RISE UP
Rise up! Out of the paralysis of toxic stress and trauma. It’s time my fellow nonspeaking autistics!
Trauma?? What trauma? I can sense you neurotypical onlookers wondering, perplexed. So let me paint you a word picture by way of explanation. Fair warning: it is a perhaps a rather uncomfortable, even disturbing image to ponder. But after all, trauma itself is disturbing. Living it is jarring. The wake up call must be as well.
Imagine for a moment that you are lying helpless on an operating table awaiting surgery. You look up, taking in the scene, but your awareness goes unnoticed. Because you are out of it-right? All known experts and research agree that you are not cognizant. Except you are. You are! You lie there powerless to impact the flurry of activity occurring around you and to you. You are considered to be and treated as a nonthinking, nonfeeling mound of flesh.
You can’t cry out, you can’t use your body in any way to signal your awareness, because it just won’t cooperate. You can’t make them realize that you are in there experiencing every bit of this. So they carry on oblivious to you. You sense their disregard for your presence, listen to their flippant unfiltered comments, hear their surgical plans and jargon, see their scalpels and saws, anticipate and feel the pain. You are trapped in your body. No way out. At their mercy. The fear, the hopelessness, the desperation washes over you. You realize that to their minds all is copacetic, but this does little to offset the horror of your lived experience. If you make it through, survive and live to tell the tale, this ordeal will not be soon forgotten.
Now imagine that this ordeal happens to you over and over, day after day, year after year. THIS, my friends, is the trauma. This is the lived experience of a nonspeaking autistic who has no way to communicate and is not presumed competent. We go through life without any control over that life because we can’t control our body to reliably speak or act on our environment. How our bodies do act get us labeled as disruptive, aggressive, weird, dumb and the list goes on. As a result we are bullied, marginalized, isolated, dismissed. All the while the ‘experts’ of our lives fail to see the folly of their ways. To be misjudged and mistreated to the extent that we are on a continual basis is nothing short of serial traumatization.
Gaining a way to communicate and being presumed competent is the first step to rising from this life paralysis. The next steps require wider awareness and access to emotional healing methodologies. Check out my recent presentation at
I-ASC’s SpellX event that seeks to spur this awareness. https://vimeo.com/478613863
After over a decade of being frozen out of a purposeful life, I gained my voice and rose up to achieve greater emotional wholeness. I want this for each and every nonspeaker on the planet. Nothing is impossible. Rise up!