goes through a series of steps every night to process the information and situations that we encounter on earth. A healthy sleep “architecture” is essential for babies and children. Parents of children with autism are acutely aware of this fact because their own sleep architecture is disrupted when their child’s sleep architecture is disrupted. During sleep, the eyes sometimes move back and forth in the Rapid Eye Movement / REM phase of sleep during which the muscles of the eyes pull on the bones of the cranium, ever-so-slightly, to readjust their position. The cranial bones, after all, “float” over the brain meninges in both children and adults and when these bones move into certain positions that are just slightly askew, they squeeze the cranial nerves that belong to the autonomic nervous system just slightly. The eye movements that happen naturally during REM sleep alleviate some of the pressure on the cranial bones and, during waking hours, a person with insomnia or trauma-related issues, can use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR instead of having to go into an REM sleep cycle to readjust the cranial bone positions. Indeed, these eye movements also transport information from one hemisphere of the brain to the other and back so that the part of the brain that deals with narrative and language (usually the left brain) can weigh in on material from the part of the brain that deals primarily in symbols (usually the right brain). It’s an elegant system for the removal and release of trauma when REM sleep is accessible.
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The technology of the human body is something that most of us in the English-speaking world ignore or are hardly aware of. We ignore “gut intuition” and dreams, dismissing them as being less real and less important than something that we might read out of a book or observe with our eyes during a state of wakefulness. For westerners, focusing on “intuition” and “dreams” makes us less logical, and less credible. We believe that there’s nothing that can be “known” that comes from the “felt sense”, the “knowing” or understanding of the body.Children who have nothing to compare their reality to and no words to describe (to themselves or to others) what they are experiencing inside their bodies, must act out their trauma. Until the emotion of the trauma can be fully acted out and embodied, it stays lodged in the autonomic nervous system, sometimes for a lifetime. But trauma also causes people, both adults and children, to “go away” on a spiritual-emotional level. In people who have been traumatized and who are having a flashback due to being triggered in some way, the eyes become distant and the energy of the body changes such that it feels like that person is no longer in the room. They look through you, rather than looking at you.
A parent of a child with autism who has been traumatized by essentially experiencing the loss of their child though the child’s body is still physically present and moving about, creates a precarious situation. Big Pharma has no interest in a cure for autism. The only hope that a child has is his or her parent / caregiver, or the effort made by some loved one who seeks out an autism cure. But parents today are often so traumatized that they refuse to even consider the possibility of a cure for autism. To put hope in something like a cure sets parents up to experience a massive, potentially devastating disappointment. So parents and caregivers for ASD kids have to work on their own trauma first, and establish a way – a method – by which the body and the autonomic nervous system can continue to feel hope without always feeling the continuous crushing experience of disappointment at the same time. Armoring the body and the “felt sense” against the prospect of hope and other positive feelings is part of what happens to us when we’ve been traumatized in some way. We stop feeling our emotions and we even stop feeling the body – parts of us literally go numb. Or parts of the body scream out in pain or become diseased. This is how we survive trauma when we don’t know how to release it – we carry the trauma with us and hobble through life without hope and without an orientation toward the present tense. We are “happy” with being numb.
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That being said, I can say from my own experience in treating my own trauma and treating other people’s trauma that trauma therapy using sacred medicines should be undertaken as something that will require about 1 year to complete at the very least. Completion though, is a restoration to baseline, which does not mean that the person will never have to release trauma again in the future. In some cases, it might take a bit longer and in many cases, it will take less than 1 year to overcome trauma. Other therapies that do not involve the sacred medicines take longer and are less powerful. These therapies that don’t involve the sacred medicines may be more palatable to parents or they may simply be the only treatments that they can access easily.
Some children with autism may need more than trauma therapy and they may need certain ongoing treatments like nutritional supplements or treatment with chlorine dioxide solution because their trauma is biological or toxicological. As we noted above, trauma can be physical, biological, emotional, or toxicological. Discovering the medicines that help a child feel better, behave better, and “come back” will vary from child-to-child.
Trauma therapy might be conceptualized as a series of “sub-personalities” or “soul parts” that are not “integrated”. These soul parts / sub-personalities exist around or near the patient’s body – sometimes they are partially in the body and partially out – like energy that sticks out on one side of the body, for example. Sometimes a soul part or sub-personality will become very small and go to live in the Unconscious mind of the autonomic nervous system – in an area of the body essentially that is experienced with pain or discomfort of some kind. These soul parts / sub-personalities may require “searching” or soul retrieval work by the parent or by a skilled shaman who is familiar with soul retrieval techniques. Parents can do this type of work for a child. If we don’t take the word “shaman” too seriously and we acknowledge that our human nature, our bodies, are designed to heal and to be the healer, then we can be like shaman. We can search for soul parts and sub-personalities to heal our child. But psilocybin, Ayahuasca, and peyote are sacred medicines that are also capable of assisting in the “search and rescue efforts” for soul parts that have gone astray.
Shaman should be revered, so we tend to use that word with some reverence, and also with skepticism in the English-speaking world. So we have to overcome the ideas that we have about what a healer is and what a healer is not, without using arrogance to accomplish that feat. Instead of arrogance, we can use curiosity. Curiosity though is also in short supply in those with a lot of trauma. Curiosity, after all, can make us vulnerable.
Sub-personalities / soul parts that are not fully incarnate or “hooked into” the autonomic nervous system so as to be able to embody the body, feel like a sense of profound embarrassment. These are the parts that are halfway inside the body and halfway outside the body energetically speaking. But the sub-personalities that are able to hook in partially often line up first to tell their story to people who have been traumatized. The story, of course, is not in the form of a narrative, but rather, it takes the shape of a strong, usually complex, negative emotion like anger, fear, or sadness. In children, emotions have to be “unpacked” by an adult who can give words to the feeling and to the experience, however it was encoded in the body. But in children with trauma, the emotion makes them “spiky” and unapproachable. In the trauma-informed therapies, we would call this a “flashback”. The child is trapped in a moment in the past (though a person can also get trapped in moments of great anticipation in the future too) and as such, the people around them in the present tense can’t reach them. The child who is having a flashback seems out of control to parents.
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Unfortunately, we’ve all been taught that flashbacks are incurable and perpetual. Recently, for example, the FDA voted not to approve MDMA for use in the treatment of PTSD even though MDMA is like a miracle for PTSD sufferers. Why would the FDA do that? Is it because the FDA is trying to protect us from something? Or is it because the FDA represents the interests of pharmaceutical companies that stand to lose a huge profit if people are able to legally work with MDMA to treat trauma.Often, the real-life situation, the memory of the event that caused trauma for a child has been lost and what’s left is “encoded”. This “encoded” storyline is a rendition of the moment of trauma, except that it’s symbolic and often bizarre. This doesn’t matter. When the symbolic content and emotional material is allowed to come forward and be expressed, it naturally finds and pairs with the narrative of what happened in real life upon integration. At this point, the traumatic memory becomes a source of wisdom rather than a source of perpetual pain and flashbacks.
Some people have a lot of soul parts and sub-personalities that line up near and around the patient in anticipation of being released once the patient begins to work on their trauma. The energy field of a patient with autism is very external and sometimes distant and spread out in relation to the autistic person’s body. This creates a particular vibe in the autistic patient’s home and family. As trauma begins to be released, more trauma rises to the surface for release. Psilocybin, for example, requires a commitment of several months and usually 10-20 macrodosing sessions under the guidance of someone who is familiar with Intention and psilocybin to get through a body of trauma that’s built up for years.
One psilocybin “trip” for an adult is enough to integrate 1-2 soul parts or sub-personalities that have endured a mild to moderate amount of trauma. Sub-personalities that have “received” and “held” repeated traumas of the same type or that have experienced a very powerful event that was especially traumatic may take more than one full macrodosing session with psilocybin to release. But children are often not a candidate for peyote or psilocybin “trips”. Rather, they can work with the sacred medicines using microdosing instead if parents and caregivers are open to such and thing and able to gain access to these medicines. Parents and guardians must be available and ready to notice the release of trauma when it happens and to talk with kids about their internal dialogue and developing narrative while microdosing.
Parents who wish to work with psilocybin, Ayahuasca, or peyote for trauma can learn about how these sacred medicines work and with repeated use, the plants themselves can teach the parents about how they should be used and the culture of their administration. The parent then becomes the “shaman” for the child. The sacred medicines teach parents how to heal their children through the “felt sense” and wisdom of the high-tech human suit – the autonomic nervous system and the wild part of our human nature.
A book like this one becomes a “mind-container” or a starting block for the shaman-parent to dialogue with the self and with the sacred medicines. A tribe living in the wilderness is aware of the plants and the animals that live in the jungles or forests, the deserts, or the plains. An awareness of nature and a narrative mind-based experience with nature becomes the language of a psilocybin or peyote “trip”. The sacred plants teach on the basis of what a given human “knows” in the mind. We are westerners, after all. We come from developed nations. But the people in tribes” who had never learned to read or do math were still intelligent and to the extent that they had a language, that language was the “mind-substance” used by the sacred plant medicines to communicate.
Essentially, if you have a model of autism in your mind, this model becomes a part of the system that will either be built upon or deconstructed when you take psilocybin or Ayahuasca. A model that is hopelessly flawed is still the foundation of thought that a parent can use to become the healer for their child. But before any of that is possible, the broken bone – the parent’s puzzle pieces – the parent’s own trauma must be healed. The process of healing trauma can take years or just a few months depending on the approach, dosing schedule, and willingness to seek wisdom and healing in this way.
Parents who can’t access sacred medicines for one reason or another can access trauma-informed therapies are the culturally sanctioned treatments that are available throughout the English-speaking world. These are alternatives to the sacred medicines that parents can use to overcome trauma in themselves and in their autistic children.
Click here to learn more about the DreamLight.app, a guided meditation and brain-entrainment tool for trauma release.
